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Nheengatu, also known as Modern Tupi and Amazonic Tupi, is a Tupi–Guarani language. It is spoken throughout the Rio Negro region among the Baniwa, Baré, and Warekena peoples, mainly in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira and the state of Amazonas, Brazil.
Since 2002, it has been one of Amazonas's official languages, along with Apurinã, Baniwa, Dessana, Kanamari, Marúbo, Matis, Matsés, Mawé, Mura, Tariana, Tikuna, Tukano, Waiwai, Waimiri, Yanomami, and Portuguese. Outside of the Rio Negro region, the Nheengatu language has more dispersed speakers in the Baixo Amazonas region (in the state of Amazonas) among the Sateré-Mawé, Maraguá, and Mura people. In the Baixo Tapajós and the state of Pará, it is being revitalized by the people of the region, such as the Borari and the Tupinambá, and also among the riverside dwellers themselves.
A 2005 study cited by Ethnologue estimated the number of Nheengatu speakers at around 19,600, though this figure is subject to debate. Thomas Finbow, professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), estimated that there were between 5,000 and 7,000 speakers in Brazil, and fewer than 10,000 globally, including communities in Venezuela and Colombia. Nheengatu is a useful subject to study language change due to its long history of documentation spanning several centuries. Due to its role as a former lingua Lingua franca, Nheengatu is a significant minority language in Brazil.
Taking as an example, here is a comparison between Brazilian Portuguese, Tupi language, and Nheengatu:
Eduardo de Almeida Navarro, a Brazilian philologist specialized in Nheengatu, argues that with its current characteristics, Nheengatu would only have emerged in the 19th century as a natural evolution of the Northern General Language (NGL).
Comparisons between Tupi, Portuguese, and Nheengatu variants:
| bird | pássaro | gûyrá | wira | wirá | wirá |
| man | homem | abá | apiawawa | apigá | apigá |
| woman | mulher | kunhã | kuyã | kunhã | kunhã |
| happiness | alegria | toryba | surisa | çuriçawa | surisawa |
| city | cidade | tabusu | tawasu | mairí | tawasú |
| hammock | rede | iny | makira | makira, gapõna | makina |
| water | água | 'y | ii | yy | i |
With the Amazon already conquered by the Portuguese and having established a colony at the beginning of the 17th century, the so-called state of Grão-Pará and Maranhão, whose capital Belém was named Cidade dos Tupinambás or Tupinãbá marií, Franciscan and Jesuit priests, aiming at catechism using that language, elaborated the grammar and their orthography, which (with time) resulted in the Northern General Language, or Amazonian General Language (a name still used today), whose development took place parallel to that of São Paulo general language. Since then, Nheengatu has spread throughout the Amazon as an instrument of colonization, Portuguese domain and linguistic standardization, where many peoples started to adopt it as their main language at the expense of their own, such as peoples like the Hanera, better known as Baré, who became Nheengatu speakers, which led to the extinction of their native language. The Maraguá people, themselves historical speakers of Nheengatu, recently sought to revitalize their own language; today they learn Maraguá alongside Nheengatu in local schools.
The number of speakers of other languages vastly outnumbered the Portuguese settlers in the Amazon, so much so that the Portuguese themselves adapted to the native language. "To speak or converse in the colony of Grão Pará, I had to use Nheengatu; if not, I would be talking to myself, since no one used Portuguese, except in the government palace in Belém and among the Portuguese themselves."
The General Language was established as the official language from 1689 to 1727 in Grão Pará and Maranhão, but with the aim of deculturating the Amazon people, the Portuguese language was promoted, but without success. In the mid-18th century, the Amazonian General Language (together with the related São Paulo General Language, a similar variety used further south) was used throughout the colony. At this point, Tupinambá remained intact, but as a "liturgical language". The languages used in everyday life evolved drastically over the century due to contact with the language, with Tupinambá as the "language of rituals, and Amazonian General Language, the language of popular communication and therefore of religious instruction." Moore (2014) notes that by the mid-18th century, the Amazon and Tupinambá General Languages were already distinct. Until then, the original Tupinambá community was facing a decline, but other speaking communities were still required by Portuguese missionaries to learn the Tupinambá language.
