Mundurukú, a Tupian language of Brazil, exhibits two opposite scenarios. On one extreme, there is Mundurukú do Pará, the language of daily communication in the Mundurukú Indigenous Land, with fluent speakers found across all generations and still acquired by children as a mother tongue. On the other extreme, there is Mundurukú do Amazonas, formerly spoken in the Kwatá-Laranjal Indigenous Land, but whose inhabitants have shifted to Portuguese. A group of Mundurukú students from Amazonas decided to initiate a process of language revitalisation as a way to strengthen the community's ethnic and cultural identity. This paper reports the initial stages of language planning, and includes future actions to promote language use in the homes and communities, assessement of language proficiency, and definition of educational programs to teach Mundurukú in local schools.
Mundurukú do Amazonas; language revitalisation; language planning; language policy; indigenous education; language teaching; orthography
