Documenting and describing Ecuadorian Siona

Martine Bruil, LUCL, Leiden University

Project Details:

Small Grant. Duration: 2011-2011. £7,454

Project Summary:

Ecuadorian Siona [snn] is a highly endangered language with less than 200 speakers left. It is spoken in six communities in the Cuyabeno reserve and on the banks of the Aguarico, the Eno and the Aguas Negras in Eastern Ecuador (latitute=0º0659’N, longitude=76º3989’W). Even within the underdocumented Western-Tucanoan branch of the Tucanoan family, there is little existing documentation on Siona. Therefore this dissertation project aims to fill this gap through documenting a corpus of various genres, to train Siona speakers to document their language themselves, and to develop a description of the language with a special focus on the evidential system.