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February 6, 2014鈥擟ommon languages like English, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish have the potential to connect billions of people. But those connections come at a price鈥攁s less common languages are dying out.

Assistant Professor of became interested in Zapotec-Chatino languages while traveling in the region of Oaxaca, Mexico. 鈥淚 found their Spanish fascinating鈥攙ery melodic and very rhythmic,鈥� Sicoli said. 鈥淎nd a lot of that structure is carried over from the indigenous languages spoken there,鈥� he continued. Those indigenous languages are Zapotec-Chatino, a diverse language family that can be traced back 2,500 years. There are roughly 20 to 25 languages under Zapotec, which Sicoli likens to the Romance language family.

In 2007, Sicoli began his field research with nine native speakers, who conducted interviews in 103 towns throughout Oaxaca. Within one year, his project had trained 22 interviewers. Working with the community, Sicoli says, is essential in his fieldwork. 鈥淸We] trained native speakers and gave them some sense of capacity building to do linguistics work, and many have taken it upon themselves to learn more,鈥� he said. Many of the native speakers Sicoli worked with have become activists who raise awareness about endangered languages, while others have gone on to study linguistics at university.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 the thing that is going to keep [a] language alive. To have an effect, [projects] need to be really involved with the community and driven by the community,鈥� he continued.

Sicoli and his team recorded 2,500 utterances from each town, creating the largest collection of data for an indigenous language in Mesoamerica. The breadth of the survey showed Sicoli the status of Zapotec-Chatino in Oaxaca. 鈥淔ifty percent of the population centers were moribund,鈥� he said. Moribund refers to the state where children are no longer learning the language. The data also revealed how quickly things were changing. 鈥淲e found five extinct varieties where the [recent government] census said there were speakers and one town with [Zapotec] speakers where the census reported none,鈥� he explained.

Knowing the number of Zapotec-Chatino speakers allows researchers like Sicoli to do targeted documentation鈥斺�渢o go back to some of the towns that we found to be very moribund or very threatened but which are important because of the structures of the language,鈥� he said. The survey is also a tool to raise awareness about endangered languages. 鈥淪ometimes the way language shift happens is that no one knows what鈥檚 going on.鈥�

As part of the Documenting Endangered Languages Program, Sicoli is now working to turn the data he collected on Zapotec-Chatino languages into a free and accessible archive. Not only will researchers have access to the data for linguistic study, but communities in Oaxaca will be able to use the information in order to revitalize indigenous languages.

Sicoli hopes to create a print version of the archive鈥攆or communities without Internet access鈥攁nd educational materials for those who want to teach these languages. 鈥淲e have a graduate student here who is working on second language acquisition and Zapotec,鈥� he said. These materials could help local communities teach Zapotec to children and adolescents who grew up speaking only Spanish.

Sicoli鈥檚 research is part of the resurgence of studying less common languages. Up until the 1990s, scholars primarily focused on the most common languages and what was universal about them. 鈥淔or a while, linguists were discouraged from doing fieldwork at the expense of all of the languages that were going extinct at the time,鈥� he explained. There has been a shift in the field, Sicoli says, from understanding what is universal across languages to understand what is different.

鈥淟anguages are knowledge systems in part; we learn about different types of knowledge that humans have and the way that it鈥檚 organized through languages,鈥� he said. How humans express knowledge becomes a window into how we process and organize information. 鈥淚t turns out that people think about space in different ways鈥攖hat鈥檚 not without limits鈥攂ut we only learned that by doing comparative studies [of languages].鈥�

Not only do people think about space differently, they think about time and sound different as well. English speakers typically characterize sounds in terms of high and low. 鈥淚鈥檝e done work in Zapotec that shows that metaphor isn鈥檛 active, but a thick/thin metaphor [is],鈥� Sicoli said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 another nature-based metaphor. Thicker strings produce lower sounds, and thinner objects鈥攚hen you hit them鈥攑roduce higher sounds.鈥�

We still know little about these variations in cognition, Sicoli says. But researchers won鈥檛 be able to gain more insights without first preserving and documenting endangered languages. 鈥淭here is a push that we won鈥檛 be able to understand human language and what it is for humanity without understanding its diversity.鈥�
 

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Listen to excerpts from Assistant Professor Mark Sicoli鈥檚 field research. Native speakers say the number 20 in twenty different varieties of Zapotec and Chatino.