This collaborative project will complete the documentation and description of two highly endangered and closely-related Amazonian languages, Omagua and Kokama-Kokamilla, and seek to determine the origin of these two historically important languages. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, Omagua was one the largest languages of the Amazon basin. The Omaguas suffered tremendously during the European invasion, however, and Omagua now has fewer than ten speakers, the youngest being 80 years old. Despite the historical importance of the language, there are no grammatical descriptions of Omagua, nor any lexical resources beyond colonial era wordlists. The area and situation is similar for Kokama-Kokamilla. The researchers will work closely with the remaining speakers of these endangered languages to develop dictionaries, a collection of oral and written texts, and grammatical descriptions of the languages. Dr. Michael will focus on the documentation of Omagua and Dr. Vallejos on the documentation of Kokama-Kokamilla to create a permanent record of the languages for use by the ethnic communities, linguists, anthropologists, and historians.
Beyond the basic scientific task of language documentation, this project aims at determining the relationship of Omagua and Kokama-Kokamilla to other Amazonian languages, and in doing so, gain insights into Pre-Columbian cultural history. Although long thought to be members of the continent-spanning TupÃ-Guaranà family, recent work has demonstrated that Omagua and Kokama-Kokamilla arose through contact between speakers of a TupÃ-Guaranà language and speakers of another unknown language. The result was a language that mixes aspects of the TupÃ-Guaranà lexicon and grammar with those from the unknown contact language. By systematically comparing the lexicon and grammatical features of Omagua and Kokama-Kokamilla with those of other language families across Amazonia, and with specific languages in the area in which these two languages are spoken, Dr. Michael and Dr. Vallejos will clarify the linguistic processes involved in their genesis, thereby gaining insights into the cultural circumstances in which they arose.
This project developed linguistic documentation and analyses of grammatical structure of Omagua, a highly endangered yet historically significant language now spoken by fewer than ten elderly individuals in northern Peruvian Amazonia. This project aimed to create a permanent linguistic record of this language and also to clarify the historically and theoretically signicant circumstances of its genesis. Omagua was known to have emerged from the grammatical and lexical mixing of a language of the continent-spanning Tupí-Guaraní family with other, as yet unknown, languages, but many questions remained unanswered about this process. At the time that Europeans arrived in the Americas, Omagua was one of the largest languages (in terms of number of speakers) spoken in the Amazon Basin, but due to the location of the Omaguas along reachers of the upper Amazon proper, the Omaguas were decimated by disease and slave raids that, by the early 18th century, left their population significantly reduced. We worked with the last speakers of Omagua (the youngest in their 70s), collecting narratives, building a dictionary, and develop analyses of the grammatical structure of the language. As a result of this work, materials on Omagua will be available in the future both to the descendants of these speakers and to linguists researching the linguistic history of the Amazon Basin, and of Tupí-Guaraní languages in particular, and to linguists whose work requires the comparison of languages from diverse families and regions of the world. The project clarified certain aspects of how the Omagua language emerged, and how it is related to other languages in the Amazon basin. Using modern linguistic data collected by the project, a number of 18th century Jesuit religious texts, and colonial-era historical materials, it was determined that Omagua (and its sister-language Kokama) descended from a Pre-Columbian contact language. Although contact languages -- that is, languages that exhibit a number of different types of language mixing -- that emerged during the colonial period in the Americas are well-known and widely studied (e.g. the various creole languages of the Carribean area), well-documented Pre-Columbian languages are extremely rare. Having determined that Omagua emerged from a Pre-Columbian contact language, it will be possible to use Omagua in comparative studies that seek to distinguish the effects of particular sociohistorical circumstances (e.g. that of plantations in the colonial era Carribean area) on outcomes of language mixing, from the effects of language structures as such. Comparative work on Tupí-Guaraní languages was also carried out, which both served to clarify the relationship of Omagua to other Tupí-Guaraní languages, confirming the close relationship of Omagua and Kokama to Tupinambá, the major language spoken along the Atlantic coast of Brazil when Europeans arrived, and developing an internal classification of the Tupí-Guaraní family as a whole. This work relied on phylogenetic methods adapted from evolutionary biology, and constitutes the first classification of this important language family based on clear data and explicit methodologies. This internal classification promises to yield important insights about the development and geographical dispersion of the speakers of Tupí-Guaraní languages, promising important insights into Pre-Columbian South American history.
