A Grammatical Description of the Nambikwara Languages Latundê, Sararé and Sabanê, and the Reconstruction of Proto-Nambikwara

The Nambikwara language family is spoken in the north-western part of the state of Mato Grosso and adjacent parts of the state of Rondônia, Brazil. It consists of three mutually unintelligible dialect groups, usually referred to as Northern Nambikwara, Southern Nambikwara, and Sabanê. The project has three major objectives. One is to provide a description of the grammars of Latundê (representative of Northern Nambikwara), Sararé (representative of Southern Nambikwara) and Sabanê (the sole representative of the third group). In view of the imminent extinction of Latundê, Sararé, and Sabanê, the grammatical descriptions will be as complete as possible and will minimally include a lexicon and a description of the phonetics, the phonology, the morphology, and the syntax of these three languages. The research results will provide material for the comparative and typological study of the Nambikwara language family and thereby help us achieve our second objective, which is the reconstruction of Proto-Nambikwara, which in turn will offer a contribution to the study of comparative linguistics of the Indian languages of lowland South American. In addition, the research results will be evaluated against the background of theories of language typology. The projects third objective is thus to contribute to the discussion of the typological classification of the Amerindian languages, as regards the phonological, morphological and syntactic properties of the Nambikwara linguistic family.