A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro,

by Alfred Russel Wallace

The Lingoa Geral.—Last in the order of notice, though first in the list, is the Lingoa Geral. The basis of this is the Guarani language; and, with two exceptions, the distribution of the numerous dialects and subdialects of the Guarani tongue is the most remarkable in the world; the exception lying with the Malay and the Athabascan tongues. The Malay numerals have long been known to extend from Polynesia on one side to Madagascar on the other, and, along with the numerals, a notable percentage of other words as well. The Athabascan dialects are spoken on the shores of the Arctic Sea, at the mouth of the River Columbia, and within the tropics; since the speech of certain of the formidable Apach tribes of Mexico has been shown to belong to the same class with that of the Loucheux at the month of the Mackenzie River.

These are the two most remarkable instances of a wide and irregular distribution of language known to investigators; and next to these comes, as already stated, that of the Guarani tongues.

It matters little from what point we begin to consider them. Perhaps the mouth of the Amazons is as convenient as any. If this be our starting-point, we may follow the coast southwards, and in the direction of the River Plate. In nine cases out of ten, as often as the earlier Portuguese adventurers came upon an Indian population occupying the sea-shore, that population spoke a language which they called Tupi, Tupinaki, Tupinambi, or something similar in the way of a compound of the root tup, and which they found to be intelligible with the forms of speech spoken in several distant districts elsewhere. If they landed on the parts about Bahia, the language was akin to what they had previously heard at Olinda, and what they would afterwards hear at Rio Janeiro: and so on along the whole sea-board. Hence, there were Tupi forms of speech as far north as the Island of Marajo, Tupi forms of speech as far south as Monte Video, and Tupi forms of speech in all (or nearly all) the intervening points of coast. The fishermen of the Laguna de los Patos spoke Tupi. The Cahetes of Bahia did the same. So did the Tamoyos of the Bay of Rio Janeiro, and so the Tupinaki, Tupinambi, and Tupinaes—the Tupi Proper so to say. This made the Tupi pass for the leading language of Brazil; so long at least as Brazil was known imperfectly, or along the sea-coast only.

It was soon however noticed that, as a general rule, the Tupi was spoken to only an inconsiderable distance inland, i.e. until one got to the Province of San Paolo, going southwards. In Goyaz, in the hill-ranges of Pernambuco, Bahia, Porto Seguro, etc., came forms of speech which those who spoke the Tupi separated from their own,—forms of speech of the barbarians (so to say) of the interior as opposed to the more civilized mariners of the coast. The Botocudo, the Canarin, the Coroado, the Coropo, the Machacari, the Camacan, the Penhami, the Kirivi, the Sabuja, the Gran, the Timbyra, and a vast list of other Brazilian Indians besides, were different from and other than the Tupi. But this distinction between the coastmen and the inlanders ceases as we go southwards; and when Cabeza de Vaca, in 1540, made his overland journey from St. Catalina to the city of Assumcio on the Parana, the chief Indians with whom he came in contact were allied to each other and allied to the tribes of the coast.

But the nomenclature changed with the change from Portuguese to Spanish dominion; and, though the Indians of the Brazilian province of San Paolo (the province of Brazil where they first began to extend inland and towards the centre of the continent) and those of Rio Grande de Sul might be Tupi, the allied populations of Entre Rios, Corrientes, Monte Video, and Paraguay were known under the designation of Guarani. This gave us a Tupi-Guarani class of languages in which it was not very incorrect to say that the Tupi were the Guarani of Brazil, and the Guarani the Tupi of Paraguay. The chief difference was a verbal and nominal one.

The first part, then, of the South American continent where the Tupi-Guarani (or Guarani-Tupi) were found in large masses, with an extension inland as well as an extension coastwise, were the Brazilian provinces of San Paolo in its southern part, the Brazilian province of Rio Grande de Sul, and the Spanish territories of Entre Rios, Corrientes, part of Buenos Ayres, Monte Video, and Paraguay—Paraguay in its southern and eastern rather than in its northern and western parts. In these quarters the language changed, and the affinities of the populations were with the Indians of the Chaco—the Mocobi, Toba, and Abiponians, etc.

It was through the Guarani of Paraguay that the Jesuits did the chief part of their labours in the way of conversion, and it was through the Tupi of Brazil that the Portuguese did the chief part of their Indian trading: facts which favoured the formation of a Lingua Franca on a Tupi-Guarani basis.

At present we have seen the Indians of this family following the coast or the water-system of the Plata. But there is another series of fact connected with their distribution, clear and patent enough to have been known to the earlier philologists, such as Hervas and his contemporaries. The extension of populations akin to the Tupi-Guarani was just as great along the course of the Amazon as it was along that of the Parana,—just as great, and probably greater. It was also spread along the feeders of the Amazon; the southern feeders, and the northern feeders of that river. By the southern feeders the line ran towards the system of the Parana, by the northern towards that of the Orinoco. So that as far northwards as the equator, and as far south as Buenos Ayres, Tupi-Guarani were to be found. More than this, as the Amazon arises on the Andes, and as its head-waters were Tupi-Guarani, the extension of that family from east to west was as remarkable as its diffusion from south to north. Still it gives us the hem of the garment, the fringe of the carpet, rather than the carpet or the garment itself. It gave the circumference of a circle rather than the parts pertaining to the centre. I call it a circle for the sake of illustration; for the sake of showing that there were a vast class of distinct and different languages which it had more or less completely surrounded. In reality the outline was irregular, formed in the main by the Ocean and the Amazons, but with long processes attached to it; dipping in towards the centre on one side, and flying off from the periphery on another.

We will go further in the details of the same processes, offsets, indentations, or prolongations. The Omaguas are found as far west as the Napo; and they preponderate at the junction of the Japura. They are said to speak the Yete, Putumayo, and Zeokeyo dialects of the Sucumbia language. This gives us a third term; possibly a third philological division—Tupi, Guarani, Sucumbia. Such are the names of the languages, the populations being Tupi, Guarani, and Omagua; the Tupi (chiefly) in Brazil, the Guarani in Paraguay, the Omagua in New Granada. The full details of the Tupi-Guaranis of the Amazons are somewhat obscure. At the mouth of the Tapajos, and the mouth of the Tocantins, they are specially mentioned, so they are in the great island of the Tupenambazes.

The Napo and Putumayo are the chief rivers that carry us along the Tupi-Guarani (Omagua) lines northwards. The most important of the southern lines are those of the Ucayale and the Huallaga, rivers, be it observed, of the extreme west; the latter running at the very foot of the Andes. The Cocamas and the Cocamillas occupy the watershed of these two streams for an undetermined distance southwards; and they navigate them with the boldness of the Omaguas. This gives us a fourth section—Tupi, Guarani, Omagua, Cocamilla.