Tupi

WILDE, GUILLERMO

Native Peoples of the World. An Encyclopedia of Groups, Cultures, and Contemporary Issues

Mesa Verde Publishing/M.E. Sharpe

Lugar: Armonk (NY); Año: 2013; p. 164 - 166

The name tupi is the generic designation of a several indigenous groups that currently live in Brazil. At the begining of sixteenth century, the most part of their ancestors inhabited the litoral, but were practically exterminated by wars of conquest, epidemics, and enslavement. Some remains escaped to the inland avoiding contacts with white society untill the second half of twentieth century. The tupi language constitutes a variant of the broader tupi-guarani linguistic family, which includes several languages of the linguistic stock also called tupi, such as arikém, tupari, ramarama, mondé, munduruku, juruna, among others. In the northeast of the state of Amazonas, the general language known as nheengatú, is recognized as the ?modern tupi? and spoken by Indians and non-Indians. The historical relations among the different tupi groups are not well known to date, but it is reasonable to assume that all of them descend from the ancient populations of the coast that began an early process of political and linguistic segmentation