This work contains a comprehensive description of Kwaza, which is an endangered and unclassified indigenous language of Southern Rondonia, Brazil. The Kwaza language, also known in the literature as Koaia, is spoken by around 25 people today. Until recently, our knowledge of Kwaza was based on only three short word lists, from 1938, 1943 and 1984. Like the language, the culture and the history of its speakers are undocumented. The Kwaza people as an ethnic group have been decimated by increasing ecological, physical, social and cultural pressure from Western civilisation since contact in the past century. This is the situation for many indigenous peoples of Rondonia and of the Amazon region in general. Linguists expect that the majority of these peoples will cease to exist as distinct language communities during the coming decades. The present work is intended as a contribution to the documentation and preservation of the languages of the Amazon basin. In this respect, Kwaza has represents an especially urgent case in view of its undetermined classification, the lack of documentation and its endangered status. This work is based on the authors personal fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 2002, and it consists of three parts. Part I contains a thorough description of the phonology and morphosyntax of the language and a concise overview of its social, cultural and historical context. Part II contains a diverse selection of transcribed and translated texts with interlinear morphological analyses. Part III is a dictionary of Kwaza, including many examples and an English-Kwaza register. This complete description is of interest to linguists in general, scholars of South American languages in particular, and anthropologists and historians interested in the Guapore region.

This is an edition of the first dictionary of a Creole language, compiled in 1767/8, together with a more or less contemporaneous vocabulary of that same language, the Negerhollands spoken on the Virgin Islands, under Danish rule at that period. There are more than 3400 entries, varying greatly in nature and length and ranging from a simple translation of the respective German lemma to extended articles containing examples of phraseology and syntax and also providing metalinguistic commentaries. The dictionary is a major document of the early stages of a Creole language. The same is true to a lesser extent of the vocabulary, which displays obvious Danish influences. Over and above this, the dictionary is also of outstanding value as a testimony of early 18th century lexicography in the German-speaking area.

Negerhollands is the original creole language, lexically closely related to Dutch, of the Virgin Islands. It emerged as a separate language around 1700 and died out completely only a few years ago, having gradually been replaced by English in the course of the nineteenth century. Apart from giving information about the history and the features of this language, this book is an attempt to document the various phases of Negerhollands and make texts accessible to a wider public.