Kamarakoto Documentation Project

	Ioana Fugaru and Ramón Rodríguez Figueroa \| Research group: Language Typology and Quantitative Linguistics, Philipps-Universität Marburg
	Tuesday 12 \| 11:20-12:05 \| Session on documentation and revitalization
	Room E. Rivet, ISH (4th floor)
	Open to the public

---- Our contribution to the workshop will focus around the Kamarakoto data we collected during our first field trip in the Kamarata Valley, which took place in May/June 2014. The major challenge of this first encounter with the Kamarakotos has very early proven to be establishing the status of the Kamarakoto spoken nowadays (for us, as well as for the members of the community). The “real” or “old” Kamarakoto has obviously become a notion of the past, as all speakers are aware of the fact that the other two “sister dialects” have had a major influence on the development of this language in the past century. While all speakers agree that “Old Kamarakoto” is no longer spoken nowadays, they also emphasize the differences between today’s Kamarakoto and the other Pemón dialects. These facts are all reflected in the lexical and morphosyntactic data collected, which are an extensive wordlist, based roughly on the Swadesh wordlist and on the lexical data collected by G. G. Simpson in 1939 in the Kamarata Valley, as well as several recorded audio texts transcribed by native speakers. The long-term aim of this project is the exhaustive description of the language spoken nowadays by the Kamarakotos and its status among the Pemón dialects and ultimately among the Cariban languages (in Venezuela). To this end, a detailed phonological description of the dialect is necessary as well as establishing an appropriate orthography that would also reflect the community’s needs (as this is not the case currently). In terms of morphosyntactic analysis, one of the big areas of interest is the information structure on a clause level, as well as on a text level (reference/participant tracking etc.). We are currently laying the groundwork for subsequent reliable research in this field and additional data will be necessary along the way. It is also important to keep in mind that this research is happening against the background of a very rapidly changing society as the influence of Spanish is increasing every day and the ancestral traditions and old ways of life are dwindling. ---- ==== References ==== * George Gaylord Simpson. The Kamarakoto Indians – A Carib Tribe of Venezuelan Guayana. 1939. English language manuscript for: Los Indios Kamarakotos. Revista de Fomento III Nos. 22-25: 197-660 (Caracas: Ministry of Development, June 1940). Republished by Angel Conservation. 2010.