The Makú Language of the Auari River, Northern Amazonia

Series: 

Author:
Raoul Zamponi
This book provides a detailed grammatical and lexical description of Makú (Máku), a language isolate formerly spoken in a remote region of northern Brazilian Amazonia. Based on materials collected by researchers since 1912, it documents a language that became extinct around 2000 with the passing of Kuluta (Sinfrônio Magalhães). Makú represents a remnant of a historically diverse and complex ethnolinguistic landscape, largely erased through the expansion of neighboring groups and colonization. The volume includes seventeen annotated texts and is accompanied by approximately 1,000 audio recordings, allowing direct access to 500 examples from the grammatical description, nearly as many vocabulary items, and ten texts, all recorded from Kuluta, providing an invaluable resource for linguists and researchers of Amazonian languages.
Copyright Year:
2026
E-Book (PDF)
Availability:
Not Yet Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-75524-6
Publication:
30 Jul 2026
Hardback
Availability:
Not Yet Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-69486-6
Publication:
20 Aug 2026
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Raoul Zamponi, Ph.D. (2000), works primarily on little-known languages of the Americas and the Andaman Islands. He is currently a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and a member of the Ad-Hoc Expert Committee of the UNESCO World Atlas of Languages.
Preface and Acknowledgements
List of Tables, Maps, and Figures
Abbreviations and Symbols

1 Introduction
 1.1 The Makú
 1.2 Language Contacts
 1.3 Previous Work and Sources
 1.4 Attrition Phenomena in Kuluta’s Idiolect and Calques Produced by Elicitation
 1.5 Aim and Organization of the Book

2 Phonology
 2.1 Phonological Variation
 2.2 Phonotactics
 2.3 Stress
 2.4 Phonological Processes
 2.5 Deletion and Contraction Processes in Spontaneous/Fast Speech

3 Word Classes
 3.1 Property Concept Words as Verbs
 3.2 Nouns
 3.3 Pronouns
 3.4 Quantifiers
 3.5 Verbs
 3.6 Adverbs
 3.7 Conjunctions, Interjections, Ideophones, and Particles

4 Morphology
 4.1 Inflectional Morphology
 4.2 Word-Formation Processes

5 Tense, Aspect, Mood, and Evidentiality
 5.1 Tense
 5.2 Aspect
 5.3 Mood
 5.4 Evidentiality

6 Syntax
 6.1 Noun Phrases
 6.2 Verb Phrases
 6.3 Declarative Clauses
 6.4 Imperative Clauses
 6.5 Interrogative Clauses
 6.6 Exclamatory Clauses
 6.7 Complex Sentences
 6.8 Discourse Phenomena

7 Issues in Semantics
 7.1 Nouns
 7.2 Personal Pronouns
 7.3 Stative Verbs
 7.4 Non-Stative Verbs
 7.5 Adverbs of Time

8 Texts
 8.1 The Opossum and the Turtle—Version A
 8.2 The Opossum and the Turtle—Version B
 8.3 The Opossum and the Turtle—Version C
 8.4 The Manioc—Version A
 8.5 The Manioc—Version B
 8.6 The Manioc—Version C
 8.7 The Manioc—Version D
 8.8 The Wood Stork
 8.9 Bucha and Makunaima
 8.10 The Water
 8.11 The Stone
 8.12 When I Was Small
 8.13 My Wedding
 8.14 Future Plans
 8.15 Other Plans
 8.16 Survival Tasks
 8.17 Valéria’s Illness
 8.18 Our Garden

9 Vocabulary
 9.1 Makú–English Vocabulary
 9.2 English–Makú Finder List

References
Index of Authors, Languages, and Subjects
This volume will appeal to linguists, anthropologists, and researchers of Amazonian and endangered languages, as well as anyone interested in language documentation and the preservation of linguistic diversity.
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