Kuikuro people
     
|
|
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 592 (in 2010) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Brazil | |
| Languages | |
| Kuikuro (Karib), Portuguese |
The Kuikuro are an indigenous people from the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. Their language, Kuikuro, is a part of the Carib language family. The Kuikuro have many similarities with other Xingu tribes. They have a population of 592 in 2010, up from 450 in 2002.
The Kuikuro are likely the descendents of the people who built the settlements known to archaeologists as Kuhikugu, located at the headwaters of the Xingu River. The settlements were probably inhabited from around 1,500 years ago to about 400 years ago; after this point the population may have been reduced by diseases introduced by Europeans. Stories of Kuhikugu may have inspired the British explorer Percy Fawcett on his ill-fated expedition looking for the "Lost City of Z" in the 1920s.
the Kuikuro language is a language of the Karib language family, one of four dialects from the southern Karib language, the other three being the Kalapalo, Nahukuá and Matipu languages. The Kuikuro language is still used in all aspects of life of the Kuikuros, except with communicating with other tribes. Intermarriage and Increased access to television and trading with the outside world has increased the need for the use of Portuguese. Tribal leaders and men most often know Portuguese, and it is rarer for women to know it, but this has been changing in recent years.
An orthography has been developed for Kuikuro and other Upper Xingu languages for training native teachers and creating educational materials. These teachers have now written a large number of texts, some used in local schools. Linguist Bruna Franchetto collected audio recordings of stories told in Kuikuro with transcriptions, which are permanently archived at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America.
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