Kheuól do Uaçá (Amapá)

Historical aspects, grammar and education

Abstract

The kheuól do Uaçá language is spoken by two differents indigenous peoples, the Karipuna and Galibi-Marworno, who share the same land, Terra Indígena do Uaçá, in the Oiapoque municipality, at the Amapá state, Brazil, French Guyane border. The population of each is, respectively, 2922 e 2529 people (Siasi; Sesai, 2014). This language is derived from the Guyanese, which came from French, and was born between the late 17th century and the early 18th century in Cayenne. The Guyanese is spoken by about 60.000 people in French Guyane (Jennings; Pfänder, 2018). Historical elements, such as the fact that the region was a contested border between Brazil and France until 1900 and, due to its difficult accessibility, being the destination of ethnically distinct peoples, made the Uaçá a multilingual region, albeit on a small scale (Lüpke et al., 2020). In this work, we present aspects of the Kheuól language in several dimensions, namely: current speakers, descriptive status of the language, historical trajectory of the communities of speakers, grammatical profile and aspects of its teaching in indigenous schools.

Keywords: kheuól, indigenous languages, creole languages, indigenous school education