The Lower Oyapock
Discover the 2025 awarded project "The Lower Oyapock: Language Practices and Mobility Dynamics in a Cross-Border Region (French Guiana, Brazil)", supported by the Louis Dumont Fund for Research in Social Anthropology.
Located along the border between French Guiana and Brazil, the Lower Oyapock region is marked by remarkable linguistic diversity, including French, Portuguese, Guianese Creole, Brazilian Creole (Patoá), Palikur, Wayampi, Emerillon, and Saramaka. This plurality gives rise to hybrid language practices, closely linked to the social spaces in which they unfold.
In this context, the Cité Scolaire of Saint-Georges de l’Oyapock — inaugurated in September 2023 — offers a unique site of investigation. As the first secondary education institution established on the French bank of the Oyapock River, it constitutes a major educational infrastructure that contrasts with the situation on the Brazilian side and encourages new cross-border mobilities.
This research project aims to analyse how students at the Cité Scolaire navigate between these linguistic and cultural spaces, focusing on the interplay between their language practices and their everyday mobility. The study is based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork combining participant observation and semi-structured interviews, to better understand how identities and senses of belonging are constructed within this multilingual borderland.
Pietro Mariano Nascimento Raymundo
Pietro Nascimento is a master's student in Anthropology at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), under the supervision of Olivier Allard. He holds a double bachelor's degree in Philosophy and in Language, Literature, and Civilizations from the Federal University of São Paulo and the University of Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is interested in language dynamics in multilingual contexts and cross-border circulations in the Amazon, particularly in the Lower Oyapock region, at the border between French Guiana and Brazil.
