About

My name is Eduardo Rivail Ribeiro. I’m a Brazilian linguist interested in the documentation of indigenous South American languages (particularly those of the Macro-Jê stock), as well as the dialectology of (Brazilian) Portuguese. I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago’s Department of Linguistics and currently live in Baltimore, Maryland, with my wife and kids. Kawina is my Karajá name, given to me by a friend from the Southern Karajá village of Krehãwa (Araguaia River, Central Brazil).

Besides being interested in all things Karajá (the Macro-Jê language which is the topic of both my MA thesis and my PhD dissertation), I’m mainly interested in historical linguistics and morphology (and, better yet, a combination of both). I’m currently working on:

  • my (rather overdue) PhD dissertation, “A Grammar of Karajá”, which I shall have defended by the end of the current year;
  • a reconstruction of Proto-Jê, which will soon be submitted for publication;
  • a number of short papers on specific comparative topics (a comparison among the poorly-documented Macro-Jê languages of the Brazilian northeast, an investigation into the diachronic origins of a pattern of replacive morphology in Karajá, the description of some unsuspected caveats of long-range genetic comparison, etc.);
  • an investigation, with Walkíria Neiva Praça (an expert on Tapirapé), into past and ongoing language contact in the Araguaia region (Central Brazil).

I have recently finished a paper, with Hein van der Voort (an expert on Rondonian languages), in which we propose the inclusion of the Jabuti family into the Macro-Jê stock. Although this claim is not completely original (we follow in the footsteps of the great ethnographer Curt Nimuendaju), it is a potentially controversial one. The paper will soon appear on IJAL.

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In 2006, J. Pedro Viegas Barros and I organized a symposium for the 52nd International Congress of Americanists, "Advances in Native South American Historical Linguistics" (Seville, Spain). The program (including abstracts) is available here.


Web projects

I'm one of the moderators of Etnolinguistica.Org, a discussion list and online repository of information on Native South American languages, and have recently launched a collaborative, interdisciplinary project to create an online Macro-Jê bibliography.

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I also manage the Curt Nimuendaju Digital Library, an online collection of hard-to-find books and articles on South American languages. Here are some of our most recent additions:

Este site é melhor visualizado com senso crítico. © 2009-2010 Eduardo R. Ribeiro