From Collectionism to ‘Collaboration’: Researchers and Speakers of Indigenous Languages in Argentinean Linguistics

Abstract

We can recognize three moments between the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 21^st century in which the link between researchers and Indigenous speakers has taken different forms, according to the theoretical frameworks applied and the disciplinary spaces from which research is carried out. In this work we propose to analyze three models: the ‘collector’, the ‘rescue’ and the ‘collaborative’ models. They correspond to three main types of collaborators throughout the period: the ‘anonymized speakers’, whose function was to provide some lexical terms and general information about languages; ‘identified speakers’, who played a key role in the linguistic descriptions; and ‘involved speakers’, members of the communities that develop or actively accompany instances of linguistic research and revitalization.