State of the art of the Kinikinau language: descriptive, sociolinguistic and comparative studies

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the state of the art of the Kinikinau language, an Aruák language (Aikhenvald 1999: 67) currently located in the southern pantanal of Mato Grosso do Sul state. This language is in a moribund stage (less than 7 speakers) according to Oliveira (2017). We call attention to the amount of existing descriptive works and present some criticismes on the comparative studies, in order to show this studies as provisional forms of understanding the language and the changes which has undergone over time. The article is divided as follows. In section 1, we give a short presentation on the Kinikinau people, on the critical sociolinguistic situation in which the language actually is, and on the linguistic literature of the Kinikinau language. In section 2, we deal with what was thought to be the only study of that language in the 19th. In section 3, we deal with the studies made in the twentieth century. In section 4, we present the studies made in the 21st century. Finally, in section 5, we make some final considerations on the matter of the paper.