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Tupian languages

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Tupian languages
 
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Family of South American Indian languages with at least seven subgroups, spoken or formerly spoken in scattered areas from the Andes Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean and (with two exceptions) south of the Amazon River to southernmost Brazil and Paraguay. About one half of the 50 attested Tupian languages are extinct. The largest subgroup, Tupí-Guaraní, includes the extinct language Tupinambá, the source for borrowings of many New World flora and fauna terms into Portuguese and hence other European languages. Another language of the subgroup, Guaraní, is spoken as a first or second language by more than 90% of Paraguayans, who consider it a token of Paraguayan identity.

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Wikipedia: Tupian languages
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Tupian
Geographic
distribution:		 Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay
Genetic
classification:		 Je-Tupi-Carib?
 Tupian
Subdivisions:
Arikem
Awetï
Mawé-Sateré
Mondé
Mundurukú
Puruborá
Ramarama
Tuparí
Tupi-Guarani
Yuruna
ISO 639-2 and 639-5: tup

The Tupi or Tupian language family comprises some 70 languages spoken in South America, of which the best known are Tupi proper and Guarani.

Contents

History, members, and classification

When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil, they found that wherever they went along the vast coast of this newly discovered land, most natives spoke similar languages. Jesuit missionaries took advantage of these similarities, systematizing common standards then named línguas gerais "general languages", which were spoken in that region until the 19th century. The best known and most widely spoken of these languages was Old Tupi, a modern descendent of which is still used today by Indians around the Rio Negro region, where it is known as Nheengatu ([ɲɛʔẽŋaˈtu]), or the "fine language". However, the Tupi family also comprises other languages.

In the neighbouring Spanish colonies, Guarani, another Tupian language closely related to Old Tupi, had a similar history, but managed to resist the spread of Spanish more successfully than Tupi resisted Portuguese. Today, Guarani has 7 million speakers, and is one of the official languages of Paraguay and Bolivia.

The Tupian family also includes several other languages with fewer speakers. These share irregular morphology with the Ge and Carib families, and Ribeiro connects them all as a Je-Tupi-Carib family.

See also

External links

Bibliography

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tupian languages".  Read more

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