The Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi) workshop will bring together researchers working on formal approaches to Mayan linguistics. There are currently around thirty Mayan languages spoken in Central America. Some are relatively stable while others are severely endangered. Though there are many researchers working on formal issues in Mayan linguistics, there have been no recent forums dedicated entirely to this topic. FAMLi hopes to remedy this gap. The workshop will help researchers make new contacts, foster collaboration, and inspire interest in Mayan languages within the broader field of linguistics. A special goal of FAMLi is to encourage research by native speaker linguists through active recruitment of submissions and travel funding assistance. The FAMLi workshop will be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the 2009-2010 academic year. This location will pull participants from MIT and neighboring institutions. The workshop will feature five invited speakers as well as fourteen talks and twelve posters. Four of the invited talks will represent current research in the core areas of formal linguistics: phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The fifth talk will focus on the interaction between formal linguistics and the study of under-documented or endangered languages.
FAMLi will bring together scholars with similar scientific interests, but different levels of language expertise. Mayan languages are genetically close enough that many of the same theoretical questions arise in languages across the family. At the same time, the many differences which exist among the individual languages make collaborative discussion a profitable way to investigate problems and have the potential to yield solutions that might not be clear from investigations of individual languages in isolation. The research presented at FAMLi will also underscore the importance of careful, thorough fieldwork on under-represented and endangered languages for the investigation of formal questions. Another positive outcome will be the creation of contacts between Mayan scholars and the broader theoretical community. This will lead to new partnerships between native speaker linguists, other members of the Mayan linguistics community, and theoretical linguists who may have never worked on Mayan languages before.
There are presently about thirty Mayan languages spoken by over six million people living primarily in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. The first Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi) Workshop was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April 2010 (details are available online: http://web.mit.edu/famli). This conference was the first dedicated to formal work on contemporary Mayan languages. In addition to five invited speakers––representing all major areas of formal linguistics––FAMLi featured fifteen presentations and a poster session of eight posters, all selected based on a blind review panel of abstracts. Presentations touched on issues in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The poster session also featured work in discourse analysis and issues in the revitalization and teaching of Mayan languages. The conference was attended both by members of the linguistics community in the greater Boston area (MIT, Harvard, Boston University), as well as by linguists who traveled from abroad. The three-day event fostered a serious yet friendly environment for linguists to exchange ideas and form new connections. In addition to the high caliber of presentations and discussion, this workshop was unique in that fully half of the presentations were by native speakers of Mayan languages. All major branches of the Mayan family were represented, with talks by speakers of Chol, Tzotzil, Yukatek, Poqom, K’ichee’, Q’anjob’al, and Kaqchikel. To our knowledge, this was the first workshop which featured such strong participation from native-speakers of under-documented languages. We anticipate that the success of FAMLi will help increase awareness of the importance and potential impacts of involving native speakers––not just as sources of data, as has been traditional in the field, but as researchers––in the scientific study of their languages. The participation of native-speaker linguists will not only increase our knowledge of under-documented and endangered languages, but may also contribute to the revitalization of these languages.
