The work of linguists
There
is still much to be done when it comes to having a better knowledge
of the Indigenous languages spoken in Brazil. Of the approximately 180
of them, a 1995 survey verified that:
- 30 have a satisfactory description or documentation;
- 114 have some kind of phonological and/or syntactic description;
- the rest remains mostly unknown.
In the face of the threat of extinction of those languages, the role
of the linguists who are specialized in them – mostly as consultants
for projects of school education – is very important. Bruna
Franchetto (anthropologist and linguist/ Museu Nacional/ UFRJ) writes
about it:
Introduction
Figures and percentages can be very eloquent when one speaks of Indigenous
languages in Brazil, a country that is still multi-lingual.
In South America, Brazil is the country with the largest linguistic
density – that is, genetic diversity –, and also with one
of the lowest concentrations of population per language. There are some
180 languages, the majority of them spoken in the Amazon Region, for
a population estimated in 350,000 individuals of 215 ethnic groups.
These languages belong to 41 families, two branches and ten isolated
languages, according to Aryon Rodrigues (1). The number
of speakers range from a maximum of 20,000/10,000 (Guarani, Tikuna,
Terena, Macuxi, Kaingang) to the fingers of one hand, when it is not
the case of one last remaining speaker; but the average is of less than
200 speakers per language. The total number of languages is expected
to increase with the descriptions of new languages and of languages
that still have been only partially documented.
In the 1980’s, researchers from the Museu Goeldi (Goeldi Museum)
of Belém discovered the last two speakers of Puruborá
and re-discovered Kujubim; in 1987, Zo'e was incorporated into the Tupi-Guarani
family; in 1995 an isolated group that spoke the previously unknown
Canoê was found. Pierre and Françoise Grenand list 52 Amazon
groups still not contacted and whose languages may reveal new genetic
groupings and new additions to families and branches already established
(2). Linguistic classifications are constantly altered
according to the increase in the number of descriptions, of re-examinations
of descriptions and of data that had already been available, and of
comparisons between languages, which enables scientists to review hypothesis
about the pre-History and History of Indian peoples. Numbers and classifications
may also be altered as differences between dialects and languages are
clarified; in this field play, in addition to our linguistic ignorance
proper, ideological and political factors that are both internal and
external to Indigenous peoples.
Michael Krauss made a warning to the world when he affirmed, based
on a rigorous survey, that in the 21st Century 3,000 of the 6,000 languages
that still exist in the planet will disappear, and, of the remaining,
2,400 will be near extinct (3). Thus only 600, or
10% of the languages spoken today, are safe; in the next century, says
Ken Hale, the category ‘language’ will include only those
spoken by at least 100,000 people (4). That means
that 90% of the world’s languages are in danger; and at least 20%
- maybe 50% - of are already dying. An agonizing language, or ‘in
danger’, is typically a local, minority, language in a situation
of a generation breakdown in which the parents still speak it with their
parents but no longer with their children, who abandon definitely the
use of the native language, which will die within a century unless something
is done to revive it. Among the main factors of this kind of ‘death
penalty’ is the pressure of the national, dominant languages, in
situations of social-economic pressures, of assimilation through means
such as education, the media (radio, TV etc.), and the sedimentation
of positive attitudes for the language of the colonizer and negative
for the language of the colonized. Krauss estimates that 27% of the
South American languages are no longer learned by children.
Languages in South America
Researcher Willem Adelaar presented in 1991 the following table for
South America:
|
|
Number of native languages
|
Number of speakers
|
|
Argentina
|
14-23 |
169.432 a 190.732 |
|
Bolivia
|
35 |
2.786.512 a 4.848.607 |
|
Brasil
|
170-180 |
155.000 a 270.000 |
| Chile |
6 |
220.053 a 420.055 |
|
Colômbia
|
60 a 78 |
194.589 a 235.960 |
| Equador |
12-23 |
642.109 a 2.275.552 |
|
Guiana Francesa
|
6 |
1.650 a 2.600 |
|
Guiana
|
10 |
17.000 a 27.840 |
|
Paraguai
|
14-19 |
33.170 a 49.796 |
|
Peru
|
50 a 84 |
4.724.307 a 4.831.220 |
|
Suriname
|
5 |
4.600 - 4.950 |
|
Venezuela
|
38 |
52.050 a 145.230 |
Source: Adelaar, Willem - “The endangered problem: South
America”. In: Endangered
Languages (edited by Robert Robons and Eugene Uhlenbeck), New York:
St. Marin 's Press,
1991. (5)
Colette Grinevald estimates the languages in South America in more
than 400, more than the rest of the Americas. They present surprising
genetic variety and a large number of isolated languages, although not
as vast as in other regions of the world, such as the 760 languages
spoken in Papua New Guinea or the 850 currently in use in India. The
genetic variety of South America (118 families), however, is comparable
only to that of Papua New Guinea (6).
