Community-engaged fieldwork with Ch'ol (Mayan) in Mexico

By Carol-Rose Little (McGill University)

In this talk, I discuss community-engaged fieldwork with Ch’ol, a Mayan language of southern Mexico. There are around 252,000 Ch’ol speakers in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Tabasco and Campeche as well as diaspora communities in the United States and Canada. While Ch’ol is still being used by all generations in Mexico, Spanish has been displacing Ch'ol in many contexts. For example, Ch'ol is no longer used as the primary language in local governments or schools. Nevertheless, many Ch’ol activists and linguists have been trying to expand the usage of Ch’ol in various domains. I discuss recent efforts by community members and native speaker linguists to encourage and broaden the usage of the Ch’ol language. These efforts include orthography workshops, academic presentations in Ch’ol, social media content, embroidery, poetry, and a crowd-sourcing model for corpus creation. I hope to highlight the diverse types of projects that can come from community-linguistics partnerships and to provide inspiration for work with other heritage languages. This talk builds on the following collaborative work: Little et al. 2021, Vázquez Martínez & Little 2020, Little & Vázquez Martínez 2018.

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Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2021