On April 23-25, the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy will host an international workshop on Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics. This National Science Foundation-funded conference, the first of its kind, will bring together specialists to discuss the unique properties of Mayan languages.
A particularly exciting (and unprecedented) feature of this workshop is the fact that more than half of the presentations will be made by linguists who are also native speakers of Mayan languages. The involvement of native speakers in the documentation, analysis and revitalization of their own languages is increasingly important as a large number of the world’s languages (including many in the Mayan family) face extinction.
The organizers of the conference are Jessica Coon, an MIT graduate student in linguistics who works on Chol, a Mayan language of Chiapas, Mexico, and Robert Henderson, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in the Mayan languages of Guatemala.
For general questions and information, please send an e-mail to: famli2010@gmail.com.
A particularly exciting (and unprecedented) feature of this workshop is the fact that more than half of the presentations will be made by linguists who are also native speakers of Mayan languages. The involvement of native speakers in the documentation, analysis and revitalization of their own languages is increasingly important as a large number of the world’s languages (including many in the Mayan family) face extinction.
The organizers of the conference are Jessica Coon, an MIT graduate student in linguistics who works on Chol, a Mayan language of Chiapas, Mexico, and Robert Henderson, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in the Mayan languages of Guatemala.
For general questions and information, please send an e-mail to: famli2010@gmail.com.
