#Episode 83 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lingthusiasm · 1 year

Text

Transcript Episode 83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro who’s an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, a native speaker of Q’anjob’al, and a learner of Kaqchikel. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about kids acquiring Indigenous languages.

But first, some announcements. We love looking up whether two words that look kind of similar are actually historically related, but the history of a word doesn’t have to define how it’s used today. To celebrate how we can grow up to be more than we ever expected, we have new merch that says, “Etymology isn’t Destiny.” Our artist, Lucy Maddox, has made “Etymology isn’t Destiny” into a swoopy, cursive design with a fun little destiny star on the dot of the eye, available in black, white, and my personal favourite, rainbow gradient. This design is available on lots of different colours and styles of shirts. We’ve got hoodies, tank tops, t-shirts in classic fit, relaxed fit, curved fit – plus mugs, notebooks, stickers, water bottles, zipper pouches. You know, if it’s on Redbubble, we might’ve put “Etymology isn’t Destiny” on it.

We also have tons of other lingthusiastic merch available in our merch store at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I have to say, it makes a great gift to give to a linguistics enthusiast in your life or to request as a gift if you are that linguistics enthusiast.

We also wanna give a special shoutout to our aesthetic redesign of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Last year, we reorganised the classic IPA chart to have colours and have little cute circles and not just be boring grey lines of boxes and to even more elegantly represent the principle that the location of the symbols and rows and columns represents the place and degree of constriction in the mouth. I think it looks really cool. It’s also a fun little puzzle to sit there and figure out which of the specific circles around different things stands for what. We’ve now made this aesthetic IPA chart redesign available on lots more merch options, including several different sizes of posters from small ones you can put on a corkboard to large ones you can put up in your hallway. They look really, really good, especially if you have some sort of office-y space that needs to be decorated. Plus, it’s on tote bags and notebooks and t-shirts. If you want everyone you meet to know that you’re a giant linguistics nerd, you can take them to conferences and use them to start nerdy conversations with people.

If you like the idea of linguistics merch but none of ours so far is quite hitting your aesthetic, or if there’s an item that Redbubble sells that you think one of our existing designs would look good on, we’ve added quite a few merch items in response to people’s requests over the years, so we’d love to know where the gaps still are and keep an eye on lingthusiasm.com/merch.

Our most recent bonus episode was a behind-the-scenes interview with Sarah Dopierala, who you may recognise as a name from the end credits, about what it’s like doing transcripts from a linguistics perspective and her life generally as a linguistics grad student. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to all of the many bonus episodes and to help Lingthusiasm keep running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Pedro, welcome to the show!

Pedro: Hello. Thank you so much for this invitation. I really appreciate it.

Gretchen: We’re really excited to have you. Let’s start with the question that we ask all of our guests, “How did you get interested in linguistics?”

Pedro: That’s an interesting question. I think there’re two main things. One is that I had the opportunity to attend a boarding school where there were many Mayan languages and, in addition to that, there was a class on grammar of Mayan languages, and I think that’s one of the things that motivated me to be curious about that language. Then after becoming an elementary school teacher, I was also interested about knowing more about how these languages work. For example, how language works in this case – well, in the case of Guatemala, for example, people think – I am assuming that that was in the past, but there’s, I think, some people who still think that Indigenous languages don’t have a grammar from there as well. Is it true that, in fact, there’s no grammar of this language? That’s kind of how I started –

Gretchen: There’s no language with no grammar.

Pedro: That’s true. I like when people say that everybody has a mental grammar. I like that. Which is true for every language as well. It’s how I would say I got interested in linguistics.

Gretchen: And you’re already a speaker of Q’anjob’al, and so going to this boarding school and being exposed to other people speaking other languages.

Pedro: Also, I acquired Q’anjob’al when I was a kid. And then I went to this boarding school. But unfortunately, I didn’t know any of those languages until later when I started living with my wife who is a native speaker of Kaqchikel, and from there I started to learn, but it has been a long process for me.

Gretchen: To learn different ones. So, you were at boarding school, and you’re encountering, “Okay, Mayan languages have grammar – great!” What happened after that?

Pedro: When I graduated from this boarding school, I became an elementary school teacher. I taught, I think, a couple of years. But one thing that I noticed is that there was that need to understand a bit more of the language. I thought, well, this is something that one of my best friends, who is Eladio Mateo Toledo, he said, “Well, let’s find someplace to go.” We went to school in Guatemala City to study sociolinguistics at that time. I’m talking about years ago. But it was a way to find opportunities to learn a little bit more about the languages.

Gretchen: So, you studied sociolinguistics in Guatemala City and thought, “Oh, this is cool. I wanna do more of it”?

Pedro: I finished sociolinguistics, and then I received a fellowship or a scholarship in a different university. It’s Universidad Rafael Landívar. There was this project called “EDUMAYA” where there were scholarships to Mayan speakers or Indigenous speakers in Guatemala. This was an opportunity for me to get an undergrad in linguistics. After that, I think I took two or one year off, but while I missed those years from school, I was working at OKMA – Oxlajuuj Keej Mayab’ Ajtz’iib’ – under the direction of Nora England.

Gretchen: What is this organisation?

Pedro: This organisation works on Mayan languages. It’s a group of Mayan speakers who studied their own language.

Gretchen: That sounds great.

Pedro: It was really great. In that case, I was an elementary school teacher, and then I started to work very hard at OKMA. It was a huge difference teaching kids and then doing analysis on a language. For me it was a big transition, but it was amazing because I had the opportunity to learn many things about how Mayan language work. It was unique.

Gretchen: And the kids that you were teaching when you were teaching in school were Mayan kids as well?

