Language planning for "Mundurukú do Amazonas"

Abstract

Mundurukú, a Tupian language of Brazil, exhibits two opposite scenarios. On one extreme, there is Mundurukú do Pará, the language of daily communication in the Mundurukú Indigenous Land, with fluent speakers found across all generations and still acquired by children as a mother tongue. On the other extreme, there is Mundurukú do Amazonas, formerly spoken in the Kwatá-Laranjal Indigenous Land, but whose inhabitants have shifted to Portuguese. A group of Mundurukú students from Amazonas decided to initiate a process of language revitalisation as a way to strengthen the community's ethnic and cultural identity. This paper reports the initial stages of language planning, and includes future actions to promote language use in the homes and communities, assessement of language proficiency, and definition of educational programs to teach Mundurukú in local schools.

The community as a language planning crossroads: macro and micro language planning in communities in Wales

“…Language ideologies, power relationships and language norms are therefore salient points in the understanding of language practices by social actors. As a result, Chua and Baldauf (2011) Picanço (2012) question the effectiveness of government-lead macro-level language planning on a micro level. It could be argued that many now believe that the communities themselves must be key agents (Mac Giolla Chríst, 2008) in developing language use patterns and ideologies that foster and develop language use on micro community level.…”

Um breve histórico da escrita Mundurukú

“…Essas formas apenas mostram a correspondência segmental, não sendo marcados nem o tom nem a laringalização. 4 O dialeto Mundurukú do Amazonas exibe somente [ɾ], tendo já neutralizado o contraste entre /d/ e /ɾ/ em qualquer contexto(Crofts 1967;Picanço 2012a). Na primeira análise da fonologia Mundurukú, Braun e Crofts (1965) também reportaram somente o tepe[ɾ], e não a oclusiva[d], mas que depois foi reanalisada como um fonema distinto, "apesar de [/d/] se achar em distribuição quase complementar com os fonemas /r/ e /n/"(Crofts 1967: 89).…”