Nheengatu

Nheengatu, also known as Modern Tupi and Amazonic Tupi, is a Tupi–Guarani language. It is spoken throughout the Rio Negro region among the Baniwa, Baré, and Warekena people in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, and the state of Amazonas, Brazil.

The language has been one of Amazonas' official languages since 2002. Outside of the Rio Negro region, the Nheengatu language is spoken across the Baixo Amazonas region among the Sateré-Mawé, Maraguá, and Mura people. In the Baixo Tapajós and the state of Pará, Nheengatu is mainly spoken among the Borari and the Tupinambá peoples.

A 2010 study by UNESCO estimated the number of Nheengatu speakers at around 10,000. In 2025, Thomas Finbow, a professor at the University of São Paulo, estimated that there were between 5,000 - 7,000 speakers in Brazil, and fewer than 10,000 globally, including communities in Venezuela and Colombia. Nheengatu is a useful study on language change, on account of its long history of documentation that spans several centuries. Due to its former role as a lingua franca, Nheengatu is one of the most significant minority languages in Brazil.

Name

The name of the language derives from the words (meaning "language" or "word") and (meaning "good"). Nheengatu is referred to by a wide variety of names in literature, including Nhengatu, Tupi Costeiro, Geral, Yeral (in Venezuela), Tupi Moderno,Template:Rp Nyengato, Nyengatú, Waengatu, Neegatú, Is'engatu, Língua Brasílica, Tupi Amazônico, Ñe'engatú, Nhangatu, Inhangatu, Nenhengatu, Yẽgatú, Nyenngatú, Tupi, and Lingua Geral. It is also commonly referred to as the (LGA) in Brazil.

Classification

Nheengatu descended from the extinct Tupinambá language and belongs to the Tupi–Guarani branch of the Tupi language family. The Tupi–Guarani language family is a large and diverse group of languages, including Xeta, Siriono, Arawete, Kaapor, Kamayura, Guaja, and Tapirape. Many of these languages were spoken years before the Portuguese colonization of what is now Brazil. Over time, the term "Tupinamba" was used to describe groups that were "linguistically and culturally related".

			Portuguese	Ancient Tupi	Yẽgatu (Nheengatu from Rio Negro)	Traditional Nheengatu	Tapajoawaran Nheengatu
1st person	singular
	plural	exclusive
		inclusive
2nd person	singular
	plural
3rd person	singular
	plural

Eduardo de Almeida Navarro, a Brazilian philologist specializing in Nheengatu, argues that with its current characteristics, Nheengatu would have only emerged in the 19th century as a natural evolution of the Tupi language.

English	Portuguese	Ancient Tupi	Yẽgatu (Nheengatu from Rio Negro)	Traditional Nheengatu	Tapajoawaran Nheengatu
bird
man
woman
happiness
city
hammock
water

In addition to the now extinct general language of São Paulo, Nheengatu is closely related to ancient Tupi, and to Guarani of Paraguay. Ancient Nheengatu and Guarani were mutually intelligible.

History

Belonging to the Tupi–Guarani linguistic family, Nheengatu emerged in the 18th century, descending from the now extinct Amazonian Tupinambá, a regional Tupi variant that originated in the Odisseia Tupínambá. The exodus of that nation, fleeing from Portuguese invaders on the Bahia coast, entered the Amazon and settled first in Maranhão, and from there to the Guajará Bay (Belém), the mouth of the Tapajós river, to the Tupinambarana island (Parintins), between the borders of Pará and Amazonas. The language of the Tupinambás became a lingua franca, hence why the Arawak peoples of the Parintins region came to be called Tupinambaranas (meaning "fake Tupinambá").

By the early 17th century, the Portuguese had conquered the Amazon and established the colonial state of Grão-Pará and Maranhão, whose capital, Belém, was known as Cidade dos Tupinambás or Tupinambá Marií. In pursuit of catechism, Franciscan and Jesuit priests codified the grammar and orthography of the local lingua franca, which over time developed into the Northern General Language, also known as the Amazonian General Language. Its development occurred in parallel with that of the São Paulo General Language. Nheengatu subsequently spread throughout the Amazon as a tool of colonization, Portuguese dominion, and linguistic standardization. Many peoples came to adopt it as their primary language at the expense of their own; the Hanera, better known as the Baré, are one such example; their shift to Nheengatu ultimately led to the extinction of their native tongue. The Maraguá people, themselves longstanding Nheengatu speakers, have more recently undertaken efforts to revitalize their own language, and today Maraguá is taught alongside Nheengatu in local schools.

