Linguistic ecologies, language contact, and linguistic diversity: Perspectives from Amazonia and beyond
University of Texas at Austin
Linguistic ecologies, language contact, and linguistic diversity: Perspectives from Amazonia and beyond Patience Epps University of Texas at Austin While interaction among speakers of different languages is a given in multilingual societies around the world, the dynamics of this interaction and its linguistic outcomes vary considerably in the context of local practices and ideologies. This variability comes into particular focus in small-scale speech communities, where social and cultural contexts are sometimes very different from those that are more typical of contemporary urban and/or globalized communities. This course explores the relationship between these ‘linguistic ecologies’ and the particular contact outcomes that emerge, which can be understood as ranging from the proliferation of linguistic diversity to its complete erasure. Our principal focus is the Amazon basin, where the diversity of language families is among the highest in the world and corresponds in many regions with extensive interaction among speakers of different languages. In the first lecture, we discuss the Vaupés region of northwest Amazonia, where high levels of multilingualism among indigenous languages have been accompanied by closely constrained code-switching, low rates of lexical borrowing, heavy structural diffusion, and the apparent absence and/or invisibility of shift among local languages – but where contact between the same indigenous languages and colonially mediated ones (Lingua Geral, Spanish, and Portuguese) has led to very different outcomes, including language shift. In the second lecture, we move on to consider other interactive, multilingual regional systems within the Amazonian context, and the relationship of such sociocultural practices as linguistic exogamy, the integration of captives, and the circulation of ritual specialists to processes of language contact, maintenance, diversification, and/or loss. The third lecture focuses on the existence and distribution of typologically noteworthy features of Amazonian languages – in particular, a relatively fuzzy syntax-morphology distinction and the proliferation of certain grammatical domains such as evidentiality, nominal classification, associated motion, and valence-adjusting morphology – and their relationship to processes of contact and grammaticalization. Finally, in the fourth lecture we consider other global regions, particularly those exhibiting high linguistic diversity and multilingualism (such as Northern Australia, Vanuatu, Eastern Cameroon, and parts of Siberia), and explore some of the parameters along which the dynamics of multilingual interaction vary across these regions – how speakers may make use of different languages actively and/or passively, in everyday and/or in ritual contexts, and in response to particular social obligations or concerns. We investigate how these effects may register in lexicon and/or grammar; how they may involve language shift and/or maintenance; how multilingual regions vary with respect to diversity on the level of families, languages, and dialects; and how this diversity may be spatially distributed.