Lacandon
This project is aimed at the documentation of Lacandón, a Yucatecan Mayan dialect spoken by around 600 people in the rain forest of Chiapas, Mexico. They are divided into a northern and southern group that are culturally similar yet ethnically separate. Both groups are descendants of Yucatec-speaking refugees who escaped assimilation and extermination during the Spanish Conquest and the nationalizing influences that came later. The southern Lacandones were eventually converted to Christianity and have since lost most of their traditional knowledge. By contrast, the northern Lacandones remained culturally intact right up until 21st Century. The northern Lacandones are the focus of the documentation project, because they are now on the cusp of change. With the death of their patriarch, intensified deforestation, and a burgeoning migrant population, the community has begun to abandon their traditional way of life and join the modern world. Currently, all but the elder women are bilingual, and although the language of childrearing is Lacandón, parents see proficiency in Spanish as an advantage and are sending their children to the new state-run primary school. At the same time, Spanish television has become the single source of entertainment, stories are no longer told in communal settings, and a Baptist church has recently been founded in the community. Several Lacandones have expressed deep concern that the culture is not being passed on to the children, and have asked for help to preserve it.
Cook and Carlson aim to build a comprehensive visual, aural, and written record of the living traditions of the Lacandón culture. The approach entails developing a system of language description for Lacandón that incorporates all the relevant data to describe the language within its socio-cultural and historical setting. The description system is designed non-hierarchically, permitting an infinite number of links between pieces of textual, linguistic, socio-cultural information, and the raw (recorded) data. The documentation will be made available on DVD and the Internet. Also envisioned is a trilingual (Lacandón/Spanish and Lacandón/English) DVD dictionary with approximately 9,000 lexical entries, grammatical notes, contextualized examples, and short analyzed texts.
For the Lacandones, this project will create a living record of their language and cultural traditions. The audio-video recordings and texts can be used to develop projects that aim to preserve Lacandón culture and provide the community with ways of maintaining and strengthening those expressions of their traditional culture. For the academic community, this project will mean the documentation of one of the least well documented Maya languages. For historical purposes it will help to pin down the Yucatecan subgroup and all that took place in it. The dictionary would be valuable for other interests, including glyphic studies, since presumably Lacandón would contain much that may no longer be retained among the more acculturated groups of Maya.