Mamaindê is a Nambikwaran language spoken in the Mato Grosso state of Brazil, in the very north of the indigenous reserve, Terra Indígena Vale do Guaporé, between the Pardo and Cabixi Rivers. In the southern part of the reserve, speakers of Sabanê and Southern Nambikwara are found.
History At the start of the 1900s, there were an estimated 3000 Mamaindê members. Their endangerment arose as a result of various intertribal wars and massacres in the 30s and 40s as well as measles outbreaks, leaving them with only 50 Mamaindê members by 1965 according to SIL workers Peter and Shirley Kingston. Their population began to rebuild in the 90s, according to SIL workers Dave and Julie Eberhard, when they traced a steady increase in population size and found that their community had grown to 136 members by 1999.
Traditionally located in the Cabixi river region, the Mamaindê people belong to the Nambikwara language family. This language family was extensively studied by American Anthropologist and Ethnologist, David Price, who describes the discovery of gold in the Coxipo river in 1719 as the root for the initial presence of Portuguese and other non-indigenous people in the Mato Grosso region. Being a variety of Northern Nambikwara, the Mamaindê indigenous group, specifically, only came into contact with Brazilian society about three generations ago. It wasn’t until 1911 that the Portuguese actually starting to settle in the Nambikwara area, following the spread of the telegraph line throughout Brazil. Though contact between the indigenous and non-indigenous was both violent and peaceful, measles and massacres ultimately began to exterminate most Nambiwaran tribes. This genocide, which occurred in a span of 30 years, paved the way for the assimilation of the survivors to local Brazilian populations (especially after losing their land), and eventually led to the creation of pidgins/dialects between their indigenous languages and Portuguese.
With a strenuous process, the Mamaindê were one of the few tribes able to regain "legal title of their land". Being initially given a heavily impoverished reserve in 1961, survival was especially wearisome. They decided to walk back to their original land anticipating better living conditions, though lost 30% of their already decaying population on their 400km journey. In times of desperation and in hopes of giving their offspring a better chance of survival, Mamaindê mothers would even travel to the Cuiaba-Porto Velho highway to give babies away to truck drivers and passerby’s. During these arduous times when their population was down to 50 people and on the path to extinction, SIL International, a non-profit language development organization, became involved in their communities. This organization brought Protestant missionaries into Mamaindê communities, which was unlike most Nambikwaran groups who were mainly in contact with Catholic missionaries. Rising familiarity with the bible led to part of it being translated into the Mamaindê language. Young generations were often encouraged to study in missionary schools located away from their villages where they were formally educated in practicing religion in their villages and the norms of "white people’s way of life". Pushing for sustainability and working towards community development, SIL was able to kick-start their advancement in preserving the Mamaindê culture, language and population.
Classificatiom The language family of which Mamaindê belongs to is Nambikwara (also spelled Nambicuara or Nambiquara). Speakers of languages from this family have once or currently lived in the Chapada dos Parecis, the Guaporé Valley and the northern region between the Iquê River and the Cabixi and Piolho rivers. Nambikwara languages can be split into three divisions: Sabanê, Northern Nambikwara and Southern Nambikwara. Languages within each division are mutually intelligible, and are considered dialects of them. Multilingualism is common among Nambikwara that live in the north areas due to heavy contact with different Nambikwara languages as well as Portuguese. As previously mentioned, according to David Price, contact between Portuguese speakers and speakers of Nambikwara languages initially occurred when Portuguese began travelling onto Nambikwara territory in search of gold.
Documentation
Work on Nambikwara David Price contributed greatly to research on the Nambikwara community and focused his fieldwork on them for his doctoral dissertation in anthropology (1967-1970). He worked with/for "the government agency in charge indigenous people", FUNAI, to aid the Nambikwara community. In addition, Price wrote "The Nambiquara Linguistic Family" which classified 6 of the family’s languages. His contribution to the Nambikwara documentation didn’t end there, as he also wrote the published article "Pareci, Cabixi, Nambikwara: a Case study in the Western classification of native peoples" (Journal de la Societe des Americanistes. 69:129-48, 1983). The book that dives into each specific Nambikwara group and its history called "Before the Bulldozer", was also written by Price in 1989.
Nambikwara has various other linguistic literature available as well. A descriptive grammar can be found for Nambikwara; Menno Kroeker wrote the journal article "A Descriptive Grammar of Nambikuara" in 2001 which was published by The University of Chicago Press. This work includes information on the languages in the Nambikwara family in terms of Grammatical Clauses, Verbs, Nouns, Vowels, Phrases, Syllables, Adjectivals, Consonants, etc. This texts generally explains the grammar on Nambikwara. According to Klein and Stark in the book they edited titled "South American Indian Languages: Retrospect and Prospect", Nambikwara also has phonological descriptions and a pedagogical grammar, as well as paper on the languages’ phonological details.
