Seminar Series: Abstract

18.00
February 17 2009
APCD Lecture Theatre, Hedley Bull 
Building, ANU

Linguistics and Language Activism in Southern Mexico: 
The Chatino Language Documentation Project
Prof. Tony Woodbury (U. Texas, Austin)

Chatino is a cluster of languages belonging to the Zapotecan subgroup 
of the sprawling and diverse Otomangean language family. It is spoken 
by about 40,000 people in a compact, ruggedly mountainous region of the 
southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The Chatino Language Documentation 
Project is an ongoing project to document those languages. The work 
began in 2003, when Emiliana Cruz, a speaker of San Juan Quiahije 
Chatino, and later her sister Hilaria Cruz, entered graduate school at 
the University of Texas and began analyzing their language in 
collaboration with me, an interested linguist who had thitherto 
specialized in languages of the American arctic. The work grew, first as 
the basis for Chatino literacy training which we offered during summers 
in San Juan Quiahije, and later as a training and research effort in a 
string of new Chatino communities. The project is now committed to 
producing audio- and video documentation of the use of Chatino in a 
range of social contexts in each community; to the analysis of the 
various Chatino languages; teaching literacy in each variety; and 
supporting efforts to maintain and honor Chatino, particularly in 
communities where it is under threat of replacement by Spanish. In the 
course of this growth, the project has added a range of participants, 
from new Chatino and non-Chatino linguistics graduate students, to local 
preceptors and collaborators of all ages, to volunteers.

 The project is a novel one in an academic context. Rather than following 
a strictly academic agenda, it makes an activity, the documentation of 
Chatino, a meeting ground for a diverse group of actors with a wide 
range of ultimate goals, from language preservation and support, to the 
scientific study of human linguistic diversity, to the study of 
indigenous Mesoamerican history, verbal art, and life ways. It operates 
with a focus on training, leveraging the enthusiasm of participants. Its 
products, which have emerged both by design and by accident, have 
included training courses, literacy materials, audio- and 
video-archives, analyses of a highly unusual tonal systems involving 
over ten contrastive tones, historical studies of Chatino 
diversification, and the identification of ancient Mesoamerican 
traditions of poetic parallelism in village political oratory as well as 
everyday speech.