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 Rondônia in Brazil.
[5] According to David Price (1983),[2] a reference to the Nambikwara people was made as early as 1671 in a report by Padre Gonçalo de Veras.
[6] 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.
One group of missionaries, known as the New Tribes Mission, were killed by the Nambikwara in 1950 supposedly in an act of revenge.
[7] 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.
At present, many of the original 30 groups of Nambikwara people are extinct, and the remaining people reside in the nine territories of the Nambiquara territory: “Vale do Guaporé, Pirineus de Souza, Nambikwara, Lagoa dos Brincos, Taihãntesu, Pequizal, Sararé, Tirecatinga and Tubarão-Latundê”.
Sabanê is spoken by the Nambikwara inhabiting the northern part of their demarcated territory, north of the Iquê river.
[9] Attempts to describe Southern Nambikwara have been made since at least the early 20th century, often in the form of vocabulary lists.
In his 1978 paper “The Nambiquara Linguistic Family” David Price[2] discusses several vocabulary lists published between 1910 and 1960, including those compiled by Levi-Strauss (1948),[8] Rondon (1948),[10] and Roquette-Pinto (1913).
[11] Price insists that early vocabulary lists are largely inadequate, and often contain mistranslations, because many of them were compiled by individuals with no formal linguistics training (1978).
Price himself published a paper in 1976 called “Southern Nambiquara Phonology”, which lists the speech sounds found in Nambikwara and discusses stress and length in the language.
Kroeker's descriptions are based on the several hundred pages of data he gathered while living among the Nambikwara people, and focuses primarily on the language's syntax and semantics.
Specifically, he describes Nambikwra parts of speech, word order, tense, aspect, mood, voice, clause structures, and noun incorporation.
[3] Kroeker (2001) also briefly outlines Nambikwara phonology, providing a list of phonemes and a discussion of syllable structure, tone, length, and stress.
Furthermore, they are also inflected to represent evidentiality: whether the statement was based on observational, inferential, quotative, and what Lowe refers to as “internal support newness”.
[15] In the following example sentences (1) and (2) from Lowe (1999),[15] one can see how the use of a specific suffix helps the hearer distinguish whether the statement being given is observational or quotative: wa3kon2work-na2-OBSERVED.ACTION-ra2-PERFVwa3kon2 -na2 -ra2work -OBSERVED.ACTION -PERFV'He worked.'
[15] Nambikwara has seven different kinds of pronouns: personal, possessive, indefinite, demonstrative, reflexive, reciprocal, and interrogative.
However, Lowe (1999)[15] states that there are few corpus examples of the simultaneous use of time and evidentiality suffixes in definite nouns.
[3] Nambikwara also makes use of different subject and object suffixes that must “refer anaphorically to the real person/object that is either alluded to or given overtly in the subject/object of the clause” and are divided into first, second, and third person.
The following tables (adapted from Kroeker 2001) lists the personal pronoun free forms and bound object and subject suffixes that can be used in Nambikwara.
This is a story telling device, used to make the event that the speaker is describing sound more interesting and believable.
Lowe (1999) also gives the following chart, which shows some verbal evidentiality and tense suffixes for verbs that convey new information.