User:Pcruz1/Language selection
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Nheengatú (ISO: yrl)
About the language
Nheengatu (ISO: yrl) is an indigenous language of the Tupi-Guarani family, is then derived from the Tupi trunk, and originated from the ancient Amazonian tupinambá, an ancient Tupi dialectal branch of the Amazon, which extended throughout the region from the Brazilian state of Maranhão. The language name derives from the words nhẽẽga (meaning "language" or "word") and katu (meaning "good")
Currently, it continues to be spoken by approximately 19,060 people, in three linguistic variants in Brazil: that of the Rio Negro region, called Yẽgatu, that of the Baixo Amazonas, known as traditional nheengatú and that of the Baixo Rio Tapajós or Nheengatu Tapajoawara, in addition of the foreign variants: Nheengatu from Venezuela (Ñeengatu) and Nheengatu from Colombia (Nyengatu). It is written in the Latin alphabet and used as an official language in the Brazilian state of Amazonas.
In terms of users, less than half of the community speaks the language, and the number of speakers is decreasing at an accelerated pace. Furthermore, most adults in the community are speakers, but children are not. This is good evidence that Nheengatu is an endangered language and that developing computational resources to it might contribute to its preservation.
Morphology
There are eight word classes in Nheengatu: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, postpositions, pronouns, demonstratives, and particles. A very used book source for Nheengatu morphology is Cruz’s (2011) Fonologia e Gramática do Nheengatú, written in Portuguese.
Pronouns
There are two types of pronouns in Nheengatu: personal or interrogative. Nheengatu follows the same pattern as Tupinambá - another indigenous language in Brazil - in that the same set of personal pronouns is adopted for the subject and object of a verb.
Verbal Affixes
Apart from pronominal prefixes, Nheengatu also has verbal prefixes. Verbs in Nheengatu fall into three mutually exclusive categories: intransitive, transitive, and stative. To conjugate verbs in Nheengatu, users attach a prefix that agrees with the subject of the sentence.
isé se-ruri a-iku.
1sg 1sgE-be.happy 1sgA.be
“I am happy.”
Reduplication
This is a morphological process that tends to be used to indicate a repeated action.
U-tuka~tuka ukena
3sg-knock (reduplication) Door
"He is (repeatedly) knocking on the door."
Availability of Resources
In spite of the fact that only 20,000 people speak the language nowadays, there is a good amount of resources about the language available. After a quick dig on the internet, I was able to find an 18-track LP with melodies sung in Nheengatú, a 112-page textbook dedicated to language learners, a language-learning app similar to Duolingo to learn Nheengatu, and a magazine with poems and lyrics written in the target language. Therefore, it is fair to say that there is a significant number of materials to make this language a good choice for the project.,,
