Xavante ( ) (referring to the people, sense 2a) is an Akuwẽ (Central Jê) language spoken by the Xavante people in the area surrounding Eastern Mato Grosso, Brazil. The Xavante language is unusual in its phonology, its ergative object–agent–verb word order, and its use of honorary and endearment terms in its morphology.
The Xavante people are approximately 18,380 individuals in 170 villages as of 2014, but the language is spoken by 9,600 people, of whom about 7,000 are monolingual. The current speakers, made up of all ages, use the language vigorously and hold positive attitudes towards Xavante. It has been orthographically rendered as Chavante and Shavante, and is also called Akuen, Akwen, A’uwe Uptabi, A’we, Crisca, Pusciti, and Tapuac.
Classification Xavante is a member of the Jê language family, itself a member of the Macro-Gê stock. This stock is spoken in a wide distribution of non-central Brazil; Macro-Gê is also popular in the eastern, northern, and central, and southwestern parts of the country, as well as being distributed in nearby Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina, but the Jê family is its only remaining large subgroup, with other languages remaining in isolates due to extinction. Within Jê, its 16 languages are distributed in four divisions; northern, north-eastern, central, and southern, and are better preserved than other languages in the stock due to its inland-inhabiting speakers. Xavante is classified in the central, alongside Xerente, Xakriaba, and Akroa. The stock is marked by a large presence of nasal vowels, this also being marked in the proto- Jê reconstructed language. Consonant inventories of the Macro-Ge stock are of medium size, with Xavante historically undergoing a phonological change from velar consonants to glottal stops. All are mildly synthetic, without complex morphology, and have SV constituent orders.
History The Xavante people originate from the east of the Araguaia River, in what was then called the province of Goias. In the early 18th century, this area was heavily invaded by colonizers searching for gold, leading to the indigenous population in the area to suffer from epidemics and live in the residential settlements created by the government. Following this, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, groups of indigenous people, now distinctly self-identifying as Xavante, settled in Mato Grosso; this area was relatively undisturbed until the 1930s.
At this point, the government under Getúlio Vargas initiated the ‘March to the West’ campaign within the National Integration Program, in which expansion to the interior of Brazil and ‘domestication of the Savage’ were heavily promoted. The Xavante people were used in print media as illustrations of newly ‘pacified’ people who had decided to ‘join Brazilian society’. In the meantime, groups including missionaries had invaded the Mato Grosso to try to convert the Xavanate into Catholicism; the indigenous people, angry at the unsolicited invasion, attacked the group in return. However, following this period until the 1960s peaceful contacts, in which goods were exchanged, were established.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, the Xavante land was coveted for farming and agriculture purposes; deals to arrange transfers to white settlers were often fraudulent, and land used for monocultures, such as entire fields of rice, or grazing. The people were transferred from Mato Grosso to southern Brazil, a less fertile region; however, the Xavante people then began the attempt to recover the land they had lived on prior to contact with settlers in the 1970s, with demands for territory being met with violence by large capitalist companies that now had hold of the areas. In 1981, six areas were demarcated to the Xavante, and in 1991, the rights to extensions of some areas were won. However, conflicts regarding the territories between the Xavante and Brazilian government continue today. Currently, there has been a Program of Documentation of Indigenous Cultures (PRODOCULT) devoted to Xavante, run by J.R. Welch and R. Costa; the permanent collection, containing images, text, cartography and more information on the Xavante people and language, is housed in the Museum of the Indian.
Documentation The Xavante language was first referenced in the 19th century, in works of comparative philology which used word lists from the language and overviews of its structure. In the 20th century, Xavante has been studied academically since the 1960s by both Brazilian and foreign linguists, starting with a grammar; papers from this period examined the language’s phonemes, syllable structure, as well as aspect and acquisition. By the 1980s, works on the syntax and semantics of Xavante were published, focusing on sentence initial devices and focus; the first Xavante-Portuguese dictionary was also produced by Hall, McLeod, and Mitchell, all of whom had researched extensively in Xavante (1987). Since the 1990s, more specific properties of the language have been researched academically, namely with respect to acquisition, name agreement, assimilation, morphology, and respect/intimacy relationships. A revised Xavante-Portuguese dictionary, again compiled by Hall, McLeod, and Mitchell, was released in 2004.
Phonology The phonology of Xavante is described by McLeod (1974).
Vowels Xavante has nine vowel qualities, long and short. Four occur nasalized, long and short. Front Central Back High , Mid Low , , ,
is when long and when short. is raised after in a non-initial syllable. is a central vowel. It is a rounded in certain stylistic conventions. is a mid vowel when long, and a more open when short. is when long and or when short. and do not vary much. is written in the orthography.
Consonants Xavante has ten consonants, illustrated in the chart below.
LabialCoronalGlottal apical laminalObstruentsVoicelessVoiced Sonorants
The phonetic realizations of these phonemes include those shown in the following chart:
LabialCoronalGlottalapicallaminalObstruentsVoiceless ~ Voiced ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Sonorants
( varies between obstruent and sonorant, alveolar and palatal.)