Speakers of other languages vastly outnumbered the Portuguese settlers in the Amazon, to the point that the Portuguese themselves adapted to the native language. A Portuguese colonist stated: "To speak or converse in the colony of Grão Pará, I had to use Nheengatu; if not, I would be talking to myself, since no one used Portuguese, except in the government palace in Belém and among the Portuguese themselves."

The General Language was established as the official language from 1689 to 1727 in Grão Pará and Maranhão. In order to erase the Amazonian identity, the Portuguese language was promoted, but did not see much success. In the mid-18th century, the Amazonian General Language, along with the related São Paulo General Language, was used throughout the colony. At this point, Tupinambá remained intact, but as a chiefly liturgical language, while the General Language was used for commmunication. By the mid-18th century, the Amazon and Tupinambá General Languages were already distinct.

Nheengatu continued to evolve as it expanded into the Alto Rio Negro region through contact with other languages such as Marawá, Baníwa, Warekana, Tucano, and Dâw.

The General Language evolved into two branches, the Northern General Language (Amazonian) and the Southern General Language (Paulista), which at its height became the dominant language of the vast Brazilian territory.

An anonymous manuscript from the 18th century is emblematically titled Dictionary of the general language of Brazil, spoken in all the towns, places, and villages of this vast State, written in the city of Pará, year 1771.

If Nheengatu was the major obstacle for the cultural and linguistic domination of Portuguese in the region, the colonizers saw that it was necessary to take it away from the people and impose the Portuguese language, which at first was not successful since the general language was very well rooted both among indigenous people and in the speech of blacks and whites themselves. The language was banned by Pombal's government, who intended to impose the Portuguese language in Brazil. Hence, many places had their names changed from the Northern General language to names of places and cities in Portugal, such as Santarém, Aveiro, Barcelos, Belém, Óbidos, Faro, Alenquer, and Moz.

A regional ban on the Northern General language came right after the Cabanagem separatist revolts; after the rebels were defeated in 1860, the regencial Brazilian government imposed a harsh persecution on the speakers of Nheengatu. Half of the male population of Grão-Pará was murdered and anyone who was caught speaking in Nheengatu was punished. The imposition of the Portuguese language this time had an effect and with the advent of Portuguese schools, the population was shepherded to the new language.

Also in the 20th century, economic and political events like the Amazon Rubber Boom, which brought huge waves of government encouraged settlers from the Northeast to the Amazon, led to an increased Portuguese presence. This again forced indigenous peoples to move or be subjected to forced labor. The language was again influenced by the increased presence of Portuguese speakers.

Nheengatu remained mainly among the most distant inhabitants of the urban centers, in the families descended from the cabanos and among unconquered peoples. Furthermore, "tapuios" (ribeirinhos) kept their accent and part of their speech tied to their language. Until 1920 it was common for Nheengatu to be used in traditional commercial centers in Manaus, Santarém, Parintins, and Belém.

Current use

Nheengatu is spoken in the Alto Rio Negro region, in the state of Amazonas, in the Brazilian Amazon and in neighboring parts of Colombia and Venezuela. There are potentially as many as 19,000 Nheengatu speakers worldwide, although some journalists have reported as many as 30,000. Currently, it is still spoken by around 73.31% of the 29,900 inhabitants of São Gabriel da Cachoeira (IBGE 2000 Census), around 3,000 people in Colombia, and around 2,000 people in Venezuela, especially in the Rio Negro river basin (Uaupés and Içana rivers). Furthermore, it is the native language of the rural caboclo population of the area and is a common language of communication between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, or between Indigenous peoples of different languages. It is also an instrument of ethnic affirmation of Amazonian indigenous peoples who have lost their native languages, such as Barés, Arapaços, Baniuas, Uarequenas, and others.

Ethnologue rates Nheengatu as "changing" with a rating of 7 on the Gradual Intergenerational Interruption Scale (GIDS) (Simons and Fennig 2017). According to this scale, this classification suggests that "the population of children may use the language among themselves, but it is not being transmitted to children". According to the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages of the World, Nheengatu is classified as "severely endangered". The language has recently regained some recognition and prominence after being suppressed for many years.

In December 2002, Nheengatu gained official language status alongside Portuguese in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira in accordance with local law 145/2002. Now Nheengatu is one of the four official languages of the municipality.

