“Sound Effects in Storytelling: Ideophones in Werikyana and Other Cariban Languages”

Spike Gildea, Linguistics, and 2022–23 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. “Traditional storytellers in the Amazon use ideophones, words that speakers associate with specific actions and emotions, to help bring a story to life. I will analyze a recorded Werikyana (Cariban) story as told by a master story-teller, producing two English and two Portuguese translations to illustrate the importance of ideophones in this genre. Then I will compare Werikyana ideophones with those in related languages to see how many ideophones I can reconstruct to the ancestral language, Proto-Cariban.”