Amazonian Linguistics Summer School

General Information

This course offers a space for learning and exchange for students, professors, researchers and speakers of Peruvian native languages. It focuses on professionals’ training and prepares them for language documentation and collective creation of an academic work that can be publicly disseminated at the end of the experience.

All this within a framework that offers an overview of the Peruvian linguistic diversity –through Amazonian and Andean linguistics, sociolinguistics and language planning courses- and approaches the field work practice from a reflective and critical perspective.

The course addresses the various areas involved in the process of documenting and describing a little-known language. To achieve this purpose students will visit a native community located in Pucallpa –the Peruvian Amazon rainforest- to study the Kakataibo, a Panoan language spoken in the Peruvian regions of Huanuco and Ucayali. Here, students will be introduced to a current research project conducted by the university and they will have to collaborate on it through well-defined tasks related to the different aspects of the linguistic research such as the collection, processing and analysis of data.

In addition to this, the course will include the use of digital audio and video recording equipment, the analysis of linguistic structures of different levels (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics), the theory of transcription, the design of alphabets and the use of linguistic software.

Professor of the course

Roberto Zariquiey is PhD in Linguistics by the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) and professor and researcher at PUCP. His specialty focuses on the documentation and description of Amazonian languages, in particular of the linguistic family cloth, but has also done fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes. He has published books and scientific articles in Peruvian and international journals.

Words of the Professor

My name is Roberto Zariquiey and I am a Professor of Linguistics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. I have been researching, documenting and publishing books and papers about the Amazonian languages, especially the Panoan family, during more than eight years. I am looking forward to meet you and conduct linguistic research in the Amazon together.
The course will deal with the linguistic and cultural diversity of Peru, with emphasis on Amazonian languages. You will conduct linguistic fieldwork with me on Kakataibo, a Panoan language spoken in the Peruvian regions of Huanuco and Ucayali. At the end, you will be familiar with the basic principles and methods of linguistic fieldwork and you will get a general overview of the linguistic diversity in Peru.