María Alejandra Regúnaga is Full Professor at the University of La Pampa, and Associate Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina.
Duration
5 months, 7 January to 7 June 2027
Host at the University of Passau
Prof. Dr. Johann-Mattis List
(Lehrstuhl für Multilinguale Computerlinguistik)
The research I propose focuses on three Indigenous languages from the southernmost tip of South America: Yahgan, Selk'nam, and Haush, which were spoken on the island of Tierra del Fuego and the Fuegian archipelago (Argentina/Chile). All of of these languages have ceased to be the everyday means of communication of their communities (Yahgan and Selk'nam since around the mid-20th century, and Haush since the late 19th century). Consequently, the only resources available to increase our knowledge of these languages, both quantitatively and qualitatively, are legacy materials, in particular a collection of manuscripts discovered in recent years in Argentine and German archives. My proposal aims to digitalise these unpublished manuscripts (dating from 1865 to 1974) and process them using specific digital tools – developed by Prof. Dr. Johann-Mattis List and his team at the Chair for Multilingual Computational Linguistics – in order to organise and systematise the data available for each language. This work will not only safeguard the information on the under-researched South American Indigenous languages contained in these manuscripts, but will also make the Yahgan Selk'nam and Haush linguistic datasets available for (re)use in descriptive or comparative studies.
