Coatec Zapotec Dictionary, Texts, and Video Archival

FAIN: FN-50086-11

Rosemary G. Beam-de-Azcona
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Mill Valley, CA 94941)

Coatec Zapotec is an Otomanguean language spoken in the southern part of Oaxaca, Mexico. It is a moribund language with an estimated few hundred speakers, most of them over 50. In the previous round of funding the PI was awarded a DEL fellowship in order to 1) finish revisions and additions necessary to publish a grammar of Coatec Zapotec, 2) enter hand-transcribed texts into a Toolbox database, and 3) create metadata for and archive notebooks and audio recordings made during fieldwork on Coatec from 1996 to 2004. In the previous application these three tasks were prioritized and focused on, while other tasks were identified as ultimately necessary but beyond the scope of a one-year project. The current application requests one additional (and final) year of funding to complete all major work on Coatec. The remaining tasks to be completed during the second phase of the project are 1) to revise, edit, and fill in the gaps of an existing lexical database to be published as a dictionary, 2) to fully process a large corpus of texts to be disseminated to both the Zapotec community and the worldwide community of scholars, and 3) to digitize, create metadata for, and edit (where necessary for archiving) up to 34 hours of video. (Edited by staff)