Nimuendajú was right: The inclusion of the jabutí language family in the Macro-Jê stock

Abstract

So far, the available data on the Arikapú and Djeoromitxí languages of the Brazilian Amazon, which together form the Jabutí language family, have been too sparse to enable one to evaluate existing proposals for a genealogical classification. Recent descriptive fieldwork, however, has yielded information that strongly corroborates an early hypothesis of Nimuendajú (2000 [1935]) that the languages are related to those of the Jê family. In this article, we compare the reconstructed ancestors of both families, Proto-Jabutí (van der Voort 2007) and Proto-Jê (Ribeiro [forthcoming]), ultimately demonstrating that Nimuendajú was right. We also discuss some of the consequences of this discovery for current ideas about prehistoric population movements in lowland South America.