The MáÃhiki Project is a three-year, team-based project that will thoroughly document MáÃhiki (ISO 639: ore), the highly endangered language of the MáÃhuna people. MáÃhiki is spoken in northern Peruvian Amazonia, and belongs to the Tukanoan language family, which has played an import role in recent years in linguistic typology and theories of language contact. The MáÃhiki Project's concrete products - including a dictionary, a grammatical description, and a collection of MáÃhuna narratives and oral history texts - will serve both scientific goals and objectives set by the MáÃhuna people.
Spoken by 90-100 individuals out of an ethnic population of approximately 400 people, MáÃhiki is presently highly endangered, and language revitalization a major concern of the MáÃhuna people. The MáÃhiki Project will train MáÃhunas as linguistic researchers so that they can participate fully in the documentation of MáÃhiki, and will also develop and test innovative family-based language revitalization techniques with an eye towards applications in other language endangerment situations.
Research on MáÃhiki is scientifically important in three ways. First, it will provide crucial data for reconstruction of the proto-language from which the modern Tukanoan languages descended, thereby yielding insights into the cultural history and peopling of the Amazon Basin. Second, because of its geographical isolation from other Tukanoan languages, MáÃhiki has not participated in the Vaupés Linguistic Area (VLA), one of the most theoretically important language contact areas in the world, centered on the Brazilian-Colombian border. As a result, MáÃhiki can provide crucial insights into which linguistic features characteristic of the VLA originated from the Tukanoan languages that participate in the area, and which features derive from other languages families in the area, such as Arawak languages. This knowledge will allow linguists to better understand what kinds of linguistic features flow between languages in circumstances of intense social contact. Finally, MáÃhiki exhibits a number of theoretically interesting grammatical subsystems, including morphological frustratives (i.e. suffixes which indicate that an action failed to be carried out, or failed to realize its intended goal) and a system by which the grammatical relations between nouns and verbs are inferred from context, rather than marked grammatically. These phenomena will allow linguists to better understand the ways in which human languages can vary, including how social and interactional factors are relevant to linguistic structure.
