Since 2016
PI in the project “Variation and language attitudes in Yurakaré: Setting out for a cross-linguistic perspective” funded by DFG (German Research Foundation) at the Institute of Linguistics, General Linguistics, University of Cologne

2012 - 2016
Teaching Position and Scientific Staff at the Institute of Linguistics, General Linguistics.
Teaching, managing the website content of the General Linguistics section, book orders, supervision of BA, MA, and PhD students.

2011 - 2012
Teaching Position at the Institute of Linguistics, General Linguistics

2011
PhD degree at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Thesis title: “Evidentiality and intersubjectivity in Yurakaré: An interactional account” 

2009 - 2011
Research assistant in the project “The Documentation of Yurakaré (extension)” at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

2006 - 2009
PhD student in the project “The Documentation of Yurakaré (extension)” at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

1998 - 2005
Magistra Artium degree in Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn. Title of MA thesis: “Beitrag zur Diskursanalyse von Quichua-Erzählungen aus Ecuador” (Contribution to the discourse analysis of Quichua narratives from Ecuador)

1996 - 1998
Latin American Studies at the Universities of Cologne, Bonn.

The Yurakaré language is severely endangered due to a break in intergenerational transmission. And yet, many children have at least some passive knowledge of the language. What, then, are the remaining pockets in which Yurakaré is still passed on to children? And what role do local theories and practices of language socialization play in the interruption of language transmission? This project tackles these questions by documenting theories about language socialization circulating among the Yurakaré, and by piloting the recording of Yurakaré child language in remaining pockets of transmission.

Duration: 2024-2025

Funding: Endangered Languages Documentation Programme

Description:
This project investigates linguistic variation in the Yurakaré, an isolated language spoken by approximately 2,000 people in the Bolivian Amazon. Variation patterns show systematic relations to social factors such as age, gender, region, social group and style. These findings, however, come largely from studies on English and a few other major Western languages. Our knowledge of variation and language attitudes in small, non-Western languages, on the other hand, is relatively low, although existing studies on small languages show that they may differ from large Western languages in their patterns of variation. To get a more comprehensive picture of linguistic variation in the languages of the world, many more case studies on variation in different languages are needed. Such a case study will be carried out in the proposed project. The project has three objectives: The first goal is to identify and describe variation patterns in the Yurakaré. To this end, a corpus study will be carried out using the DobeS Yurakaré corpus. To verify the results, a field study will be conducted in the form of structured interviews in two Yurakaré villages. Systematic language data will be collected from speakers representing all relevant social groups. The second goal of the project is to investigate the relationship between variation and language attitudes. This goal is also part of the structured interviews in which data on the perception of certain linguistic variants, on the linguistic socialisation of the speakers and on their attitudes to certain variants are collected. The third goal of the project is to explore the relation between linguistic variation at the level of individual language and linguistic diversity. To achieve this goal, the applicant cooperates with Nicholas Evans of the Australian National University in Canberra. In his project The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity he and his colleagues are exploring this question. Case studies will be conducted in language communities of different social organisations. The project proposed here is a further case study that represents one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world: the Amazon region.

Support: DFG

Duration: 2016 - 2019