A lei de cooficialização das línguas Tukano, Nheengatu e Baniwa em São Gabriel da Cachoeira: questões sobre política linguística em contexto multilíngue.

Abstract

The municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira located on the Rio Negro in the Northwest Amazon, is home a diverse range of ethnic groups, languages, and cultures, forming a complex sociolinguistic reality. There are five language families in the region that are divided into several ethnic groups. Each language family is concentrated in one of the three main tributary river systems: Uaupés, Içana and Rio Negro/Xié. In this way, one language is predominant for interethnic communication in each of these river systems – Tukano in the Uaupés basin, Nheengatú along the Negro and Xié, and Baniwa along the Içana. After much discussion by the indigenous leaders and some institutions and organizations (IPOL, ISA, UFAM, FOIRN) these three languages were granted official status at the municipal level in the law 145/2002, which, after a few years, was regulated by the law 210/2006. In this thesis, I will analyze what the officialization law and its regulations represent for the social agents who are experiencing the process of its implementation. Throughout the study, I observed how actions are being developed to operationalize the policy cooficializing the Tukano, Nheengatú, and Baniwa languages, as well as the use of these and other indigenous languages in various contexts in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira. This study provides the perspectives of indigenous teachers participating in the PARFOR undergraduate program (a national program providing basic teacher training education), obtained through the use of a questionnaire. In addition, interviews were conducted with FOIRN (the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro) directors and with former municipal councilors who had been involved in the development of this law. In the results presented here, I analyze the representations, knowledge, beliefs, and attidudes these people have about the coofficialization policy, in addition to characterizing their use of other languages. I will show how these two sources of information – survey responses and interview responses – work in dialogical interaction with one another, and situate both within a broader social context.