The goal of this project is to complete and publish a dictionary of Ninam, an endangered Yanomaman language, spoken by only 560 people along the MucajaÃ, upper Uraricaá, and Paragua rivers in Roraima, Brazil and Venezuela. This project completes the dictionary began by Ernesto Migliazza in the 1960s; it secures previously collected information otherwise at risk, with fieldwork to expand the information on the language and its lexical entries. Two versions will be prepared: a more technical one for scholars (with look up options in Ninam, Portuguese, Spanish, and English), and a practical version for the Ninam communities and local educators (Ninam, Portuguese, and Spanish). The language offers much of scientific interest. The dictionary will contain a grammatical sketch, with attention to unusual typological traits, of which Ninam has a number, for example, an evidentiality system, nasal harmony, serial verbs, and unusual ergativity, among others.
This dictionary will have the merits well known from other dictionaries of indigenous Latin American languages, preserving endangered knowledge systems encoded in vocabulary. The Ninam dictionary will serve linguistics and other disciplines which depend on language-related material (anthropology, history, biology, geography). The dictionary will benefit Ninam communities, addressing the need for resource materials much needed for language maintenance efforts and native-language curriculum in schools. The project provides training of graduate students in both the US and Brazil. It benefits the general public interested in cultural diversity, increasing information of cultural as well as linguistic significance. It contributes to language typology, linguistic theory, and to understanding the history of the Yanomaman languages and their speakers.
The major outcome is the completion of the fieldwork and analysis for the Ninam dictionary. The dictionary database includes lexical entries with look up in both Ninam-Portuguese-English and Portuguese-English-Ninam, with example sentences, texts, and a grammatical sketch. Copies of the dictionary database have been delivered to the Ninam communities and to collaborators at the Federal University of Roraima, Brazil. The project website has been created and will be launched electronically soon, with the dictionary available on-line. Soon to appear are the comprehensive dictionary with example sentences of Ninam and a grammatical sketch, and a nearly completed practical dictionary, to be published in Brazil, for the Ninam and for educators and others working with Ninam communities. Additional outcomes which were not included in the project’s official objectives include: successful contributions to the documentation of this endangered language; obtaining the data and foundation for more in-depth grammatical analysis and a more comprehensive grammar (for later research), a more complete understanding of the linguistic situation of Ninam, of its vitality, and of language groups in neighboring regions, identification of borrowings and the influences of language contact in the region, and discovery of unique or unusual typological traits and analysis of areal parameters (to be treated in future work). An additional significant outcome was the training and skills transfer to several graduate students, community members, and others who worked with the project.
