Collaboration in the Context of Teaching, Scholarship, and Language Revitalization: Experience from the Chatino Language Documentation Project

Cruz, Emiliana; Woodbury, Anthony C.

Collaboration in the Context of Teaching, Scholarship, and Language Revitalization: Experience from the Chatino Language Documentation Project

Files

cruz_woodbury.pdf (4.98 MB)

Date

2014-09

Authors

Cruz, Emiliana

Woodbury, Anthony C.

Publisher

University of Hawaii Press

Volume

8

Starting Page

262

Ending Page

286

Abstract

We describe our own experience of linguist-community collaboration over the last ten years in our Chatino Language Documentation Project, focused on the Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico). We relate episodes in the emergence and evolution of the collaboration between ourselves, and of the collaboration among ourselves and the Chatino communities with which we have worked. Our experience has several special features. First, our own collaboration began as native Chatino-speaking Ph.D. student and her teacher in a program focused on training speakers of Latin American indigenous languages in linguistics and anthropology, and developed into a larger collaboration among students and faculty where the student had a major leadership role. Second, our approach was documentary-descriptive and comparative, but it was also socially engaged or ‘activist,’, in that we sought to promote interest, awareness, and respect for the Chatino languages, to teach and support Chatino literacy, and to preserve and offer access to spoken Chatino, especially traditional verbal art. Our approach had synergies with local interests in writing and in honoring traditional speech ways, but it also led to conflicts over our roles as social actors, and the traditionally activist roles of indigenous teachers. Third, we experienced plasticity in the collaborative roles we played. Between ourselves, we were student and teacher, but also initiator and follower as we became engaged in revitalization. At the same time, the native speaker linguist found herself occupying a range of positions along a continuum from “insider” to “outsider” respect to her own community. *This paper is in the series Language Documentation in the Americas edited by Keren Rice and Bruna Franchetto

Keywords

Chatino Language, language documentation, language revitalization

Citation

Cruz, Emiliana & Anthony C. Woodbury. 2014. Collaboration in the Context of Teaching, Scholarship, and Language Revitalization: Experience from the Chatino Language Documentation Project. Language Documentation & Conservation 8: 262-286.

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24607

Extent

25

Rights

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States

Collections

Volume 08 : Language Documentation & Conservation

Full item page

Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.