Nambikwara (also called Nambiquara and Southern Nambiquara to distinguish it from Mamaindê) is an indigenous language spoken by the Nambikwara, who reside on federal reserves covering approximately 50,000 square kilometres of land in Mato Grosso and neighbouring parts of Rondônia in Brazil. UNESCO’s Atlas of the World Languages in Danger classifies Nambikwara as vulnerable.

According to David Price (1983), a reference to the Nambikwara people was made as early as 1671 in a report by Padre Gonçalo de Veras. However, in another account from the Povos Indígenas do Brasil, the Nambikwara people are said to have been first contacted in 1770, when the Portuguese, in search of gold, began building a road between Forte Bragança and Vila Bela. Further contact was established when in 1907, Colonel Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon began exploring the territories inhabited by the Nambikwara, and established a telegraph line between 1909 and 1915.

In the early to mid 1900s, the Nambikwara were also contacted by missionaries from the United States and from throughout Brazil. One group of missionaries, known as the New Tribes Mission, were killed by the Nambikwara in 1950 supposedly in an act of revenge. However, not all contact with missionaries resulted in death. In 1962, the “first systematic studies of the Nambikwara languages” were carried out, specifically for the Mamaindê language. Since the 1930s, Mamaindê speakers were also taught the bible as it was translated into their language by some missionaries, and some were convinced to join schools and learn Portuguese. According to David Price while there had been a long history of Christian education for the Mamaindê speakers, many of them could not actually be considered Christian believers and simply spoke of their experiences with the missionaries as “learning about white people’s way of life”.

In 1968, then president of Brazil Costa e Silva created the first reserve for the Nambikwara people with the aim of “transfer[ing] all of the Nambikwara groups to the single reserve [to] free up the rest of the region for farming initiatives”. Unfortunately, the reserve that the Nambikwara were transferred to contained inefficient soil, and the lands originally inhabited by them with the most efficient soil were all sold off to farming companies by the late 1960s. The construction of a highway between Cuiabá and Porto Velho also decreased the size of the Nambikwara territory even further. At present, many of the original 30 groups of Nambikwara people are extinct, and the remaining people reside in the nine territories of the Nambiquara territory: “Vale do Guaporé, Pirineus de Souza, Nambikwara, Lagoa dos Brincos, Taihãntesu, Pequizal, Sararé, Tirecatinga and Tubarão-Latundê”.

The Nambikwara language family can be divided into three major groups: Sabanê, Northern Nambikwara (Mamaindê), and Southern Nambikwara (or just Nambikwara). Sabanê is spoken by the Nambikwara inhabiting the northern part of their demarcated territory, north of the Iquê river. Sabanê speakers were most affected by epidemics brought by contact with missionaries, and many of them had died because of those epidemics. However, today many of the remaining Sabanê speakers live with Mamaindê speakers or in Vilhena city.

Northern Nambikwara is spoken by groups of Nambikwara along the Roosevelt and Tenente Marques rivers. Northern Nambikwara is further divided into seven mutually intelligible dialects spoken by the Da’wandê, Da’wendêm Âlpimentê, Yâlãkuntê (Latundê), Yalakalorê, Mamaindê, and Negarotê people. Lastly, Southern Nambikwara is spoken by the rest of the Nambikwara people, with four regional dialects spread across the Juruena valley, the region along the Galera and Guaporé rivers, and the region along the Sararé valley. Unlike Northern Nambikwara, Southern Nambikwara dialects are not mutually intelligible.

Attempts to describe Southern Nambikwara have been made since at least the early 20th century, often in the form of vocabulary lists. In his 1978 paper “The Nambiquara Linguistic Family” David Price discusses several vocabulary lists published between 1910 and 1960, including those compiled by Levi-Strauss (1948), Rondon (1948), and Roquette-Pinto (1913). Price insists that early vocabulary lists are largely inadequate, and often contain mistranslations, because many of them were compiled by individuals with no formal linguistics training. Further, Price argues that these early publications do not reflect the “phonological realit(ies)” of the Nambikwara language, because these researchers tended to assume that sounds that were contrastive in their native languages were also contrastive in Nambiquara.

Since the 1960s, more sophisticated and complete descriptions of Nambikwara have been published, including descriptions of Nambikwara phonology, morphophonemics, syntax and semantics. Price himself published a paper in 1976 called “Southern Nambiquara Phonology”, which lists the speech sounds found in Nambikwara and discusses stress and length in the language. An earlier paper by Barbara Kroeker (1972) also describes Nambikwara phonology, and devotes more attention to the phonological processes that occur in the language and the morphological restrictions on Nambiquara sound patterns. A detailed description of the Nambikwara grammar comes from Menno Kroeker's (2001) paper “A Descriptive Grammar of Nambiquara”, which was published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Kroeker's descriptions are based on the several hundred pages of data he gathered while living among the Nambikwara people, and focuses primarily on the language's syntax and semantics. Specifically, he describes Nambikwra parts of speech, word order, tense, aspect, mood, voice, clause structures, and noun incorporation. Kroeker (2001) also briefly outlines Nambikwara phonology, providing a list of phonemes and a discussion of syllable structure, tone, length, and stress. Ivan Lowe has also published descriptive grammars of Nambikwara through the Summer Institute of Linguistics. No pedagogical grammar of the language is currently available.