The Mekéns language (Mekem), or Amniapé,Wanda Hanke, Morris Swadesh, & Aryon Rodrigues, ca. 1950 , Notas de fonologia Mekéns is a highly endangered Brazilian indigenous language belonging to the Tupi language trunk, and classified as one of the five surviving languages of the Tupari sub-family. The language is spoken by approximately 25 people (ibid) in the state of Rondônia, in the Amazon region of northwestern Brazil, straddling the border with neighbouring Bolivia.
Classification The Mekéns language is a language classified under three sub-families of the large Tupian trunk. Moving downward from the Tupi trunk classification comes the Tuparic, Nuclear Tuparic, and Akuntsu-Mekens sub-families, the latter to which the Mekéns language belongs.
Geographical distribution Nowadays, the majority of Mekéns language speakers live inside the federal indigenous reservation Rio Mequens, located within the municipality of Cerejeira, in the vicinity of the Mequens river tributary. The inhabitants of the reserve refer to both their language and ethnic group as the Sakurabiat (or Sakirabiat), literally translating as "Spider-Monkey". The language is spoken by the members of this ethnic group, with a total population of 66 (as of 2003), living within the reserve.
Subdivisions Within the reserve there are four distinct, documented subgroups, namely the Sakirabiat, Guarategayet, Guaratira, and Siwkweriat groups. Although initially a term for only one dialect group, the term Sakirabiat has now become the one name which encompasses all of the subgroups. This can be attributed to a sharp decline in their population during the 20th century.
There are three groups of Mekens speakers:Wolf Dietrich, "O tronco tupi e as suas famílias de línguas. Classificação e esboço tipológico". In Volker Noll & Wolf Dietrich, eds., O português e o tupi no Brasil, São Paulo, 2010. Sakïrabiát (Sakirabiá, Sakiráp) Koaratira (Guaratira, a.k.a. Kanoé – not the same as the Kanoé language) Koarategayat (Guaratégaya, Guarategaja, Warategáya)
Endangerment In the Rio Mequens reservation today, Portuguese is spoken by everyone living within the boundaries, and has become the first language of most of the residents. Furthermore, the majority of the population is monolingual and unable to speak Mekéns fluently. Only about 23 people on the reserve are fluent, with most of these people being elders; however most of the residents are familiar with the everyday words of the language, including the names of the most common animals and plants, kinship terms, manufactured objects, and domestic utensils. Children on the reserve are not learning Mekéns, meaning the language is not being effectively transmitted from one generation to the next. This is a clear indication of a high level of language endangerment.
History According to historical sources, the Guaporé river basin has consistently been the documented location of the members of the linguistic family known as the Tupi-Tupari family. The first documented contact of Europeans with the indigenous peoples living on the right bank of the Guaporé river dates back to the 17th century. For the century that followed, the area of present-day Rondônia was heavily occupied by both Portuguese and Spanish settlers, who were disputing the boundaries of their neighbouring colonies. In the late 18th century this area was abruptly abandoned by the settlers, as the colonies were moving toward independence and the interest in enforcing colonial boundaries sharply decreased.
The area was largely empty until the mid-19th century when demand for rubber drove rubber tappers to the region and brought back a heavy occupation of the area. Although having suffered substantial losses in their population, the Sakurabiat peoples survived these periods of occupation, an outcome attributed to the isolation of the villages that stood on the right bank of the Guaporé river. Their location in the headwaters of the Guaporé River's west tributaries made them difficult to access, and likely saved the group from extinction.
According to the accounts of members of the Guaratira people, the first interactions of the Sakurabiat peoples with outsiders occurred in the early 1930s, when European-Bolivian settlers navigated the Mequens river upstream, reaching their villages. The outbreak of the Second World War greatly increased the demand for rubber and led to conflicts between the rubber tappers and the indigenous population. Their traditional lands were invaded and they were forced to yield to the rubber-tapping industry. Furthermore, epidemic diseases including measles and influenza, brought by these outsiders spread rampant, causing numerous deaths and a drop in a population numbering in the thousands (during the early 1930s and 1940s) to 64 people in 1994.
Documentation The amount of literature available on the language is very limited, and there are no pedagogical grammars written on it either. The descriptive grammar available involves the dissertation and three subsequent research papers by Ana Vilacy Galucio, a researcher who received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2001, with her dissertation on the Mekéns language. She is currently a senior researcher and the Coordinator of the Human Sciences Department at the Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi research institution in Belém, Brazil, and an invited researcher of the Traces of Contact Project at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Holland.
Her dissertation paper, titled the Morphosyntax of Mekens (Tupi), involves research and data collected through field work done at the Rio Mequens Indigenous Reservation. It includes a detailed chapter on the morphology of the language, including lexical categories, inflectional morphology, and word formation processes. There is also a detailed description of the Mekéns syntax in the subsequent chapter which includes phrasal categories, as well as noun, verb, adpositional, and adverb phrases. The final chapter of her dissertation focuses on the structure of sentences, including the declarative, imperative, and interrogative sentence structures, non-verbal predicate clauses, complex sentences, and pragmatically marked sentence structures. In 2002, Galucio wrote a subsequent paper describing the word order and constituent structure in Mekéns and, in 2006, a paper in Portuguese on the relativization of the Sakurabiat (Mekéns) language.
