Documenting Ecuadorian Siona Linguistic Variation: The collection and anotation of a sociolinguistically and culturally informed video corpus

The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides grants worldwide to for the linguistic documentation of endangered language and knowledge. Grantees create multimedia collection of endangered languages. These collections are preserved and made freely available through the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) housed at the library of SOAS University of London.

Ecuadorian Siona (ISO-639-3snn; /200.09, -76.14) is a severely endangered Western Tukanoan language spoken by less than 200 speakers in 6 villages on the Cuyabeno and Aguarico rivers in East Ecuador. This project aims to document rapidly disappearing cultural knowledge, such as the oral history, shamanistic practices, traditional ways of cooking and making artifacts. The outcomes of this project will be an transcribed, translated and annotated audio-visual corpus, community materials, the training of community documenters and linguistic resources, including a culturally informed lexicon and linguistic papers on the dialectal variation between the Aguarico and Cuyabeno communities and language contact phenomena. Primary investigator: Martine Bruil

Project Details


Location: Ecuador, South America, Americas Organiser(s): Endangered Languages Documentation Programme Project partner(s): University of California, Berkeley Funder(s): Arcadia Funding received: £75,381.00 Commencement Date: 01/2010
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