The endangered Tariana, the only Arawak language of the Vaupes River Basin, north-west Amazon, Brazil: a corpus of audio recordings and stories

Tariana is an endangered Arawak language from north-west Amazon. It is spoken by c.70 people in two villages on the Vaupes River, north-west Amazonia, Brazil. The Tariana language belongs to the Arawak language family (see Arawak Languages). It is spoken by about 100 people in the multilingual linguistic area of the Vaupe´s River Basin (northwest Amazonia, Brazil). This area is known (Aikhenvald, 2002b; Sorensen, 1967) for its multilingual exogamy: one can only marry someone who speaks a different language and belongs to a different tribe. People usually say: ‘My brothers are those who share a language with me’ and ‘We don’t marry our sisters.’ The other languages in this area belong to the Tucanoan family, and they are still spoken by a fair number of people. The basic rule of language choice throughout the Vaupe´s area is that one should speak the interlocutor’s own language. Descent is strictly patrilineal, and consequently, one identifies with one’s father’s language group. There is a strong cultural inhibition against ‘language-mixing,’ viewed in terms of lexical loans. In its grammatical and semantic structure, Tariana combines a number of features inherited from proto-Arawak, with the areal influences from Tucanoan in the form of grammatical calques and diffused patterns.

    Data Record Details
    Data record related to this publication The endangered Tariana, the only Arawak language of the Vaupes River Basin, north-west Amazon, Brazil: a corpus of audio recordings and stories
    Data Publication title The endangered Tariana, the only Arawak language of the Vaupes River Basin, north-west Amazon, Brazil: a corpus of audio recordings and stories
  • Description

    Tariana is an endangered Arawak language from north-west Amazon. It is spoken by c.70 people in two villages on the Vaupes River, north-west Amazonia, Brazil. The Tariana language belongs to the Arawak language family (see Arawak Languages). It is spoken by about 100 people in the multilingual linguistic area of the Vaupe´s River Basin (northwest Amazonia, Brazil). This area is known (Aikhenvald, 2002b; Sorensen, 1967) for its multilingual exogamy: one can only marry someone who speaks a different language and belongs to a different tribe. People usually say: ‘My brothers are those who share a language with me’ and ‘We don’t marry our sisters.’ The other languages in this area belong to the Tucanoan family, and they are still spoken by a fair number of people. The basic rule of language choice throughout the Vaupe´s area is that one should speak the interlocutor’s own language. Descent is strictly patrilineal, and consequently, one identifies with one’s father’s language group. There is a strong cultural inhibition against ‘language-mixing,’ viewed in terms of lexical loans. In its grammatical and semantic structure, Tariana combines a number of features inherited from proto-Arawak, with the areal influences from Tucanoan in the form of grammatical calques and diffused patterns.

  • Other Descriptors
    • Descriptor

      The corpus of Tariana collected by Alexandra (Sacha) Aikhenvald, also known as Kumatharo, consists of over forty hours of recordings and over 1000 pages of stories told by speakers of all ages. Some stories are presented here. The dataset consists of: information about the Tariana language; a selection of papers on Tariana (pdf); a Tariana dictionary (pdf); some pictures (jpg); maps (pdf); Pedagogical materials in Tariana, a selection of materials in use by the Escola Indígena Tariana (Iauaretê, Amazonas, Brasil), under the current leadership of Rafael Brito (pdf); and recorded Tariana stories. The recorded Tariana stories and other sound files are restricted. If you would like to listen to them, e-mail Alexandra.Aikhenvald@jcu.edu.au. Pode tambem entrar em contato com o Rafael Brito [rbserevali@gmail.com]‎ ou Jose Luis Brito [luisbritojose@yahoo.com.br].

    • Descriptor type Full
    • Descriptor
    • Descriptor type
  • Data type dataset
  • Keywords
    • arawak language
    • tariana language
    • northwest amazon
    • Brazil
  • Funding source
  • Research grant(s)/Scheme name(s)
  • Research themes
    People and Societies in the Tropics
    FoR Codes (*)
    SEO Codes
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    Temporal (time) coverage
  • Start Date 1994/01/01
  • End Date
  • Time Period
    Spatial (location) coverage
  • Locations
    • Northwest Amazon, Brazil.
  • Related publications
      Name Aikhenvald, A.Y. (2006) Tariana. In: Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics. Elsevier, Oxford, UK, pp. 506-507.
    • URL http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/9365/
    • Notes
    • Name Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2006) Complement clause types and complementation strategies in Tariana. In: Complementation: a cross-linguistic perspective. Explorations In Linguistic Typology . Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 178-203. ISBN 978-0-19-929787-0 Item availability restricted.
    • URL http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/9319/
    • Notes
    • Name Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2011) Le tariana. In: Dictionnaire des langues. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, France, pp. 1483-1488. ISBN 978-2-13-056914-5 Item availability restricted.
    • URL http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/16610/
    • Notes
    • Name Aikhenvald, Alexandra (2010) Language contact and pragmatic notions: Tariana in its multilingual context. In: Information Structure in Indigenous Languages of the Americas: Syntactic Approaches. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 225, 225 . De Gruyter Mouton , Berlin, Germany, pp. 17-38. ISBN 978-3-11-022852-6
    • URL http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/15781/
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    The data will be licensed under CC BY: Attribution 3.0 AU
  • Other Licence
  • Statement of rights in data This dataset is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australian licence
  • Data owners
    Citation Aikhenvald, Alexandra (2012): The endangered Tariana, the only Arawak language of the Vaupes River Basin, north-west Amazon, Brazil: a corpus of audio recordings and stories. James Cook University. https://research.jcu.edu.au/data/published/bd3c4963907873bfbe46995bfb1c0228