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47-581: This article related to the Indigenous languages of the Americas is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Bolivia -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Indigenous languages of the Americas The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before

94-464: A Dios ) Mexico Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto) , Mexico Belize North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region , Nicaragua Honduras ( Atlántida , Colón , Gracias a Dios ) United States Northwest Territories , Canada Mexico Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community , United States Mexico Tupi language Old Tupi , Ancient Tupi or Classical Tupi ( Portuguese pronunciation: [tuˈpi] )

141-535: A distinct similarity with the voiced stop [ɡʷ] (possibly via [ɣʷ] , which would likewise be a fricative counterpart of the labiovelar semivowel), thus being sometimes written gu . As a consequence of that character, Tupi loanwords in Brazilian Portuguese often have j for Î and gu for Û. It would have been almost impossible to reconstruct the phonology of Tupi if it did not have a wide geographic distribution. The surviving Amazonian Nhengatu and

188-442: A few others use -s- instead. Some examples: To express something happening in the future, the clitic -ne is always added to the last word in the sentence, independent of its grammatical class. This clitic has other meanings and may then be used as a particle in different positions. Tupi verbs are divided into its verbal and its nominal forms. Each division contains its respective verb moods. All nouns in old Tupi end in

235-468: A spoken language (used by Europeans and Indian populations alike) only in isolated inland areas, far from the major urban centres. Its use by a few non-Indian speakers in those isolated areas would last for over a century still. When the Portuguese first arrived on the shores of modern-day Brazil, most of the tribes they encountered spoke very closely related dialects . The Portuguese (and particularly

282-399: A vowel. In the case of a verb or adjective substantivized, the suffix -a is added, if it does not already end in a vowel. The same occurs when a noun and an adjective are in composition. In this way: Unlike the Portuguese language, the tense of an action, in old Tupi, is expressed by the noun, not the verb. Such tenses are future , past and a time called "unreal", which is similar to

329-547: A well-known 19th century Brazilian poet and scholar, in 1858; and a chrestomathy published by Dr Ernesto Ferreira França in 1859. The most recent dictionary is the Old Tupi Dictionary (2013), by the Brazilian scholar Eduardo de Almeida Navarro . In Brazil, tupinology is the study of tupi language and literature. It began in 1901, with the work of Theodoro Sampaio . An individual who dedicates themselves to

376-851: Is Joseph Greenberg 's Amerind hypothesis, which, however, nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation , contact , and coincidence. According to UNESCO , most of the Indigenous languages of the Americas are critically endangered, and many are dormant (without native speakers but with a community of heritage-language users) or entirely extinct. The most widely spoken Indigenous languages are Southern Quechua (spoken primarily in southern Peru and Bolivia) and Guarani (centered in Paraguay, where it shares national language status with Spanish), with perhaps six or seven million speakers apiece (including many of European descent in

423-427: Is pitanga ) (from ybytyra , mountain) In Old Tupi, there are only numerals from one to four, both cardinal and ordinal, as the need for mathematical precision was small in a primitive economy. Cardinal numerals can either come after or before the noun they refer to, while ordinals only come after. For example, in the case of cardinal numbers, mokõî pykasu code: tpw is deprecated and pykasu mokõî code: tpw

470-459: Is a classical Tupian language which was spoken by the indigenous Tupi people of Brazil , mostly those who inhabited coastal regions in South and Southeast Brazil . In the words of Brazilian tupinologist Eduardo Navarro , "it is the classical indigenous language of Brazil, and the one which had the utmost importance to the cultural and spiritual formation of the country". Old Tupi belongs to

517-601: Is a common mistake to speak of the "Tupi–Guarani language": Tupi, Guarani and a number of other minor or major languages all belong to the Tupian language family , in the same sense that English , Romanian , and Sanskrit belong to the Indo-European language family . One of the main differences between the two languages was the replacement of Tupi /s/ by the glottal fricative /h/ in Guarani. The first accounts of

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564-566: Is deprecated are equivalent terms, meaning "two pigeons". In the case of ordinals, ta'yr-ypy code: tpw is deprecated means "first son (of a man)" and 'ara mosapyra code: tpw is deprecated means "third day". They are the same as prepositions, but they come after the term they refer to. They are divided into unstressed postpositions, which are appended to the previous word, and stressed postpositions, which are written separately. Just like in Portuguese or English, some verbs require certain postpositions: There are many ways to negate

