Zapotec-Chatino is a diverse language family with a 2500-year history involving the earliest writing and State-level social organization in the Western Hemisphere. Currently several Zapotec-Chatino languages have gone extinct only within the last generation and more than half of this family will be lost in the next generation. The work of the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) project "Preserving and Enhancing Access to the Survey of Zapotec and Chatino Languages" supported by the National Science Foundation will ensure that the extensive media and transcription files of the Zapotec and Chatino Survey are permanently preserved, providing free online dissemination that makes them discoverable and accessible for scholarly and educational purposes. Between 2007 and 2010, the Survey documented the languages spoken in 104 towns of Oaxaca, Mexico. In response to the decline of cultural knowledge through loss of these languages, young Zapotec and Chatino speakers applied a linguistic survey and transcribed the results. Without the work of this DEL project, that documentation will remain beyond access for scholars and community members. This project creates a permanent archive of the numerous Zapotec-Chatino varieties, compiling the largest born-digital dataset of a Native American language family. The Zapotec and Chatino Survey corpus includes over 300,000 recorded and transcribed utterances containing thousands of vocabulary items and hundreds of grammatical patterns. The corpus is applicable to researching multiple levels of linguistic structure with potential for comparative linguistic study, through which we can gain insights into human cognition and into languages and cultures of ancient America. The project will contribute to the professionalization of a young scholar by hosting a postdoctoral position and involve undergraduate students in research. The project will produce materials that can be used for language maintenance efforts in Zapotec-Chatino communities and can be applied in classrooms in the U.S. to broaden American understandings language endangerment.
