This project will produce a grammar of Tataltepec de Valdés Chatino, a language of Oaxaca, Mexico belonging to the widespread Otomanguean language stock. Tataltepec Chatino is an independent branch among the Chatino languages and as such informs the reconstruction of a proto-Chatino parent language, which in turn will offer insight into the reconstruction of the more remote common ancestor languages, proto-Zapotecan and proto-Otomanguean. A reference grammar of Tataltepec Chatino is highly urgent since the language is now spoken by fewer than two thousand people, mostly over 30 years old, all in the village of Tataltepec de Valdés. The project researches several less commonly-observed traits in its syntax, phonology and phonetics, among them, its word order which is verb-subject-object and its rich system of lexical tone and unusually intricate rules for the interaction of tones. It also will allow for the recording of Tataltepec Chatino speech and Tataltepec linguistic customs which will be a valuable resource for the speakers of the language and their descendents.
The production of this grammar is part of a larger effort at the University of Texas to document and describe the Chatino languages of Oaxaca in a way that places a strong emphasis on speaker training in linguistics, Chatino language literacy, and related areas. To this end, the researcher will continue work with an established team of speaker trainees and also seek out new trainees. Recordings of the language in use, along with transcriptions, translations, and analyses, will be archived in a digital archive, where they will be available to future researchers and community members.
The project supported by the award titled Doctoral Dissertation Research (DEL): Research on Tataltepec de Valdés Chatino (cta) funded the co-PI’s linguistic field research on Tataltepec de Valdés Chatino, an Otomanguean language known locally as Chá’knyá. The co-PI’s research had as its primary goal the production of a reference grammar of Tataltepec de Valdés Chatino, which will serve as his Ph.D. thesis. This project is part of a larger effort at the University of Texas to document the Chatino languages of Oaxaca. The reference grammar, which will describe the sound systems, word formation processes, and syntactic rules of the language, is an urgent project since the language is today spoken by fewer than 500 persons (almost none children) in one community, and as such is highly endangered. Tataltepec Chatino specifically merits study as it forms an independent branch of the Chatino family. It will therefore inform research to reconstruct Proto-Chatino and more remote ancestor languages. It also features a complex system of lexical tone, in two senses: every word shows up with one of nine distinct tonal patterns, and these patterns undergo automatic changes depending on the pattern of the preceding word. Another goal of this research is to build a corpus of translated Tataltepec Chatino discourse which will be archived in a digital archive to be made available to both members of the Tataltepec and community and the larger academic community as well. This corpus of translated and annotated discourse contains personal recollections, conversations and narratives, and was produced by the co-PI working closely with Tataltepec Chatino speaker-trainees who the co-PI trained to perform basic linguistic analysis of their native Chatino. The corpus of spoken Chatino now contains more than 28 hours of speech (about 11.5 recorded during the duration of this grant), 21 of which have been transcribed and translated into Spanish and await organization and accessioning to an online archive. In addition to the corpus which will be made available to the community, speakers were given CD recordings of their contributions to the speech corpus, and trilingual word lists (Chatino-Spanish-English) were distributed within the community. The co-PI has given presentations on Tataltepec Chatino’s tonal phonology (Sullivant 2012a, 2013) and demonstratives (Cruz and Sullivant 2012), as well as presentations on a typologically rare numeral classifer system (Sullivant 2012b) and a presentation on the influence of migrants’ exposure to English on the language ideology of the Chatinos of Tataltepec de Valdés and San Marcos Zacatepec (Villard and Sullivant 2013). While investigating the origins of Tataltepec Chatino’s numeral classifier, the co-PI found its source in the nearby but distantly related Mixtec languages, and presented a poster on the topic (Sullivant 2012c). To distribute these works, many are available for download (along with other writings about the Chatino languages) at https://sites.google.com/site/lenguachatino/recursos-academicos as well as at the co-PI’s Academia.edu page (http://utexas.academia.edu/JohnSullivant). References Cruz, E. and J.R. Sullivant. 2012. Demostrativos próximos y distales: Un estudio comparativo del uso de demostrativos en el chatino de Quiahije y Tataltepec. Coloquio de Lenguas Otomangues y Vecinas-V. Oaxaca, OAX. Sullivant. J. R. 2012a. La mora y el tono en el chatino de Tataltepec de Valdés. Coloquio de Lenguas Otomangues y Vecinas-V. Oaxaca, OAX. ----. 2012b. Tya?à: el clasificador numérico del chatino de Tataltepec de Valdés. Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America, Austin, TX. ----. 2012c. From 'companion' to numeral classifier in Mixtec. Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Portland, OR. ----. 2013. The Tone of Tataltepec Chatino. Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Boston, MA. Villard, S. and J.R. Sullivant. 2013. ¿Por qué no das clases de inglés? Obstacles to language revitalization in two Chatino communities. Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Boston, MA