611-479: Is done by adding the particle -ne to the end of the sentence, but this does not change the fact that the verb itself does not express time.) Verbs from the second class are not conjugated and are used only with pronouns of the second series. This is because they are actually adjectives generally indicating a state or characteristic. Objects of transitive verbs in Old Tupi may come in many positions relative to

658-604: Is limited to certain regions where the languages are most spoken. Although sometimes enshrined in constitutions as official, the languages may be used infrequently in de facto official use. Examples are Quechua in Peru and Aymara in Bolivia, where in practice, Spanish is dominant in all formal contexts. In the North American Arctic region, Greenland in 2009 elected Kalaallisut as its sole official language. In

705-509: Is quite different from Indo-European languages in phonology , morphology , and grammar , but it was adopted by many Luso-Brazilians born in Brazil as a lingua franca . It belonged to the Tupi–Guarani language family, which stood out among other South American languages for the vast territory it covered. Until the 16th century, these languages were found throughout nearly the entirety of

752-579: Is referred to as tupi antigo in Portuguese ). It has previously been known, in Portuguese, as língua brasílica "Brazilian language". The following is a summary of the main characteristics of Classical Tupi, its typology and other distinguishing features. Old Tupi was first spoken by the Tupinambá people , who lived under cultural and social conditions very unlike those found in Europe . It

799-602: Is still the basis for most modern scholars. It is easily typed with regular Portuguese or French typewriters and computer keyboards (but not with character sets such as ISO-8859-1, which cannot produce ẽ , ĩ , ũ , ŷ and ỹ ). Its key features are: Tupi features clusivity , i.e., a distiction between inclusive (including the adressee) and exclusive (excluding the adressee) first-person pronouns. Personal pronouns in Tupi come in two series, each with its own uses. First series pronouns are generally used alone or along with verbs of

846-412: Is the best available record of how Tupi was actually spoken. In the first two or three centuries of Brazilian history, nearly all colonists coming to Brazil would learn the tupinambá variant of Tupi, as a means of communication with both the Indigenous people and with other early colonists who had adopted the language. The Jesuits, however, not only learned to speak tupinambá , but also encouraged

893-462: Is the origin of most city names of indigenous origin ( Pindamonhangaba , Ubatuba , Botucatu , Jacareí ). It also names several plants and animals, and many proper names are tupi names, such as Moacir, Iara, Iracema and Jandaia. It has a rich literature, which includes cathechisms, poems and plays. The names Old Tupi or Classical Tupi are used for the language in English and by modern scholars (it

940-482: The Jesuit priests who accompanied them) set out to proselytise the natives. To do so most effectively, doing so in the natives' own languages was convenient, so the first Europeans to study Tupi were those priests. The priests modeled their analysis of the new language after the one with which they had already experienced: Latin , which they had studied in the seminary . In fact, the first grammar of Tupi —written by

987-563: The Portuguese Prime Minister Marquis of Pombal expelled the Jesuits from Brazil in 1759, the language started to wane quickly, as few Brazilians were literate in it. A new rush of Portuguese immigration had been taking place since the early 18th century, due to the discovery of gold , diamonds , and gems in the interior of Brazil, and these new colonists spoke only their mother tongue. Old Tupi survived as

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1034-518: The Quechuan languages , Aymara , Guarani , and Nahuatl , which had millions of active speakers, to many languages with only several hundred speakers. After pre-Columbian times, several Indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas, based on European, Indigenous and African languages. The European colonizing nations and their successor states had widely varying attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars learned and promoted

1081-787: The Tupi language . In many Spanish colonies, Spanish missionaries often learned local languages and culture in order to preach to the natives in their own tongue and relate the Christian message to their Indigenous religions. In the British American colonies, John Eliot of the Massachusetts Bay Colony translated the Bible into the Massachusett language , also called Wampanoag, or Natick (1661–1663); he published

1128-532: The Tupi–Guarani language family, and has a written history spanning the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries. In the early colonial period , Tupi was used as a lingua franca throughout Brazil by Europeans and Amerindians, and had literary usage, but it was later suppressed almost to extinction. Today, its sole living descendant is the Nheengatu language . As the most important native language of Brazil, it

