Sabanê Language

The Sabanê language is one of the three major groups of languages spoken in the Nambikwara family. The groups of people who speak this language were located in the extreme north of the Nambikwara territory in the Rondônia and Mato Grosso states of western Brazil, between the Tenente Marques River and Juruena River. Today, most members of the group are found in the Pyreneus de Souza Indigenous Territory in the state of Rondonia.

Currently, there are less than 5 native speakers of the Sabanê language, with all the speakers being more than 50 years old. With no apparent transmission level, this language is considered as highly endangered when compared to the other two Nambikwara languages which have higher levels of transmission and preservation.

History

Amongst the languages in the Nambikwara family, the Sabanê people have the smallest population size. During World War II, many Nambikwara territories suffered from invasions brought about by the search for rubber to supply the war. The installation of tappers resulted in the Nambikwara people being forced into hard labour. Many of the Sabanê people were amongst those forced to provide food crops for the tappers. Due to harsh working conditions, many of the Sabanê people tried to flee to the forest, however this action was met with violent retaliation from the tappers who would return them to the village and murder multiple leaders. In addition, Sabanê people suffered from epidemics brought on by contact with the invaders of their land. This led to an immense loss of lives bringing the Sabanê people close to extinction.
Around 1930, the arrival of the Jesuit Missionaries in the Cerrado region brought formal education to the Nambikwara region. By the beginning of 1940, there was the first school called “Irmãzinhas da Imaculada Conceição”, where small groups of children learned to read and write. Consequently, with arrival of rubber tappers many roads began to open near the Nambikwara villages, which allowed for the formalization of indigenous education.

Language Family

The Nambikwara linguistic family has no known relationships with any other South American linguistic families. The word Nambikwara, Tupi in origin and meaning pierced ear, was designated to the people occupying the northwest Mato Grosso and the border areas of Rondônia. Along with Sabanê, it includes the Southern and Northern Nambikwara languages. These three branches of Nambikwara further include more than fifteen languages and dialects. Unlike Sabanê, Northern and Southern Nambikwara languages are well preserved with the Southern Nambikwara language having the highest level of transmission, with all its people being speakers of the language.

Linguistic Origins and Literature

The first mention of the Sabanê people being described using this very distinction occurred in 1914, in an account from Cândido Rondon, a Brazilian explorer of Indigenous and Portuguese descent, while building a telegraph line through Nambikwaran land. Linguistic documentation did not occur until Claude Lévi-Strauss, a philosopher on a French cultural expedition did so in 1948. While there was documentation of the language concerning classification done in 1919 by Edgar Roquette-Pinto, and again in 1948 by Rondon and Faria, these two reports did not include any linguistic details. Levi-Strauss however created a word list, comprising fifty-six words, and began to describe the morphology and phonology of Sabanê in some detail. Levi-Strauss concluded that it was not possible to determine at that point whether Sabanê belonged to the Nambikwara family given significant morphological and phonological differences with the other Nambikwara languages. In the following years, Sabanê appeared in some comparative analyses and more developed documentation of the linguistics of Sabanê emerged from this. The most notable of these comparative studies comes from David Price, from the University of Brasília in 1978, who described the phonology of Nambikwara languages in comparison to one another.

Pedagogical Grammar

A comprehensive linguistic description focusing exclusively on Sabanê did not emerge until Gabriel Antunes de Araujo's ‘A Grammar of Sabanê’, in 2004. Antunes de Araujo is a linguist and professor at the University of São Paulo. This book includes an extensive description of the phonology, morphology, syntax, adverbs, and interrogative words of the Sabanê language, along with some general historical and cultural information on the Sabanê people.
Antunes de Araujo's work remains the most comprehensive and complete documentation of the Sabanê language, and was sponsored by CAPES ( Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior), a body of the Brazilian government, as well as WOTRO, a Dutch organization. Another notable documentation of the Sabanê language, Levi-Straus’ work, was supported by the French government.

Ethnography

There have also been some (however very few) ethnographies on the Sabanê people- one of the most prominent being by Edwin Reesink in 2004, that primarily focuses on the cultural implications of names and naming in Sabanê culture, and was also sponsored by WOTRO. This lack of documentation and information tends to be significant for Sabanê culture and language; while it appears in a number of works, it is usually only mentioned with very little information provided.

Phonology

Sabanê has 16 phonemes — 11 consonants and 5 vowels. Each has different allophones.

Consonants

Sabanê's 11 consonants are shown in the table below.

The consonants used in Sabanê are similar to those for the Northern Nambikwara languages, although there are no implosives in Latundê. However, the Southern Nambikwara languages have different phonemes such as glottalized and aspirated consonants as wells as only one implosive and one affricate .

Vowels

Sabanê has 5 phonemic vowels, listed in the table below.

Once again the vowels used in Sabanê are similar to Northern Nambikwara, but vary when compared to Southern Nambikwara. Southern Nambikwara has a much larger vowel inventory, including creaky