Toward an interactional approach to multilingualism: Ideologies and practices in the northwest Amazon

Abstract

This study examines language ideologies and communicative practices in the multilingual Vaupés region of northwestern Amazonia. Following a comparative overview of the Vaupés as a ‘small-scale’ language ecology, it discusses claims from existing ethnographic work on the region in light of data from a corpus of video-recordings of sociolinguistic interviews and spontaneous everyday conversations. It shows how a practice-based and interdisciplinary approach combining language documentation methodology and ethnographic, structural linguistic, and interactional perspectives can contribute to understanding of macro and micro aspects of multilingualism, thus contributing to future work on the Vaupés, typologies of small-scale multilingual ecologies, and language contact research.