ISSN: 2317-2347 – v. 9, n. 2 (2020)
Todo o conteúdo da RLR está licenciado sob Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0 Internacional
Brazil. On September 3 of that year, a few days after Vargas' suicide, President Café Filho, his replacement, signed law n. 2.311, instituting, as a subject, Brazilian Ethnography and Tupi Language in all Faculties of Philosophy and Letters in Brazil.
Such a law had an evident nationalist meaning. It was the consequence of a strong statist tendency that the second Vargas government represented, one of the last echoes of the populist pacts that international capitalism would cause to collapse throughout the Third World in the 50s and 60s. This phenomenon was exemplified by the military coup of 1964 in Brazil, the fall of Perón in Argentina, and the deposition of Ahmed Sukarno in Indonesia. In that moment of economic de-nationalization and political alignment of Brazil with the United States, Structuralism began to take root in Brazilian university and intelligentsia. Thus, from the 60s onwards, artificial toponymic creation in indigenous languages was greatly weakened.
The source of the data used and all the information presented in this study was the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which, at www.cidades.ibge.gov.br, publishes information about Brazilian municipalities in their economic, political, social, demographic, and historical aspects. The IBGE provides tables and graphs with its research on all cities and states in the country, offering information on the history of the 5570 Brazilian municipalities and even their names since their early days. After analyzing hundreds of artificial toponyms of Tupi origin of all the Brazilian states, we chose twenty names that adequately exemplify the categories in which all those can be classified.
The names on which this study was focused were only those having Tupi origins, which are the most numerous, and are fundamentally those of human settlements that became municipalities as their basic administrative units. Therein one can find great onomastic variability, which does not occur with the names of physical and natural aspects of space. In fact, as Dauzat (1937) reminds us, such names tend to be maintained throughout the centuries.
Thus, through a survey of place names in indigenous language, we carried out a survey of their antiquity, seeking to determine when such names came to exist. Considering that the ancient Tupi and the General Languages derived from it (not including Nheengatu) were no longer spoken starting in the second half of the 19th century, we believe that all the toponyms of this origin that appeared since then, outside the areas of use of Nheengatu, were artificial.
