Standard interview techniques often cannot record the full range of grammatical devices used in a language. While monologues and linguistic interviews are essential to documenting a language, they fail to capture nuances of face-to-face interactions, particularly between people of different social statuses. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Jule Gomez de Garcia (California State University, San Marcos) will direct a team of linguists who will work in collaboration with Ixil Maya speakers to produce a new and uniquely complete reference grammar of the Nebaj dialect of the language, based on a corpus of spontaneous Ixil conversations and narratives. The grammar will present a thorough description of the language as used in a range of discourse contexts including meetings, male-female interactions, oral histories, and storytelling. The Ixil speakers will participate in all stages of the documentation process, gaining skills in audio and video recording, transcription, data processing, and construction of the web-based dictionary and text databases from which the team will derive the grammar.
The grammar will provide a much-needed reference for academic researchers of Mayan languages. The materials also will serve the community of speakers who will use it to develop materials to enhance adult and child literacy projects. The project will afford Ixil speakers the opportunity to share in the documentation and preservation of their language, and, at the same time, to present and preserve their stories of survival in the aftermath of the Guatemalan Civil War. The intimacy of detail they have been willing to share will make this documentation a unique historical record of the endurance of a modern-day Mayan population. Thus the research will benefit both scholars and the wider public, by giving them an opportunity to better understand contemporary Ixil Maya society and, by extension, other peoples in similar situations throughout the hemisphere.
Grammar of the Nebaj dialect of the Ixil Maya language (SIL code IXI) The trilingual reference grammar of the Nebaj dialect of Ixhil Mayan[1] is currently in the final editing stages. The Ixhil-Spanish-English grammar is based on elicited and spontaneous narratives, oral histories, spontaneously occurring conversations, transcripts of meetings, and other genres of spoken Ixhil collected from male and female native speakers in Nebaj, El Quiché, Guatemala. Seventy Ixhil speakers, members of the Grupo de Mujeres y Hombres por la Paz, who range in age from 18 to 70+, participated in all stages of the grammar production, from data collection, through analysis, to grammatical descriptions. During the course of the project, the Grupo members acquired skills in audio and video recording, transcription, data processing, and grammatical analysis. From their narratives on cultural and agricultural practices, members of the Grupo created and self-published ten trilingual booklets for their children: U xan – Adobe Chem – Tejido – Weaving B'oxb'o'l – Corn dough, huiskil leaf soup Q'ya'n – Abono – Compost U ta'l va ni b'anax ti' u aval – Comida en la siembra – Food for planting season U ava txikon – Siembra de frijol – Planting beans U ava ko'm: 1 – Siembra de milpa: 1 – Planting the milpa: 1 U ava ko'm: 2 – Siembra de milpa: 2 – Planting the milpa: 2 U pitx'oj – Tapisca – Harvest K'uaay – Troja – Corn crib In addition to the booklets, 450 audio, video and text files of primary data resulting from the grammar project have been added to the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Requests for viewing the archives can be made through AILLA: www.ailla.utexas.org/site/welcome_sp.html/ In order to continue their successful working relationship, the Ixhil participants and the academic team members have formed the Colectivo de Investigación Ixhil and continue to research and document historical, linguistic, and cultural topics in the Nebaj area with other academic entities and other members of the Ixhil community. The following is a representative sample of academic presentations and publications that have resulted from the data collection and analysis conducted for this project: Axelrod, M. 2011. "Language ideologies and communities of practice in language revitalization." Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Claremont University, Claremont, CA. García, M.L. under review. "The Long Count of Ixhil Historical Memory in Guatemala’s Post-War Period". American Ethnologist. García, M.L. Under review. "Ixhil Irrealis and the Particle ‘Koj’". International Journal of American Linguistics. García, M.L., Gómez de García, J., Axelrod, M., & Hughes, M. 2013. "Imperative and Irrealis in Ixhil Maya Sacred Speech". Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL), Santa Barbara, CA. García, M.L., Gómez de García, J., & Axelrod, M. 2012. "Analysis of Syllable Nuclei in Ixhil Maya". Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL), Santa Barbara, CA. García, M.L. & Guzaro Raymundo, M. 2009. Bajo la Sombra de la Santa Montaña: la historia de la CPR de la Sierra. (In the Shadow of the Sacred Mountain: the history of the Communities of Population in Resistance of the Sierra.) Guatemala: ASOMOVIDINQ. García, M.L., Axelrod, M., & Gómez de García, J. 2009. "The Chicken Has Its Tail in the Grass: Spatial Relationships in Ixhil Maya Identical Arrangements". Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL), Santa Barbara, CA. Gómez de García, J., García, M.L., Axelrod, M., & Hughes, M. 2010. "The Ixhil Maya Community-Based Grammar Project". 2nd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC), Honolulu, HI. Gómez de García, J., Hughes, M., Axelrod, M., & García, M.L. 2010. "How We Will Write Our Grammar: Ixhil Maya Speakers Decide What Their Book is About". Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL), Santa Barbara, CA. Hughes, M. & Gómez de García, J. 2010. "Grassroots Grammar". California State University Statewide Conference on Community-Based Research. (Winner of Chancellor’s Blue Ribbon Award for Community-based Research.) Los Angeles, California. March, 2010. [1] We use the spelling "Ixhil" rather than the more commonly used spelling "Ixil" in order to better represent the pronunciation of the name of the language and to conform with the orthographic conventions used in the Ixhil region. In the orthographic system of Ixhil, "xh" represents the "sh" sound that occurs in the name "Ixhil" while "x" represents a different sound in the language. The word "Ixhil" is not used in discourse in and about the Ixhil language and the origins of the term are not known.
