Nheengatu
The Nheengatu language, often spelled Nhengatu, is an indigenous language of the Americas from the Tupi–Guarani language family. The name of the language is derived from the words nhe'eng and katu. The name of the related language Ñheengatu, in Paraguay, is similarly derived. Nheengatu is referred to by a large variety of names in literature, including Nhengatu, Coastal Tupian, Geral, Yeral, Modern Tupí, Nyengato, Nyengatú, Waengatu, Neegatú, Is’engatu, Língua Brasílica and Tupi Amazônico. It is also commonly referred to as Língua Geral Amazônica in Brazil.
Speakers of Nheengatu can be found in the Upper Rio Negro region, with a close variety spoken in the Middle Rio Negro region. More specifically, speakers can be found in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira in the state of Amazonas in Brazil, where Nheengatu has been made an official language since 2002. Speakers can also be found in the neighbouring countries of Venezuela and Colombia.
Current status
There are around 2000 speakers in Venezuela, 3000 in Colombia, and around 3000 in Brazil. However, there are inconsistencies across literature with regards to the number of speakers of Nheengatu: the Summer Institute of Linguistics gives an estimate of 3000 speakers in Brazil, where as other sources have cited the speakers to be at around 30,000, which is highly unlikely based on the total population of 41,885 of São Gabriel da Cachoeira.There are perhaps around 19,000 Nheengatu speakers worldwide according to The Ethnologue, although some journalists have reported as many as 30,000. The language has recently regained some recognition and prominence after having been suppressed for many years. It is spoken in the Upper Rio Negro region of Amazonas state, in the Brazilian Amazon, and in neighboring portions of Colombia and Venezuela. It is the native language of the area's rural population, and it is also used as a common language of communication between Indians and non-Indians, and between Indians from different tribes. Its use is also a way for some of the native peoples who have lost their original languages to affirm their ethnic identity, as in the case of the Barés, the Arapaços, the Baniwa people, the Werekena and others.
In 1998, University of São Paulo professor Eduardo de Almeida Navarro founded the organization Tupi Aqui dedicated to promoting the teaching of historic Tupi and Nheengatu in high schools in São Paulo and elsewhere in Brazil. Professor Navarro has written a textbook for the teaching of Nheengatu which Tupi Aqui makes available, together with other teaching materials, on a website hosted by the University of São Paulo.
In December 2002, Nheengatu gained the status of official language alongside Portuguese in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Brazil, where many speakers are concentrated, pursuant to local law 145/2002.
Ethnologue classifies Nheengatu as “shifting”, with a ranking of 7 on the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale . According to this scale, this rating suggests that “the child-bearing population can use the language amongst themselves, but it is not being transmitted to children”. According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, Nheengatu is classified as “severely endangered”.
History
To understand Nheengatu as it exists today, it is crucial to understand its historical origins and its evolution. Moore documents the historical development of Nheengatu, which is a case of language contact that has stretched over five hundred years, ever since the Portuguese landed in Brazil in 1500. Upon European contact, there was a lot of cultural and commercial exchange. European men also sought after local women and started families, producing children who would speak their native language, which is the now-extinct precursor of Nheengatu called Tupinambá. Europeans also learned this language in order for them to act as middlemen, and Tupinambá went on to be used in the colony after the Portuguese settled down in the new lands permanently. By the mid-16th century, Jesuits arrived in Bahia, Brazil. These missionaries were active learners of the native languages, even producing language manuals. Better-known linguistic works from the 16th and early 17th century are Arte da Grammatica da Lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil by Father José de Anchieta and Arte da Língua Brasilíca by Luis Figueira.Amazonia was established as the second colony at the beginning of the 17th century. At the mouth of the Amazon, the state of Maranhão was linguistically diverse, and faced an influx of immigrants from Brazil who spoke Tupinambá: “Indians, whites, blacks, mulattos and mestizos leaving their homes in Brazil to populate the northern colony brought the Brasílica with them”. The number of speakers of other languages immensely outnumbered the Portuguese settlers in this second colony. With this influx of immigrants from Brazil, Tupinambá was the language that people would go to within the colony.
Língua Geral was established as an official language from 1689-1727, after which Portuguese was promoted instead, but to no avail. By the mid 18th century, Língua Geral Amazônica was used throughout the colony. At this point, Tupinambá remained intact, but as a “liturgical language”. The languages used in daily life had evolved drastically over the century due to language contact, with Tupinambá as the “language of the ritual acts, and Língua Geral Amazônica the language of popular communication and, therefore, of religious instruction”. Moore observes that by the mid-18th century, Língua Geral Amazônica and Tupinambá were already distinct from each other. By then, the original Tupinambá community was facing a decline, but other speech communities were still required by the Portuguese missionaries to learn the Tupinambá language. Efforts to communicate between communities resulted in the ‘corruption’ of the Tupinambá language, hence the distinction between Tupinambá and Língua Geral Amazônica.
