Publishing and Archiving of Coatec Zapotec Materials

FAIN: FN-50067-10

Rosemary G. Beam-de-Azcona
Regents of the University of California, Davis (Davis, CA 95618-6153)

Coatec Zapotec is an Otomanguean language spoken in the southern part of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. It is a moribund language with an estimated few hundred speakers, almost exclusively older adults in as few as seven towns. Materials currently available on this language are lacking, and the Southern Zapotec subgroup to which it belongs is often said to be the least well understood of the Zapotec group. This project seeks to change that. It will make available, through publishing and archival [sic], both the raw materials and the analytical products of fieldwork conducted over an eight-year period from 1996 to 2004. By the end of the fellowship year, I intend to have a currently incomplete grammar ready for publication, to have significantly increased the electronic corpus of Coatec texts, and to have archived 48 notebooks and 52 units (tapes and minidiscs) of audio recordings. Through this work, current and future generations of Zapotec people, linguists, and other scholars interested in the Zapotec and Oaxaca will have access to a wealth of information which could otherwise be lost. (Edited by staff)