Geny Gonzales Castaño from the Department of Linguistics of the University of Cauca, was honored with the most important award granted by the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas in the United States, for her doctoral thesis "A grammar of the Namtrik language de Totoró - Barbecue language spoken in the Colombian Andes ".

 

The Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages ​​of the Americas SSILA presented the Mary R. Haas award in the Honorable category to Geny Gonzales Castaño, professor of the Department of Linguistics of the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the University of Cauca, for his doctoral thesis "A grammar of the Namtrik language of Totoró - Barbecue language spoken in the Colombian Andes", which she developed at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France).

 

The doctoral thesis that obtained the recognition was proposed by its directors Tulio Rojas Curieux (University of Cauca) and Antoine Guillaume (Université Lumière Lyon 2 Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage DDL) and by the jurors Spike Gildea, (Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon) and Colette Grinevald (Université Lumière Lyon 2 Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage DDL).

 

This research work, recognized with the highest award granted by the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages ​​of the Americas in the United States, presents a description of the grammar of the Namtrik language, also known as Namui Wam or Guambiano, belonging to the barbecue family. This language is spoken in southwestern Colombia by around 23,242 people on the Andes mountain range, in the department of Cauca, in the reservations of Guambia, Ambaló, Totoró, Quisgó.

 

In this regard, teacher Geny Gonzales Castaño explained that this grammar describes a seriously threatened variant of namtrik, spoken in the Totoró reservation by around 76 speakers, corresponding to 1% of the total population of the community (7023 inhabitants). "In the Totoró reservation, Spanish has displaced namtrik in all public, family and community spaces, with three generations of monolingual Spanish speakers existing."

 

“Most of the studies that exist on the phonology and morphosyntax of namtrik were carried out by graduates of the Master's in Ethnolinguistics from the Colombian Center for Aboriginal Languages ​​Studies of Colombia CCELA, especially on the variant spoken in Guambía and in the Totoró reservation. However, despite these efforts, prior to the preparation of this doctoral thesis, there was no descriptive grammar of Namtrik in any of its variants, ”he emphasized.

 

In this sense, this dissertation seeks to contribute to bridge this gap in the knowledge of this language, as it is the first descriptive grammar of Namtrik, carried out in a contemporary typological framework.

 

This grammar is based on a corpus of data both natural (oral texts, monologues and conversations) and controlled that come from three sources: “Lexicon of the Namtrik language of Totoró” (Rojas Curieux, Vasquez de Ruiz, Gonzales Castaño, & Díaz Montenegro , 2009); oral tradition primer “Namoi kilelɨpe as’an c’ipɨk kɨn. This is how our elders counted” (Rojas Curieux, Gonzales Castaño, Díaz Montenegro, Tunubalá Tombre, & Chavaco, 2016) and the data collected in the framework of the linguistic documentation project “Documentation and Description of Namtrik, an endangered language of the Colombian Andes ” , funded by the HRELP-SOAS scholarship program "Hans Rausing Endangered Language Documentation Program" (HRELDP), School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

 

"The documentation project was carried out in parallel to the writing of this doctoral dissertation, this being also part of the objectives sought by the project, which followed the classical perspective of linguistic documentation proposed by Franz Boas at the beginning of the 20th century , which still constitutes the parameter about what it means to carry out linguistic documentation today, according to which it is defined by three types of activities: collection of texts, a grammar and a dictionary ”, adds the Teacher.

 

In total, 8 hours of audio files (17 files) and 29 hours (55 files) of video were collected. 15 hours were transcribed and translated into Spanish, which were used in the elaboration of this grammar and are available for consultation on the page of the documentation project "Documentation and Description of Namtrik, an endangered language of the Colombian Andes", in the archive Endangered Languages ​​Archive at SOAS University of London.

 

 

These data were collected during three field studies that lasted a total of 16 months. The first was carried out between the months of March and August 2015; the second between the months of July and November 2016 and the third between the months of February and June 2018. A group of 17 Namtrik speakers participated in the recordings: María Gertrudis Benachí, Marco Antonio Ulcué, Erminia Conejo, Aristides Sánchez, Carmen Tulia Sánchez, Carolina Luligo, Micaela Luligo, Marcelina Conejo, Ismailina Sánchez, Encarnación Sánchez, Tránsito Sánchez, Juanita Sánchez, Inocencio Ulcué, Nemesio Bolívar Conejo, Gerardina Sánchez and José María Sánchez; who had learned this language during their childhood and had stopped using it in their adult life, when Namtrik was replaced by Spanish as the language of communication in Totoró.

 

"Professors from the schools of the reservation, students of the undergraduate program of Anthropology and Systems Engineering from the University of Cauca and community members of the reservation also participated, who spontaneously approached the workshops and also made their own videos with cell phones and computers."

 

This thesis consists of twenty chapters that present the different levels of organization of the Namtrik language: phonological, morphological and syntactic. At the end of the document, in the form of an annex, we also include the transcription, translation, segmentation and glosses of the documentation project “Documentation and Description of Namtrik, an endangered language of the Colombian Andes”.

 

More Info:

 

Faculty of Human and Social Sciences

Email: decanaturachs@unicauca.edu.co