Rice Linguists Study Native Languages in Brazilian Jungle

CONTACT: Philip Montgomery

PHONE: (713)
831-4792

E-MAIL: pmontgom@rice.edu

RICE LINGUISTS STUDY NATIVE LANGUAGES IN BRAZILIAN JUNGLE

Like an old-time traveling medicine show, Rice
linguist Spike Gildea and his team of Rice graduate students show up every
summer in jungle villages in Brazil playing guitars and offering trade goods.

The deal is simple. Gildea trades fishhooks and cloth for stories and time.
He has two purposes: documenting living languages of indigenous people whose
ways of life are threatened by encroaching Western civilization; and spreading
word among natives of the threat of AIDS, which caused the first official death
among northern Brazilian Indians last year.

Gildea, an associate professor of linguistics, received a three-year National
Science Foundation grant in 1992 to study the Cariban family of languages in
Brazil. Additional grants from Rice allowed him to stretch the funding through
the summer of 1997. He concluded the first phase of his research in August and
now will take some time to write for publication.

The team has been working in northern Brazil studying 10 of about 25
languages of the Cariban family spoken in a geographic area stretching from
southern Columbia across to Venezuela and the Guianas to well south of the
Amazon River. The territory is hostile and remote.

Aside from snakes and large insects that bite, there are numerous parasites
and fierce diseases. In addition, the native speakers are known for being
aggressive and are reputed to have been cannibals, a practice they have
apparently given up under pressure from contact with Westerners. But Gildea has
managed to make numerous friends among the tribes.

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