Volume 2016, Issue 240 - Special Issue: Indigenous American languages in contact and in context, Issue Editor: Aurolyn Luykx

The sociocultural complex of the northwest Amazon is remarkable for its system of linguistic exogamy in which individuals marry outside their language groups. This article illustrates how linguistic exogamy crucially relies upon the alignment of descent and post-marital residence. Native ideologies apprehend languages as the inalienable possessions of patrilineally reckoned descent groups. At the same time, post-marital residence is traditionally patrilocal. This alignment between descent and post-marital residence means that the language which children are normatively expected to produce – the language of their patrilineal descent group – is also the language most widely spoken in the local community, easing acquisition of the target language. Indigenous migration to Catholic mission centers in the twentieth century and ongoing migration to urban areas along the Rio Negro in Brazil are reconfiguring the relationship between multilingualism and marriage. With out-migration from patrilineally-based villages, descent and post-marital residence are no longer aligned. Multilingualism is being rapidly eroded, with language shift from minority Eastern Tukanoan languages to Tukano being widespread. Continued practice of descent group exogamy even under such conditions of widespread language shift reflects how the semiotic relationship between language and descent group membership is conceptualized within the system of linguistic exogamy.

Post-colonial interactions between indigenous groups in Amazonia have intrigued observers since contact was established between non-indigenous Brazilians and first-nation peoples. Exchanges between different ethnic groups were largely referred to en passant or in an anecdotal manner. Yet an expanding literature dealing with the dynamics of interethnic contact can now help assess the historical precedents and sociolinguistic features between different indigenous communities. In this article we explore the contact history of the Awá-Guajá of eastern Amazonia, and the sociolinguistic variation that developed between their different communities and neighboring indigenous groups. The Awá-Guajá came into permanent contact with Brazilian mainstream society in 1973 and were settled into four communities by Brazil’s Indian Service. They are Tupí-Guaraní speakers and can converse with other members of this language family, namely, the Ka’apor and Tenetehara. This interaction reveals linguistic affinities and a distinct historical engagement between these groups. Loan words and dialects developed from these relationships, and each group was also influenced by the enveloping machinations of mainstream society. The Awá-Guajá defer to the Ka’apor and Tenetehara yet keep a guarded distance from them, exposing an interesting dynamic that remits us to power relations, historical ecology, and the looming influence of the Brazilian state.

This article examines the language ideologies and socio-political realities associated with the highly localized oral traditions of northwestern California, including both stories and songs, which are both connected in profoundly indexical ways to the distinctiveness of the languages. My findings suggest that the principle of linguistic relativity , whereby speakers of contrasting languages subscribe to different worldviews, often emerges from conscious choices of interpretation among community members, who actively strive to set their languages and worldviews apart from those of neighboring societies – in association with a pervasive ideology of localism. Today, as the languages undergo revitalization, this long-standing concern with local difference is receiving renewed attention in the context of the tribal language programs where speakers are also striving to keep their languages, stories, songs, and worldviews distinct – both from the neighboring tribes as well as the English-speaking world. Today, as in the past, the distinctive languages continue to play an important role in the maintenance of identity, setting the communities apart in publicly accentuated ways and instilling language learners with a sense of pride in the uniqueness of their own traditions.

This article contributes to the study of linguistic differentiation in a Zapotec transborder community formed by migration between the village of San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca, Mexico, and West Los Angeles, California. In the Tlacolula Valley of Oaxaca, an area characterized by remarkable linguistic diversity combined with extreme localism, the way a person speaks, whom they can understand and who can understand them marks their place on a complex sociolinguistic map. However, the contours of this map are shifting due to domestic and international migration patterns. Among Guelavians in Oaxaca judgments of sociolinguistic differences between speakers are often made on the basis of the particular linguistic variety spoken by an individual, and its perceived similarity or divergence from San Juan Guelavía Zapotec. In contrast, among Guelavian migrants in Los Angeles there is a widespread tendency to evaluate migrants from other Zapotec-speaking communities on the basis of where, when and to whom they speak Zapotec, regardless of the variety. By analyzing differences in the metalinguistic practices of Guelavians living in Oaxaca and Los Angeles this work contributes to understandings of the shifting relationship between language, locality and identity brought about by indigenous transborder migration.

Resumen Las lenguas guaycurúes y mataguayas (Gran Chaco) constituyen casos interesantes y tipológicamente inusuales por la complejidad de sus sistemas de demostrativos que combinan deíxis espacial con rasgos como visibilidad, tangibilidad, movimiento, postura y evidencia (visual). Sistemas similares han sido hallados en otras lenguas del mundo, aunque la combinación de estos con postura y/o movimiento es atípica. En la familia guaycurú los demostrativos, además de cumplir la función de determinantes, son clasificadores nominales. Esta característica, en cambio, no es del todo compartida por las lenguas mataguayas. En las lenguas de ambas familias los demostrativos contribuyen también al señalamiento pragmático del tiempo, el modo y la evidencialidad, no necesariamente codificados en el predicado. El trabajo muestra las semejanzas entre los sistemas de ambas familias y propone que ellas no pueden explicarse por causas universales o mera coincidencia, sino que el contacto juega allí un papel importante. Por otra parte, aun cuando la hipótesis de una relación genética entre ambas familias sea razonable, esta no parece suficiente para explicar las similitudes en los sistemas de demostrativos, que van más allá de las formas presumiblemente cognadas.

Though usually referred to as “the Quechua language”, Quechua is actually a diverse language family extending from Colombia to northern Argentina. Quechua languages are not all mutually intelligible, but speakers are generally unaware of that fact, since they use it mostly in local, communitarian settings. This study examines the evolving speech behavior and meta-linguistic discourse of an international group of Quechua speakers, most of whom were encountering different varieties of Quechua for the first time as participants in a two-year graduate program in bilingual-intercultural education. Over the course of the program, students developed several strategies to facilitate communication across their different Quechua varieties. We examine those strategies and their implications for language planning, language education, and the emergence of a broader pan-Quechua identity.