In 1998, University of São Paulo professor Eduardo de Almeida Navarro founded the Tupi Aqui organization dedicated to promoting the teaching of historical Tupi and Nheengatu in high schools in São Paulo and elsewhere in Brazil. Professor Navarro wrote a textbook for teaching Nheengatu that Tupi Aqui makes available, along with other teaching materials, on a website hosted by the University of São Paulo.

Revitalization

In 2007, USP established the first Brazilian university extension course dedicated to the study of Nheengatu. In 2012, the language was incorporated into the graduate program in translation studies. Consequently, in 2016 Graciliano Ramos's was translated into Nheengatu. Translations contribute to lexical revitalization; this translation of Ramos's work included linguistic and lexical research on Nheengatu, allowing for the use of obsolete words remembered only by the elders or already completely forgotten and replaced by borrowings from Portuguese, although borrowings adopted more than a century ago—now fully integrated into the language's tradition—were also employed. In 2017, The Little Prince was also translated as part of a master's dissertation supervised by USP professor Eduardo de Almeida Navarro. Likewise, in many instances the translation employed equivalent terms, adaptations, neologisms, and the revival of archaic words; for example, the tiger was replaced with Template:Wikt-lang (jaguar) and wheat with Template:Wikt-lang (corn), and the very title revived an old expression which served "to connect a word that had fallen out of use with the naming of a character in the book who was mysterious and little known".

In 2021, "Nheengatu App" was launched, becoming the first application for teaching an Indigenous language in Brazil. It teaches the Tapajoara variant of the language. Its release was supported by the Template:Interlanguage link and the Secretariat of Culture of Pará. According to its creator Suellen Tobler, the app was used in Indigenous schools in the Lower Tapajós region, and by September 2023 approximately 2,200 users had registered. In March 2024, the project was presented at Campus Party Brasília. Other Brazilian Indigenous groups showed interest in the initiative, and Tobler went on to co-author two other apps for teaching native Brazilian languages.

In 2023, the Brazilian Constitution was translated into Nheengatu, marking the first time it was rendered into an Indigenous language—until then, it had been translated only into Spanish and English. The translation was carried out by 15 bilingual Indigenous individuals from the Upper Negro River and Middle Tapajós regions,Template:Efn through a project sponsored by the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and the National Council of Justice, within the framework of the United Nations's International Decade of Indigenous Languages. They worked for at least three hours a day over the course of three months; project curator and then National Library president Marco Lucchesi stated the work was intense with specialists available around the clock to answer any questions. Then STF president Rosa Weber attended the launch event in São Gabriel da CachoeiraTemplate:Efn and stated Nheengatu was chosen because of its significance to the Amazon region. Later, Weber presented a copy to Lucchesi at the National Library, the first time in 100 years that a head of the judiciary had visited it.

Documentation

Over the course of its evolution since its beginnings as Tupinambá, extensive research has been done on Nheengatu. There have been studies done at each phase of its evolution, but much has been focused on how aspects of Nheengatu, such as its grammar or phonology, have changed upon contact over the years. (Facundes et al. 1994 and Rodrigues 1958, 1986).

The first documents that were produced were by Jesuit missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as by Father José de Anchieta (1595) and by Luis Figueira (1621). These were detailed grammars that served their religious purposes. Multiple dictionaries have also been written over the years (Mello 1967, Grenand and Epaminondas 1989, Barbosa 1951). More recently, Stradelli (2014) also published a Portuguese-Nheengatu dictionary.

There have also been several linguistic studies of Nheengatu, such as Borges (1991)’s thesis on Nheengatu phonology and Cruz (2011)’s detailed paper on the phonology and grammar of Nheengatu. She also studied the rise of number agreement in modern Nheengatu by analyzing how grammaticalization occurred over the course of its evolution from Tupinambá (Cruz 2015). Cruz (2014) also studies reduplication in Nheengatu in detail, as well as morphological fission in bitransitive constructions. A proper textbook for the conducting of Nheengatu classes has also been written. Lima and Sirvana (2017) provides a sociolinguistic study of Nheengatu in the Pisasu Sarusawa community of the Baré people, in Manaus, Amazonas.

In 2023, the Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil (Brazilian Constitution), promulgated in 1988, was translated into Nheengatu for the first time.

