Brief description
Tariana is an endangered Arawak language from north-west Amazon. It is spoken by c.70 people in two villages on the Vaupes River, north-west Amazonia, Brazil. The Tariana language belongs to the Arawak language family (see Arawak Languages). It is spoken by about 100 people in the multilingual linguistic area of the Vaupe´s River Basin (northwest Amazonia, Brazil). This area is known (Aikhenvald, 2002b; Sorensen, 1967) for its multilingual exogamy: one can only marry someone who speaks a different language and belongs to a different tribe. People usually say: ‘My brothers are those who share a language with me’ and ‘We don’t marry our sisters.’ The other languages in this area belong to the Tucanoan family, and they are still spoken by a fair number of people. The basic rule of language choice throughout the Vaupe´s area is that one should speak the interlocutor’s own language. Descent is strictly patrilineal, and consequently, one identifies with one’s father’s language group. There is a strong cultural inhibition against ‘language-mixing,’ viewed in terms of lexical loans. In its grammatical and semantic structure, Tariana combines a number of features inherited from proto-Arawak, with the areal influences from Tucanoan in the form of grammatical calques and diffused patterns.
Full description
The corpus of Tariana collected by Alexandra (Sacha) Aikhenvald, also known as Kumatharo, consists of over forty hours of recordings and over 1000 pages of stories told by speakers of all ages. Some stories are presented here. The dataset consists of: information about the Tariana language; a selection of papers on Tariana (pdf); a Tariana dictionary (pdf); some pictures (jpg); maps (pdf); Pedagogical materials in Tariana, a selection of materials in use by the Escola Indígena Tariana (Iauaretê, Amazonas, Brasil), under the current leadership of Rafael Brito (pdf); and recorded Tariana stories. The recorded Tariana stories and other sound files are restricted. If you would like to listen to them, e-mail Alexandra.Aikhenvald@jcu.edu.au. Pode tambem entrar em contato com o Rafael Brito [rbserevali@gmail.com] ou Jose Luis Brito [luisbritojose@yahoo.com.br].
Created: 2012-06-26
Data time period: 1994
text: Northwest Amazon, Brazil.
User Contributed Tags
Login to tag this record with meaningful keywords to make it easier to discover
- Local : researchdata.jcu.edu.au//published/bd3c4963907873bfbe46995bfb1c0228
- Local : jcu.edu.au/tdh/collection/f9810cb2-5b96-4bce-858a-61def913b8d5
- Local : 2f4cd14b505b643a7589bb0d87ef8275
