DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: A Grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua

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This dissertation research will provide a grammar of the Huehuetla variety of Tepehua, a member of the Totonacan language family of Mexico. The precise number of remaining speakers of Huehuetla Tepehua (henceforth HT) is unknown, but the three varieties of Tepehua are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people in the Mexican states of Hidalgo, Veracruz, and Puebla. HT is spoken only in the township of Huehuetla and the outlying villages. The grammar of Huehuetla, to consist of a basic description of the language, an HT/Spanish dictionary, and a compilation of stories and other texts in HT, will be submitted to the University of Texas at Austin as a dissertation in linguistics.This project has significance for several fields and groups. First, it will be significant for linguistics because it will provide a description of a nearly undocumented language, and it will help determine whether HT and the related variety Tlachichilco Tepehua are dialects of the same language or separate languages. More specifically, it will be important to the field of historical linguistics, because a grammar of HT will help facilitate the reconstruction of Proto-Totoncan. Second, the project will provide results that will be useful to fields that focus on Mesoamerica, such as archaeology and art history, and that utilize historical linguistics to decipher glyphs and to reconstruct prehistory. Third, the project will be significant for the Tepehua people themselves: (i) it will provide a foundation on which to base pedagogical materials needed for language preservation, and (ii) it will provide them with the beginnings of a body of literature that is written and recorded in their native language and culturally relevant to them.The project involves nine months of fieldwork in and around the town of Huehuetla. The collected data will consist of elicited words and sentences; elicited narratives such as stories, recipes and jokes; and naturally-occurring speech, such as conversations and ceremonies. All data will be recorded on minidiscs; the narratives will be recorded on Hi8 videotapes as well, both to document speech events and to aid in analysis and translation.