The goal of this paper is to illustrate the kind of very complex sociolinguistic field situations we sometimes naïve and unprepared linguists can be confronted with, complex in their variety of multilingualism and language contact patterns, and complex in their being cast in specific language ideologies. The paper considers the origins, the accomplishments and the limitations of a language revitalization and salvage linguistics project in Nicaragua for what was considered a practically moribund ancestral language: Rama, known locally as “the Tiger language”. It situates the project in its Sandinista revolutionary time and its multilingual context, and it raises the question of why no attention was paid at the time to the local variety of creole known as “Rama Cay Creole”, the language actually used by the Rama people, who asked for the revitalization of their ancestor language. It muses about how the ideology of the time prevented working with the variety of language that could have served much more efficiently as a marker of identity than the ancestral language and how ideologies can evolve, since the same Rama Cay Creole is now becoming a legitimate object of study, although most likely too late for that community because it, in turn...

Language Documentation and Description, Vol. 3 (2005)