In Brazil
In what concerns Indigenous languages in Brazil, Aryon Rodrigues, in
his work mentioned above, estimates that, at the time of the Portuguese
Conquest, 1, 273 languages were spoken; thus, in 500 years, there was
a loss of some 85%. That can be observed in the ethno-historical map
in which Curt Nimuendajú, in the 1940’s, tried to show a
panorama of the peopling of Indigenous Brazil using only the available
historical documentation sources produced by the colonizers: a territory
covered in all its extent with color stripes and dots indicating linguistic
branches, families, groups and isolated languages spoken by countless
peoples; white spaces show areas, especially along the low courses of
the main rivers, that were depopulated already at the onset of colonization
(7).
Luciana Storto describes the grave and significant situation of the
Indigenous lands spoken in the State of Rondônia: 65% of them
are under serious danger because they are spoken by few people and are
no longer being used by children; 52% are not spoken by children; thus
only 35% are momentarily safe (8). Many linguists
who dedicate themselves to the study of these languages witness evident
processes of loss. On the Upper Xingu, for example, an inter-tribal
system in which genetically distinct languages are spoken side by side,
there are languages still fully alive and languages nearly extinct.
There are only fifty speakers of Trumai (an isolated language), and
Yawalapiti (Aruak) survives with less than ten speakers in a multi-lingual
village where Kuikuro (Karib) and Kamayurá (Tupi-Guarani) predominate
(9). Although still healthy, the other languages
of the Upper Xingu show worrisome signals: school is considered the
time/space in which the language ‘of the whites’ is to be
learned; the young, fascinated with anything that comes from the city,
try to speak more and more Portuguese while at the same time do not
maintain oral traditions. It is as if the invasion of – and the
desire for – new knowledge annihilates everything that is associated
with the old, with village life.
It is the great diversity that makes the losses irreversible. For linguists,
these losses mean the impossibility of retracing linguistic pre-History
and thus of determining the nature, the range and the boundaries of
human linguistic possibilities, both in terms of structure and in terms
of communication behavior or poetic expression and creativity. More
serious and more complex are the consequences of linguistic losses to
the Indigenous populations, who are minorities under siege. If the relationships
between linguistic identity and ethnic, cultural and political identity
are complex – and they are not equivalent, as the Indigenous peoples
of the Brazilian Northeast demonstrate -, there are no doubts in relation
to the consequences of the agony and disappearance of a language for
the intellectual health, the oral traditions, the artistic forms (poetic,
chants, speech), the knowledge and the ontological and cosmological
perspectives of the people deprived of its mother tongue. It is certain
that linguistic and cultural diversity can be equated; so, in that sense,
linguistic loss is not only a local catastrophe but also a disaster
for Humanity as a whole.
What do we know and how have we learned about those languages?
First data
The 16th Century witnessed Europe expand beyond its borders. The expansion
led European scholars, many of them missionaries but some travelers
as well, to immerse themselves into diversity. They enlarged linguistic
horizons and began to accumulate knowledge that was registered in lists
of words, grammar outlines and texts of speeches. Research began in
the new worlds that fed theories and typologies, inspired either on
the evolutionist schemes that were prevalent until the end of the 19th
Century or on the universalism of the rationalism of the grammar philosophers
that flourished in particular in the 17th Century.
While the Spanish registered almost obsessively the languages found
in the territories they conquered as they moved inland in their colonies,
the Portuguese concentrated on the languages spoken along the coast,
where the Tupi-Guarani predominated. The documents of the first three
centuries of the colonization of Brazil that have reached us are grammars
and catechisms of three languages that disappeared, along with their
speakers, in the same period: Tupinambá, Kariri and Manau. Old
Tupi disguised itself on the Línguas Gerais – Paulista and
Amazônica –, of which considerable written and missionary
memory has survived.
