About

My name is Eduardo Rivail Ribeiro. I’m a Brazilian linguist working on the documentation of indigenous South American languages (particularly those of the Macro-Jê stock), as well as the dialectology of (Brazilian) Portuguese. I recently obtained a PhD at the University of Chicago’s Department of Linguistics and currently live in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, where I work as a linguistics visiting professor at the Federal University of Pará.

I'm also currently working on the documentation and description of two endangered Amazonian languages, Aikanã and Kwazá (Rondônia, Brazil), in a project coordinated by Hein van der Voort, under a DoBeS post-doc grant from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. I remain interested in all things Karajá (the Macro-Jê language which is the topic of both my MA thesis and my PhD dissertation) and in historical linguistics and morphology (and, better yet, a combination of both).

Under construction

I’m currently readying my reconstruction of Proto-Jê for publication and working on two collaborative projects: an investigation, with Walkíria Neiva Praça (an expert on Tapirapé), into past and ongoing language contact in the Araguaia region (Central Brazil), and a study, with archaeologists Jonas Gregorio de Souza and Henrique Valadares, on the diffusion of Arawak cultural elements in eastern Brazil.

Web projects

logo.jpg

I'm one of the moderators of Etnolinguistica.Org, a discussion list and online repository of information on Native South American languages. I also manage the Curt Nimuendaju Digital Library, an online collection of hard-to-find books and articles on South American languages, and a collaborative, interdisciplinary project to create an online Macro-Jê bibliography.

Page tags


"O senhor saiba: eu toda a minha vida pensei por mim, forro, sou nascido diferente. Eu sou é eu mesmo. Diverjo de todo o mundo… Eu quase que nada não sei. Mas desconfio de muita coisa."

(Riobaldo Tatarana, em Grande Sertão: Veredas, de Guimarães Rosa)

Este site é melhor visualizado com senso crítico. © 2009-2011 Eduardo R. Ribeiro