phonological description of the Paiter Suruí language

• Grant number: 25/22316-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: November 01, 2025
• End date: October 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Luciana Raccanello Storto
• Grantee: Daniel Bardelli Vieira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 24/17181-2 - Subsidies for the installation of the Indigenous Documentation Center - actions by the Museum of Archaelogy and Ethnology, AP.ESP

Abstract

This project aims to describe the phonology of Suruí, a tonal language from the Mondé family of the Tupian stock, spoken by the Paiter people. This description will be done through a review of the existing literature on the subject, such as the works of the missionary couple Carolyn and Willem Bontkes, the master's thesis by Tine Van Der Meer, titled "Fonologia da Língua Suruí" (1982), and the DEA mémoire by Mariana Guerra, titled "Aspects of Suruí phonology and phonetics" (2004). Although there are already works on the subject, these studies disagree on some unresolved topics, such as whether to include the glottal stop as a phoneme, the description of a sonorization process, among other things.Furthermore, with the same goal of phonological description, this project also intends to transcribe and translate audio recordings of Suruí narratives with the assistance of a native speaker. Thus, the project will also contribute to the documentation of materials produced in Suruí.Finally, the project also intends to analyze the issue of the multiple existing orthographies for the language, caused by successive changes in the writing system made by different linguists (MOORE, 2005). Thus, an orthography will be chosen to be used in the transcription of the narratives and in future works. (AU)