Kamëntà ¡Ã¡, commonly rendered Camsá or Sibundoy in old sources, is a language isolate and native language of the Kamëntà ¡Ã¡ people who primarily inhabit the Sibundoy Valley of the Putumayo Department in the south of Colombia.
Kamëntà ¡Ã¡ appears to be a language isolate. Researchers have tried connecting it to the Chibchan languages without success. Fabre reports that the Kamëntà ¡Ã¡ are descended, at least in part, from the , whose language is unattested.
Jolkesky notes that there are lexical similarities with the Choco languages due to contact.
Mason lists the following names as Coche (Mocoa) varieties.
Howard and O'Brien call the retroflex phonemes in the above table retroflex, while Huber & Reed use the alveolo-palatal symbols. More specifically, Howard uses and , O'Brien uses and , and Huber & Reed use and .
Huber & Reed, Howard, and O'Brien all analyze six vowel phonemes in Kamëntà ¡Ã¡: , , , , , and . O'Brien notes that has a limited distribution and is rarely found at the beginnings of words, and that in many cases may be an allophone of before palatal consonants. Howard found that and fluctuate in some morphemes, as do and .
Kamëntà ¡Ã¡ is a polysynthetic language with prefixes and suffixes. It also has dual number, which is unusual for languages around it.
Huber & Reed's book provides a comparison between 68 indigenous languages of Colombia. The following table provides the order of words in the book, along with glosses in English and Spanish. The Kamëntà ¡Ã¡ words follow their orthography, i.e., using and instead of and .