Amazon: the last surviving indigenous languages

Abstract

In this article, we present the indigenous languages of the Amazon, those that have already become extinct, those that continue to be spoken and already recorded, and the languages of isolated indigenous peoples, with special attention to these last Brazilian Amazonian indigenous languages that remain after more than four centuries of colonization. For the organization and discussion of the study, we divided languages into five categories: living, extinct, dead, weakened and revitalized. The methodology used was a qualitative approach and the techniques used were meta-research focusing on the triangulation of bibliographic data and ethnographic research. The study verified that there are 36 language families and of the 718 indigenous languages that existed in the Brazilian Amazon, only 26 are still spoken fluently and uninterruptedly by about 5,000 or more speakers within each ethnic group, 438 have become extinct, 3 are dead and only have records. written, 243 are debilitated and are spoken by small groups and older people, generally over 40 and 8 have been revitalized. In other words, reintroduced into the practice of interaction and communication of the linguistic community. We also approach in this work the concept of each of these categories of indigenous languages and the situation in which each language finds itself within the context of these linguistic categories.