Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

142 Mutua Mehinaku & Bruna Franchetto
us, not so much from the musical viewpoint, but from the linguistic, anthropological
and historical viewpoint.
Within the Xingu Indigenous Land there are four regions: the Upper, Middle,
Lower and Eastern Xingu. The Upper Xingu is occupied by nine distinct
ethnic groups: the Kuikuro, Kalapalo, Nahukwa and Matipu, who form the Carib-language
subsystem; the Yawalapiti, Wauja and Mehinaku, speakers of two
Arawak languages, the latter two speaking variants of the same language; and
the Aweti and Kamayurá (or Apyap, as my informant Kanawayuri Kamaiurá
says), speaking two languages from the Tupi-Guarani family, part of the Tupi
trunk. In the Middle Xingu live two peoples, the Ikpeng (Carib) and the Trumai
(an isolated language), and in the Lower Xingu another two peoples, the Kayabi
(Tupi-Guarani) and the Yudja (Tupi). To the east of the Xingu Indigenous
Park live the Kĩsêdje and the Tapayuna, both speaking Ge languages. These
indigenous lands are multilingual. Has it always been so?
Archaeological research appears to show that the first peoples to inhabit
the Upper Xingu region were potters who spoke (and still speak) a language
from the Arawak linguistic family, while the peoples speaking a Carib language
arrived in the region some time later (Heckenberger 2001). Various other peoples
arrived in the Xingu afterwards to form the Xinguano cultural system.
Each helped shape the Xinguano culture and today we can appreciate the complex
outcome of this process, including its linguistic diversity.
The Upper Xingu region was denominated the ‘uluri area’ by the Brazilian
ethnologist Eduardo Galvão (1960), called by the Upper Xingu Carib people as
kutãupügüko, ‘our grandfather’. The word uluri, Kamayurá in origin, has entered
the Portuguese language and refers to the pubic covering used by women
(a bark triangle with a burity palm cord). In Kuikuro this attire is called etungi.
Among the peoples living in the southern area of the Xingu Indigenous Land
the women do indeed traditionally use the uluri. Today we can see the end
result of this great mixture of cultures and languages of the peoples living in
the Xingu Land.
4.1 The Upper Xingu Carib language: A history of
separations between peoples
Until the mid twentieth century, the description of Bakairi made by Karl Von
den Steinen (published in 1892) was undoubtedly the best work on a Carib
language and on a southern Carib language in particular. Steinen’s book also
included a comparison of Bakairi words with those from northern Carib lan-