Doctoral Dissertation Research: Using Ethnographic Methods to Document the Garifuna Language

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Speaker responses about language use in interview settings are often skewed towards formal and prescriptively sanctioned norms. By collecting and analyzing video and audio recordings of everyday conversations, narratives, and routinized speech events including ancestor rituals, Alison Broach under the direction of Eve Danziger of the University of Virginia will create a corpus naturalistic Garifuna [cab] speech. The data samples in the resulting corpus will have been only minimally affected by the data collection process. Garifuna is an Arawakan language spoken in several Central American countries and on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. Broach will document the Guatemalan variety about which little has been written. Garifuna is of interest because of its unique historical origins through which it has acquired both Carib and West African features. Documenting Garifuna using both state-of-the-art ethnographic and language documentation methods, Broach will study in depth the morphological and lexical borrowings into Garifuna from Spanish and French, languages with which Garifuna is in close contact. This data will then lead to an analysis of how Garifuna has changed over time, especially as Spanish and English replace Garifuna as the language of choice for member of the speech community. Results will also inform ongoing Garifuna language revitalization efforts. Garifuna data will be archived at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America and at LIBRA, an online open access repository for University of Virginia scholars.