Language attrition and remembering: The case of Vilela (Argentine Chaco)

GOLLUSCIO, LUCÍA

Leipzig

Conferencia; Conferencia en el Instituto Max Planck; 2006

Instituto Max Planck for Anthropological Research, Department of Linguistics

p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Vilela, the last member of the Lule-Vilela family, is a severely endangered language spoken in the Argentine Chaco. Shift to Spanish has been completed and the number of speakers is so small as to put the language on the brink of extinction. The exceedingly low number of speakers, their abandonment of the use of the language for daily interaction, and the lack of both a speaking and a social community has required a qualitative, ethnographic, and speaker-centered approach. This has included not only the documentation of linguistic attrition in our consultants’ speech, but especially the systematization of the language remembering processes triggered through our consultants’ active participation in the documentation of their language.  The goals of this talk are the following: To analyze some phenomena of reduction and loss of phonological and grammatical distinctions. To describe vocabulary shrinkage, and To explore the process that our main consultant ML has been undergoing in language remembering, as well as its results.