Cette thèse cherche à approfondir la culture des Muinanes à travers leur histoire et leur langue. Nous décrivons, en premier lieu, certains aspects ethnographiques et historiques du groupe muinane. En second lieu, et en ce qui concerne la langue, nous abordons le problème de la catégorisation lexicale et établissons des comparaisons entre les caractéristiques du muinane et celles des langues apparentées bora et miraña. En d’autres termes, dans une perspective typologique, notre but est de définir les classes de catégories lexicales du muinane et de déterminer des critères phonologiques, morphosyntaxiques et discursifs à utiliser pour la définition des catégories. Nous abordons aussi la question de la présence ou de l’absence d’une classe adjectivale. Nous décrivons les outils employés par les locuteurs de la langue pour exprimer l’attribution et la qualification et finalement nous proposons un rapport entre l’absence d’une vraie classe adjectivale et le système saillant de classification nominale, dans un ensemble de langues de la région amazonienne appartenant aux familles bora, tukano orientale, uitoto et andoke. / The objective of this doctoral thesis is to approach the culture of the Muinane people through their history and language. We describe some ethnographic and historical aspects of the indigenous muinane group living in the colombian Amazon. We are concerned with the study of their language and particularly with the lexical categorization and with the comparison between the muinane, bora and miraña, all classified as integrating the bora linguistic family. In other words, our goal is to define the classes of lexical categories of the muinane from a typological perspective, and to determine the phonological, morphosyntactical and discursive criteria, which allow us to define this categorization. We debate here the question of the existence or the absence of an adjectival category in the bora languages and the strategies used by their speakers to express qualification and attribution. Finally, we propose a relationship between some languages spoken in the northwest Amazon, which don’t exhibit an adjectival class but have a rich and salient system of nominal classification such as the languages from the bora, uitoto and eastern tukanoan linguistic families.

This work presents a preliminary analysis of the phonology of Kakua, an endangered language of the Kakua-Nukak family (formerly classified as Makú). Kakua is spoken by approximately 300 people living in the Vaupés region of the Amazon rain forest, in northwest Amazonia, Eastern Colombia. This analysis is based on data collected with Kakua speakers from the village of Wacará, a settlement of approximately 120 people, living along the basin of Caño Wacará, located between the Querarí and the Vaupés Rivers, to the east of Mitú, close to the Colombia-Brazil borders. The phonological inventory of Kakua includes five vowels and seventeen consonants. Kakua also presents contrastive prosodic features of nasalization and an inventory of three contrastive tones. Kakua phonology presents various interesting typological features from both areal and cross-linguistic perspective. The work presented here is a first attempt to provide a better illustration of a little-known endangered language of Amazonia. / text

Ce projet vise la documentation et la description du mako, une langue autochtone parlée par environ 1200 personnes dans l’Amazonie vénézuélienne et pour laquelle le seul matériel accessible à date se limite à 38 mots. L’objectif principal est de créer une collection de textes ethnographiques annotés et, à long terme, une grammaire de la langue qui puisse servir comme point de départ pour des activités d’appui au maintien de la langue dans la communauté et pour avancer la recherche linguistique. Un objectif secondaire est d’établir le degré de vitalité de la langue telle que parlée chez les différentes communautés mako. Cette recherche mènera à une description des différents aspects de la grammaire de la langue, par exemple sa phonologie, sa morphologie et sa syntaxe. En plus de contribuer à l’étude et description des autres membres de la famille linguistique sáliba et à la reconstruction de leur proto-langue commune, les données du mako contribueront aussi à des discussions sur comment le langage fonctionne et seront donc un apport précieux pour la théorie linguistique. Cette recherche fera avancer la théorie de la documentation des langues et pourra donc faciliter les efforts de documentation et maintien des langues d’autres communautés indigènes. Le projet constitue une application du modèle de travail de terrain Community-Based Language Research. / This dissertation focuses on the documentation and description of Mako, an indigenous language spoken in the Venezuelan Amazon by about 1000 people and for which the only available published material at the start of the project were 38 words. The main goals of the project were to create a collection of annotated ethnographic texts and a grammar that could serve as a starting point for both language maintenance in the community and for further linguistic research. Additionally, the project sought to assess the language’s vitality in the communities where it is spoken and to understand the relationship of Mako to the two other extant Sáliban languages, namely Piaroa and Sáliba.This research has thus led to an assessment of language vitality in the Mako communities of the Ventuari River, a comprehensive description of the Mako language—heretofore undescribed—, and an evaluation of the genetic relationship between the three Sáliban languages. The description of the language covers a wide range of topics in areas such as phonetics and phonology, nominal and verbal morphology, and syntax of both simple and complex sentences. Discourse-level morphology and discourse-organization strategies are also covered. Aside from facilitating the study of other members of the Sáliban family and reconstruction of the common ancestral language, the description of Mako also contributes to the typology of Amazonian languages and to our understanding of the pre-history of this area of the Orinoco basin. The products of this project also have the potential to be mobilized in language literacy efforts in the Mako communities.