The Rama language is one of the indigenous languages of the Chibchan family spoken by the Rama people on the island of Rama Cay and south of lake Bluefields on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Other indigenous languages of this region include Miskito and Sumu . Rama is one of the northernmost languages of the Chibchan family . The Rama language is severely endangered. Their language was described as "dying quickly for lack of use" as early as the 1860s . By 1980, the Rama were noted as having "all but lost their original ethnic language", and had become speakers of a form of English creole instead . In 1992, only approximately 36 fluent speakers could be found among an ethnic population of 649 individuals in 1992 . The number of speakers on Rama Cay island was only 4 in 1992. There have been several language revitalization efforts. The fieldwork for the first dictionary of Rama was done during this time by Robin Schneider, a graduate student from the University of Berlin .It is spoken in Honduras and Nicaragua Phonology There are three basic vowel sounds: a, i and u. In addition to these, e and o have been introduced as distinct vowels in some foreign loanwords. Each vowel may be either short or long. Here the vowels are shown in standard Rama orthography (see for example ): The following consonants are found (IPA transcriptions are shown where helpful): Rama words have non-predictable stress. Phonotactics and sandhi Rama phonotactics includes notable consonant clusters at the beginning of words (e.g. "toucan", "hot", "man", "killed") and word-internally (e.g. "speaks", "fish"). Variations among speakers witness a tendency to simplify such clusters (e.g. or "man", or "we, us, our"). Such clusters often arise due to a tendency to omit unstressed short vowels. For example, when the third person singular subject prefix i- and the past tense suffix -u are added to the verb stem "eat", thus: i- + + -u, the verb stem loses its only vowel, resulting in the form "he/she/it ate". Sometimes omitting different vowels may lead to alternative results. Adding the past tense suffix -u to the verb stem "kill", i.e. + -u, may give either or "killed". There are also cases of vowel alternation in morphemes (e.g. the first-person subject prefix may appear as n-, ni- or na-) and lexical stems (thus the stem "stay" may appear in the forms