Work on Mamaindê Beginning in the 1960s, SIL International (formerly Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc.) worked among the Mamaindê which could be considered a documentation project of the language. Their documentations on Mamaindê specifically includes the following: Peter Kingston’s unpublished master’s thesis on Mamaindê repetition and other discourse features (Reading University, 1974), Kingston’s "Sufixos referenciais e o elemento nominal na lingua Mamaindê" on verb and noun morphology (published in Serie Linguistica 5:31-81, Brasilia, SIL), David Price’s book "Before the Bulldozer" in which Mamaindê history is covered in one section (1989), Paul Aspelin’s dissertation on Mamaindê food exchange (1979), Dave Eberhard’s published phonology thesis on Mamaindê stress (1995) and his two articles on prosodic features; a paper on Mamaindê nasals (on the Rutgers Optimality Archives website) and a paper on Mamaindê tone (in the proceedings of the Symposium on Andean and Amazonian Languages and Cultures, 2004, Vrije Universitieit, Amsterdam).
Other research conducted with the Mamaindê includes Joan Miller’s research beginning in 2002. Miller has a PhD in Social Anthropology (CAPES Concept 7) from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ, Brazil and has work entitled The Things. Body decorations and the notion of person for the Mamaindê (Nambiquara) 2007. She conducted a research project from 2007 - 2008 called Objectivization and subjectivation regimes in Amazonia: a study of the body adornments of Mamainde (Nambiquara). This project works to include the Mamainde ethnographic analysis in the debate about regimes of objectification and subjectivation in Amazonia and other ethnographic contexts such as Melanesia (Curriculo Lattes).
Edilberto Fernandes Syryczyk has a PhD in Science and Mathematics Education, REAMEC - UFMT Program (2016) that reaches along many categories including Indigenous Mathematical Knowledge, Indigenous Ethnomathematics, Indigenous Culture, Ethnology of Nambikwara, Mathematical Knowledge in Mamaindê. He has contributed to an extension project called Arts & Culture Yucotindu that aims to promote the revitalization of the Mamainde culture. The project works to foster spaces of cultural knowledge exchange among the Mamaindê for example by valorizing the tradition of hand crafted utensils (Curriculo Lattes).
Varieties Among the Nambikwaran languages, at least Northern (Mamainde), Southern (Nambikwara), and Sabane are mutually unintelligible. Mamainde, however, is a dialect cluster, and its varieties are sometimes considered distinct languages. The following distinctions are made by Eberhard (2009). Population figures are those of Ethnologue 16, dated 2007:
Mamaindê proper (including Nagarotê, 330 speakers) Latundê (20) Lakondê (1) Tawandê (or Da’wan’du; unattested and speakers unknown) Yalakalore (extinct and unattested) Yalapmunde (Alapmunte; extinct and unattested)
Yelelihre is another unattested Nambikwaran variety.
Geographic distribution list geographic locations for the following 3 Northern Nambikuara language varieties. The Mamaindê (population: 200) live in Capitão Pedro, Mato Grosso, a village located near Vilhena, Rondônia. The Negarotê (population: 100) live in a main village near the town of Comodoro, Mato Grosso, as well as another village close to the town of Nova Alvorada, Mato Grosso. The Latundê (population: 20) live in the Tubarão-Latundê reserve, located about 150 kilometres west of Vilhena, Rondônia. The reserve has 3 villages. Rio do Ouro: mostly ethnic Aikanã Gleba: contains ethnic Aikanã, Kwazá, and Latundê Barroso: mostly ethnic Latundê
Phonology The following description is based on Mamaindê proper.
Vowels Mamaindê has 20 vowels:
FrontCentral BackHigh i, ĩ, ḭ, ḭ̃ u, ũ, ṵ, ṵ̃ ʊMid e, ẽ, ḛ ə o, õ, o̰Low a, ã, a̰, ã̰
Consonants Mamaindê has 14 contrastive consonants:
Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Plosive Fricative Nasal Lateral Glide
Morphology The aspects of morphology for Mamaindê include morphological typology, morphological processes and grammatical categories. Under the topic of morphological typology, Mamaindê is highly polysynthetic and an agglutinative language. Under the topic of morphological processes, reduplication is a highly present process occurring in various environments as well as in many forms (for example suffixed reduplication, prefixed reduplication and exceptional cases). Another morphological process in Mamaindê is head-marking in which possession is marked "on the head of the noun phrase (the possessed) and not on the dependent (the possessor)". The grammatical categories in Mamaindê consist of types of nouns, types of verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and interjections.
Pronouns Mamaindê includes three person pronouns [ta̰i], [wa̰i] and [ha̰i]; first, second and third person respectively. These are used to refer to all basic grammatical relations including subject, object (as exemplified in a) and indirect objects (as exemplified in b). These pronouns can also be modified by noun classifiers (/-soʔka/), gender markers, plural markers, demonstrative markers and final nominal suffixes (/-ãni/), as exemplified in (b), as no distinct set of pronouns designate these differences.
Noun Classifiers