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1 The Kotiria and their language This chapter introduces the Kotiria1 people, their language, and the sociolinguistic context in which it is spoken. An overview of linguistic diversity in Amazonia, of Kotiria’s place within the Tukanoan language family,2 and of the history of research is presented in §§1.1–1.2. Kotiria demography, location, and contact history are sketched in§§1.3–1.4. Section 1.5 outlines important features of the Vaupés social system, focusing on linguistic exogamy, multilingualism, and language contact, and §1.6 surveys current language maintenance and documentation efforts. 1.1 Linguistic diversity in Brazilian Amazonia The Amazonian basin, covering parts of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, is one of the world’s most linguistically diverse regions (for details, see the articles in UNESCO 2006). Currently, it is within the Brazilian portion of the basin, known officially as “Amazônia Legal”3 (henceforth “Brazilian Amazonia”), that 1 During the eight years I have worked with this language community, there has been a change in their attitude towards the name “Wanano,” by which the group is generally known to the outside world. There are, in fact, several versions of this name—Wanano, Guanano, and Uanano—that appear alternately in the literature; however, it is name that has no meaning in their own language, nor does anyone seem to know its origin or meaning in any other language. It is a name given by unknown outsiders and its use has been called into question by village leaders and the directors, teachers, and students of the indigenous school. In 2006, the group publicly adopted the policy of using exclusively their own traditional name Kotiria ‘water people’ to refer to themselves and to their language and have requested that the outsiders working with them do the same. Indeed, other groups throughout the region have made similar requests, among them the Wa’ikhana (also known in the region as Piratapuyo), with whom I also work. Such decisions alongside other expressions of pride and selfdetermination reflect the increasing empowerment of local groups and strengthening of long-repressed self-esteem. 2 Both the terms “Tukano” and “Tukanoan” are used in the literature to refer to the language family. For clarity in this work, I use “Tukano” to refer to the language and “Tukanoan” to refer to the language family as a whole. 3 “Legal Amazonia” includes all the states of Brazil’s northern region: Acre, Amazonas, Amapá, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, and Tocantins, as well as the centralwest state of Mato Grosso, and the portion of the northeastern state of Maranhão lying west of the forty-fourth meridian. This macroregion shares borders with Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana, and covers 2 Chapter 1 we find both the highest concentration of indigenous people and the greatest density of languages within this vast rainforest: over 140 languages, belonging to some forty different families (Moore 2006).4 There are moreover, two creole languages, seven languages classified as isolates, and an estimated forty-five to sixty indigenous groups with whom there is still little or no contact, and about whose languages virtually nothing is known. In the 2010 national census,5 the total population of Brazil figures at slightly under 191,000,000, and the indigenous population is listed as approximately 818,000, an increase of 11.4 percent over the decade.6 Nonetheless, although the indigenous population of Brazil has grown steadily over the past twenty-five years, it still represents only 4 percent of the total population. Thus, Brazil’s total indigenous population is proportionately quite small, and the sizes of individual indigenous groups vary greatly— Moore and Gabas (2006) estimate that only 15 percent of the groups have more than a thousand speakers. Ten percent have between 501 and 1,000, 18 percent have 251 to 500, 25 percent have 101 to 250, 8 percent have 51 to 100, and 24 percent have 50 or fewer. The average population size of indigenous groups in Brazil is less than two hundred speakers (Leite and Franchetto 2006). These statistics point to a serious state of endangerment for virtually all of the indigenous languages spoken in Brazilian Amazonia; indeed, it is predicted that, even with current growing efforts to protect indigenous languages and oral approximately 5,217,423 km2 , corresponding to approximately 61 percent of Brazilian territory. Together, the states of Amazonas and Pará represent more than 55 percent of this total. 4 Both numbers of groups...

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