Abstract
In this article, we provide the first quantitative account of the frequent use of embedding in Shawi, a Kawapanan language spoken in Peruvian Northwestern Amazonia. We collected a corpus of ninety-two Frog Stories (Mayer 1969) from three different field sites in 2015 and 2016. Using the glossed corpus as our data, we conducted a generalised mixed model analysis, where we predicted the use of embedding with several macrosocial variables, such as gender, age, and education level. We show that bilingualism (Amazonian Spanish-Shawi) and education, mostly restricted by complex gender differences in Shawi communities, play a significant role in the establishment of linguistic preferences in narration. Moreover, we argue that the use of embedding reflects the impact of the mestizo1 society from the nineteenth century until today in Santa Maria de Cahuapanas, reshaping not only Shawi demographics but also linguistic practices. (Post-colonial societies, Amazonian linguistics, Kawapanan, Shawi, embedding, language variation and change, contact linguistics)∗
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 427-451 |
| Journal | Language in Society |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2022 |
| MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Funding
The authors acknowledge the financial and academic support of the Language in Interaction Research Consortium (Netherlands), the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (Australia), and Koneen Säätiö (Finland). We are also grateful for the comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers and for the helpful suggestions provided by the editors Jenny Cheshire, Susan Ehrlich, and Tommaso Milani. All mistakes or misinterpretations remain our own. 1