Nheengatu continued to evolve as it expanded into the Alto Rio Negro region. There was contact with other languages such as Marawá, Baníwa, Warekana, Tucano, and Dâw (Cabalzar; Ricardo 2006 in Cruz 2015).
The General Language evolved into two branches, the Northern General Language (Amazonian) and the Southern General Language (Paulista), which at its height became the dominant language of the vast Brazilian territory.
An anonymous manuscript from the 18th century is emblematically titled Dictionary of the general language of Brazil, spoken in all the towns, places, and villages of this vast State, written in the city of Pará, year 1771.
If Nheengatu was the major obstacle for the cultural and linguistic domination of Portuguese in the region, the colonizers saw that it was necessary to take it away from the people and impose the Portuguese language, which at first was not successful since the general language was very well rooted both among indigenous people and in the speech of blacks and whites themselves. The language was banned by Pombal's government, who intended to impose the Portuguese language in Brazil. Hence, many places had their names changed from the Northern General language to names of places and cities in Portugal, such as Santarém, Aveiro, Barcelos, Belém, Óbidos, Faro, Alenquer, and Moz.
A regional ban on the Northern General language came right after the Cabanagem (a separatist revolt on the Grão-Pará province caused by insatisfaction of the people by their living conditions and the elite's ressentment after the Brazilian independence and the abdication of Pedro I of Brazil), after the rebels were defeated (1860), the regencial Brazilian government imposed a harsh persecution on the speakers of Nheengatu. Half of the male population of Grão-Pará was murdered and anyone who was caught speaking in Nheengatu was punished. The imposition of the Portuguese language this time had an effect and with the advent of Portuguese schools, the population was shepherded to the new language.
Also in the 20th century, economic and political events like the Amazon Rubber Boom, which brought huge waves of government encouraged settlers from the Northeast to the Amazon, led to an increased Portuguese presence. This again forced indigenous peoples to move or be subjected to forced labor. The language was again influenced by the increased presence of Portuguese speakers.
Nheengatu remained mainly among the most distant inhabitants of the urban centers, in the families descended from the cabanos and among unconquered peoples. Furthermore, "tapuios" (ribeirinhos) kept their accent and part of their speech tied to their language. Until 1920 it was common for Nheengatu to be used in traditional commercial centers in Manaus, Santarém, Parintins, and Belém.
Ethnologue rates Nheengatu as "changing" with a rating of 7 on the Gradual Intergenerational Interruption Scale (GIDS) (Simons and Fennig 2017). According to this scale, this classification suggests that "the population of children may use the language among themselves, but it is not being transmitted to children". According to the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages of the World, Nheengatu is classified as "severely endangered". (2026). 9789231040962, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. . ISBN 9789231040962 The language has recently regained some recognition and prominence after being suppressed for many years.
In December 2002, Nheengatu gained official language status alongside Portuguese in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira in accordance with local law 145/2002. Now Nheengatu is one of the four official languages of the municipality.
In 1998, University of São Paulo professor Eduardo de Almeida Navarro founded the Tupi Aqui organization dedicated to promoting the teaching of historical Tupi and Nheengatu in high schools in São Paulo and elsewhere in Brazil. Professor Navarro wrote a textbook for teaching Nheengatu that Tupi Aqui makes available, along with other teaching materials, on a website hosted by the University of São Paulo.
In 2021, "Nheengatu App" was launched, becoming the first application for teaching an Indigenous language in Brazil. It teaches the Tapajoara variant of the language. Its release was supported by the and the Secretariat of Culture of Pará. According to its creator Suellen Tobler, the app was used in Indigenous schools in the Lower Tapajós region, and by September 2023 approximately 2,200 users had registered. In March 2024, the project was presented at Campus Party Brasília. Other Brazilian Indigenous groups showed interest in the initiative, and Tobler went on to co-author two other apps for teaching native Brazilian languages.
