Documenting languages: a view from the Brazilian Amazon
- Daniel L. Everett
Abstract
The languages of Amazonia are hard to get to, spoken by small numbers of people, and their study often entails learning to speak them as part of analyzing them, since researcher and language teacher may otherwise have no language in common. It is not surprising, therefore, that they, like languages in similar situations in different parts of the world, have not attracted large numbers of researchers nor have they traditionally played a strong role in the development of linguistic theory. Yet this seems to be changing, as more and more very talented Brazilian researchers, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, begin to seriously engage the need for documentation and description of Amazonian languages. In this brief survey, I want to provide an overview of the history of the study of Amazonian languages, some indication of their theoretical significance, and a discussion of future prospects and needs for Amazonian research. I will focus my discussion here on the Brazilian Amazon, though similar considerations and prospects hold for other countries that contain portions of Amazonia. I will understand an ‘Amazonian language’ to be one spoken in the river basins of the Amazon or Orinoco systems (these rivers join in the rainy season...
Keywords: language documentation, Amazonian languages, Amazon, Orinoco, Brazil, research, history, theory, considerations
How to Cite:
Everett, D., (2003) “Documenting languages: a view from the Brazilian Amazon”, Language Documentation and Description 1, 140-158. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd311
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