Mekéns language

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: • 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. 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. ==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. There is no case, class or gender marking associated with nouns. There is, however, a number distinction: nouns may be marked as either singular or plural. Singular nouns, which constitute the default case, are unmarked. Plural nouns are marked by the collective clitic "-iat". Plural marking can be omitted if it is marked in other elements in a clause, such as the verb or demonstrative. The collective or plural form in nouns is marked to the right of the noun phrase and before other clitics. When a noun is altered by one or more adjective stems, the collective marker is usually inserted to the right of the last adjective stem, after the noun (seen in examples 1A and B). It may also be inserted to the right of the first adjective stem after the noun (seen in example 1D), and may sometimes attach directly to the noun, before the adjective stems (seen in example 1E). The collective morpheme is freer than the other affixes in Mekéns, since its scope extends over more than just a single world. It is therefore appropriate to consider this collective morpheme as a Noun Phrase modifier, like the postpositional clitics in the language. Examples 1E and 1F illustrate its scope over the entire noun phrase. In part a, it refers to a group of non-Indian young boys, and in example b, it refers to the group of "non-indian black guys", and not just to the "black guys". In the second personal plural, third personal plural and third person co-referential plural forms respectively, personal pronouns are marked by the collective clitic "-iat". Table 1 illustrates the use of the morpheme in the above forms. Note that the vowel "i" changes to "y", when suffixed to personal pronouns. In verbs, plurality may be marked in two ways - either through the application of the plural suffix "-kwa", or through stem alteration. In example 2A, the "-kwa" suffix is attached to the verb to indicate the killing of more than one person. In stem alteration, "one verb is used for a singular argument, and a different verb is used for a plural argument". This is demonstrated in example 2B. With auxiliaries, the plurality of their argument is expressed with the clitic "-iat". In examples 3A and 3B, the third personal plural is implied, although there is no indication of person after the auxiliary-plural word. When there is no marking for person in transitive verb stems, this indicates the third person. Furthermore, as seen in example 3B, when other overt plural markers are present, the third personal singular coreferential prefix takes a plural reference. In example 3C, there is no marking of person in neither the lexical verb nor the auxiliary; the person/number of the argument is indicated only by the use of morpheme "-iat", which is suffixed to the auxiliary. The sentence is therefore interpreted as having a third-person plural subject. Moving to example 3D, the sentence has a first person plural subject, seen after the "-iat" morpheme. ==References==