A new study indicates that one of the largest of the indigenous language families in Latin America originated in the sixth century BCE in the basin of the Rio Tapajós and Rio Xingu, near the present-day city of Santarém in the Brazilian state of Pará. There are around fifty languages in the Tupí-Guaraní language family, which gave us words like “jaguar” and “piranha.” Now, Dr. Fabrício Ferraz Gerardi from the University of Tübingen’s Institute of Linguistics and a team of international researchers have used methods developed in the field of molecular biology to compare and investigate the Tupí-Guaraní languages. This has shed light on how the languages are related to each other, as well as on their geographical and chronological evolution. The new study has been published in the latest edition of PLOS ONE.
