Máku , also spelled Mako (Spanish Macú), and in the language itself Jukude, is an unclassified language and likely language isolate once spoken on the Brazil–Venezuela border in Roraima along the upper Uraricoera and lower Auari rivers, west of Boa Vista, by the Jukudeitse. 300 years ago, the Jukude territory was between the Padamo and Cunucunuma rivers to the southwest. The last speaker, Sinfrônio Magalhães, died in 2000. There are currently no speakers or rememberers of Máku and no-one identifies as Jukude any longer. Aryon Rodrigues and Ernesto Migliazza, as well as Iraguacema Lima Maciel, worked on the language, and the data was collected into a grammar by Chris Rogers published in 2020. Name The people called themselves jukude-itse (person-PL) 'people'. When speaking to outsiders, they referred to themselves as or . Maku ~ Mako (in Spanish orthography Macu or Maco) is an Arawakan term for unintelligible languages and people held in servitude in the Orinoco region. (See Maku people for a partial list.) While the stress of the word in other languages called 'Maku' may be on either the first or final syllable, as Máku/Mácu or Makú/Macú (Migliazza, Fabré), the word was pronounced with initial stress by the jukudeitse and so the name is often written with stress on the first syllable: Máku (Dixon & Aikhenvald (1999), Maciel (1991), and Rogers (2020)) or Máko (Campbell 2012), though also Makú or simply Maku (Migliazza). The disambiguator Maku-Auari has also been used. Genetic relations Suggested genetic relations involving Máku include: with Arawakan with Warao within a Kalianan grouping with Arutani–Sape (a.k.a. Makú) within a Macro-Puinavean grouping with Nadahup (a.k.a. Makú), Katukinan, and Arutani–Sape Kaufman (1990) finds the Kalianan proposal "promising", though he is now dated. Language contact Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Sape, Arutani, and Warao languages, as well as the Saliba-Hodi, Tikuna-Yuri, Katukina-Katawixi, and Arawa language families due to contact. Phonology The Máku syllable structure is (C)(C)V(V)(C). /k/ is voiced to intervocalically and can occasionally be realized as [g] in other environments too. /j/ is sometimes realized as word-initially before /a u/ or word-medially, as in /jukude/ [ʑokude̞] 'person'. It can occasionally be fronted to or . Nasals assimilate to the place of articulation of the stop they precede. /w/ is realized as before /i e/. It is realized as [ʋ] or before /y/ (a sequence which only occurs in the word /lymywy/ 'take'). Rogers