Tupi Jesuit grammars today still generate admiration and repulsion.
On one hand, the clarity and the details of the observations that allow
us to appreciate the phonological and morpho-syntactic systems and process
of Tupinambá and Old Tupi is fascinating. On the other hand,
and at the same time, the manner in which they translate and classify
the facts into categories of the Greek-Latin grammatical tradition is
criticized. Indigenous languages, in any case, were consumed and transfigured
– in other words, conquered – by the missionary enterprise,
in writing, in the catechisms, and in the pedagogical plays in which
the Christian bi-lingual (Tupi/Portuguese) combat of Good and Evil should
involve Indians and whites alike, sinners from Indian villages and settlements,
in the fight against the demon of paganism and in the elevation to the
kingdom preached by the Conquerors. Later on, Tupi romanticism in the
construction of the Brazilian nationality would show the profane face
of this missionary tradition, rising up with its lyricism about death,
massacre and sacrifice of entire peoples. And it is a Tupi language
transfigured (and disfigured) by literature that translated into the
Brazilian national imaginary a generic Indian that continues to exist
in common sense, in the History taught in schools, on films and on TV
programs.
Discoveries in the new worlds opened a path for Linguistics, which
appeared as a science in the second half of the 19th Century comparing
and classifying the known languages of the known lands and retracing
their history. Brazil’s territory began to be peopled, little by
little, with dozens of peoples and languages on the maps drawn by the
colonization fronts moving inland. The missionary was replaced –
better yet, was joined – by the studious traveler, who followed,
directly or indirectly, the expeditions of conquest: Koch-Grümberg,
Steinen, Capistrano de Abreu, Nimuendajú, to mention just the
most important. Grammar observations, more or less systematic, were
published with, or illustrated by, collections of texts and alphabetical
transcriptions of pieces from the oral traditions of several Indigenous
peoples. A corpus began to be formed, in general made up of descriptions,
which would be transfigured once more and incorporate in the national
folklore its most emblematic characters, such as Macunaíma, the
trickster hero of the Karib peoples of Northern Amazonia.
Evangelization and research
Evangelizing zeal has been, in any case, the basis of the missionary
linguistic interest; today it continues to be so for the linguistic
work of many missions of faith, headed by the US’s Summer Institute
of Linguistics (SIL). These missions and their linguists, who bring
with them the tragic binomial ‘to annihilate cultures, to save
languages’, after doing a long study, empty out words and enunciation
in Indigenous languages in order to make room for news contents, bibles
and the gospel, new semantics for conquered peoples made passive under
the road roller of civilizatory conversion. SIL, which doubles as a
militantly evangelizing mission and a research institution, played an
important role in the implementation of the research on ‘Indigenous’
Linguistics in Brazil between the end of the 1950’s and the late
1970’s. It also held, until not so long ago, a position of leadership
in the Linguistics international scene (it has money for publishing
and publishes in English).
Although with difficulty, lay Linguistics managed to untangle itself
from the missionary perspective by documenting what is left of the diversity,
and by dividing itself between the development of its descriptive and
explanatory models and the application of its knowledge in favor of
political projects that will make possible a worthy survival of the
Indigenous languages in the face of the fascination and the power of
the ‘white’s’ language in the media, in the papers, in
the machines, in the schools.
A 1991 survey by Storto and Moore showed that in Brazil between eighty
and one hundred Indigenous languages had had some kind of description;
yet almost half of them had no documentation at all. The authors considered
that 10% of the languages had a satisfactory grammatical description.
At the time, there were no more than twelve PhDs in Brazil who dedicated
themselves to the study of these languages, and only eight universities
offered Indigenous languages in Graduate programs. SIL was then working
with forty languages, and had not contributed to the formation of a
single Brazilian researcher. Non-missionary linguists were studying
fifty-nine languages, an increase of 36% since 1985 (10).
Between 1987 and 1991, the Programa de Pesquisas Científica das
Línguas Indígenas Brasileiras – Program of Scientific
Research of the Brazilian Indigenous Languages – (PPCLIB) of the
Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa – National Research Council –
(CNPq) gave support to scholarships, field researches and intensive
courses.
