Language loss and language gain in Amazonia

The Amazon Basin is renowned for its high linguistic diversity. The history of Amazonian languages has been marred with language extinction and loss ever since the European conquest. Newly emergent varieties of the national languages – Portuguese and Spanish – bear the substratum influence of the indigenous languages. In many Amazonian languages, the necessity of always marking how the speaker knows things and being precise is linked to the obligatory category of evidentiality – grammatical marking of information source. In numerous varieties of Amazonian and Andean Spanish, a pragmatic convention to state the information source accounts for the evidential overtones of dizque across South America, where it has become an established feature of language varieties transmitted to childre