Orthography design for Chuxnabán Mixe

Abstract

Many discussions of orthography development center on the later stages of such endeavors and on the impact of newly developed orthographies over an extended period of time. This paper focuses on the early stages of orthography development for Chuxnabán Mixe, a previously undocumented language, and the establishment of a working orthography in collaboration with the community for the purpose of language documentation. The orthography design follows many of the linguistic, pedagogical, sociopolitical, and practical principles observed in new orthographies, such as phonemic orientation, maximum ease of learning, local acceptability, and ease of use with computers and new media. While the community favors using conventions from the dominant language, Spanish, it also prefers dialectal particularity over multidialectal uniformity. Chuxnabán Mixe is a Mixean language spoken by 900 people in one village in Oaxaca, Mexico. Limited documentation is available for some of the other Mixean varieties, but there is no widely used uniform orthography. Mixean languages and dialects differ primarily in their vowel systems, and each variety, if documented, has its own orthographic conventions established, often highlighting dialectal idiosyncrasies. This paper illustrates the orthography development and discusses some of the similarities to and differences from other orthographic conventions used for this language family.