Concept

Tiriyó language

Summary
Tiriyó is the Cariban language used in everyday life by the Tiriyó people, the majority of whom are monolingual. Although Tiriyó is the preferred spelling, the Tiriyó refer to themselves as tarëno; other variations, including tarano, tirió, and trio, exist. The Tiriyó are located on both sides of the Brazil-Suriname border in Lowland South America. Because Tiriyó is spoken by the entire Tiriyó population, its level of endangerment is low. However, it may be threatened by the presence of a newly installed radar station staffed by a considerable number of non-Indigenous people close to the main village. Ewarhuyana, listed in Campbell (2012), is an alternate name for Tiriyó. The modern Tiriyó is formed from various different Indigenous communities; some of these, such as the Aramixó, are mentioned in European writings as early as 1609–1610. Many of the now-Tiriyó groups lived between Brazil and French Guiana until they were driven out by the Oyampi, a Tupi-Guaranian group allied with the Portuguese. Together, the Portuguese and Oyampi drove these groups westward, and they mingled with the groups that were in the area to form the modern Tiriyó group. As such, the Tiriyó established contact relatively early with runaway slave groups that settled in the area around the end of the 18th century. They maintained regular commercial relations with one group, the Ndyuka, and for many years they were the only contact the Tiriyó had with foreign populations. The first recorded contact between the Tiriyó and a European took place in 1843 between a ‘Drio’ village and Robert Schomburgk; this and the meeting between French explorer Jules Crevaux and a few ‘Trio’ were the only two points of contact between Tiriyó and Europeans in the 19th century. Subsequent contact between Europeans and Tiriyó in the first half of the twentieth century produced ethnographic and linguistic studies of the region and Tiriyó subgroups in particular. After the ‘exploratory phase’ of contact came the ‘missionary phase,’ wherein newly built airstrips facilitated contact between missionaries and the Tiriyó.
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