June 16 () –
One of the largest indigenous language families in Latin America originated in the 6th century BC in the Tapajós and Xingu river basins, near present-day Santarém in the Brazilian state of Pará.
There are about fifty languages in the Tupi-Guarani language family, which gave us words like “jaguar” and “piranha”. Now, Dr. Fabrício Ferraz Gerardi from the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Tübingen and a team of international researchers used methods developed in the field of molecular biology to compare and investigate the Tupi-Guarani languages. This has shed light on how languages are related to each other, as well as on their geographical and chronological evolution. The new study has been published in the latest issue of PLOS ONE.
Little is known about the history of the Tupi-Guarani language family. It includes around 40 languages still spoken today and at least nine others that have become extinct. The number of speakers per language ranges from less than 100, like Amondawa and Juma, to 6 million, like Paraguayan Guarani.. Only some of the Tupi-Guarani languages have been written.
“It is mainly the extinct languages that we know from phonetic transcriptions annotated by researchers in past centuries”, says Fabrício Gerardi it’s a statement.
For the relationship analysis of the various Tupi-Guarani languages, the research team used comparative lists of basic vocabulary. They asked, for example: Are the words for “leg”, “sing” or “bat” the same or similar in the languages studied? Or do they not share a common root?
“In the analysis of molecular biological relationships, for example, of different animal or plant species, the respective gene sequences are used. They indicate which areas are the same or similar. The general random rate of genetic changes (mutations) it can also be used to estimate how long ago two related species diverged from a common ancestorGerardi explains.
Mutations in the genes of biological species correspond to phonetic changes or substitutions in related languages. Thus, in Tupinambá, one of the Tupi-Guarani languages, the tapir is called “tapitir”; in awetí, a language that broke off from these languages, it is called “tapitit”.
Large-scale analyzes of the vocabulary and grammatical structures of the Tupi-Guarani languages using molecular biology algorithms can be used to create a family tree.
“We wanted to know what the tree looked likehow strongly related the individual languages were to each other, how old each language was, and when it split into new languages,” says Gerardi.
The distribution of the Tupi-Guarani language family extends more than 4,000 kilometers both in length and breadth. “In some cases, we have archaeological finds from the same area that we try to assign to individual languages. For example, there are certain words in the languages to describe special properties of the ceramics discovered there,” says Gerardi. “This allows us to establish a temporal and spatial relationship between language and archaeological finds. The ceramics could be dated using the radiocarbon method, so we indirectly have a temporal calibration of language development.“he adds.
Along the way, Gerardi and the research team were able to identify the probable place of origin of the Tupi-Guarani language family in the Tapajós-Xingu basin some 2,550 years ago. “However, to better corroborate our findings, the archaeological and linguistic evidence would need to be further explored,” he says.
