This award supports the documentation of the only two extant members of the Kawapanan group from Peruvian Amazonia: Shiwilu (JEB) and Shawi (CBT). Documentary work is especially urgent for Shiwilu, since it is in immediate danger of complete disappearance with only a few elderly fluent speakers remaining. The award also supports the development of reusable software to aid in the production of scientific materials for the linguists and pedagogical materials for community members. The goals of the project include compiling and digitizing existing wordlists and grammar information, as well as the collection of primary data in the field through digital audio/video recording of consultants. The materials include: spontaneous texts, questionnaires, elicitation, and wordlists. The resulting corpus will be transcribed, translated into Spanish and English, analyzed and processed in order to produce databases, dictionaries, grammars, and text collections. Four workshops for community members are being held to raise sociolinguistic awareness, to encourage community involvement in the documentation, and to promote literacy in the native languages.
The project will capture a permanent record of Kawapanan and Amazonian cultural knowledge that will likely disappear in as little as one generation. A study of Shiwilu and Shawi may have a high scientific impact on the field as there is little systematic descriptive work on Kawapanan as a whole. It contributes to linguistic typology through the description of specific features such as a set of consonants unusual for the Amazon, classifier systems, highly complex verbs, and pragmatic ergative marking. Also, the project contributes to the reconstruction of Kawapanan, which will help to shed light on its possible inclusion in a larger family or stock. Furthermore, the project includes the use of state-of-the-art digital audio/video recording, and the development of open, reusable annotated data in Unicode/XML. All data will be preserved in a lasting archive for posterity. On the technical side, the main intellectual merit is data re-purposing: the production of flexible data to serve the descriptive, computational, or theoretical linguist as well as the anthropologist, the language learner or educator. The project responds to the demands of the Kawapanan communities, who are striving to preserve their languages. The resulting linguistic descriptions, workshops, and learner-oriented resources will be crucial to revitalization efforts. Finally, the project contributes to the training of two linguistic students.
