Paumarí (also Paumari, Purupuru, Kurukuru, Pamari, Purupurú, Pammari, Curucuru, Palmari) is an Arauan language spoken in Brazil by about 300 older adults out of an ethnic population of 900. It is spoken by the Paumari Indians, who call their language “Pamoari”. The word “Pamoari” has several different meanings in the Paumarí language: ‘man,’ ‘people,’ ‘human being,’ and ‘client.’ These multiple meanings stem from their different relationships with outsiders; presumably it means ‘human being’ when they refer to themselves to someone of ostensibly equal status, and ‘client’ when referring to their people among river traders and Portuguese speakers. Speakers of Arawan languages, particularly Paumarí (who have had the most contact with non-natives) are beginning to speak Portuguese. The result, for many of the speakers in Paumarí, is a hybrid of Portuguese and Paumarí, incorporating vocabulary from both languages while retaining the syntax of neither (Chapman, a researcher from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, claims that, at the time of her arrival in 1964, all Paumarí spoke a mixture of Paumarí and Portuguese). Out of the Paumarí group that inhabits the Tapauá River, the youth, which makes up nearly a majority of the population, spoke only Portuguese in 1964. This ‘linguistic Creole’ tendency in the Paumarí language highlights exactly why languages such as Paumarí are endangered. It is a largely head-marking language with unmarked SVO word order and an ergative alignment for marking of nouns combined with accusative marking of pronouns. Paumarí has only two open word classes - nouns and verbs. However, it also has numerous closed classes including fourteen adjectives, adpositions, interjections, conjunctions and demonstratives. Paumarí nouns are elaborately divided into over one hundred possessed nouns and a larger number of free nouns. Furthermore, each free noun has grammatical gender - being either masculine or feminine, with feminine being the unmarked gender and indicated by the suffix -ni. Verb roots have up to fifteen suffix positions, but all are only optionally filled. Most of these refer to location or aspect, plus a negative suffix -ra. Phonology Paumarí has a consonant inventory that is similar in size to most languages of the Amazon Basin, but is areally unusual for featuring bilabial and coronal implosives, which have been lost from other Arauan languages but are reconstructed clearly for the protolanguage of the family. It is one of very few languages in the New World to contrast implosives with other voiced stop consonants: