Jane Grant Room
330 Hendricks Hall
1408 University St.
CLLAS graduate student grantee Thiago Pereira Vital de Castro, Department of Linguistics, will talk about the research he conducted with the support of a CLLAS Graduate Student Research Award.
The Djeoromitxi language is an endangered indigenous language spoken in Northwest Brazil, in the state of Rondônia on the Brazil-Bolivia border. This language is spoken in contact with other languages. Various factors including frequent interaction with other groups, interethnic marriage and contact with the non-Indian community have led most of the indigenous people to speak more Portuguese than their mother language, leading to the endangerment of Djeoromitxi. Due to the progressive endangerment of Djeoromitxi, the documentation of this language is very urgent.
Thiago Castro wrote in his grant application: “The primary goal of my research trip to Brazil this summer is to continue the documentation of the Djeoromitxi language and culture. These recordings will form the basis from which I ask further questions necessary to understand how the forms of the language combine both to encode the universal communicative functions shared by all languages (who did what to whom, when, why, etc.) and to create the unique kinds of information that the Djeoromitxi speech community found essential for their life before integration.”