Yeꞌkuana (Yeꞌkuana: [jeʔkwana]), also known as Maquiritari, Dekwana, Yeꞌkwana, Yeꞌcuana, Yekuana, Cunuana, Kunuhana, Deꞌcuana, Deꞌkwana Carib, Pawana, Maquiritai, Maquiritare, Maiongong, or Soto is the language of the Yeꞌkuana people of Venezuela and Brazil. It is a Cariban language. It is spoken by approximately 5,900 people (c. 2001) around the border of northwestern Brazilian state of Roraima and Venezuela – the majority (about 5,500) in Venezuela. At the time of the 2001 Venezuelan census, there were at 6,523 Yeꞌkuana living in Venezuela. Given the unequal distribution of the Yeꞌkuana across two South American countries, Ethnologue lists two different vitality ratings for Yeꞌkuana: in Venezuela it is listed as Vigorous (6a), while in Brazil it is classified Moribund (8a) on the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS).

In Brazil, the Yeꞌkuana are believed to have settled on the lands they now occupy more than a century ago, coming from the larger population centres in Venezuela. Traditional mythology and oral history, however, tells that the lands around the Auari and Uraricoera rivers have long been travelled by the Yeꞌkuana.

During the 18th century, there was a lot of missionary activity in Yeꞌkuana territory, during which they were forced into constructing forts for the Spanish, and coerced into converting to Catholicism. A rebellion was organised against the Spanish in 1776. The 20th century brought a new wave of exploitation in the form of the colonists looking to capitalise on the discovery of rubber. Whole villages were forced into labour, driven in chain gangs to the rubber camps. Later, another wave of missionaries arrived around the early 1960s. The Brazilian Yeꞌkuana decided not to live in the missions established on that side of the border, because the missionaries’ attention in Brazil was focused on the Sanumá and not on them. They were also more reluctant to convert, having seen their Venezuelan cousins convert and become (from the Brazilian Yeꞌkuana perspective) culturally weaker as a result, giving up key elements of their traditional ways of life. On the Venezuelan side of the border, this wave of missionaries brought the establishment of health services, schools, and access to local markets, also creating several relatively large communities centred around the missions.

In 1980, a married Canadian missionary couple came to live among the Yeꞌkuana for a while, but they did not like their way of life, and there were disagreements between them and the Yeꞌkuana, and they left. After this, the Brazilian Yeꞌkuana decided that they did not want religion, but they did want a school, seeing the benefits that that infrastructure had provided indigenous communities in Venezuela. They got one, after negotiating with the leader of the Evangelical Mission of Amazônas. So began a process of becoming sedentary, wherein the Yeꞌkuana all moved closer together, and established semi-regular schedules (including that certain times of day for children were set aside for school). This establishment of solid permanent contact also led to more far-reaching mobilisation and contact with other indigenous communities and the state of Roraima. The Yeꞌkuana became known as skilled canoe makers and manioc scrapers, all while remaining fairly removed from the intense river traffic and influx of outsiders that had harmed many other indigenous communities.

The Yeꞌkuana language is situated typologically in the Cariban family, which is subdivided into seven subfamilies and one uncategorised language. Yeꞌkuana is a member of the Guianan Carib subfamily, along with ten other languages. The Guianan languages are located, for the most part, around the Guiana Shield. Yeꞌkuana and Wayumara form a smaller category within the Guianan subfamily, the Maquiritari-Wayumara subfamily.

The first documentations of Yeꞌkuana in the nineteenth century consist of several wordlists by Schomburgk, followed by several comparative and ethnographic works. The early twentieth century saw more wordlists, moving away from works more generally about the Cariban languages to more specifically focusing on Yeꞌkuana. Escoriaza (1959 and 1960) provided a grammatical sketch. The 1960s and 70s mostly saw work on the ethnography of the Yeꞌkuana, including their mythology, political structure, and village formation. Schuster 1976 published a wordlist within his ethnography, but otherwise there was not much linguistic study in that time period. Heinen (1983–1984) published a grammar sketch couched in his mostly ethnographic study; Guss (1986) includes some texts in the language in his publication on oral tradition; and Hall (1988) published two volumes on morphosyntax and discourse analysis. Later, Hall (1991) looked at transitivity in verbs, amid many more ethnographic studies, and Chavier (1999) studied some further aspects of the morphology. A dictionary was published on CD-ROM, and most recently, Natália Cáceres’ MA thesis is a brief overview of the sociolinguistic profile of the Yeꞌkuana, while her doctoral dissertation presents a more complete descriptive grammar. Coutinho (2013) has also explored the number system of Yeꞌkuana, from a typological perspective.

At the beginning of a word, and after a glottal stop, /ɾ̠/ becomes [d], /j/ is in free variation with [ɟ], and /h/ becomes [hʷ] ~ [ɸ]; this last change also happens following /o/, /u/, or /w/.

All consonants except the glottal stop /ʔ/ can be found geminated; it is unclear what phonetic environments allow gemination, and similarly unclear whether a distinction exists between geminated consonants and sequences of glottal stop plus consonant. The phoneme /k/ is commonly labialized to [kʷ] when geminated or preceded by /ʔ/, /o/, /u/, or /w/, and occasionally also after /n/ [ŋ].