1175-487: The future perfect , of Portuguese. They are indicated, respectively, by the adjectives -ram, -pûer and -rambûer . These, when in composition with the noun, receive the suffix -a , as explained above. The degrees of the noun (augmentative and diminutive) are made by the suffixes "-'ĩ' or '-'i'", for the diminutive, and "-ûasu' or '-usu'" for the augmentative (these suffixes may suffer several phonetic transformations. Here are some examples with their explanations: (Child

1222-410: The stop consonants shifted easily to nasal stops , which is attested by the fitful spelling of words like umbu ( umu , ubu , umbu , upu , umpu ) in the works of the early missionaries and by the surviving dialects. According to most sources, Tupi semivowels were more consonantal than their IPA counterparts. The Î, for instance, was rather fricative, thus resembling a very slight [ʑ] , and Û had

1269-561: The 11th century (with the Nordic settlement of Greenland and failed efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador ) and the end of the 15th century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus ). Several Indigenous cultures of the Americas had also developed their own writing systems , the best known being the Maya script . The Indigenous languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from

1316-461: The 2010 census. In Canada, 133,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in the 2011 census. In Greenland, about 90% of the population speaks Greenlandic , the most widely spoken Eskaleut language . Over a thousand known languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of

1363-489: The Americas by European settlers and administrators, had become the official or national languages of modern nation-states of the Americas. Many Indigenous languages have become critically endangered, but others are vigorous and part of daily life for millions of people. Several Indigenous languages have been given official status in the countries where they occur, such as Guaraní in Paraguay . In other cases official status

1410-554: The Brazilian coast, from Pará to Santa Catarina , and the Río de la Plata basin . Today, Tupi languages are still heard in Brazil (states of Maranhão , Pará , Amapá , Amazonas , Mato Grosso , Mato Grosso do Sul , Goiás , São Paulo , Paraná , Santa Catarina , Rio Grande do Sul , Rio de Janeiro , and Espírito Santo ), as well as in French Guiana , Venezuela , Colombia , Peru , Bolivia , Paraguay , and Argentina . It

1457-509: The Jesuit priest José de Anchieta and published in 1595—is structured much like a contemporary Latin grammar. While this structure is not optimal, it certainly served its purpose of allowing its intended readership (Catholic priests familiar with Latin grammars) to get enough of a basic grasp of the language to be able to communicate with and evangelise the natives. Also, the grammar sometimes regularised or glossed over some regional differences in

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1504-1166: The Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages. The first Commissioner of Indigenous languages in Canada is Ronald E. Ignace . Colombia Colombia delegates local Indigenous language recognition to the department level according to the Colombian Constitution of 1991 . Bolivia Corrientes , Argentina Tacuru , Mato Grosso do Sul , Brazil Mercosur Peru (Official Language) Jujuy , Argentina Comunidad Andina Peru (Official Language) Comunidad Andina Belize Mexico Mexico Belize Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Colombia ( Cauca , Nariño , Putumayo ) La Guajira , Colombia Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto) , Mexico Mexico Honduras ( Gracias

1551-447: The Old Tupi language date back from the early 16th century, but the first written documents containing actual information about it were produced from 1575 onwards – when Jesuits André Thévet and José de Anchieta began to translate Catholic prayers and biblical stories into the language. Another foreigner, Jean de Lery , wrote the first (and possibly only) Tupi "phrasebook", in which he transcribed entire dialogues. Lery's work

1598-669: The United States, the Navajo language is the most spoken Native American language, with more than 200,000 speakers in the Southwestern United States . The US Marine Corps recruited Navajo men, who were established as code talkers during World War II. In American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America (1997), Lyle Campbell lists several hypotheses for the historical origins of Amerindian languages. Roger Blench (2008) has advocated

1645-546: The arrival of non-Indigenous peoples . Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct . The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other; instead, they are classified into a hundred or so language families and isolates , as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified due to the lack of information on them. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most widely reported

1692-489: The case of Guarani). Only half a dozen others have more than a million speakers; these are Aymara of Bolivia and Nahuatl of Mexico, with almost two million each; the Mayan languages Kekchi , Quiché , and Yucatec of Guatemala and Mexico, with about 1 million apiece; and perhaps one or two additional Quechuan languages in Peru and Ecuador. In the United States, 372,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in

