Why this project?
Our principal goal is to address linguistic questions regarding the histories of contact and population movement in the Southern Cone. To this end, careful analysis of the extant textual record for the area –spread across multiple archives, periods, regional varieties and genres (songs, dialogues, wordlists, Bible translations, etc.)– will be essential. The project will harness digital technologies in order to compile a comprehensive, public-facing textual database for some 16 core Southern Cone languages and another 14 languages of the northern periphery of the Southern Cone (the Gran Chaco cultural-linguistic area). Digitising and linguistically analysing the archival texts under a standardised encoding system, will allow us to focus on broader-picture linguistic comparisons across:
![[Our Earth and its Story: a popular treatise on physical geography. Edited by R. Brown. With ... coloured plates and maps, etc.]](https://chico-sc.ppls.ed.ac.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/TdF.jpg "[Our Earth and its Story: a popular treatise on physical geography. Edited by R. Brown. With ... coloured plates and maps, etc.]")
This fundamental work will lead us to:
Beyond these broader comparative goals, the project will provide key descriptions for 30 individual target languages, many of which have very limited such work available.
Finally, the widest ranging objective of the project will be to contribute a linguistically-informed, data-rich evaluation of the question of proposed long-term isolation of Southern-Cone populations.
Given the ethnic, territorial and socio-economic marginalisation of the indigenous groups associated to the target languages, and the threat that most of these are under, a key goal of the project is to involve community members and speakers in data retrieval and analysis, taking a decolonial approach. This will entail engaging with their own language maintenance practices, interviewing and recording them as collaborators, in order to include their perspectives on these heritage materials, and, where possible, inviting them to develop partnerships or collaborations.
While the data we will work with is not formally proprietary, it represents cultural heritage that has been – through various forms of colonial violence – denied to the languages' traditional communities. With this in mind, the corpus will have an open-access, lay interface allowing the general public (including indigenous groups) easy access to digital and printable versions of heritage texts, as well as sample recordings and contextualised lay histories of the languages, peoples and texts.