With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Carolyn J. MacKay and Frank R. Trechsel will conduct three years of linguistic research on Pisaflores Tepehua, an undocumented and endangered Totonacan language spoken in and around Pisaflores, Veracruz, in Mexico. Fieldwork will emphasize recording and analyzing grammatical, lexical, and text material. The PIs will work with native speakers to produce a grammatical description of Pisaflores Tepehua, a trilingual Tepehua/Spanish/English lexicon, and a collection of personal histories, narratives, conversations, and other discourse genres recorded in digital audio and video formats. The project will thus produce a comprehensive description of the language and document its use as an expression of social and cultural identity.
This documentation will: a) provide the first and perhaps only grammatical description of this typologically interesting and undocumented language; b) yield data essential to the reconstruction of Proto-Totonacan, the ancestor language from which all the Totonacan languages are descended; c) help determine the historical relationship of Pisaflores Tepehua to other Totonacan languages and to other indigenous languages in Mesoamerica; and d) provide speakers of the language with a practical orthography and other materials for use in literacy and language maintenance projects. Tepehua is currently the principal means of communication in Pisaflores, and it is still being acquired by children. But it is rapidly being replaced by Spanish. Without documentation and revitalization, Tepehua may be abandoned within a generation. Tepehua materials resulting from this project will be valuable to the native speakers in Pisaflores, who are struggling to maintain their language for future generations, and to linguists and other scientists interested in native American languages and cultures.
