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Kinship Terms in the Makurap Language: Contributions to Documentation
Letícia Gonçalves, Ana Vilacy Galúcio
The Amazon is home to remarkable linguistic and cultural diversity, yet many Indigenous languages spoken in the region are under severe threat and may disappear in the near future. One such language is Makurap, a Tupian language spoken by the Makurap people in the Rio Guaporé and Rio Branco Indigenous Territories in Rondônia, Brazil. Today, Makurap has only a small number of speakers, largely due to the interruption of intergenerational transmission. In this context, language documentation plays a key role in recording and preserving linguistic knowledge for future generations.
This study examines the Makurap kinship system in order to contribute to the documentation of the language and to the preservation of the community’s cultural identity. The data were drawn from the Archive of Indigenous Languages of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (ALIM). The research is grounded in the methodological principles of language documentation proposed by Drude (2006), Himmelmann (1998), and Franchetto (2007). The procedures involved data collection at ALIM, transcription, annotation, and analysis of materials from elicitation sessions and interviews with speakers, making it possible to build a thematic lexical corpus that reflects the relational organization of the community.
The analysis identified central features of the Makurap kinship system, including distinctions between maternal and paternal lines, the role of the speaker’s gender in the selection of terms, classificatory patterns that group siblings and cousins under a single term, and specific plural and possessive forms. These findings show that Makurap encodes not only linguistic categories but also social and cultural structures that are central to community life. The study therefore contributes to a better understanding of both the formal organization of the language and the social world it expresses, while also providing material that may support future dictionary and grammar development, as well as broader efforts toward language documentation and revitalization.