Isthmus Zapotec (ZAI) is a Zapotecan language of the Otomanguean stock spoken by approximately 80,000 people in and around Juchitán de Zaragoza, in southern Oaxaca, Mexico. Although the percentage of residents of Juchitán older than 50 who speak ZAI is quite high (more than 80%), the percentage of children who are growing up speaking the language is much lower, hovering around 50%. Thus, while stable Spanish-ZAI bilingualism has been the norm for several centuries, the language shift from ZAI to Spanish is now occurring very quickly (as is common in the majority of indigenous communities throughout Mexico). Given that the long-term viability of the language is uncertain, it is important to document spontaneous language use in a variety of natural contexts.
The main objective of this project is to document information structure in the language by recording, transcribing, annotating, and analyzing spoken texts from spontaneous life narratives. In addition, native speaker judgments of constructed examples will be elicited. Information structure is understood as the study of the ways that the different components of sentences -- intonation, morphology, and syntax -- are organized by speakers in order to communicate certain kinds of information. Although the available linguistic documentation on ZAI is greater than that of most other Mexican indigenous languages, particularly those outside of the Mayan language family, no documentation of information structure or discourse phenomena exists for this language. The documentary corpus to be obtained will thus allow for a more complete understanding of the range of constructions that are available to IZ speakers and how they are employed to respond to specific discourse motivations. These materials promise to bring novel data to Mesoamerican linguistics and will provide new grounds from which to evaluate and inform theoretical work on information structure and narrative.
Proper linguistic documentation and, in particular, the documentation of discourse can be an important tool in forging effective language maintenance efforts in the ZAI community. The recordings and transcriptions will be made available to the community, thereby contributing to ZAI language teaching and learning. The documentation of ZAI oral genres could have an especially positive effect, since local schools lack materials derived from their own oral traditions and/or from naturally-occurring speech.
This project is concerned with the linguistic documentation, description and analysis of naturally-occurring discourse in Isthmus Zapotec [ZAI], a Zapotecan language spoken by approximately 80,000 people in Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, Mexico which is under threat given a rapid shift to Spanish. Over the course of twelve months in Juchitán, the co-PI recorded, transcribed, annotated, and analyzed spoken texts from spontaneous conversation and collected elicited native speaker judgments of constructed examples, something not represented currently in any archives of the language. As a tonal and verb-initial language, the close study of ZAI offers a unique opportunity to explore the possible combinations of tone, intonation and verb-initial syntax that may occur in the coding of information structure. The study of discourse and information structure is scarce in tonal and verb-initial languages and extremely lacking for the great majority of Mesoamerican languages including those in the Otomanguean stock. For ZAI in particular, no studies on discourse have yet been published. With this in mind, the documentary corpus obtained will allow for a more complete understanding of the range of constructions that are available to ZAI speakers and how they are employed to respond to specific discourse motivations. These materials promise to bring novel data to Mesoamerican linguistics and will provide new grounds from which to evaluate and inform theoretical work on information structure and narrative. Preliminary analyses of the data collected have been presented at the Society for Functional Linguistics conference in April 2012 and at Information Structure in Spoken Language Corpora in June 2013. Additional work will be presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas in January 2014. The corpus will be archived at the Endangered Language Archive Repository (ELAR) at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the Whatcom Museum, and at the Archive for the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AILLA) at the University of Texas, Austin. While potentially valuable to the work of other linguists, making the recordings and transcriptions available to the community for educational purposes will also contribute to ZAI language teaching and learning by providing important material for stimulating writing and reading in the language. In this, the documentation of ZAI oral genres could have an especially positive effect since local schools lack materials deriving from their own oral traditions and/or from naturally-occurring speech. In addition to audio-visual material recorded in conversational, monologic, and elicitation settings, the corpus contains approximately 10 hours of audio-visual recordings of ZAI language instruction. This type of linguistic documentation can be an effective tool in forging future language maintenance efforts in the ZAI community as it continues its efforts to revitalize and promote interest in the language. Finally, this project was also able to assist in the publication of written materials-- stories, anecdotes, and poems-- in ZAI (along with their translation to Spanish) collected by a local public bilingual elementary school. This was completed in January 2013 in the form of a small book which was distributed to the teachers of the school for use in the classroom.
