How to commentate a soccer match in Shipibo-Konibo (Pano)?

Abstract

The present paper lists and illustrates eleven strategies that are systematically used by Shipibo-Konibo speakers in order to comment live soccer matches in the context of an indigenous soccer cup informally called “Mundialito Shipibo”. We argue that these lexical, morphosyntactic and discursive strategies can be classified into three types according to their function: iconic strategies, which attempt to present the information more vividly (onomatopoeic forms and ideophones, reduplications, parallel structures and hearsay-quotatives); emotional strategies, which are used by soccer commentators to express their emotions and their feelings (interjections, player-directed speech and diminutives); and proximity strategies, which bring the speech closer to the Shipibo-Konibo audience (lexical Shipibo-Konibo innovations, vocatives, evidential access configurations and code alternations). These various strategies are crucial for understanding the new social dynamics that the Shipibo-Konibo language is getting into as a consequence of becoming an urban language, and are clearly creating a new speech genre. The new social uses that the Shipibo-Konibo people are giving to their language and the features that the language is developing in this new social context are crucial to understand the future of Shipibo-Konibo and other minority languages in Peru.

Keywords

• Amazon region
• Pano family
• Shipibo-Konibo language
• Soccer commentations
• Urban indigenous languages