Investigating Endangered Language Contact for Awakateko and K'iche', two Mayan languages

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Language contact situations arise when at least two languages or varieties interact. Linguists know that there are a wide variety of outcomes that occur in these situations. For example, sometimes only a few words are borrowed, or perhaps entirely new languages emerge, or speakers use both languages and switch and mix between them in systematic, patterned ways. There are significant gaps in existing knowledge about language contact situations, and those gaps are even larger when considering contact situations involving two or more endangered languages. Endangered language contact raises questions on language 'vitality,' that is, who, how and where the languages are in use. Even more understudied is child language acquisition in such contact situations. This project will document the language usage by children and adults in a region where endangered languages are in contact. Broader impacts include providing graduate students with international research and training opportunities and fostering a new international collaboration between U.S. and foreign academic institutions. The NSF Office of International Science and Engineering is providing support for international activities associated with this project.With more than 30 Mayan languages are spoken by about 3 million people in an area of 345,937 square kilometers, many of these languages are in contact, resulting in multilingual speakers. Although documentation projects have been carried out on several Mayan languages, their interaction under contact has not been studied extensively. Understanding the principles of contact-induced change will allow language scientists to better document these languages and to make suggestions concerning their maintenance. The team will focus on Awakateko and K'iche', two endangered Mayan languages from the Huehuetenango region of western Guatemala. This project will investigate the following main questions: How do children acquiring one or both of these languages use them, and what determines which language is more dominant? What are the patterns of everyday use of Awakateko and K'iche' by adult speakers in this area? What factors determine the relative importance of one of the languages? Led by University of Maryland linguist Maria Polinsky, the collaboration includes two U.S.-trained linguists, Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro and Dr. Ajb'ee Jiménez Sánchez, both of whom are native speakers of Mayan languages and are also experienced in linguistic fieldwork on their own and other Mayan languages. The team is uniquely positioned to carry out this investigation, given their collective expertise on heritage languages, syntactic theory, Mayan languages, language contact, and child language acquisition. The project will focus on a set of phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena: stress; palatalization; numeral classifiers and detransitivization means (i.e., antipassive and agent focus). In addition, the project will construct a transcribed, annotated corpus of naturally occurring data (narratives and dialogues) with bilingual and multilingual speakers which will be accessible to other researchers and the general public. The project has a strong training component that will engage native speakers of both languages, and these trained native-speaker citizen scientists will play the primary role in data collection.