Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

Tetsualü: The pluralism of languages and people in the Upper Xingu 127
“Taking the form of nasty practical jokes, the hazing is justified on the grounds
that the outsider has ‘stolen’ a potential spouse. When the victim, for example,
gets into his hammock after dark he finds it filled with ashes and earth” (1977:
316). Indeed hatũe men and women really suffer at the hands of their spouses’
lovers.
Kumatsi, my father, also tells of the difficulty of communicating with my
mother Ipi. Kumatsi tells us about two fundamental and contrasting aspect of
the Upper Xingu multilingualism. Firstly it is the village where the individual
is born that determines his or her primary language. It is true that a village, a
‘community,’ differs from others through the language that prevails there, and
that there is not only a discourse but also a practice that maintains the predominance
of one language, pushing the others into the background, almost hidden
in the spaces between the houses. On the other hand, nobody stops speaking
their own maternal language when they go to live in another village: not
only do they not stop, they steadfastly maintain it. This is how bilingual people
come about, although the two languages that they know and speak are not on
the same level of knowledge, less still of use. The tetsualü, the ‘mixed people,’
always know more than one language, but must obey the precise rules governing
their potential use. Another aspect worth noting is that when an individual
learns another language, he or she also becomes able to speak all its variants:
someone who knows Kuikuro can also understand Kalapalo, Matipu and Nahukwa,
while knowing Mehinaku allows the person to understand Wauja. Conversation
with my father took place in a typically multilingual Upper Xingu
form: myself speaking in Kuikuro, but understanding Mehinaku; Kumatsi
speaking in Mehinaku, but understanding Kuikuro.
From Kumatsi’s testimony we know that he already understood a bit of
Kuikuro, knowing the names of some objects, such as bow, arrow, manioc
bread, water. This surprised some of the Kuikuro. Here we can recall that, soon
after the flu and measles epidemics, the Nahukwa – just three families of
whom had survived – were taken by their kin to the Mehinaku village. Kumatsi
had Nahukwa friends when he was a child and was able to hear another language
from them, just as his small friends were also able to learn the Mehinaku
language. From what he himself says, although able to understand a Carib
language well, he was unable to speak Kuikuro with any fluency. He says that
he never persisted with the learning process because he knew that he would
never be able to speak like a native: “it’s better to stay with ‘my language’:
when people really don’t understand, I speak nahiruta, I risk speaking in Kuikuro
only if it’s inevitable.”
It was very interesting to analyze the various marriages that have taken
place in my family. The mixture of languages and cultures began at least as