Dictionary Kariri
The Rodrigues-Seabra dictionary of the Kariri language
(Kiriri-Kipeá dialect) by Ricky Seabra
Introduction
The Kiriri-Kipeá dialect, better known as Kariri, was the best documented of the 4 dialects of the indigenous Kariri linguistic family from Northeastern Brazil. Kiriri-kipeá has a grammar and catechism written in the dialect by Jesuit priest Luiz Vincenzio Mamiani in 1698 and 1699. The Dzubukuá dialect has only one catechism written by Jesuit priest Bernard Nantes (1709). And of the Pedra Branca and Sabuya dialects, only a few words survived and are documented in the work of Lucien Adam (1897).
The first dictionary of the Kiriri-Kipeá language was made by Aryon Dall'igna Rodrigues of the University of Brasília and was published in Revista Brasileira de Linguística Antropológica (Brazilian Journal of Anthropological Linguistics), vol. 4, nº2, December 2012 (O artigo definido e os numerais na língua Kiriri: Vocabulários Português-Kiriri e Kiriri-Português). To create the dictionary, Rodrigues extracted words from the Grammar of Mamiani (the 2nd edition from 1877) and not from the Catechism.
This new dictionary available here online is based on the Rodrigues dictionary but it presents some new features; spelling changes, new words decoded and extracted from the catechism, and the last words spoken in Kiriri recorded in 1961 by linguist and missionary Wilbur Pickering, totaling approximately 189 new words. However, the most innovative thing about the dictionary is that it shows how nouns are declined and how verbs are conjugated in 5 tenses.
I hope this dictionary will be useful for researchers, students, and teachers from the Brazilian Northeast region who have shown interest in the language, and in particular, the Kariri-Xocó Indians in Alagoas and the Kiriris in Bahia who are trying to revive it.
This dictionary was originally made in an Excel document. In 2017, I started working with the Natural Language Institute in Brasília. They took up interest in my project and their Natural Labs developers converted my Excel data into a SQL database creating the online platform found on this webpage.
We suggest that this dictionary be used accompanied by Rodrigues' original to help identify and report any errors that may exist to the email rickyseabra@gmail.com