The Language Studies Program at San Francisco State University offers an exciting opportunity to be involved in a collaborative community-based research project involving the documentation and preservation of the oral tradition in the Zapotec dialect of Teotitlán del Valle, México. The dialect spoken in this community of approximately 5,000 has to date not been systematically documented in a comprehensive manner. In a collaborative effort between the Museo Comunitario de Teotitlán del Valle and San Francisco State University, a group of qualified students accompany Dr. Troi Carleton to Teotitlán del Valle for three weeks in the summer to work with the community in building an archive of the oral tradition of the community in Zapotec for the Museo Comunitario.
Working and living with members of the community, the SFSU research team works together with the community to decide on a research agenda that addresses both the goals of community as well as SFSU. One of the exciting things about the project is the truly collaborative effort between the community and SFSU. Members of the community participate in many ways, from providing texts to assisting in linguistic analysis. Part of the project involves training native speakers to be part of the language documentation team so that reliance on outsiders to document their language can eventually be eliminated.
The documentation component of the project has two objectives. There is the interest and commitment to documenting the oral tradition, which includes personal histories, traditional practices and local legends and myths. In addition, there is a commitment to producing a dictionary and grammar of the dialect for the community. These are long term commitments that have been embraced by both the community of Teotitlan del Valle as well as San Francisco State University.
In addition to the documentation component of the project, the project also has a pedagogical component. There are two major objectives of this component. First, one objective of the program is to train students to conduct collaborative empowering field research and to sensitize them to the critical point we have arrived at with respect to endangered languages around the world. The second objective of the project involves training native speakers to document their own language. By putting together a team of native speakers trained in language documentation, the power to preserve their own tradition rests in their hands. Also, by augmenting the research team to include native speakers, the efficiency of the teams is increased exponentially. The ultimate goal of training native speakers is for outside researcher to eventually be an unnecessary participant of the documentation effort, but a welcome collaborator.
For more information about how to participate in this research project and more details about what the trip involves, click here.