Sketch grammar, texts and dictionary of Enawene-Nawe (Arawak, Brazil)

Ubiray Nogueira de Rezende , Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

Project Details:

Individual Graduate Studentship. Duration: 2005-2007. £14,443

Project Summary:

This project aims at documenting, as full as possible, the Enawene-Nawe language, which belongs to the Arawak family, the largest group of indigenous language in South America. Enawene-Nawe is the mother tongue of only about 350 people who live in a small village in the Juruena Valley, in the northwest of Mato Grosso, Brazil. Enawene-Nawe people are monolingual, although they are experiencing a fast and increasing process of contact with the Brazilian society. Their language still does not have a valuable amount of adequate documentation available. This project will contribute to improve this situation, by documenting the Enawene-Nawe language in a variety of social and cultural contexts and by creating different types of multimedia materials, such as texts, audio and video recordings, properly annotated. Results will be a sketch grammar presenting phonetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic descriptions, a collection of texts and a small dictionary.