FROM ORAL TO WRITTEN: STORYTELLING IN NHEENGATU IN UPPER RIO NEGRO - AMAZONAS STATE

• Grant number: 13/13244-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2014
• End date: August 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Wilmar da Rocha DAngelis
• Grantee: Patrícia Regina Vannetti Veiga
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The antecedents of this paper take us back to 2010, when I had been for the first time in São Gabriel da Cachoeira municipality, in the Upper Rio Negro region (Amazonas State). Over three months of field work already done in the region, it has become explicit the native people movement for their own native languages strengthening policies, mainly by the widening use of these languages in native people schools. One of these languages is Nheengatu, or Língua Geral Amazônica (Amazonian General Language), mother tongue of the Baré People, and spoken by various other ethnic groups, also being considered a lingua franca of the people from the region. Nowadays, the region native communities are building a school education based on the cultural practices of their ancestors and elders stories, including the production of written texts in their language for bilingual teaching. This process reveals us some particular problems, difficulties and theoretical questions; so, how is it possible to transfer to a written modality the language and the knowledge which are transmitted orally? This paper intends to investigate this process, by the analysis of these different forms of language. As a corpus, we want to use some oral narratives, confronting them with their respective registries written by teachers in meetings to be promoted during the research and field work. We intend, then, to analyze the impacts and uses of writing in oral communication and to develop methods to evaluate in which extent the usage in writing contributes to the nheengatu language revitalization, which is suffering a crescent abandonment and use restrictions. Finally, this research also observe the register and studies of a writing system construction from a language of oral tradition.