The Indigenous Portuguese of the Baré: A Decolonial Proposal for the Description and Analysis of Linguistic Data

• Grant number: 24/17674-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2029
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Evani de Carvalho Viotti
• Grantee: Mariana Payno Gomes
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research aims at describing and analyzing the indigenous variety of Portuguese spoken by the Baré people in São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Amazonas, Brazil), which has emerged from contact with Nheengatu (Tupi-Guarani family). It represents a pioneering perspective on this variety within the fields of contact linguistics and anthropological linguistics, inspired by the demands of indigenous peoples for the recognition and documentation of the varieties of Portuguese they speak (Década das Línguas Indígenas, 2024). As the variety under investigation emerges from contact with Nheengatu, we aim to identify features of the indigenous language that may be related to new phenomena in Portuguese, such as syntactic-semantic patterns of the active-inactive typology. The linguistic data will initially be drawn from a 20-hour corpus of recordings, already collected and partially transcribed according to the prosodic-pragmatic method of the C-ORAL Brasil project. However, this corpus needs to be expanded, by establishing new collaborative dialogues with the speakers so that the knowledge they hold about their own language becomes part of the linguistic analysis. We will discuss the data from a linguistic contact and evolution perspective, which allows for an understanding of the sociohistorical and cultural contexts in which new vernaculars emerge (cf. Mufwene, 2008), combined with a decolonial approach to description and analysis (cf. Ameka, 2020; Mufwene, 2021; Negrão; Viotti, 2022). According to this epistemological framework, contact phenomena convey more than just linguistic information: the variety of Portuguese that emerges from the interaction with Nheengatu may also serve as a vehicle for expressing a worldview (cf. Hymes, 1962; Lucy, 1992; Leavitt, 2011).