Trumai language
| Trumaí | |
|---|---|
| ho kod ke | |
| Native to | Brazil |
| Region | upper Xingu River |
| Ethnicity | 120 Trumai people (2006) |
|
Native speakers
|
51 (2006) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | trum1247 |
Trumai is an endangered language isolate of Brazil. Most Trumai are fluent in languages of wider communication, and children are not learning it well.
Trumai is a language spoken by the indigenous community of the same name located in the Xingu reserve along the Upper Xingu River in central Brazil. Murphy and Quain reported that there were only 25 people remaining in the Trumai community. Fortunately, this has since increased to 94 as of 1997, of which 51 people spoke the Trumai language. In the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Grimes observes that there are 78 speakers as of 2003. Due to the popularity of speaking Portuguese among the local population, Trumai is considered an extremely endangered language because the children are not learning to speak it as a first language.
The Trumai people first entered the Upper Xingu region sometime in the early 19th century after being driven away from southeastern Brazil by the Xavante people. The first contact the Trumai had with a white person was in 1884 when Karl von den Steinen explored the Upper Xingu region. He observed the differences between Trumai culture and other Xingu cultures due to the Trumai’s relocation. In the fifty years or so that followed Von den Steinem’s first visit to the Trumai, there is little documentation of the community because researchers who visited the Xingu region preferred visiting and studying other indigenous cultures instead.
In the time between the Trumai’s first arrival in the upper Xingu and Von den Steinen’s first contact with them, they were continuously being attacked by the native communities in the region, including the Suyá and Ikpeng. Following a period of contacts from researchers, including Buell Quain in 1938, the Trumai moved to a new territory again, this time because of a flu and measles epidemic. After recovering from this, the subsequent population increase led to the emergence of more Trumai villages in the Upper Xingu region, while their former territories have since become occupied by other communities.
Despite being surrounded by a variety of different languages that belong to the four major stocks of Brazilian indigenous languages (Tupi, Arawak, Cariban, and Ge), Trumai is an isolated language. There is speculation that Trumai belongs to the Equatorial language stock, in which case it is still very far removed from other languages and families belonging here.
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Wikipedia