Tariana Texts and Cultural Context (review)

This superb book offers a substantial ethnohistorical and typological glimpse of Tariana, a North Arawak language spoken by fewer than 100 of the 1,500 ethnic Tariana (North-West Amazonia, Brazil). It contains ten short oral texts, each accompanied by interlinear glosses and a literal translation, which the author collected from a single speech community (the Brito family) during three expeditions during 1991–97. The texts were selected from a corpus of over 130 stories to illustrate specific aspects of Tariana material and spiritual culture or ethnic self-consciousness and include legends of the tribe’s migrations into the Vaupés River area, punishments for violating exogamy rules or other taboos, creation mythology, the nature of evil forest spirits, and finally the reasons for language loss among the Tariana. This latter event resulted mainly from Catholic missionary policy of the early twentieth century in promoting monolingualism among the local tribes of the area, so that all younger Tariana today have shifted to East Tucano. Tariana is expected to disappear as a living language within a few generations, an impending extinction that renders this book all the more important.

The texts (39–143) are followed by a useful bibliography of works on Tariana history, society, and language (144–46). But the most informative portion of the book is its long introduction (8–38) which provides the first concise English language description of Tariana language, ethnohistory, and culture. Maps (4–5) show the location of the Tariana and neighboring tribes. These are followed by a discussion of the traditional multilingualism of the area, which should be of great interest to specialists in language contact. Originally, against the backdrop of an interethnic system of exogamy, language functioned as a marker of ethnicity so that individuals retained their father’s language, and lexical borrowing between languages was generally avoided as a violation of the exogamy rules. Traditionally, most individuals in the Vaupés area seem to have been fluent in at least two languages. Tables illustrate the rate of language retention today among the Vaupés tribes, the origin of Tariana place names, kinship terms, names for months and parts of the day, terms associated with the layout of the traditional long house, and classificatory terms for shamans and for hierarchies of evil spirits. Basic typological features of the language itself are discussed and Tucano influence on the grammatical structure and lexicon assessed. Tariana is particularly interesting for its complex nominal morphology, an innovation absent in Tucano as well as in other Arawak languages. Tariana nouns may consist of up to 15 morpheme positions, only one of which is prefixal, with most of the positions occupied by enclitics. Another interesting typological feature is the presence of noun classifiers, a topic the author will analyze cross-linguistically in a special monograph, Classifiers: A typology of noun categorization devices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, to appear).

This important contribution to Amazonian linguistics represents only a small portion of the author’s ongoing, highly prolific work in documenting the languages of the region. A detailed Tariana grammar as well as a dictionary are currently in preparation as are descriptions of several other Vaupés area languages. Highly recommended for typologists, sociolinguists, and anyone interested in endangered languages.