Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Contact and Language Change in the Andes-Amazon Borderland

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

University of Michigan doctoral student, Nicholas Emlen, with the guidance of Dr. Bruce Mannheim, will undertake linguistic anthropological research on how people in complex language contact situations negotiate their multilingualism. The research will be carried out in the complex linguistic ecology of the Upper Urubamba River area of Southern Peru, the traditional home of the Machiguenga people. This valley serves as a major conduit between the Central Andean highlands and the Amazonian lowlands, and is currently the site of massive colonization and development by Quechua-speaking and Spanish-speaking agro-pastoralists, traders, and gas company workers. The area has been the site of periods of intense Andean-Amazonian contact since before recorded history, and today highlanders and lowlanders live side-by-side. The resarcher will focus on language contact between Spanish, Machiguenga, and Quechua in two communities in the Upper Urubamba area: a frontier town that serves as the main commercial link between the highland road-based economy and the Amazonian river system, and a small "mixed" community in which highlanders and Machiguengas have intermarried and live together. This situation is interesting as a site of language contact because many of the sociocultural coordinates that are found in other areas do not map cleanly onto the Upper Urubamba. Attention will be paid to the ways in which speakers draw on the formal properties of each language, such as words, sounds, grammatical structures, as well as higher-order linguistic phenomena such as discourse and performance styles. The researcher will engage in participant observation, conduct structured and unstructured interviews, and carry out quantitative measurement of phonological variation and social factors. Language contact studies in the Andes tend to examine the relationship between the Andean languages and Spanish. This project will broaden the scope of language contact research to other indigenous languages in a broader geographical perspective. The project will also draw on archaeology, history, and historical linguistics to understand the linguistic nature of the Andes-Amazon relationship at various time depths. Funding this research supports the education of a social scientist.