Bakairi

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This is the first comprehensive bibliography of contemporary Carib-speaking Amerindians. It resumes widely dispersed social anthropological and linguistic resources for twenty-six different Carib-speaking groups as well as general and comparative works about this South American language family. Each group is introduced along with common ethnonyms, their settlement region, recent demographic data and a brief contact history. This bibliography contains about three thousand entries and offers a valuable tool for scholars and students of Carib-speaking Amerindians.

In this study, I will investigate how much linguistic content of a Bakairi oral story remains analogous in a recent recording as well as which linguistic changes occur over time, presumably influenced by the storytellers' viewpoint and natural changes in the language. In 1887, Steinen (1892: 235-244) documented an oral story about a jaguar and an anteater, in which the anteater tricks the powerful jaguar. The same 19thcentury story is occasionally retold in Bakairi festivals. A 20th-century recording of the story shows how the Bakairi people have safeguarded its remote culture as well as its collective identity through the careful listening and retelling of its stories. At first, I will briefly look at some theoretical frameworks of narratology and storytelling. Then I will discuss the two oral texts, followed by a study of what remains analogous and what has become dissimilar. The analysis will point out expected reasons for retention of oral tradition among illiterate speakers of the language.

For languages with little or no written register, namely undocumented languages, oral narratives are the main means of handing down local history and culture. Of such narrative accounts, topic descriptions and storytelling tend to involve recreations of dialogues. The former refers to procedural discourses, such as how to manufacture canoes or make foodstuff. In contrast, storytelling is a narrative style meant to recreate, for instance, historical or mythological events. In the creative process of a story, narrators oftentimes make use of quotations to demonstrate or describe events. It is argued that all languages employ direct quotations, i.e. quoted as they are spoken. On the other hand, an increasing number of non-Western European languages, which have been documented within the last fifty years, have been found to lack indirect quotations. Bakairi, an endangered Cariban language spoken in the Southern Amazonia, is an example of a language without indirect quotations. The present study of the Bakairi language investigates the occurrence of narrative quotations, their grammatically conditioned forms, as well as their pragmatic functions. By examining such aspects of narrative quotations, this paper aims to shed light on the significance that the lack of indirect quotation has on the way information is conveyed. One of the benefits of investigating small or endangered languages is the discovery of previously unknown linguistic and cultural phenomena. This paper will show that Bakairi speakers value the memorization of quotations in order to recall them as they are stated in order to preserve a story as it is said. The absence of a written documented history can inculcate in its community members the duty to safeguard its history through the careful listening and retelling of its stories. Hence, to keep its history intact, little is expected of a storyteller in terms of instilling judgment, making inferences, or even, reaching conclusions.

Bakairi, a language spoken in southern Amazonia, has a gamut of marking devices of possession and ownership. Whether the possessed entity is of the animate or inanimate class, the employed mechanism is different. Hypernyms are often used to help determine if the possessed noun is an object, a meat meal, a vegetarian meal, or even a fruit meal. Affixes can help determine if the possessed item is still connected to its whole or if it has been detached. Different affixes can help distinguish if the family member is consanguineal or affinal. Finally, if a body part is used in a predicative sentence, it becomes incorporated in the verb, somewhat like the backformation of the English verbs to babysit, to housekeep, or to bookkeep. These mechanisms are quite relevant in the culture. There are very few people to choose from to be a spouse, so it is vital to know who is not consanguineal. Animacy is also very important because humans are included with animals in the animate class. Intrinsically possessed nouns must be incorporated, otherwise, they appear as detached objects. Being a qualitative study, this article sheds light on an undocumented language in order to help corroborate linguistic theory, propose hypotheses, and further understand world languages. The primary aim of the article is to provide a description of mechanisms of the expression of possession and ownership in Bakairi.