Southern Nambikuára language
| Nambikwara | |
|---|---|
| Southern Nambikwara, Nambiquara | |
| Kitãulhu | |
| Native to | Mato Grosso, Brazil |
| Ethnicity | Nambikwara |
|
Native speakers
|
720 (2006) |
|
Nambikwaran
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | sout2994 |
Nambikwara (also called Nambiquara and Southern Nambiquara, to distinguish it from Mamaindê) is an indigenous language spoken by the Nambikwara, who reside on federal reserves covering approximately 50,000 square kilometres of land in Mato Grosso and neighbouring parts of Rondonia in Brazil. Due to the fact that the Nambikwara language has such a high proportion of speakers (and, one can infer, a high rate of transmission), and the fact that the community has a positive attitude towards the language, it is not considered to be endangered despite the fact that its speakers constitute a small minority of the Brazilian population. For these reasons, UNESCO instead classifies Nambikwara as vulnerable.
According to David Price (1983), a reference to the Nambikwara people was made as early as 1671 in a report by Padre Gonçalo de Veras. However, in another account from the ‘’Povos Indígenas do Brasil’’, the Nambikwara people are said to have been first contacted in 1770, when the Portuguese, in search of gold, began building a road between Forte Bragança and Vila Bela. Further contact was established when in 1907, Colonel Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon began exploring the territories inhabited by the Nambikwara, and established a telegraph line between 1909 and 1915.
In the early to mid 1900s, the Nambikwara were also contacted by missionaries from the United States and from throughout Brazil. One group of missionaries, known as the New Tribes Mission, were killed by the Nambikwara in 1950 supposedly in an act of revenge. However, not all contact with missionaries resulted in death. In 1962, the “first systematic studies of the Nambikwara languages” were carried out, specifically for the Mamaindê language. Since the 1930s, Mamaindê speakers were also taught the bible as it was translated into their language by some missionaries, and some were convinced to join schools and learn Portuguese. According to David Price while there had been a long history of Christian education for the Mamaindê speakers, many of them could not actually be considered Christian believers and simply spoke of their experiences with the missionaries as “learning about white people’s way of life”.
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Wikipedia