A Dictionary of Pisaflores Tepehua (TPP)
FAIN: PD-50016-11
Ball State University (Muncie, IN 47306-1022)
Carolyn J. MacKay (Project Director: December 2010 to December 2015)
The production of an online and print dictionary of an endangered Totonac-Tepehua language spoken in the community of Pisaflores, Veracruz, Mexico.
Pisaflores Tepehua is an endangered language of the Totonac-Tepehua family spoken by approximately 2,500 speakers in the community of Pisaflores in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. The proposed project would produce a trilingual (Tepehua/Spanish/English) analytical dictionary, the first dictionary of any of the three Tepehua languages and the first analytical dictionary of a Totonac-Tepehua language. Containing at least 5,000 lexical items, the dictionary would provide a transcription and phonological and morphological analysis of each word, examples of the words used in context, and definitions in both Spanish and English. It would be produced in both print and electronic versions, with the print version accompanied by a CD of digitized audio tokens, or sound files, of each lexical entry and each example phrase, and the electronic version with links between the dictionary entries and their audio tokens. The resulting resource would provide linguists and researchers of language as well as members of the community with useful documentation for linguistic analysis and language preservation. The team of investigators has done fieldwork in the area since 1998 and has published the only linguistic documentation currently available on the Pisaflores Tepehua language. The team would work with speakers of the language over the summers of 2011-2013, recording and verifying the lexical entries that would then be entered into an electronic database, which would serve as the basis for both the print and digital versions of the dictionary. Data entry and analysis would be undertaken during the academic year in the United States.