This is a grammar of Tariana, a member of the Arawak family – the largest language family of Central and South America. Tariana was once a dialect continuum spoken by over 1500 people in various settlements along the Vaupés river and its tributaries. The subgroups of Tariana used to constitute a strict hierarchy, and each would speak a different dialect. The difference between individual dialects is comparable to that between Romance languages. As the Catholic missions and white influence expanded, the groups highest up in the hierarchy abandoned Tariana. As the result, the language is actively spoken by only about 100 people, mostly adults, representatives of the lowest-ranking group Wamiarikune, and is severely endangered. I started assembling data on the language in 1991 and have since worked with most speakers of this dialect of Tariana. As by-products of this work, we produced a bilingual Tariana-Portuguese dictionary, several collections of texts and a practical grammar, and launched a program for teaching Tariana in secondary school. The dedication of the consultants, their insights and their patience made it possible to carry out this daunting task.

This grammar contains an analysis of the Tariana language, starting from a brief characterisation of language and its speakers, then going on to phonology, morphology, syntax, discourse organisation and semantics. The analysis is cast in terms of a cumulative typological framework of linguistic analysis – which employs ‘the fundamental theoretical concepts that underlie all work in language description and change’ (Dixon 1997: 128) and in terms of which significant typological generalisations are postulated; this has come to be called basic linguistic theory.