The accompanying Vocabularies were collected with much care, and several of them tested by a second party. The words are spelt with the vowels sounded as in Portuguese, thus, a, e, i, o, u, ai, pronounced ah, a, e, o, oo, i, and the consonants as in English. A til, thus ∼, over a letter denotes that it has a nasal sound; the accent shows where the stress is to be laid; and a letter placed above the line shows that it is to be very faintly sounded, often in a peculiar way, as the l in walnut. The languages are arranged in geographical order, commencing with those spoken on the banks of the Amazon, near the frontiers of Ecuador and terminating on the tributaries of the Orinooko. The Lingoa Geral is placed first, because it is the most widely spread language of South America, but it does not contain a single word in common with any of the other ten languages here given; and those that agree with it in not placing the pronoun “my” as a prefix to the words signifying parts of the body, differ most remarkably from it in the general combinations of the letters and the sounds of the words.

The Lingoa Geral, the Uainambeu, and the languages spoken at Maroa and Javita are soft and euphonious, while the Curetu and Tucano are particularly harsh and guttural, the former having the ll, and the latter the ch, sounded as in Welsh.