The principal task of this project is to provide a detailed description and analysis of the language of the Mekens people. They collectively refer to themselves and to their language as Sakurabiat (sakirabiat) nowadays. Mekens is one of the five surviving languages of the Tupari linguistic family (Tupi stock), and it is spoken in the state of Rondonia, Northwest of Brazil, by about 23 speakers. Due to its small number of speakers and to the fact that only two children are currently learning it, Mekens figures among the most endangered languages of the world. It is also, together with the majority of Brazilian languages, one for which very little information is known. Therefore, this research will enrich linguistic knowledge by gathering and analyzing primary linguistic data of an endangered language that has never been studied before, and for which very little material is available. Except for an article describing its phonological segments (Hanke et. al. 1958), the only other materials are the results of the researcher's own preliminary work with the language. The specific goals of the project are (i) to proceed with the documentation of the language, through the collection of a wide range of linguistic data, both through elicitation and through the recording of natural speech, such as conversation, and narratives, (ii) to provide a description and analysis of the language, in terms of its morphological and syntactic properties, (iii) to continue the implementation of the literacy project, which was started in Summer 1996, (iv) in the long term, to contribute to a Tupi comparative project currently in development by linguists associated to the Museum Emilio Goeldi (Brazil). Field research will be conducted in the Mekens settlement in Rondonia (Brazil) for a period of twelve months. This research project aims to provide the basis for the researcher's doctoral dissertation, in which an analytic-descriptive grammar of Mekens will be presented, providing a coherent accou nt of the many interesting morphosyntactic phenomena found in the language, such as the switch-reference system in verbal person marking, and the system of auxiliaries which marks person and position of the verb S/A arguments and tense/aspect of the clause, adding to the current understanding of these and other phenomena in natural languages.
