Collaborative Research: Multimedia Database of Ixil Mayan Narratives

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It is a sad truth that the endangerment of a language often also implies the endangerment of a population. This is true in the case of Ixil, a Mayan language spoken by entire communities only in the highlands of northern Guatemala. The remaining approximately 65,000 speakers of Ixil are the survivors of a genocidal attack upon the Ixil people that took place in the 1980s during the Guatemalan civil war. This project will serve to document not only the Ixil language but also the important social context of the survival of the Ixil people. The product of this documentation project will be a web-based, multimedia database of Ixil conversations, narratives, and oral histories containing text versions of the narratives along with voice and video files. Different programming features will render the database accessible in several formats including: 1) a technical version containing morphological and syntactic analysis of the texts intended for linguists, anthropologists, historians and others interested in the scholarly examination of the Ixil language; 2) a version intended for native speakers, teachers, and learners of Ixil, useful as the basis for curriculum for the Ixil communities' literacy and history classes for children and adults; and 3) a dictionary of the words used in the narratives. A research team consisting of Dr. Jule Gomez de Garcia, Dr. Melissa Axelrod, and graduate student Maria Luz Garcia will gather the narratives in Nebaj, El Quiche, Guatemala, and surrounding communities. Members of an Ixil women's cooperative will assist in the transcription and analysis of the narrative and conversational materials. In addition to providing documentation for the Ixil community, this product will increase understanding of the conversation and discourse structures of Ixil and provide a rich database for students of Mayan languages and cultures in general. This information will also contribute to aspects of linguistic theory dealing with an understanding of the range and parameters of linguistic structures and behaviors as they reflect human cognitive functions. The practical benefits from this research are the inclusion of university students and members of indigenous communities in the development and practice of methodologies for documenting endangered languages.