Mako documentation
(2012-2015, 2019-2020)
(2012-2015, 2019-2020)
My doctoral project (2012-2015) focused on the documentation and description of Mako, an indigenous language spoken in the Venezuelan Amazon by about 1500 people. Prior to the start of the project, the only published material on Mako amounted to 38 words. This project resulted in a large documentary corpus with audio and video recordings of culturally relevant communicative events and a collection of texts, both to be used in research and in the development of pedagogical materials. It also produced a grammar of the language (available here: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/2851/ ) and an in-depth assessment of language vitality (see Rosés Labrada 2017). I continue to work with this corpus in my descriptive and comparative research on the Sáliban languages.
I recently received funding from the University of Alberta General Research Fund to use this corpus to build a Mako lexicon. I'm currently working with 5 undergraduates students in this subproject with the goal of returning a lexicon to the Mako communities this year.