Patience Epps
Research Interests: Indigenous Amazonian languages, linguistic typology, language contact and language change, verbal art, & South American Indigenous histories
Esoteric speech forms in Amazonia: new perspectives on linguistic diversity
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.
Patience Epps is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she co-directs the Archive for Indigenous Languages of Latin America and heads the Center for Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Her research focuses on Indigenous languages of Amazonia, and engages with linguistic description and documentation, historical linguistics and language contact, linguistic typology, and the study of verbal art. Since 2001, she has been engaged in fieldwork with languages of the Naduhup family (Hup, Dâw, and Nadëb) in the context of the multilingual Upper Rio Negro region of northwest Brazil. She is also interested in broader-scale explorations of language contact and change across Amazonia, and in investigating how these effects inform our understanding of the dynamics of linguistic diversity in South America and beyond. Publications include the monograph A Grammar of Hup (2008) and the Handbook of Amazonian Languages (co-edited with Lev Michael; 2023 and forthcoming).