Tupí people

The Tupí people were one of the most important indigenous peoples in Brazil. Scholars believe they first settled in the Amazon rainforest, but 2900 years ago they started to spread southward and gradually occupied the Atlantic coast.

History

The Tupí people inhabited almost all of Brazil's coast when the Portuguese first arrived there. In 1500, their population was estimated at 1 million people, nearly equal to the population of Portugal at the time. They were divided into tribes, each tribe numbering from 300 to 2,000 people. Some examples of these tribes are: Tupiniquim, Tupinambá, Potiguara, Tabajara, Caetés, Temiminó, Tamoios. The Tupí utilised agriculture and therefore satisfied a Neolithic condition. They grew cassava, corn, sweet potatoes, beans, peanuts, tobacco, squash, cotton and many others. There was not a unified Tupí identity despite the fact that they were a single ethnic group that spoke a common language.

European colonization

From the 16th century onward, the Tupí, like other natives from the region, were assimilated, enslaved, killed by diseases such as smallpox or Portuguese settlers and Bandeirantes (colonial Brazil scouts), nearly leading to their complete annihilation, with the exception of a few isolated communities. The remnants of these tribes are today confined to Indian reservations or acculturated to some degree into the dominant society.

Tupi–Guarani languages

Tupí–Guaraní ( pronunciation ) is the name of the most widely distributed subfamily of the Tupian languages of South America. It includes fifty languages, including the best-known languages of the family, Guaraní and Old Tupí.

The words jaguar, tapioca, jacaranda, anhinga, carioca, and capoeira are of Tupí–Guaraní origin.

Languages

Rodrigues & Cabral (2012) propose eight branches of Tupí–Guaraní:

Guaraní people

Guarani are a group of culturally related indigenous peoples of South America. They are distinguished from the related Tupí by their use of the Guaraní language. The traditional range of the Guaraní people is in what is now Paraguay between the Uruguay River and lower Paraguay River, the Misiones Province of Argentina, southern Brazil once as far as north as Rio de Janeiro, and parts of Uruguay and Bolivia. Although their demographic dominance of the region has been reduced by European colonisation and the commensurate rise of mestizos, there are contemporary Guaraní populations in these areas. Most notably, the Guarani language, still widely spoken across traditional Guaraní homelands, is one of the two official languages in Paraguay, the other one being Spanish. The language was once looked down upon by the upper and middle classes, but it is now often regarded with pride and serves as a symbol of national distinctiveness. The Paraguayan population learns Guaraní both informally from social interaction and formally in public schools. In modern Spanish Guaraní is also applied to refer to any Paraguayan national in the same way that the French are sometimes called Gauls.