Xavante is highly unusual in lacking velar consonants, except for the labio-velar approximant . At a phonemic level, it arguably also lacks nasal consonants, which is less unusual in the Amazon. The language however has a high degree of allophony, and nasal stops appear before nasal vowels.It can be argued either that these are nasalized allophones of the voiced obstruents, that is, that or is pronounced before , or that the voiced obstruents are denasalized allophones of nasal stops before oral vowels, with pronounced or before . The key point is that nasality is determined by the vowels, not by the consonants.
Allophony With so few phonemic contrasts, Xavante allows wide latitude in allophones of its consonants. P and T: are aspirated as syllable onsets (at the beginning of a word, between vowels, or before /r/), and unreleased as syllable codas (at the end of a word or before a consonant other than /r/). C: freely varies among as an onset, and as a coda (only preceding another , as ). ’: is a glottal stop . B: In a C or CC syllable onset before an oral vowel, is pronounced as a plain voiced stop at the beginning of a phonological word, and as either or as a prenasalized voiced stop in the middle of a word. Before nasal vowels, as C or CC, it is pronounced .
As a syllable coda, is pronounced before regardless of the following vowel's nasality, and optionally also as before the oral allophones of the other voiced obstruents, and : or . It is before .All voiced obstruents are presumably nasalized before all nasal allophones, though is the only sequence that is attested. D: In a syllable onset before an oral vowel, is pronounced either as a plain voiced stop or as prenasalized voiced stop . Unlike , it may be prenasalized at the beginning of a phonological word, not just as a syllable onset. Before a nasal vowel, it is pronounced .
As a syllable coda, is pronounced before the oral allophone of a consonant, and as before a nasal consonant. J: In a syllable onset before an oral vowel, is pronounced , in free variation. Before a nasal vowel, it is pronounced .
As a syllable coda, is generally pronounced , and is nasalized to or after a nasal vowel.It is not yet clear when it is and when . It is also nasalized to before a prenasalized stop allophone. Between oral vowels, the sequence optionally takes an epenthetic : or . When is followed by an , a nasalized epenthetic schwa separates them. R: is an alveolar flap, , which is nasalized between nasal vowels. W: is similar to English w, but not rounded before the vowel .As McLeod & Mitchell (2003:11) describe it, antes da letra ‘i’ é pronunciado como o ‘w’ inglês, sem arredondamento dos lábios e com um pouco de fricção. Em outros ambientes não há fricção e os lábios se arredondam mais
"before the letter 'i' it's pronounced as the English 'w', without rounding of the lips and with a bit of friction. In other environments it doesn't have friction and the lips are more rounded"
This would appear to mean that is a more-or-less typical labio-velar approximant in most situations, with an unrounded semi-fricative allophone, approximately , before the vowel , though possibly a labially compressed velar in that environment.
McLeod (1974:4) had covered only the unrounded allophone:
O fonema /w/ é um vocóide oral assilábico, não-arredondado posterior fechado alto sonoro.
"The phoneme is an oral semivowel, unrounded high back [and] voiced."
H: has no place of articulation, but is a voiceless transition between vowels.
Vowels do not become nasalized because of nasalized consonants, so the only consonants that become nasal are those in a cluster preceding a nasal vowel (and coda after a nasal vowel); a preceding oral vowel blocks the nasality from spreading to preceding syllables.
Phonotactics Xavante syllables are of the forms CV, CCV, CVC, CCVC, CV:, and CCV:; that is, all syllables begin with a consonant, sometimes two; they may optionally either end with a consonant or have a long vowel. Although a syllable may end in a consonant, a phonological word may not, apart from a few cases of word-final .
The attested initial CC consonant clusters are: . All seven obstruents occur in final position, but in a maximal CCVC syllable only are attested. Across two syllables, the following CC sequences are attested:
. There are also CCC sequences such as (coda followed by onset ).
The vowels and are rare, and not attested in maximal CCVC syllables.
Grammar
Morphology In Xavante, morphological variations of words are a significant aspect of generating new constructions within the language. For example, morphology reflects honorific status, in that morphemes are used to denote relationships of intimacy and kinship. Similarly, social positions and situations of individuals are marked using morphological constructions; for instance, a’ama, a group of Xavante men trained in new forms of pre-existing words, are referred to by other members of the clan using a specific set of morphological forms. Xavante also uses a reflexive prefix, tsi-, in situations requiring this grammatical construction to be denoted; for instance, ʔmadə (to look at) becomes tsi-ʔmadə (to look at oneself). Finally, the postverbal morpheme ni appears when referring to a generic or unknown subject, as in ma ø-wæræ ni ("someone (unknown) killed him"). Morphological changes are important in generating meaning in Xavante, and reflect the possibilities of showing meaning using set morphemes.