Elena Mihas, Department of English

Ashéninka Perené [prq] is a poorly documented Amazonian Arawak language spoken in the Perené River valley in Chanchamayo and Perené Districts of Junin Province, Peru. The language is highly endangered due to the evident language transmission break. In the long-standing situation of intense language contact, older generations continue to speak the mother tongue while younger people in their 20s and 30s have only a passive knowledge of the ancestral language; children are essentially monolingual in Spanish, the language of wider communication. In the context of the language decline, the first step is to document the endangered indigenous language and revitalize its usage through native literacy. Importantly, the speakers have expressed a great deal of interest in the production and dissemination of reading materials in the language. The difficulty is that the language does not have its own writing system. Thus, the task of establishing native orthography has come to the forefront of my language documentation project. This study addresses the following questions: (1) What are the general principles of orthography development? (2) What is the phonological system of Ashéninka Perené? (3) Are there any existing orthographies of Ashéninka Perené? (4) What are the optimal decisions for the Ashéninka Perené orthography?