Language Contact in the Peruvian Amazon

A Comparative Study in the Datem de Marañón (Loreto) and Purús (Ucayali) Provinces from the Perspective of Areal Linguistics, Socioecological Systems, and Computer Science: Language and culture contact, and the consequent possibility of forming linguistic areas, is a fundamental topic for socio-anthropological and linguistic studies in the Amazon. Prototypical linguistic areas are defined as geographical spaces that bring together peoples from different ethnolinguistic families, who share linguistic and cultural features resulting from prolonged contact. The great interest in the study of linguistic areas has neglected cases of intense contact between languages of the same family, despite their importance for contact linguistics and historical linguistics. The aim of this project is to compare the dynamics of cultural and linguistic contact in two regions of the Peruvian Amazon: Datem del Marañón (Loreto) and Purús (Ucayali). Both are regions of great linguistic diversity with one fundamental difference: in the former, we find intense interaction between peoples from different linguistic families, while in the latter, the vast majority of peoples in contact belong to the Pano linguistic family. Our methods are based on interdisciplinary fieldwork (linguistics, anthropology, and, for the first time, socioecology and politics) and the computational processing of information. We will employ data mining and artificial intelligence methods for the comprehensive comparison of two representative contact processes in the Peruvian Amazon. Funded by PUCP. Research Areas: Computational Linguistics, Databases, and Language Technologies; Language Revitalization, Description, and Documentation of Endangered Languages.