Documenting the Languages of the People of the Center, especially Bora and Ocaina (North West Amazon): Final Report
Creators: name: Seifart, Frank
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022

description: This project documented the highly endangered languages of the so-called People of the Center, a culturally relatively uniform, but linguistically diverse group in the North West Amazon. We documented the traditional cultural practices, including memorized ritual discourses lasting up to three hours, repertoires of thousands of songs, and drum communication systems derived from the individual languages, as well as the informal use of the languages on a daily basis, which are both nowadays rapidly declining in a process of transculturalization towards national society and language shift towards local Spanish. Three of the seven mutually unintelligible and in part genetically unrelated languages, Bora, Ocaina, and Witoto, were the subject of exemplary and comprehensive documentations, consisting of fully transcribed and translated video recordings of a representative sample of each major type of communicative event. A number of older Witoto recordings of types of ritual speech no longer practiced today were processed and integrated in the current documentation. In addition, extensive data were included from the moribund Resígaro language, which now has only two speakers. We also processed and included substantial data from the now extinct Nonuya that were collected in the 1970s-1990s. The corpus consists of over 2000 individual recording sessions with a total of over 350 hours of vidio and/or audio recordings. Each session is placed under a thematic node in the DOBES archive, together with a metadata description, which specifies its contents, participants, etc. Almost 700 of these sessions were transcribed and translated into Spanish, adding up to an electronically searchable online corpus of over 230,000 words. Additionally we created and uploaded an extensive apparatus (almost 180 pages), which provides important information about the languages and culture of the People of the Centre, facilitating future use of the data by anyone not familiar with these. We also collected specific data for a variety of possible analyses, including anthropological, linguistic, psycholinguistic, and ethnobotanical and -zoological analyses, and have already carried out ourselves analyses relating to linguistic anthropology, grammatical description, and historical and contact linguistics. From our data, we also produced a number of materials specifically for language revitalization purposes, including teaching materials and 56 DVDs with bilingual subtitles. A language documentation server was installed in Iquitos, Peru, which hosts a copy of our documentation and constitutes a new centre for language documentation in Peru, and is part of a Latin American network we initiated. A PhD dissertation project carried out in the project, a descriptive grammar of Ocaina, is close to completion. We also helped to establish language documentation at German universities through teaching. A number of follow-up projects and activities, both in Latin America and Europe, are on their way, including the elaboration of further teaching materials and typological studies based on language documentation corpora.