Willem Adelaar, born in The Hague, the Netherlands, in 1948. Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam. Professor of Native American Languages and Cultures at Leiden University
(1 September 1999 – 31 January 2000)
During my year at NIAS I was able to prepare several grammatical sketches of Andean Amerindian languages, which will be included in the book Languages of the Andes (by W.F.H. Adelaar and P.C. Muysken) to appear in the series Cambridge Language Surveys of Cambridge University Press. The languages treated so far were Quechua, Aymara, Jaqaru, Mochica and Mapuche. Apart from the chapter on Colombia, which will be written in the coming months, the manuscript is now nearing completion and, hopefully, it will be presented to the editor before the end of 2000.
In February 2000 I attended the Colloquium Language Endangerment, Research and Documentation. Setting Priorities for the 21st Century, organised by Dr Matthias Brenzinger at the Karl-Arnold-Akademie in Bad Godesberg. At the Colloquium I presented a paper on the endangered situation of Amerindian languages in Highland South America. This paper will be published in the Proceedings of the Colloquium, as part of an ongoing programme aiming at the documentation of the endangered situation of Amerindian languages in Latin America.
During the NIAS year I also continued research on the genetic relations of languages in the western Amazon. An article proving that the Harakmbut family (in Peru) and the Katukina family (in Brazil) have a common origin will be published in Lima.