Also during the mid 18th century, however, the indigenous population then faced a sharp decline due to disease, being forced into hard labour and being oppressed by their Portuguese colonisers. There was an active push by the colonisers to increase the Portuguese presence: villages were eradicated along the Amazon, and there was an effort to replace Língua Geral Amazônica with Portuguese. There were different varieties of Tupinambá within the different communities along the Amazon, but these varieties were large replaced by Portuguese at the beginning of the 19th century. 1822 marked Brazil’s independence; after which there was a large revolt, called the Cabanagem, against the Europeans. This involved Indians, caboclos and blacks, over a decade, and much blood was shed. 40,000 lives were lost; all of which were from the Nheengatu-speaking community. With the increase in immigration due to urbanization, remaining speakers of Língua Geral Amazônica, or Nheengatu, were pushed to more remote areas in western Amazonia. Linguistic documents were also published during this time, due to increased interest in Nheengatu.
Nheengatu continued to evolve in the 20th century, as it expanded in the Upper Rio Negro region. There was contact with other languages such as Baré, Baniwa, Warekana, Tukano and Dâw Due to significant economic and political events such as the Rubber Booms, Portuguese presence was once again felt due to these events, forcing indigenous populations to relocate or into hard labour. Their language, naturally, was once again influenced with the increased presence of Portuguese speakers.
Hence, Nheengatu has evolved tremendously over the course of time, since its origins as Tupinambá.
Language family
Nheengatu developed from the now-extinct Tupinambá language, and belongs to the Tupi-Guarani branch of the Tupi language family. The Tupi-Guarani language family accounts for a large, diverse group of languages “including, for example, Xetá, Sirionó, Araweté, Ka’apor, Kamayurá, Guajá, and Tapirapé”. Many of these languages had differentiated years before the Portuguese arrived in Brazil. Over time, the term Tupinambá was employed to describe groups that were “linguistically and culturally related”, even though the original tribe was mostly gone.Existing literature
Over the course of its evolution since its beginnings as Tupinambá, extensive research has been done on Nheengatu. There have been studies done at each phase of its evolution, but much has been focused on how aspects of Nheengatu, such as its grammar or phonology, have changed upon contact over the years..As mentioned earlier, the first documents that were produced were by Jesuit missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as Arte da Grammatica da Lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil by Father José de Anchieta and Arte da Língua Brasilíca by Luis Figueira. These were detailed grammars that served their religious purposes. Multiple dictionaries have also been written over the years. More recently, Stradelli also published a Portuguese-Nheengatu dictionary.
There have also been several linguistic studies of Nheengatu more recently, such as Borges ’s thesis on Nheengatu phonology and Cruz ’s detailed paper on the phonology and grammar of Nheengatu. She also studied the rise of number agreement in modern Nheengatu, by analyzing how grammaticalization occurred over the course of its evolution from Tupinambá. Cruz also studies reduplication in Nheengatu in detail, as well as morphological fission in bitransitive constructions. A proper textbook for the conducting of Nheengatu classes has also been written.. Lima and Sirvana provides a sociolinguistic study of Nheengatu in the Pisasu Sarusawa community of the Baré people, in Manaus, Amazonas.
