Congratulations to Sunny on receiving the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship!
The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to support the vitality and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce in the United States. The fellowship is awarded to prospective and current graduate students who have demonstrated their potential for significant achievements in science and engineering research. Read more about the Program here.
Sunny's Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP) will go toward funding their research with Panãra people in the Southern Amazon Basin, on their language, Panãra (Jê, Glottocode: pana1307). Their area of focus is applying sociolinguistic principles and methods to language documentation and description contexts. After first contact in the 1970s, the population fell from approximately 700 to 60 due to disease exposure, and Panãra people were moved to the Xingú Indigenous Park. In the 1990s, the Panãra reclaimed part of their original land and have since built 7 new villages. Today, the Panãra number ~700, and there are clear generational divides that can be mapped onto the major events in their recent past, directly coinciding with distinctions in speech groups: the elders, who experienced first contact with Brazilian society speak swankjara pëë (“the language of the ancestors”); the middle-aged cohort who grew up in the Xingú speak pëëntwê (“new language”); and the young adults who grew up in the Panãra Indigenous Land speak pjôntwara pëë (“youngsters’ language”).
Sunny's research investigates the ways in which the different dialects of swankjara pëë have levelled into pëëntwê, and how the social networks in which people operate have given way to pjôntwara pëë. With this fellowship, more effort can be put into processing materials Panãra people have made with the UW Panãra research team to document their language practices.