Sidney
Facundes & Ana Paula B. Brandão
Universidade Federal do
Pará, Brazil
The
work presents a panoramic view of the research on Arawak languages, focusing on the current results, problems
and prospects for the future. Arawak languages spread
over 12 countries, from Central
America
do South
America.
Although postulated since 1782, proposals for Arawak
constituting languages have varied considerably, including from 67 up to 154
languages. Only in the early nineties comparative studies grounded on the
historical comparative method and with representative data of various languages
have been undertaken. Factors underlying the slow development of such studies
vary and may be intrinsic or extrinsic to the specifities of the family. The current state of knowledge of
Arawak languages, however, allows for more advanced
and conclusive results to be obtained if the historical comparative method is
applied today to data made available from recent language descriptions.
Furthermore, it will be shown that a combination of the results acquired through
historical comparative method plus the methods of contact linguistics and paleolinguistics are a productive way to improve our
knowledge of this language family. |