Language documentation projects
Language documentation agencies are currently not engaged in any language documentation project for Nheengatu. However, research on Nheengatu by Moore was supported by Museu Goeldi and the Brazilian National Research Council, and funded by the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas and the Inter-American Foundation. In this study, Moore focused on the effects of language contact, and how Nheegatu evolved over the years with the help of a Nheegatu-speaking informant. Moore urges for the “location and documentation of modern dialects of Nheegatu”, due to their risk of becoming extinct.Ethnography
Anthropological research has been done on the changing cultural landscapes along the Amazon, as well as life of the Tupinambá people and their interactions with the Jesuits. Floyd describes how populations navigate between their “traditional” and “acculturated” spheres. Other studies have focused on the impact of urbanization on Indigenous populations in the Amazon.Phonology
Consonants
Parentheses mark marginal phonemes occurring only in few words, or with otherwise unclear status.Vowels
| Oral | Nasal | |
| Close | ||
| Mid | ||
| Close-mid | ||
| Open | ||
| Close-back |
Morphology
There are eight word classes in Nheengatu: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, postpositions, pronouns, demonstratives and particles. These eight word classes are also reflected in Cruz ’s Fonologia e Gramática do Nheengatú. In her books, Cruz includes 5 chapters in the Morphology section that describes lexical classes, nominal and verbal lexicogenesis, the structure of the noun phrase and grammatical structures. In the section on lexical classes, Cruz discusses personal pronominal prefixes, nouns and their subclasses, verbs and their subclasses and adverbial expressions. The subsequent chapter on nominal lexicogenesis discusses endocentric derivation, nominalization and nominal composition. Under verbal lexicogenesis in Chapter 7, Cruz covers valency, reduplication and the borrowing of loanwords from Portuguese. The following chapter then discusses the distinction between particles and clitics, including examples and properties of each grammatical structure.Pronouns
There are two types of pronouns in Nheengatu: personal or interrogative. Nheengatu follows the same pattern as Tupinambá, in that the same set of personal pronouns is adopted for the subject and object of a verb.| Singular | Sg Prefix | Plural | Pl Prefix | |
| 1 | isé | se- | yãndé | yane- |
| 2 | ĩndé | ne- | pẽỹẽ | pe- |
| 3 | aʔé | i- s- | aẽtá | ta- |
Examples of Personal Pronouns in use:
As observed in Table 3, in Nheengatu, personal pronouns can also take the form of prefixes. These prefixes are necessary in the usage of verbs as well as postpositions. In the latter case, free forms of the pronouns are not permitted. Moore illustrates this with the following:
The free form of the first person singular pronoun cannot be combined with the postposition word for ‘with’.
The second set of pronouns are interrogative, and are used in question words.
Verbal affixes
According to Moore, throughout the evolution of Nheengatu, processes such as compounding were greatly reduced. Moore cites a summary by Rodrigues, stating that Nheegatu lost Tupinambá’s system of five moods, converging into a single indicative mood. Despite such changes alongside influences from Portuguese, however, derivational and inflectional affixation was still intact from Tupinambá. A select number of modern affixes arose via grammaticization of what used to be lexical items. For example, Moore provides the example of the former lexical item ‘etá’, which means ‘many’. Over time and grammaticization, this word became to plural suffix ‘-itá’.Apart from the pronominal prefixes shown in Table, there are also verbal prefixes. Verbs in Nheengatu fall into three mutually exclusive categories: intransitive, transitive and stative. By attaching verbal prefixes to these verbs, a sentence can be considered well-formed.
| Singular | Plural | |
| 1 | a- | ya- |
| 2 | re- | pe- |
| 3 | u- | aẽtá-ú |
Examples of verbal prefixes:
In these examples from Moore, the verbal first person singular prefix ‘a-’ is added to the intransitive verb for ‘work’ and transitive verb for ‘make’ respective. Only when prefixed with this verbal clitic, can they be considered well-formed sentences.
Reduplication
Another interesting morphological feature of Nheengatu is reduplication, which Cruz explains in her grammar to employed differently based on the community of Nheengatu speakers. This is a morphological process that was originally present in Tupinambá, and it tends to be used to indicate a repeated action.In this example, the reduplicated segment is tuka, which is the Nheengatu verb for ‘knock’. This surfaces as a fully reduplicated segment. However, partial reduplication also occurs in this language. In the following example elicited by Cruz, the speaker reduplicates the first two syllables of the stem word.
Another point to note from the above example is the usage of the plural word ita. Cruz highlights that there is a distinction in the usage of reduplication between communities. The speakers of Içana and the upper region of the Rio Negro use Nheengatu as their main language, and reduplication occurs in the stative verbs, expressing intensity of a property, and the plural word ita doesn't necessarily need to be used. On the other hand, in Santa Isabel do Rio Negro and the more urban area of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, speakers tend to be bilingual, with Portuguese used as the main language. In this context, these speakers also employ reduplication to indicate the intensity of a property, but the plural ita must be used if the subject is plural.
Syntax
Valency change
In her description of the phonology and grammar of Nheengatu, Cruz writes that there are two strategies in Nheengatu that express valency change, which involves the transformation of verbs. As Cruz explains in a previous chapter, transitive verbs are defined syntactically by their ability to select two arguments, while intransitives allow the selection of only one argument. This division is marked morphologically distinctly in Nheengatu. Intransitive verbs need to be morphologically transformed so they can select two arguments, and vice versa. There are two morphological operations that allow to change valency:- intransitive to transitive, via mu- 'causative', and
- transitive to intransitive, via yu- ‘reflexive/reciprocal’.
