Grammar of the Nebaj Dialect of the Ixil Maya Language [ISO 639 ixi]

California State University San Marcos Corporation, San Marcos CA

Investigators

Abstract

Standard interview techniques often cannot record the full range of grammatical devices used in a language. While monologues and linguistic interviews are essential to documenting a language, they fail to capture nuances of face-to-face interactions, particularly between people of different social statuses. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Jule Gomez de Garcia (California State University, San Marcos) will direct a team of linguists who will work in collaboration with Ixil Maya speakers to produce a new and uniquely complete reference grammar of the Nebaj dialect of the language, based on a corpus of spontaneous Ixil conversations and narratives. The grammar will present a thorough description of the language as used in a range of discourse contexts including meetings, male-female interactions, oral histories, and storytelling. The Ixil speakers will participate in all stages of the documentation process, gaining skills in audio and video recording, transcription, data processing, and construction of the web-based dictionary and text databases from which the team will derive the grammar. The grammar will provide a much-needed reference for academic researchers of Mayan languages. The materials also will serve the community of speakers who will use it to develop materials to enhance adult and child literacy projects. The project will afford Ixil speakers the opportunity to share in the documentation and preservation of their language, and, at the same time, to present and preserve their stories of survival in the aftermath of the Guatemalan Civil War. The intimacy of detail they have been willing to share will make this documentation a unique historical record of the endurance of a modern-day Mayan population. Thus the research will benefit both scholars and the wider public, by giving them an opportunity to better understand contemporary Ixil Maya society and, by extension, other peoples in similar situations throughout the hemisphere.