Documentation Enhancement: Lowland Chontal Archive and Dictionaries

FAIN: FN-50053-09

Loretta M. O'Connor
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Portland, OR 97209-1026)

The primary objective of this project is to enrich the basic documentation of Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca, a highly endangered indigenous language of southern Mexico. Lowland Chontal is one of the two surviving sisters of Oaxaca Chontal, a small and still unclassified language family spoken in the language-rich state of Oaxaca. I have worked with the lowland variety since 1997, with accomplishments that include a theoretically-oriented doctoral dissertation and, together with archeologist Peter Krofges, the establishment of a documentary electronic archive housed at Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen. Fellowship tenure will be dedicated to the linguistic annotation of the digitized materials in the archive and the production of dictionaries from the lexical database enriched by that annotation. One dictionary will be Chontal-English-Spanish, geared to academic linguists; the second will be Chontal-Spanish, designed for the Chontal community. (Edited by staff)

Associated Products

Latyaygi-English-Español: A trilingual dictionary of Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca (Book)
Title: Latyaygi-English-Español: A trilingual dictionary of Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca
Author: Loretta O'Connor
Abstract: Lowland Chontal is an endangered language of southeastern Mexico. It is one of two surviving sisters of Oaxaca Chontal, an unclassified language family with proposed links to the California linguistic area. The language is spoken fluently by fewer than 100 elders along the coastal plain of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Many more people speak Lowland Chontal with varying degrees of proficiency and as a second language. This trilingual dictionary is based primarily on the author's years of fieldwork in San Pedro Huamelula and surrounding areas. The target audience includes Chontal learners and educators as well as academic linguistics. Introductory prefaces in English and Spanish orient the user to basic sounds and grammatical patterns in the language, with links to online materials, and glossaries from English and Spanish are provided. Dictionary entries include cross-references between related words and copious example sentences from field recordings. An interactive version of the dictionary on CD (included with the print volume) permits sorting and access through multiple fields, automatic jumping between searchable terms in entries and example sentences, and the ability to print vocabulary alphabetically or by semantic domain. The author has various publications on this language and is curator of the Lowland Chontal digital archive in the DoBeS corpus.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://lincom-shop.eu/epages/57709feb-b889-4707-b2ce-c666fc88085d.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/57709feb-b889-4707-b2ce-c666fc88085d/Products/%22ISBN%209783862884438%22
Primary URL Description: LINCOM Academic Publishers, in the series Languages of the World/Dictionaries
Secondary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/latyaygi-english-espanol-a-trilingual-dictionary-of-lowland-chontal-of-oaxaca/oclc/863145927&referer=brief_results
Secondary URL Description: in the OCLC WorldCat
Publisher: LINCOM GmbH
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9783862884438
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca Electronic Archive / Digital Catalog (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca Electronic Archive / Digital Catalog
Author: Loretta O'Connor
Author: Peter Kroefges
Abstract: The electronic archive of Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca contains written, photographic, audio, and video resources. It includes audio and video recordings; folktales, narratives, and oral history; articles about the geography and the history of the Chontalpa, materials on the language, a grammatical sketch, and other studies.This documentation project was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; the archive processing and presentation were enriched by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: https://corpus1.mpi.nl/ds/asv/;jsessionid=014667DC9429390DA4C3426094E2166C?
Primary URL Description: The Lowland Chontal digital corpus, archived with and technically maintained by The Language Archive, a unit of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Access Model: Open access

The Lowland Chontal Documentation Project - DOBES Documentation of Endangered Languages (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: The Lowland Chontal Documentation Project - DOBES Documentation of Endangered Languages
Author: Loretta O'Connor
Author: Peter Kroefges
Abstract: Welcome to the electronic archive on the language and culture of the Lowland Chontal community of southeastern Mexico. Each tab on the website leads to a brief introduction to some aspect of the documentation project: Language, Geography, People & Culture, Project, Team, Data Example, and Links. From any page you may browse the Chontal corpus of archived materials and download most of these resources. This documentation project was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; the archive processing and presentation were enriched by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://dobes.mpi.nl/projects/chontal/
Primary URL Description: The Lowland Chontal Documentation project is part of the DOBES Documentation of Endangered Languages.
Access Model: Open

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