Hixkaryana is a language spoken by a few hundred members of a tribe of
Carib indians who live along the
Nhamundá River, a tributary of the
Amazon in the Brazilian
rainforest. Hixkaryana's big claim to fame is that it is one of the only languages known to humanity that uses object-verb-subject (
OVS)
word order in constructing sentences. For example:
toto yahosIye kamara
man grabbed jaguar
"The jaguar grabbed the man."
This unique characteristic has earned Hixkaryana a disproportionate amount of attention from linguists considering the extremely limited extent of its distribution.