Xukuru language
language
Xukuru (Xucuru, Shukurú, Ichikile, Xukurú: Brobo) is a poorly attested extinct language of Brazil, once spoken by the Xukuru people. It is known only from a few word lists. Xukuru was originally spoken in the Serra de São José and on the Meio River, Capibaribe River and Taperoa River in the states of Pernambuco and Paraíba. The Xukuru live in the Serra Ararobá and Pesqueira (formerly containing the aldeia of Cimbres). In Rio Grande do Norte, the Tapuia Tarairiú people are reviving the Xukuru language, as are the Xukuru themselves.
History
William D. Hohenthal, Jr. (1954) estimates the last generation of Xukuru speakers to have been born in the 1860s to the 1870s. However, by the time of Curt Nimuendajú's visit to the Xukuru in 1934, encountering about 50 of them, he could only collect 137 words from four old individuals, and the language had gone extinct by then. His manuscript was lost after his death, and only a short excerpt of it survived. Following him was Cicero Cavalcanti, an employee of the Indian Protection Service (SPI), who, in 1944, visited the Xukuru, recording a total of 2,191 descendants, but only 385 "pure" Xukuru.
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This entry incorporates text from “Xukuru language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.