My own survey, made in 1995, showed the existence of some 120 researchers
(80% actives; tem missionary researchers linked to Brazilian academic
institutions) acting in Brazil. There had been an increase in the number
of undergraduate and graduate students; SIL activities, on the other
hand, seemed to be stationary. Foreign researchers were about 10% of
the total: North Americans, French, Dutch, and Germans (besides evangelical
missions, where North Americans are the majority). Between 1991 and
1995, there was an apparent increase of some 40% in the number of languages
studied.
At that time I remarked that, of the approximately 180 Indigenous languages
spoken in Brazil, it would be possible to say that just over thirty
had a satisfactory documentation or description (something such as having
a grammar of reference with texts and possibly a lexicon), and 114 had
some kind of description of aspects of phonology and/or syntax, while
the remaining continued to exist in the realm of the unknown. These
numbers, approximate and provisory, included the visible results, in
Brazilian institutions or published, of SIL’s work. In this sense,
a tripartite classification among languages between those with no documentation,
those with little (or some) and those well documented is obviously oversimplified.
In the surveys made on the production of knowledge in the area called
‘Indigenous Linguistics’, in general what is being considered
is not the quality of the works and analyses, but its mere existence.
The quality of the linguistic documentation or description is a question
that only recently has been discussed seriously, thanks to the accumulation
of new knowledge and new data, to an increasing attention to the theories
that are at the basis of descriptive models, to the increase in the
number of researchers, to more circulation and dissemination of research
and to the development of methodologies and technologies for data storage
and processing.
‘Indigenous Linguistics’ in the 1990’s
Following the hegemony of the North American distributional structuralism
imported by SIL, the 1990’s showed a gradual and progressive development
in the area, with an interesting diversification of theoretical approaches;
different patters live side by side and compete with each other, in
a healthy scientific pluralism; the discussion between descriptive and
theoretical research, whose goal is to insert data from Indigenous languages
in the debates and confrontations of current linguistic theory, has
become more mature. Historical and comparative investigation started
again. Thus, for example, important results are expected from the Tupi
Comparativo – Comparative Tupi – project, being undertaken
by the Museu Goeldi, of the documentation of the Zo'e and the Araweté
and of the meetings of linguists who specialize on Tupi-Guarani languages,
of the research on the languages of the Pano family made in the Department
of Linguistics of the Museu Nacional/UFRJ, of the documentation of the
Yawalapiti and the Enawenê-Nawê for the Aruak family, also
being carried out by the Museu Nacional, and of the studies of the Southern
Karib languages (Universidade de Campinas – Unicamp - and Museu
Nacional) of Northeastern Amazonia (Museu Goeldi). A fruitful exchange
between Ethnology, Archaeology and Linguistics seem possible. Traditional
centers of research become stronger, new ones come into the scene, experiences
succeed or fail.
According to the most recent report available (11),
in 1998 the number of Indigenous languages that were object of some
kind of study by non-missionaries increased to around 80. There has
been a slight reduction in the activities of the SIL (30 languages under
study and eight projects considered concluded). It is interesting to
observe the increase in the number of languages that had already been
studied by missionaries and are object of renewed studies by Brazilian
linguists. Thanks to the survey carried out by Lucy Seki of theses,
dissertations, publications and unpublished works, it is possible to
assess, at least in terms of quantity, the increase in the production
of Brazilian researchers. A series of extensive and careful grammars
of reference have been published, such as the Kamayurá (12)
and the Tiriyó, Trumai, Karo, Apurinã, Tikuna, Kadiweu
and Karitiana, among others.
In contrast, the institutional panorama, unfortunately, has had little
improvement. Still according to Seki, in the end of the 1990’s,
of the 66 Graduate programs in Literature and Linguistics, only twelve
developed research on Indigenous languages. There is no doubt, however,
that there has been an increase in the number of works focusing Indigenous
languages in scientific events in Brazil; in the international events,
SIL’s missionary/linguists have not dominated the scene for a while.
In the specialized electronic media, new sites appear and Brazilians
participate increasingly more in areas such as discussion groups, some
of them created recently, such as Ling-amerindia, an initiative of researchers
from Unicamp. For the first time a wealth of reasonably dependable information
can be found at official and non-official sites, as well as in government
and scientific publications. In short, there is a lot being done in
Brazil outside the missionary universe, especially if we think about
the indigence of twenty years ago. Still, a lot more remains to be done.