In 2023, the Brazilian Constitution was translated into Nheengatu, marking the first time it was rendered into an Indigenous language—until then, it had been translated only into Spanish and English. The translation was carried out by 15 bilingual Indigenous individuals from the Upper Negro River and Middle Tapajós regions, through a project sponsored by the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and the National Council of Justice, within the framework of the United Nations's International Decade of Indigenous Languages. They worked for at least three hours a day over the course of three months; project curator and then National Library president Marco Lucchesi stated the work was intense with specialists available around the clock to answer any questions. Then STF president Rosa Weber attended the launch event in São Gabriel da Cachoeira and stated Nheengatu was chosen because of its significance to the Amazon region. Later, Weber presented a copy to Lucchesi at the National Library, the first time in 100 years that a head of the judiciary had visited it.
As mentioned earlier, the first documents that were produced were by Jesuit missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as Arte da Grammatica da Lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil by Father José de Anchieta (1595) and Arte da Língua Brasilíca by Luis Figueira (1621). These were detailed grammars that served their religious purposes. Multiple dictionaries have also been written over the years (Mello 1967, Grenand and Epaminondas 1989, Barbosa 1951). More recently, Stradelli (2014) also published a Portuguese-Nheengatu dictionary.
There have also been several linguistic studies of Nheengatu more recently, such as Borges (1991)’s thesis on Nheengatu phonology and Cruz (2011)’s detailed paper on the phonology and grammar of Nheengatu. She also studied the rise of number agreement in modern Nheengatu by analyzing how grammaticalization occurred over the course of its evolution from Tupinambá (Cruz 2015). Cruz (2014) also studies reduplication in Nheengatu in detail, as well as morphological fission in bitransitive constructions. A proper textbook for the conducting of Nheengatu classes has also been written. Lima and Sirvana (2017) provides a sociolinguistic study of Nheengatu in the Pisasu Sarusawa community of the Baré people, in Manaus, Amazonas.
In 2023, the Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil (Brazilian Constitution) promulgated in 1988, was translated into Nheengatu for the first time. (2026). 9786559721139, Supremo Tribunal Federal, Conselho Nacional de Justiça. ISBN 9786559721139
Examples of Personal Pronouns in use:
As observed in Table 3, in Nheengatu, personal pronouns can also take the form of prefixes. These prefixes are necessary in the usage of verbs as well as postpositions. In the latter case, free forms of the pronouns are not permitted. Moore illustrates this with the following:
The free form of the first person singular pronoun cannot be combined with the postposition word for 'with'.
The second set of pronouns are interrogative, and are used in question words.
| 'what, who, whom' |
| 'who, whom' |
Apart from the pronominal prefixes shown in Table (3), there are also verbal prefixes. Verbs in Nheengatu fall into three mutually exclusive categories: intransitive, transitive, and stative. By attaching verbal prefixes to these verbs, a sentence can be considered well-formed.
Examples of verbal prefixes:
In these examples from Moore (2014), the verbal first person singular prefix a- is added to the intransitive verb for 'work' and transitive verb for 'make' respective. Only when prefixed with this verbal clitic, can they be considered well-formed sentences.
In this example, the reduplicated segment is tuka, which is the Nheengatu verb for 'knock'. This surfaces as a fully reduplicated segment. However, partial reduplication also occurs in this language. In the following example elicited by Cruz, the speaker reduplicates the first two syllables (a CVCV sequence) of the stem word.
Another point to note from the above example is the usage of the plural word ita. Cruz (2011) highlights that there is a distinction in the usage of reduplication between communities. The speakers of Içana and the upper region of the Rio Negro use Nheengatu as their main language, and reduplication occurs in the stative verbs, expressing intensity of a property, and the plural word ita doesn't necessarily need to be used. On the other hand, in Santa Isabel do Rio Negro and the more urban area of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, speakers tend to be bilingual, with Portuguese used as the main language. In this context, these speakers also employ reduplication to indicate the intensity of a property, but the plural ita must be used if the subject is plural.
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