Legacy Piaroa and Sáliba documentation
2021-2024
2021-2024
These two projects can be considered twin projects; they rely on some of the same methodologies and methods and have similar, although not identical goals. They build upon some of the work on legacy materials I have been doing since 2017 (see Legacy Corpora under the Corpora tab).
All available descriptions for Sáliba—a seriously endangered Indigenous language of Colombia and Venezuela [ISO 639-3: slc]—rely almost exclusively on translation elicitation data—that is, data collected through asking for Sáliba equivalents to Spanish words or phrases. That process is fraught with problems, such as unnaturalness, the copying of Spanish structures, and so forth, which have likely affected our current knowledge about Sáliba grammar. An improved understanding of Sáliba grammar is, however, possible through the study of naturally occurring speech, like instances of language use in narratives, procedural texts, and songs. The overarching aim of this three-year project is, then, the creation of the first-ever time-aligned and annotated corpus of naturally occurring Sáliba speech—based on rich but up-to-now unused data collected in 1968-1969 with fluent monolingual and bilingual Sáliba speakers by Colombian linguist Jon Landaburu.
Piaroa traditional narratives and songs have been the focus of much prior anthropological and some linguistic work; however, much of this work remains inaccessible or has been lost. The overarching aim of this two-year project is, then, the mobilization of existing Piaroa legacy audio collections from the 1960s, to ensure their long-term preservation, their repatriation to the communities where the materials originated, and more generally, their mobilization in research and in community revitalization efforts. We will draw on three collections:
Krute Collection: 3:09:46 hours of audio recordings of three different genres: 1) narratives (2:34:10 hh), 2) greeting songs (0:08:02 hh), and 3) interactive discourse (0:27:34 hh).
Boglar-Halmos Collection: An audio corpus of ~90 hours of recordings, including 9:06:38 hours of narratives, 19:31:45 of songs, and 6:03:06 of instrumental music
Overing Collection: ~2 hours of audio
Breathing new life into legacy materials: Research and repatriation for a Sáliba collection. Insight Grant. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada [Award #435-2021-0468]. Amount: $98,437, 2021-2024
Mobilizing Piaroa Legacy Materials. Insight Development Grant. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada [Award #430-2021-00425]. Amount: $67,738, 2021-2023