1739-415: The close Guarani correlates ( Mbyá , Nhandéva , Kaiowá and Paraguayan Guarani ) provide material that linguistic research can still use for an approximate reconstruction of the language. Scientific reconstruction of Tupi suggests that Anchieta either simplified or overlooked the phonetics of the actual language when he was devising his grammar and his dictionary. The writing system employed by Anchieta

1786-469: The expectation that the student, once "in the field", would learn these finer points of the particular dialect through use with his flock. Significant works were a Jesuit catechism of 1618, with a second edition of 1686; another grammar written in 1687 by another Jesuit priest, Luís Figueira; an anonymous dictionary of 1795 (again published by the Jesuits); a dictionary published by Antônio Gonçalves Dias ,

1833-470: The field of tupinology is a tupinologist. The phonology of tupinambá has some interesting and unusual features. For instance, it does not have the lateral approximant /l/ or the multiple vibrant rhotic consonant /r/ . It also has a rather small inventory of consonants and a large number of pure vowels (12). This led to a Brazilian pun about this language, that native Brazilians não têm fé, nem lei, nem rei (have neither faith, nor law, nor king) as

1880-615: The first Bible printed in North America, the Eliot Indian Bible . The Europeans also suppressed use of Indigenous languages, establishing their own languages for official communications, destroying texts in other languages, and insisted that Indigenous people learn European languages in schools. As a result, Indigenous languages suffered from cultural suppression and loss of speakers. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch, brought to

1927-483: The first class (those that are conjugated). For example: ixé a-karukatu : I ate well. Abápe morubixaba? – Ixé : who's the cacique ? - I (am). Second series pronouns are used in many different cases: Old Tupi verbs are divided in two classes. First class are conjugated, with person markers coming at the beginning of the word. In addition, verbs can represent a present, past, or future action because, unlike Portuguese, they do not express time. (The future, in particular,

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1974-431: The natives to keep it. As a part of their missionary work, they translated some literature into it and also produced some original work written directly in Tupi. José de Anchieta reportedly wrote more than 4,000 lines of poetry in tupinambá (which he called lingua Brasilica ) and the first Tupi grammar . Luís Figueira was another important figure of this time, who wrote the second Tupi grammar, published circa 1628. In

2021-608: The nostrils. These approximations, however, must be taken with caution, as no actual recording exists, and Tupi had at least seven known dialects. According to Nataniel Santos Gomes, however, the phonetic inventory of Tupi was simpler: This scheme does not regard Ŷ as a separate semivowel, does not consider the existence of G ( /ɣ/ ), and does not differentiate between the two types of NG ( /ŋ/ and /ⁿɡ/ ), probably because it does not regard MB ( /ⁿb/ ), ND ( /ⁿd/ ) and NG ( /ⁿɡ/ ) as independent phonemes, but mere combinations of P, T, and K with nasalization. Santos Gomes also remarks that

2068-471: The second half of the 18th century, the works of Anchieta and Figueira were republished and Father João Filipe Bettendorff wrote a new and more complete catechism . By that time, the language had made its way into the clergy and was the de facto national language of Brazil – though it was probably seldom written, as the Roman Catholic Church held a near monopoly of literacy. When

2115-663: The theory of multiple migrations along the Pacific coast of peoples from northeastern Asia, who already spoke diverse languages. These proliferated in the New World. Countries like Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Guyana recognize most Indigenous languages. Bolivia and Venezuela give all Indigenous languages official status. Canada, Argentina, and the U.S. allow provinces and states to decide. Brazil limits recognition to localities. Canada Bill C-91, passed in 2019, supports Indigenous languages through sustainable funding and

2162-459: The verb: either before, after or incorporated into it. In the las case, it comes after the person markers ( a -, ere -, o -, etc.) in first class verbs, but before the root. For an example of incorporation: When the object is not incorporated, then in it is replaced by a pleonastic third-person pronoun -i- , even if the object is present elsewhere in the phrase. Monosyllabic verbs use -îo- (or also -nho- close to nasals) instead of -i- , and

2209-426: The words fé (faith), lei (law) and rei (king) could not be pronounced by a native Tupi speaker (they would say pé , re'i and re'i ). It is also a double pun because Brazil has not had a king for more than two centuries. The nasal vowels are fully vocalic, without any trace of a trailing [m] or [n] . They are pronounced with the mouth open and the palate relaxed, not blocking the air from resounding through

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