News on the Jorá (Tupí-Guaraní): sociolinguistics, description, and classification

Notícias sobre os Jorá (Tupí-Guaraní): sociolinguística, descrição e classificação

Abstract

With 45 languages, the Tupí family is one of South America's largest families. However, several gaps still remain. Some languages are already extinct and there are others for which data can no longer be collected. The situation of Jorá has reached this point. This article aims to summarize all data concerning the Jorá people and their language, parts of which were collected by the anthropologists Hanke (1959) and Béghin (1980) and other parts by the authors. On the basis of sparse data from several sources of differing reliability we attempt to classify the Jorá language using the phoneme inventory, grammatical evidence and lexical comparison. Jorá is classified as Tupí-Guaraní, closely related to Siriono and Yuki.

Keywords:
Jorá; Linguistic description; Genocide; Bolivian Tupí-Guaraní; Genetic classification.