Collaborative linguistic documentation without a community: the Vilela case

GOLLUSCIO, LUCÍA

Regensburg

Seminario; Seminario en el marco de la Cátedra de Lingüística general y comparativa; 2017

Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft Institut für Information und Medien, Sprache und Kultur (IIMSK) Universität Regensburg

Collaborative linguistic documentation without a community: the Vilela caseLucía A. Golluscio Universidad de Buenos Aires y Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina Vilela (its belonging to the Lule-Vilela family is under discussion) is the most severely endangered language in the Argentine Chaco. It shows the results of linguistic attrition without obsolescence. The extreme paucity of Vilela speakers and the lack of a speech community have proven to be critical threats. This presentation focuses on the relevance of the collaborative documentation with the remaining speakers in the case of severely endangered languages, and the challenges this work poses to both the research team and the speakers. After the introduction on the socio-political and socio-linguistic situation of the Vilela people, I will share with you the fieldwork techniques we have had to imagine, to create to carry out the documentation of the language with the two speakers located so far. In particular, despite documented phonological and grammatical reduction, core linguistic structures have been activated through language remembering strategies. Which have been the reasons ot the Vilela language and people present situation? Although the pressure of Spanish has long been present, its structure has not been decisive to vernacular language loss. Rather, the abandonment of the language among the Vilela people is rooted in their sad history of socio-cultural and socio-political subordination.