“Giving them back their languages”
The endangered Amerindian languages of the Guianas: Wayana and
Tunayana-Waiwai.
An illusion?
Introduction
The NWO Endangered Languages Programme “Giving them back their Languages: The
endangered Amerindian languages of the Guianas” research falls within the aim of
documenting all the highly endangered Amerindian languages of the Guianas that is currently
being carried out at Leiden University, and which has until now focussed on Trio (Cariban),
Mawayana (Arawakan), and Kari’na (Cariban), as they are spoken in Suriname. Ongoing work
also includes Wapishana (Arawakan) and Taruma (isolate) in Guyana. The two languages
chosen for the present project are Wayana and Tunayana-Waiwai (both Cariban) which are
spoken in the southern rainforest of Suriname, French Guiana, Guyana and Brazil. The
researchers will focus mainly but not exclusively on these groups resident in Suriname since it
is there that these languages are found to be relatively conservative compared to the varieties
spoken in the other countries. Tunayana-Waiwai is spoken by approximately 150 people in
Suriname. The Wayana speakers in Suriname number approximately 400.
Previous and ongoing research has shown that these Cariban and Arawakan languages of the
Guianas exhibit features that have been hitherto undescribed or analyzed, that can enhance
our understanding of the complexities of the language-culture interface, and how such
cognitive structures within these languages can develop and grammaticalize. The languages
of the Guianas constitute an as yet untapped source of knowledge for those studying
emergent grammar and grammaticalization processes, as well as ethnolinguistics.
Goals and focus of project
The primary aim of the programme is to write two comprehensive grammars of Wayana and
Tunayana-Waiwai. In particular, full grammatical descriptions of these languages are required
for the programmatic focus of the project which aims to look in detail at certain aspects of the
languages that have cultural import, namely the semantic and pragmatic domains pertinent to
the worldview of the speakers. The culturally-dependent conceptualization patterns that obtain
in these languages include classificatory patterns in the locative and directional postpositions,
evidentiality patterns, and truth-tracking devices. While a lot of attention has been paid in the
anthropological literature to the worldviews of Amazonian peoples, whereby one commonality
is the transformational world in which they live - that is, these peoples live in constant
interaction with the omnipresent (invisible) spirit world - little attention has been paid to the
differing structures through which this commonality is expressed, be these ethnographic or
linguistic in nature. In previous and ongoing work on related languages of these two language
families, a number of grammatical morphemes (clitics, suffixes and modal particles) have
come to light that in their basic meaning are used to chart interactions between "this world",
that is, the world of humans, and the "other-world", that is, the world of spirits, both of which
are intertwined. Concomitant with such grammatical markers, one finds a number of
categories that can best be subsumed under the term "truth and knowledge markers" that
include a frustrative marker, assertion markers, and markers which are used to assign
responsibility to an actant. It is such complex categories of grammatical marking that are
difficult to grasp unless one takes into account the worldview according to which the speakers
live. In the Cariban languages, for example, one finds a marker –me (-pe), often translated as
'being' or 'as' in the literature and termed facsimile marker in Carlin (2004) that is used on
nominals to mark that the denotee of that nominal is manifestly but not inherently that which is
denoted by that nominal, that is, it is seemingly but not intrinsically so, as shown in the Trio
example below. Here the speaker is talking about an adopted daughter: without the –me
marked on j-eemi, the speaker is referring to his biological daughter.
j-eemi-me
nai
mëe
1poss-daughter-facs she.is 3pro.anim.prox
she is my daughter (but not biologically so)
What such examples as that given above show is that it is obligatory for the speakers of these
languages to mark different kinds of truths, that is, actual truths and apparent truths, or truths
that are transient but not absolute. The researchers aim to chart systematically the linguistic
processes and means for the construction of possible worlds and the ensuing knowledge of
those worlds, with as a point of departure “the reality of a multiplicity of knowledges or versions
of the world” (Overing 1990:603).
Fieldwork among the Trio in Suriname
Some publications by Eithne B. Carlin on the (Amerindian) languages of
Suriname
1998
Speech community formation: a sociolinguistic profile of the Trio of Suriname. New
West Indian Guide 72(1/2):4-42.
1999
WYSIWYG in Trio: The grammaticalized expression of truth and knowledge. Journal
of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO), 30/3: 233-45.
2001
Of riches and rhetoric: Language in Suriname. In: Rosemarijn Hoefte and Peter Meel
(eds.), 20th century Suriname: Continuities and Discontinuities in a New World
Society. Kingston: Ian Randle, pp. 220-243.
2002
Atlas of the Languages of Suriname. Leiden and Kingston: KITLV and Ian Randle,
(co-ed. with Jacques Arends).
2002.
Patterns of language, patterns of thought: The Cariban languages. In: Carlin and
Arends (eds.) 2002, pp. 47-81.
2002
The native population: Migrations and identities. In: Carlin and Arends (eds.) 2002, pp.
10-45. (with Karin M. Boven)
2003
The experiencer role in the expression of mental states and activities in Trio.
Amerindia 28:161-82.
2004
A Grammar of Trio, a Cariban Language of Suriname. Duisburg Papers on Research
in Language and Culture, 55. Frankfurt etc.: Peter Lang.
In press:
A report of loss of linguistic diversity in the Guianas, northern Amazonia". Proceedings of the
2002 March Meeting of Experts on Endangered Languages, Paris: UNESCO
Publications. 18pp
In preparation: The language of the Mawayana, an Arawakan group of Suriname.
The last speakers of Mawayana in Kwamalasamutu, Suriname: Saana and her husband
Japoma