Causatives
The causative mu- is used to increase the valence of intransitive predicates. According to Cruz, it is a highly productive process, which allows nouns and intransitive verbs to be derived as transitive verbs. Cruz provides the following two examples to illustrate this process:Example 1a illustrates a dynamic intransitive verb, while example 1b indicates how possessing the mu- causative morpheme changes the argument. Similarly, example 2a illustrates stative intransitive verbs, which becomes a transitive predicate in 2b.
Cruz also provides the following table to illustrate more examples of dynamic intransitive verbs with the causative morpheme:
| Base | Intransitive | Causative |
| Change of state | puka “to burst” | mpuka “to burst OBJ” |
| Movement | wike “to enter” paka “to wake up” | muwike “to make OBJ enter” mbaka “to make OBJ wake up” |
| Change of state | pa “to end” sasa “to pass” yupiru “to begin” | mba “to make OBJ end” musasa “to pass O” muyupiru “to make OBJ begin” |
According to Cruz, nouns can also be combined with the causative. In a previous chapter, Cruz describes how a noun phrase can occur as a noun predicate, which selects an argument to function as the subject. The causative morpheme allows an increase of valency of this predicate. As a result of this operation, the noun is transformed into a transitive verb. In semantic terms, the transitive predicate formed from a noun can be interpreted as a “transfer relation”, in which a CAUSER is generated, and in relation to the entity referred to by the original noun, affects a CAUSEE. This is illustrated in the example below:
Literally: “I am going to make medicine on my son’s wound”
Cruz provides the following table, based on data she collected from Grenand and Ferreira ’s dictionary:
Reflexives/reciprocal
The second operation that Cruz provides is the reflexive/reciprocal prefix yu-. This operator of valence adjustment allows the transformation of transitive verbs into intransitive ones. The morpheme expresses that subject is interpreted as both AGENT and PATIENT at the same time. The referents involved may be identical, allowing a 'reflexive' interpretation. This is illustrated in examples and below. The statements in are simple transitive predicates, of which the intransitive forms in are derived.context: Order given to a woman in labour.
However, Cruz also notes that in Nheengatu, there could be ambiguous interpretations, because of how both reciprocal and reflexive expressions are expressed the same way. She explains that “nothing prevents the single argument from the verb derived from reflexive to be plural”.
Semantics
Quantification
According to Cruz, a nominal phrase in Nheengatu can be determined by “discrete quantifiers”, used to specify the quantity of an entity or by “continuous quantifiers”, used to indicate an imprecise number of entities.Discrete quantifiers
Discrete quantification involves numerals, illustrated in Table 3 below. The basic numbers, as Cruz lists, can be combined in order to form larger numbers.Despite the existence of these numbers, however, speakers of Nheengatu tend to use the cardinal numbers borrowed from Portuguese. Numerals in Nheengatu occur before the lexical nouns, without the need for a classifier. This is illustrated in the following examples and :
However, Cruz also notes that it is possible for numerals to occur without the lexical noun. She cites two possible interpretations: a) there exists a lexical noun functioning as the nucleus, that is also an ellipsis, or 2) that the numeral itself is functions the nucleus and noun. Citing that the numeral falls under the scope of the plural morpheme ita in example below, Cruz opts for the interpretation that these numerals function as nouns:
In a sub-section, Cruz also discusses the nominal status of numerals in Nheengatu. She compares the tendency for numerals to be classified as adverbs in other Tupi-Guaraní languages. In contrast, numerals in Nheengatu do not behave like adverbs and in fact have a fixed position in the noun phrase. Additionally, they can function as an argument without needing to be nominalized.
Another characteristic that is typical in languages where numerals are classified as adverbs is the allowance of the numeral to indicate a certain number of events. Cruz provides an example from Karitiana :
In this example, the event of eating monkey occurred twice, and, consequently, implies that there were two monkeys. In Nheengatu, however, the occurrences of an event must be marked by viagi, which is a combination of either a numeral or the continuous quantifier mui, and the noun viagi This is illustrated in Example below:
This example illustrates that the eating event affected two entities. Compare this with :
In this example, the quantifier affects the number of events, indicating the repeated occurrence of the eating event.
Continuous quantifiers
In this category, the quantifiers determining noun phrases are examined. Cruz first addresses two of such quantifiers: panhe ‘all’ and mui “many”. Examples to illustrate these quantifiers:Another continuous quantifier that Cruz introduces is siya, which denotes ‘several entities”. She describes this quantifier as being more semantically specific than the previous two. In syntactical terms, it can function as an argument or a predicate, allowing it to be interpreted as “various entities”.