Vilela: The last generation of speakers and the documentation, description, and history of a South American endangered language

GOLLUSCIO LUCÍA

Frankfurt

Seminario; Seminario en el marco de la Cátedra de Lingüística General- Universida Frankfurt am Main; 2018

Cátedra de Lingüística General Universidad Frankfurt am Main

Vilela (Chaco): The last generation of speakers and the documentation, description,and history of a South American endangered language Lucía A. Golluscio - Universidad de Buenos Aires y Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina Vilela (whose belonging to the Lule-Vilela family is as yet 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 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 focus on the fieldwork techniques we have had to create to carry out the documentation of the language with the two speakers located so far. In particular, despite documented phonological and lexical reduction, core linguistic structures have been activated through language remembering strategies. I will then present some important linguistic and historical results of joint research on a mythical-historical narrative recorded at the end of the 19th century.