Data collected by the UNICEF

Data on the Ofayé language

Alternative names: Ofaié, opayé, opaié, fae, ofaié-xavante, guachi, guaxi.

“Ofayé/Opaié” (with a central consonant uttered between the “p” and “f” sounds) corresponds to the autoethnonym. “Xavante” (“Men of the savanna”) which was the name given by Portuguese colonists to several distinctive populations. The Ofayé should not be mistaken for the Xavante of the Jê family.

Classification: Phylum Macro-Jê

We are following Rodrigues here, who includes the Ofayé language, which in fact was for a long time considered as isolated, in a “macro-Jê” family including the Jê languages themselves and other isolated families or languages such as the Kamakã, Maxakalí, Krenák, Pur, Kariri families and the Guato and Rikbaktsa isolated languages.

This “phylum Macro Jê” is a hypothesis now considered as highly possible despite the lack of data on some of those languages.

Geographic area: Brazil, Mato Grosso do Sul, Municipality of Brasilândia, mainly in the Ofayé-Xavante Indigeneous Territory and on the banks of the Rios Verde, Vacaris and Ivinhema.

Number of speakers: According to the ISA, the global Ofayé population would be constituted of approximately 60 people. The number of speakers probably doesn’t exceed fifteen people.

Status of the language: No official status.

According to Linguamón: “Portuguese is Brazil’s only official language. The country’s only linguistic legislation concerning other tongues refers to schooling and is restricted to bilingual and intercultural primary education (exclusively in indigenous communities), although there are actually few trained bilingual teachers.”

Vitality and transmission: The language is considered as “critically endangered” by the UNESCO, meaning it is on the verge of disappearing. Less than a third of the Ofayé speak the ancestral language, others speak Portuguese or for some of them, Kaiowa.

Historical observations

Until the beginning of the 20th century, the Ofayé population probably included thousands of people. In 1903, the population was estimated at 2,000 people. The Ofayé were semi-nomad hunter-gatherers who lived in the savanna region along the borders of the Atlantic forest. Their traditional territory was spread out from Serra do Maracaju to high-Paraná.

The progress of colonialism and development of breeding farms forced them to move more often from the beginning of the 19th century. The population drastically decreased during the 20th century. Evacuated and deported several times between the seventies and the late eighties, sent from reservation to reservation, on low quality lands without any rivers to fish from (essential activity for the Ofayé economy), far from their original land, they have tried many times to settle on the rare non-exploited areas surrounding Parana or to “squat” in the farms established on their original territories, such as the Boa Esperença farm from which they were evicted by farmers, sometimes violently.

“Strangers on their own land” according to former leader Ataíde Xetihâ-ha, they were struck by “western” diseases and malnutrition. In 1976, the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo published an article on a group of 24 sick, malnourished Ofayé with no land and started drawing society’s attention to the fate awaiting them.

Only since the late nineties did the Ofayé manage to take over a small part of this territory. Their title deed is still waiting to be signed by the President of the Brazilian Republic.

For more information on the Ofayé, see pages dedicated to them on the must-see Povos Indígenas no Brasil website (in English and Portuguese).

Sources

De Castro Alves, Flávia (2010). Brasil no Amazónico. In “Atlas sociolingüístico de pueblos indígenas en América Latina”, UNICEF. Part 1, pp 265-280.

Fabre, Alain. 2005. Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos. Available online [11/05/2011]

Online Sources

Data collected by the UNICEF on Ofayé [11/05/2011]

Pages dedicated to the Ofayé on the Povos Indígenas no Brasil website (English and Portuguese) [11/05/2011]

Page dedicated to the Ofayé on the Linguamón website [11/05/2011]

Additional bibliography

Dutra, Carlos Alberto dos Santos. 1996. Ofaié: morte e vida de um povo. Campo Grande: Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Mato Grosso do Sul.

Gudschinsky, Sarah C. 1971. “Ofaie-Xavante, a Jê language”. Estudos sôbre línguas e culturas indígenas: 1-16. Brasília: SIL.

Rodrigues, Ayron D. 1999. « Macro-Jê » In R.M.W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, (eds) The Amazonian languages, Cambridge University Press.

See the Atlas sociolingüístico de pueblos indígenas en América Latina and Fabre (2005) for a complete bibliography.