Nheengatu Dâw: a preliminary study of the phonetic, phonological and morpho-syntactic aspects of a case of Tupi-Guarani and Nadahup contact in the Upper Rio Negro
This paper presents the initial results of a preliminary investigation of a lesser-known language contact situation in the Upper Rio Negro: the variety of Nheengatu (Tupi-Guarani branch, Tupi family) spoken as a second language by Dâw elders (Dâw, Nadahup [formerly Maku] family)&am...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2020 |
| País: | Brasil |
| Institución: | Associação Brasileira de Linguística (ABRALIN) |
| Repositorio: | Cadernos de Linguística |
| Idioma: | portugués |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ojs3.cadernos.abralin.org:article/236 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/cadernos/article/view/236 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Nheengatu Dâw Alto Rio Negro Contato linguístico Upper Rio Negro language contact |
| Sumario: | This paper presents the initial results of a preliminary investigation of a lesser-known language contact situation in the Upper Rio Negro: the variety of Nheengatu (Tupi-Guarani branch, Tupi family) spoken as a second language by Dâw elders (Dâw, Nadahup [formerly Maku] family) who live in the village of Waruá (Upper Rio Negro Indigenous Area) opposite the town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Amazonas State, Brazil). This variety of Nheengatu is severely threatened, as it is no longer transmitted to the younger generations, who speak Dâw and Portuguese. The objective of this study is to create an audiovisual archive to register the use of Nheengatu amongst the Dâw elders as a historical document for the community and in order to investigate the linguistic details of this variety in the context of a broader study of linguistic variation within Nheengatu. The data analysed in this investigation have been taken from personal narratives recorded with six informants from Waruá village between July 2017 and July 2018. The phenomena found so far involve phonetics and phonology, e.g., vowel apocope that aligns Nheengatu syllables with the CVC patterns of Dâw, and some morpho-syntactic particularities, e.g., levelling in number and person paradigms and frequent use of differential object marking. In general, this features seem to be the influence of Dâw on the speakers’ Nheengatu. Additionally, we hope that the fact that Nheengatu is a second language for the Dâw elders may provide insights into the types of influence that may have occurred in the region’s historical lingua franca, the Lingua Geral Amazônica. |
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