There is an excess of partial descriptive works and a scarcity of grammars
of reference. In the realms of the types of speech, of oral art, of
the collection of oral traditions and of the elaboration of dictionaries
there are enormous gaps, such as in the socio-linguistics studies, indispensable
for understanding the many complex situations created by bi-linguism,
multi-linguism and linguistic loss.
School and linguistic preservation
In the field of Indigenous languages, the linguist is a character with
double identities: he or she is simultaneously a researcher and a consultant
of education programs, a phonologist and a writer-of-languages-of-oral-tradition,
a professor and a writer of educational material in Indigenous language.
He gets the demands of NGOs, of the government and of the Indians. Involvement
in (school) education programs does not mean only an exercise of application
of scientific knowledge. Today, it must be based on the capacity of
making a critical revision of the dominant model of the so-called ‘bilingual
education’, in many cases still tied, despite its different versions,
to a missionary model ideologically civilizatory and integrationist
(here, again, is the legacy of SIL, which monopolized, until some twenty
years ago, the so-called bilingual education in Brazil too).
On the other hand, there are Indigenous groups who have realized the
‘threat’ their languages are under and thus are interested
in their revival. In such cases, it is the Indians who try to interact
with linguists who can get involved in the documentation of their language.
For that kind of work – documenting a language in a joint project
with Indians and propose measures for its preservation or rescue –,
we lack conceptual and strategic instruments. As Grinevald says in the
work already mentioned here, such field linguist is like a one-person
orchestra: he/she has to master all the fields of descriptive Linguistics,
be familiar with the main theories that can guide his/her interpretations
and explanations, know enough of a specific applied Linguistics to get
involved with alphabetization processes or of linguistic revival without
falling into the trap of thinking that all problems are solved in school,
be able to research the language with the Indians, be sensitive and
smart, and know that doing Linguistics at an Indian village is not like
taking a leisure trip for a few weeks.
The Indians certainly would appreciate the efforts and initiatives
that would make possible the appearance of such new researcher; ‘Indigenous’
linguistics would leave behind, once and for all, the lack of professionalism
and the feeling of subordination; and society in general would learn
more about a subject directly related to the preservation of a wealth
that exists within it but which it ignores, or buries, in the common
sense of stereotypes. (Bruna Franchetto – October, 2000).
NOTES:
(1) Rodrigues, Aryon D. - “Línguas Indígenas
– 500 anos de descobertas e perdas”. In: Ciência Hoje,
16 (95), 1993.
(2) Grenand, Pierre e Grenand, Françoise -
“Amérique Equatoriale: Grande Amazonie”. In: Situation
des populations indigènes des forêts denses et humides
(edited by Serge Bahuchet), Luxembourg: Office des publications officielles
des communautés européennes, 1993.
(3) Krauss, Michael - “The world 's languages
in crisis”. In: Language, 68, 1992.
(4) Hale, Ken - “On endangered languages and
the importance of linguistic diversity”. In: Endangered Languages
- Language loss and community response (edited by Lenore A. Grenoble
and J. Whaley Lindsay), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
(5) Adelaar’s data may also be found in As línguas
amazônicas hoje (organized by Francisco Queixalós and Odile
Renault-Lescure), São Paulo: IRD/ ISA/ MPEG, 2000.
(6) Grinevald, Colette – “Language endangerment
in South America: a programmatic approach”. Em: Endangered Languages
- Language loss and community response (edited by Lenore A. Grenoble
and J. Whaley Lindsay), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
(7) Ethno-historical map of Curt Nimuendaju (Rio
de Janeiro: IBGE, 1981).
(8) Storto, Luciana - “A Report on language
endangerment in Brazil”. In: Papers on Language Endangerment and
the Maintenance of Linguistic Diveristy (edited by Jonathan D. Bobaljik,
Rob Pensalfini and Luciana Storto), The MIT Working Papers in Linguistics,
Vol. 28, 1996.
(9) Franchetto, Bruna – “Línguas
e História no Alto Xingu”. In: Os povos do Alto Xingu -
História e Cultura (organized by Bruna Franchetto e Michael Heckenberger),
Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ, 2001.
(10) Rodrigues, Aryon D. - Línguas Brasileiras,
São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 1986.
(11) Seki, Lucy - A Lingüística Indígena
no Brasil, Master’s thesis, Unicamp, 1999.
(12) Seki, Lucy - Gramática Kamayurá,
Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2000.
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