Amazon town adopts 3 Indian languages as official

SAO PAULO, Brazil, Nov 14 (Reuters) A remote Brazilian town has given official status to three Indian languages, becoming the only municipality in the country to put them on par with Portuguese to try to keep native cultures alive.

Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira, a town deep in the Amazon jungle, will start teaching the Nheengatu, Baniwa and Tukano tongues to school children and printing government documents in them.

''This is the first and only case like it in Brazil,'' Andre Fernando, a director of the Indigenous Federation of the Upper Rio Negro, which pushed for the measure, said yesterday.

His group hopes to prevent the indigenous languages from going extinct. Brazil's official language is Portuguese, though cities can adopt others as co-official ones.

''We want to rescue our languages and make sure that the government better serves the needs of Indians,'' Fernando said.

The town, 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) from the business capital of Sao Paulo, is in one of the world's richest regions of biological and cultural diversity. More than 20 indigenous languages are found there.

It is also near Colombia and in the past FARC guerrillas have used the Brazilian side of the border as a hideout.

Indians from a range of tribes make up 73 percent of Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira's 30,000 residents -- the highest percentage of any Brazilian city.

The law, in the works for years, will take effect next week after some administrative questions are ironed out and it is published in the official gazette, Nixon Vargas, the town's legal secretary said. The city council passed a bill last week detailing how to implement the law.

Jesuit missionaries developed Nheengatu from native tongues in the 17th century to serve as a lingua franca for different tribes in northern Brazil.

They also used it to help communication between Indians and non-Indians. Nheengatu has since been adopted by smaller tribes whose own languages have died and it is the most popular Indian tongue in the town.

''This is a question of recognizing the value of the cultures on the Rio Negro (river),'' said Paulo Mao, the town's secretary of culture.

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