The Cubeo people live principally along the Vaupés, Cuduyarí, and uerarí Rivers in the northwestern Amazon River Basin. Although the Cubeos have had contact with people outside their communities since the sixteenth century, their language and culture have remained largely intact.

In this fifth volume in the series of Colombia language studies, the reader gains an overview of Cubeo phonology and morphophonemics, word classes, clause structure, and subordination. The text is richly supplemented with examples. The various affixes presented in the text are listed in the first appendix with their glosses and a reference to the sections in which the affixes are discussed. In the second appendix, the practical orthography is summarized.

This grammar is especially interesting for linguists studying languages of the Tuconoan language family. The distinctive features of Cubeo grammar are the extensive system of classifiers for nouns and their modifiers, the evidential system for verbs indicating the source or validity of the information communicated, and a basic division of all verbs into two categories‧'stative and dynamic.

Nancy Morse has done extensive linguistic analysis and literacy and translation work with the Cubeo people of southeast Colombia. She has a special interest in co-authoring publications in Cubeo for the local populace in Colombia. Michael Maxwell is a linguistic consultant and computational linguist with special interest in the grammatical phenomena found in the languages of Colombia.