Patience
EPPS

 Alongside its well-known biological diversity, lowland South America also exhibits an enormous diversity of indigenous languages. Scholars are only now coming to recognize that this diversity goes far beyond the familiar anchors of geographic location and ethnic affiliation, to include a wide range of socioculturally grounded lects and registers, including shamanic and ceremonial speech forms. Today, such language variants tend to be endangered and under-documented; yet the cultural and linguistic dynamics behind their emergence, development, and maintenance over time are key to understanding linguistic diversity more generally, in this region and beyond. This project draws on emerging research to explore these esoteric Amazonian speech forms, with the goals of characterizing the parameters that structure them linguistically and ethnographically within the multilingual Amazonian context, and investigating their relationship to processes of language contact and language change.