Language loss and language gain across centuries: the history and the dynamics across the Arawak family (original) (raw)

Language contact, and language blend: Kumandene Tariana of north-west Amazonia

The Vaupés River Basin in north-west Amazonia is a well-established linguistic area characterised by obligatory multilingualism and exogamy based on linguistic allegiance. The core members of the area who take part in the multilingual marriage network are speakers of East Tucanoan languages and of one Arawak language, Tariana. The impact of East Tucanoan influence on Tariana is recognizable through structural diffusion. Two dialects of Tariana are currently spoken. Wamiarikune Tariana (W-Tariana), with a few speakers in the middle Vaupés area, is highly endangered; it is under strong pressure of Tucano. Kumandene Tariana (K-Tariana), also endangered, is spoken in the community of Santa Terezinha on the Iauarí river (tributary of the Lower Vaupés). The K-Tariana moved to their present location from Iauaretê on the middle Vaupés two generations ago, escaping pressure from Catholic missionaries. The K-Tariana intermarry with the Baniwa Hohôdene, speakers of a closely related language, now the major language in their village. Over the past fifty years, speakers of K-Tariana have acquired numerous Baniwa features. This can be seen through comparison with older sources on this dialect. At present, the degree of Baniwa impact on Kumandene Tariana varies depending on the speaker, and on the audience. The result is a curious language blend. We discuss the status of K-Tariana in the context of other blended, or 'merged' languages.

Multilingualism in the Northwest Amazon, Revisited *

2006

recent studies include the Bará and Tanimuka/Retuarã (Gomez-Imbert, 1991). The participating AR groups Sorensen identifies are the Tariano (who are now, for the most part, speakers of Tukano), Baré (speakers of Tukano or Nheengatú), and on the northern margin, the Baniwa and Coripako. Current studies, however, do not include the Baré as participants in the Vaupés system, being that they are largely acculturated and generally live outside of the focus region, to the south and east of the Vaupés, along the Rio Negro (FOIRN, 2000:14) 2 The Vaupés basin is also home to groups speaking languages in the Makú language family, principally Hup and Yuhup. These groups, descendents of what are considered to be the original occupants of the region (Neves, 1988:181-194) live in the interfluvial regions surrounding the Tiquié, Papuri and upper Vaupés rivers and their total population is currently estimated to be about 3,000 (Martins and Martins, 1999:253). Although these groups have traditional social and economic relations with their Tukanoan and Arawakan riverine neighbors-see (Jackson, 1983:chapter 8), (Chernela, 1993:chapter 8) and (Ribeiro, 1995) for descriptions of these relations-they do not participate in the Vaupés marriage system and follow internal norms favoring endogamous unions (Azevedo, 2005:37). Thus, while their presence contributes to general regional multilingualism, they do not exhibit the same feature of individual and community multilingualism found in the Tukanoan and Arawakan groups (see parallel with the Xingu groups in §2.4). 3 In a recent assembly, members of this language group decided to call for use of the traditional name, Waikhana ("fish people") to refer to the group and its language, rather than the commonly used Nheengatú term, Piratapuyo, which has belittling semantics (pira=fish, tapuya=foreigner, barbarian, one who does not speak a Tupian language). Out of respect for this decision, I will refer to the group according to their traditional name in this paper. 4 Fieldwork with both the Wanano and Waikhana has been carried out in the town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, on the Upper Rio Negro in the state of Amazonas, Brazil. Additionally, I work in traditional Wanano communities located on the Vaupés, principally Carurú Cachoeira, and in Waikhana communities located on the Papuri, principally São Gabriel, and among Waikhana living in the mission town of Iauareté.

Different histories, different results: the origin and development of two Amazonian languages

2011

Tupinambá, a member of branch III of the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family of the Tupi linguistic stock (Rodrigues 1984/ 1985) is-in so far as it is known-the only Brazilian indigenous language that has had an important role in the development of two Amazonian languages, namely Kokáma/ Omágua and Amazonian Língua Geral or Nheengatú. These are two languages that originated in contact situations and, even though having Tupinambá in common as a source language, have become typologically different in several aspects due to the peculiarities of the social histories of their speakers. With regard to Kokáma/Omágua, there are three concurring hypotheses on its origin: (a) it is simply another language of the Tupi-Guarani genetic family, (b) it is a descendant of the Amazonian Língua Geral, or (c) it developed from contact between speakers of Tupinambá and speakers of other languages, including an Arawakan one, and is not the continuity of any particular language. With regard to the Amazonian Língua Geral, some scholars treat it as a creole language, but to others it is a continuation of Tupinambá spoken outside the indigenous villages, subjected to external influences over the course of time. In this paper I present arguments in favor of the different development possibilities of both Kokáma/Omágua and Amazonian Língua Geral, taking into account aspects of 1 I am thankful to Gabriel Antunes de Araujo and Margarida Petter for having invited me to present a paper on Amazonian languages and linguistic contact at the 5 th ABECS meeting, as well as to Prof. Aryon D. Rodrigues for his criticism and suggestions, which was particularly important for me since he is the most well versed scholar of the linguistic history of the Tupi stock of languages. ANA SUELLY ARRUDA CÂMARA CABRAL 10 the social history of the respective speakers, as well as lexical and grammatical features of each of the two languages.

The Taíno: Phenomena, Concepts, and Terms

Ethnohistory, 2014

The Taíno term and concept has traditionally been used as a designation of some form of cultural identity for the groups that occupied the Greater Antilles at the time of contact. This perspective assumes that these groups shared a cultural background because of a common ancestry. However, this position has been questioned in recent years, and many problems with the concept have been brought to light. This article presents the history of the concept and discusses three recent studies that have proposed new ways to approach the problem. It ends by presenting the implications of this new perspective for future research, their limitations, how they may be misapplied, and to what extent they are applicable in different situations.

Cultural Phylogenetics of the Tupi Language Family in Lowland South America

Background Recent advances in automated assessment of basic vocabulary lists allow the construction of linguistic phylogenies useful for tracing dynamics of human population expansions, reconstructing ancestral cultures, and modeling transition rates of cultural traits over time. Methods Here we investigate the Tupi expansion, a widely-dispersed language family in lowland South America, with a distance-based phylogeny based on 40-word vocabulary lists from 48 languages. We coded 11 cultural traits across the diverse Tupi family including traditional warfare patterns, post-marital residence, corporate structure, community size, paternity beliefs, sibling terminology, presence of canoes, tattooing, shamanism, men's houses, and lip plugs. Results/Discussion The linguistic phylogeny supports a Tupi homeland in west-central Brazil with subsequent major expansions across much of lowland South America. Consistently, ancestral reconstructions of cultural traits over the linguistic phylogeny suggest that social complexity has tended to decline through time, most notably in the independent emergence of several nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. Estimated rates of cultural change across the Tupi expansion are on the order of only a few changes per 10,000 years, in accord with previous cultural phylogenetic results in other language families around the world, and indicate a conservative nature to much of human culture.