Project Description

This project focuses on the documentation of Piaroa, an indigenous language spoken in the Venezuelan Amazon, and serves to support ongoing community efforts towards preserving TEK and specialized speech genres. The project will result in a documentary corpus of audiovisual recordings of culturally relevant communicative events and a bilingual dictionary, both with potential to be mobilized in community-led literacy efforts. In addition to shedding light on typologically-rare aspects of Piaroa grammar, two other important contributions of the project are the use of innovative documentation methodologies such as oral annotation and the focus on capturing dialectal and intergenerational variation. This project is being carried out in collaboration with the Piaroa community Babel and other neighbouring communities along the Cataniapo River (Amazonas State, Venezuela).

Funding

• Community-based documentation of Piaroa traditional knowledge, with special attention to dialectal and intergenerational variation. Endangered Language Documentation Program Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship [Award # IPF 0255]. Amount: £43,787 GBP, 2018-2020

• Collaborative documentation of Piaroa, a language of the Venezuelan Amazon. Endangered Language Documentation Program Small Grant [Award # SG0408]. Amount: £9,686 GBP, 2016-2017