Dec 07, 2023
From Texas to the Peruvian Amazon, a UT Researcher Preserves a Dying Language
byMichael Nolan
Nestled deep in the Amazon basin, a makeshift house sits alongside a rustic nut storage facility. Two of the occupants of this house in Peru’s remote Madre de Dios District might be the last chance of survival for the endangered language Iñapari.
Meanwhile, over 3,000 miles away, a doctoral student is huddled over his laptop at the University of Texas at Austin. Barrett Hamp, a UT doctoral student in linguistics, has dedicated his research since 2019 to recording the indigenous language in Peru to prevent it from disappearing. “Once a language is gone, it’s gone. There’s no reviving it,” Hamp said.