Also in 2006, she published a book titled Narrativas Tradicionais Sakurabiat (Traditional Sakurabiat Narratives), an illustrated bilingual story book containing 25 traditional Sakurabiat legends or tales, as well as illustrations made by children living in the reserve. Most recently, in 2011, Galucio published her paper Nominalization in the Mekens Language. In this research paper, Galucio investigates "the different morphosyntactic and semantic properties of the distinct forms of deverbal nominalizations in Mekéns", in which she tries to "uncover the typological properties of this language".
The Sakurabiat language has not yet been described in a language documentation project. However, according to an article published in Portuguese in 2013 on the Museu Goeldi website, there is currently a documentation project in the works. This article, named Dicionário Sakurabiat, states that Ana Galucio, along with her coworker Camille Cardoso Miranda, are currently working on a Mekéns-Portuguese dictionary, as a way to register and document collected data from the speakers of the language. This is a project which aims to improve the instruction, learning, and preservation of the culture of the Sakurabiat people. Furthermore, there is a subproject currently being undertaken by Alana Neves, student at the Federal University of Pará, and oriented by Galucio, which aims to organize the current Mekéns texts available into an electronic database. These projects are being done with an eye to creating a complete grammar book in the Sakurabiat language. This would establish a pedagogical grammar resource which could be used to revitalize the Mekéns language and thus protect it from extinction.
Phonology The collection of sounds which occur in Mekéns is similar to that of the other Tupian languages, including consonants from the following series: voiced and voiceless stops, fricatives, liquids, nasals and glides. There are 15 consonants in total, with 5 voiced stops, 2 voiceless stops, 1 fricative, 1 liquid, 4 nasals, and 2 glides.
+ Phonemic Inventory of Consonants labial coronal palatal velar labiovelar glottal nasals stops (?) — — fricative liquid glide
As for the vocalic system in Mekéns, it contains 5 vowels in total, with noted contrasts between nasal and oral vowels, as well as between short and long vowels. The following table displays these contrasts in the vowels.
+ Phonemic Inventory of Vowels Oral Nasal Short Long Short LongHigh Mid Low
Grammar This grammar aims to give an overview of the Mekéns (Sakurabiat) language, based on the PhD dissertation of Ana Vilacy Galucio, published at the University of Chicago in 2001. The Mekéns language is a highly endangered Tupi language, spoken by 25 people, among members of the ethnic group of the same name. It is found within the boundaries of the Rio Mekéns Indigenous Reservation, located in the state of Rondônia in northwestern Brazil, along the border with Bolivia. The language belongs to the sub-category Tupari, where it is classified alongside four other languages: Tupari, Makurap, Ayuru and Akuntsu. Among the Tupari languages, vocalic phonemes have remained very constant over time. The phonemic vowel inventory in these languages is nearly identical; the phonemic inventory of consonants is very similar among them, but with slight differences. Although the four languages are not mutually intelligible, their sound correspondences are very regular, providing clear proof of their genetic relationship.
In the Mekéns language, verbs have a moderately high number of morphemes, to the point where an entire sentence may be constructed using a single verb. Nouns however do not demonstrate a complex morphological structure. With nouns there is no case marking, no agreement between them and their modifiers, and no formal marking in either the possessor or the possessee in possessive constructions which involve two nominals. The morphological process of stem alternation is achieved through affixation, in which suffixation is preferred to prefixation. The personal inflectional markers and the derivational valence changing morphemes, including causative, comitative and intransitivizer, are the only prefixes in the language. All of the other affixes employed in Mekéns are suffixes which mark number, tense-aspect-mood and category change (nominalization and verbalization).
There are two types of pronouns in Mekéns - these include personal and reflexive. Nouns and pronouns are clearly distinguished from each other, in that only nouns can occur with a personal prefix or form a phrasal unit with a preceding nominal. Pronouns may not be modified by a demonstrative, but nouns may.
+Table 3: Personal Pronouns singular plural 1st person õt ose kise 2nd person ẽt eyat 3rd person te teyat sete seteyat
In Mekéns, the two first person plural pronouns (the inclusive and exclusive pronouns, respectively) are formed by adding the prefixes for the first person plural inclusive "ki-" and the first person singular "o-" with the morpheme "-se". The third person and third person co-referential plural personal pronouns are formed by adding the third person singular and third person co-referential pronouns to the collective clitic "-iat".
In example 1A, the personal pronoun "õt" is found at the end of the sentence. In Example 1B, the personal third person co-referential pronoun "sete" is found in the 2nd position of the sentence.