THE REINSCRIPTION OF A DESTITUTED LANGUAGE: THE NHEENGATU AT LOW TAPAJÓS

Abstract

This work focuses on the study of revitalization and linguistic resumption of indigenous languages, and aims to understand the reinscription of Nheengatu from a set of memories, discourses and practices erected by the peoples of the Low Tapajós, in the West of the State of Pará. This region has had an intense ethnic mobilization for over twenty years, currently counting on 13 native peoples, more than 8 thousand indigenous people, 70 villages and 19 territories in different stages of the recognition and demarcation process. The reinscription of Nheengatu as an ethnic language in the face of the linguistic scenario considered monolingual in this region, is taken as a political action in view of the speeches of extinction and silencing of its collectivities and epistemologies. This is a counter-hegemonic project for the self-affirmation of indigenous communities, for the reconstruction of an ancestral memory and the affirmation of the continuity of ways of being and also of ancestral relations through the remembrance and re-signification of linguistic and cultural practices. Thus, at the same time that the peoples of the Low Tapajós reinscript themselves as indigenous, they also reinscript Nheengatu as an ancestral language.