Language documentation projects

Language documentation agencies (such as SOAS, Museu do Índio, Museu Goeldi, and Dobes) are currently not engaged in any language documentation project for Nheengatu. However, research on Nheengatu by Moore (1994) was supported by Museu Goeldi and the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq), and funded by the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) and the Inter-American Foundation. In this study, Moore focused on the effects of language contact and how Nheengatu evolved over the years with the help of a Nheengatu-speaking informant. Moore urges for the "location and documentation of modern dialects of Nheengatu", due to their risk of becoming extinct.

Phonology

Consonants

Parentheses mark marginal phonemes occurring only in few words, or with otherwise unclear status.

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Post- alveolar	Palatal		Velar		Glottal
							plain	lab.
Plosive	plain			()					()
	voiced	()					()
	prenasal
Fricative
Nasal
Trill
Approximant

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Mid
Open

Morphology

There are eight word classes in Nheengatu: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, postpositions, pronouns, demonstratives, and particles.

Pronouns

There are two types of pronouns in Nheengatu: personal or interrogative. Nheengatu follows the same pattern as Tupinambá, in that the same set of personal pronouns is adopted for the subject and object of a verb.

	Singular	Sg Prefix	Plural	Pl Prefix
1
2
3

Examples of Personal Pronouns in use:

In Nheengatu, personal pronouns can also take the form of prefixes. These prefixes are necessary in the usage of verbs as well as postpositions. In the latter case, free forms of the pronouns are not permitted. Moore illustrates this with the following:

The free form of the first person singular pronoun cannot be combined with the postposition word for 'with'.

The second set of pronouns are interrogative, and are used in question words.

			'what, who, whom'
			'who, whom'

Verbal affixes

According to Moore, throughout the evolution of Nheengatu, processes such as compounding were greatly reduced. Moore cites a summary by Rodrigues (1986), stating that Nheegatu lost Tupinambá's system of five moods (indicative, imperative, gerund, circumstantial, and subjunctive), converging into a single indicative mood. Despite such changes alongside influences from Portuguese, however, derivational and inflectional affixation was still intact from Tupinambá. A select number of modern affixes arose via grammaticization of what used to be lexical items, such as the former lexical item 'many'. Over time and grammaticization, this word became to plural suffix .

Apart from the pronominal prefixes shown in Table (3), there are also verbal prefixes. Verbs in Nheengatu fall into three mutually exclusive categories: intransitive, transitive, and stative. By attaching verbal prefixes to these verbs, a sentence can be considered well-formed.

	Singular	Plural
1
2
3

Examples of verbal prefixes:

In these examples, the verbal first person singular prefix is added to the intransitive verb for 'work' and transitive verb for 'make' respective. Only when prefixed with this verbal clitic can they be considered well-formed sentences.

Reduplication

Another morphological feature of Nheengatu is reduplication, which Cruz (2011) explains in her grammar to be employed differently based on the community of Nheengatu speakers. This is a morphological process that was originally present in Tupinambá, and it tends to be used to indicate a repeated action.

In this example, the reduplicated segment is , which is the Nheengatu verb for 'knock'. This surfaces as a fully reduplicated segment. However, partial reduplication also occurs in this language. In the following example elicited by Cruz, the speaker reduplicates the first two syllables (a CVCV sequence) of the stem word.

Another point to note from the above example is the usage of the plural word . Cruz (2011) highlights that there is a distinction in the usage of reduplication between communities. The speakers of Içana and the upper region of the Rio Negro use Nheengatu as their main language, and reduplication occurs in the stative verbs, expressing intensity of a property, and the plural word doesn't necessarily need to be used. In Santa Isabel do Rio Negro and the more urbanized areas of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, bilingualism is common, with Portuguese serving as the primary language. In this context, these speakers also employ reduplication to indicate the intensity of a property, but the plural must be used if the subject is plural.

Sample texts

Pedro Luiz Sympson (1876)

Pe. Afonso Casanovas (2006)

Eduardo de Almeida Navarro (2011)

Aline da Cruz (2011)

Sample from book Yasú Yapurũgitá Yẽgatú (2014)

Roger Manuel López Yusuino (Venezuelan Nheengatu) (2013)

See also

• Afonso Casasnovas
• Língua Geral
• Region of Cabeça do Cachorro

External links

• .
• .
• .
• .
• .
• .
• Playlist with video classes by Prof Eduardo Navarro and support material in PDF in the description of the playlist
• Website of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nheengatu, with texts, videos and audios