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Language documentation encompasses translation, typically into the dominant high-resource language in the region where the target language is spoken. To make data accessible to a broader audience, additional translation into other high-resource languages might be needed. Working within a project documenting Kotiria, we explore the extent to which state-of-the-art machine translation (MT) systems can support this second translation – in our case from Portuguese to English. This translation task is challenging for multiple reasons: (1) the data is out-of-domain with respect to the MT system’s training data, (2) much of the data is conversational, (3) existing translations include non-standard and uncommon expressions, often reflecting properties of the documented language, and (4) the data includes borrowings from other regional languages. Despite these challenges, existing MT systems perform at a usable level, though there is still room for improvement. We then conduct a qualitative analysis and suggest ways to improve MT between high-resource languages in a language documentation setting. 

In the wake of widespread and ongoing travel restrictions that began in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many documentary linguists worldwide shifted to remote work methods in order to continue or, in some cases, begin new projects. This pandemic situation has prompted questions about both methodological and ethical considerations in doing remote fieldwork. In this paper, we discuss the pros and cons of working remotely and discuss ways of working remotely based on our experiences working on projects in West Africa, northwest Amazonia, and Indonesia. We argue that elements of remote fieldwork should become a permanent part of linguistic fieldwork, but that such methods need to be considered in the context of decolonizing language documentation and centering the community’s needs and interests. 

This article analyzes the use of several response particles in face-to-face interaction in Wa’ikhana, an East Tukano language of northwestern Amazonia. Adopting a Conversation Analysis approach, we explore details of each particle, considering their prosodic shapes, the action contexts in which they occur, and their sequential positioning, all crucial to understanding their meanings in interaction. Our analysis shows that Wa’ikhana response particles exhibit both universal and language-particular properties, thus demonstrating the contributions of data from lesser-studied languages to research on language in social interaction, and the value of an interactional approach in the study of under-described, and often endangered, indigenous languages. 

This article explores and compares multilingualism in small-scale societies of Western Africa and Lowland South America. All are characterized by complex and extensive multilingual practices and regional exchange systems established before the onset of globalization and its varying impacts. Through overviews of the general historical and organizational features of regions, vignette case studies, and a discussion of transformative processes affecting them, we show that small-scale multilingual societies present challenges to existing theorization of language as well as approaches to language description and documentation. We aim to bring these societies and issues to the fore, promoting discussion among a broader audience. 

East Tukano languages are known for their developed nominal classification systems. Wa’ikhana (Piratapuyo) is in this sense a typical member of the family, since it has an open system with a large number of classes and with class markers which exercise derivational and agreement functions. Among all the Wa’ikhana inanimate classes, the class ‘round’ stands out for its semantic and morphosyntactic features. It is one of the most (if not the most) extensive classes, which includes round objects as well as objects of less prototypical shapes. Its markers in non-plural number have the biggest number of allomorphs, even though allomorphy of classifiers is not typical for this language. Besides, the class ‘round’ has a distinct plural marker, another feature absent from most classifiers. Comparison between Wa’ikhana and other related languages demonstrates that these peculiarities are shared by many East Tukano languages. Thus, the present paper aims to describe the class ‘round’ in Wa’ikhana and other languages of the family, and to show their common features as well as the features that distinguish Wa’ikhana. 

This narrative tells of an episode in the personal life of Tomás Nogueira, a speaker of Wa’ikhana (or Piratapuyo, East Tukano family), a highly endangered and still little described language. The Wa’ikhana people live in northwest Amazonia, in villages in the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Lands (Brazil) and neighboring Departamento de Vaupés (Colombia). Tomás’s tale presents us a good-humored account of a day when his hunting plans went wrong. Besides full interlinear analysis of the narrative, we off er background information about the Wa’ikhana people and a brief typological profi le of the language, highlighting salient grammatical structures that can be observed throughout the narrative.