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Ka'apor seems to have been most influenced grammatically by Amazonian Língua Geral Wayãpi by northern Carib languages. Both languages were heavily influenced in the last three hundred years by other languages, and they are mutually unintelligible today. The Ka'apor language is probably historically most closely related to the Wayãpi language, which is spoken 600 airline miles away on the other side of the Amazon River. The language is not very close to the nearest Tupí-Guaraní languages in space, Tembé (Tenetehar) and Guajá: of the two, it seems to be slightly closer to Guajá phonologically and lexically.

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Minor lexical differences and free variation can be noted between Ka'apor people originally from villages of the Turiaçu basin and those from the Gurupi basin.

Ka'apor is not spoken by any other known group except as a second language to some Tembé and other ethnically non-Ka'apor dwellers of the Gurupi region dialects of the language are minimally developed. The hyphenated terms Urubu-Caápor and Urubu-Kaápor were introduced by Brazilian indigenists in the 1950s, who were trying to standardize the spelling of native group names in ethnology. The term Urubu, meaning 'vultures,' was evidently applied to the Ka'apor people during the 19th century by their Luso-Brazilian enemies, and that is the etymology given by Ka'apor informants themselves, though they do not refer to themselves by that term when speaking to outsiders. Kambõ seems to have been borrowed from Portuguese ' caboclo', a term applied to the Ka'apor by most regional Brazilians today, probably of Amazonian origin, and often used by Ka'apor speakers in self-reference when speaking to outsiders. The person can also be identified in the Ka'apor language with awá, which is used to refer to the reflexive self ('one') and to the personal subject in interrogative sentences ('who?') awá is cognate with the uninflected terms for 'person' and 'people' in numerous other Tupí-Guaraní languages.

But 'forest dwellers' is actually best expressed by the Ka'apor name for the hunting-and-gathering Guajá, who are their neighbors, which is Ka'apehar. Ka'apor seems to be derived from Ka'a-pypor 'forest-footprints' or 'footprints of the forest.' Another gloss for Ka'apor that has been proposed is 'forest dwellers' ('moradores da mata'). Other names: Urubu, Kambõ, Urubu-Caápor, Urubu-Kaápor, Kaapor. Self-name: Ka'apor or Ka'apór (the apostrophe represents a glottal stop, a sound heard in the first sound of English 'uh-huh' stress in the Ka'apor language as a rule falls on the final syllable). Perhaps because of conflicts with Luso-Brazilian settlers and other native peoples, they engaged in a long and slow migration that took them by the 1870s in Pará across the Gurupi River into Maranhão. The Ka'apor have been originated as a distinctive people about three hundred years ago probably between the Tocantins and Xingu Rivers.

Urubu belem