Pedro: Yeah, most of them were Mayan kids, so they spoke Q’anjob’al. Even though there is this idea about bilingual education in these Indigenous communities, I had this opportunity to teach these children in Q’anjob’al. One of the norms of education is you teach these kids, and they have to learn Spanish and something like that. So, what I did is, okay, let’s take as the base the knowledge that they bring from home. They speak the language, they understand the language, so we need to teach them how to write and read. That’s what I did. I was in trouble because the parents didn’t like the idea of teaching the children in Q’anjob’al.

Gretchen: They wanted them to learn Spanish.

Pedro: Exactly. They said, “Why do we need Q’anjob’al? Why do we need to write when we speak the language?” One of the arguments I made is, okay, yeah, but we need something already that will help us to learn to write and read. It took me a while. One way to convince the parents to change their mind was that, in the first meeting when they came in to get their children’s grade, I started the meeting in Spanish. I messaged them in Spanish. It didn’t last for a minute, and they stopped me. They started to complain and say, “Why would you talk to us in Spanish when, in fact, you know that we speak Q’anjob’al?” Different people, they were angry or uncomfortable because of that. After that, I asked them this question, “Have you thought about your children who spend about five or six hours every day here at school?”

Gretchen: “And if I speak to them in Spanish, they’re not gonna understand me either.”

Pedro: Exactly. That was my point. And this “Oh, yeah, yeah.” “Have you thought about that? Do they complain?” “No.” “Okay, because they are kids.”

Gretchen: They don’t know any better, yeah.

Pedro: For me, it’s important for these children to understand what’s going on in school. One way to do this – using the language that they know. I was able, in this case, to talk with the parents, “Okay, we understand what you are after.” I had the opportunity then to teach the children, at least, I mean, at that time – so divide a year in two parts. In the first part, I would teach the kids in writing and reading Q’anjob’al. And then in the next part of the year, we switched to Spanish. But at least that was an opportunity to –

Gretchen: They have sort of a balance of the two and accommodation of the two, and they’re not coming in and suddenly someone’s talking at them in a language they don’t understand at all – “Okay, what’s going on?” Yeah.

Pedro: Those were the things that I really liked when I go back to that experience that I had as an elementary school teacher.

Gretchen: Then you started doing language work with other linguists and speakers.

Pedro: Yeah. Again, when I came to OKMA, I started working with a group of Q’anjob’al speakers on the dialectal variation of Q’anjob’al. I was there, I think, less than three years. Then I left Guatemala because my wife had a scholarship, and we went to the US. That’s how I started learning English, and then started the MA and PhD programme at the University of Kansas.

Gretchen: In linguistics as well?

Pedro: In linguistics, yeah. Then I started to work on how children acquire Mayan languages – of course, not all Mayan languages, but I started to work on Q’anjob’al to document how these children acquire Q’anjob’al.

Gretchen: Sort of informed by this experience as a schoolteacher saying, “Okay, these kids are coming in already speaking this language. What’s going on?”

Pedro: I think the question is, “What do they know?” That’s how I got interested in this. Plus, at that time I had my first son who was, I think, one-year-and-a-half or something. It was like, okay, this is an opportunity for me to learn how to document child language acquisition. So, then I started to work on Q’anjob’al.

Gretchen: I think there are a lot of linguists who get interested in child language acquisition because you have a child, you’re spending all this time taking care of your child, “What are they doing?”

Pedro: For me, it was really interesting because, again, going back to when we moved from Guatemala to the US, the first time I took care of my son, so I made basically a diary of what he was saying almost every day. I have my notes – I dunno – somewhere.

Gretchen: Then you started looking at other children as well.

Pedro: Yeah. For my MA, for example, I looked at, I think, eight or ten children. It was a cross-sectional study. As for my PhD, I worked on a longitudinal study. My main focus at that time was on how these children acquire the verb morphology in the language, in this case, the word that indicates action, for example, what happens, and then the different parts that are necessary in that verb, for example. We talk about when the action happened, and who is participating in the action. Those are the kinds of things that I tried to evaluate in my study. That’s something that, also, I have been working on these days.

Gretchen: I mean, this is the kind of thing that it’s not like, oh, you study it for one degree, and now you know everything. This is the kind of thing that people could study for a whole career.

Pedro: Exactly. That’s an interesting point because what I have learned is that, okay, I’m going to – so my advisor said, “Well, you can start with this.” And I said, “Well, okay.” I started studying acquisition of the verb morphology, I think, more than 10 years ago. And I thought, “Well, I am done.” It’s not true! Because every time I look at the data, and I find other things, and I start asking other questions. There is no end of that – which is a nice thing that you start with something small –

Gretchen: You’re not gonna be out of a job.

Pedro: It’s nice. I think one thing that I really appreciate is the opportunity that I have also in documenting acquisition for Mayan languages. For example, I have documented the acquisition of Chuj, another written Mayan language to Q’anjob’al, for example. By looking into a known language, it helps me to understand what must be going on in Q’anjob’al. And I said, “Wow! I wish I had access to this language before so I could have a better idea of how to explain what was going on.”

Gretchen: You can find some things that are similar between Chuj and Q’anjob’al, and some things that are different, because the languages are grammatically, you know, related. They’re similar.

Pedro: That really helped in terms of analysis, in terms of understanding what’s going on, in terms of explaining a specific phenomenon, for example. It really helps to have that kind of mirror, for example, to see what’s going on.

Gretchen: One thing that I know about when kids are acquiring English is they often make mistakes. They’ll say things like “runned” instead of “ran” or something like that. This tells you “Oh, they’re generalising something about a rule.” Are there some things that come up with mistakes kids make or interesting things that kids do when they’re acquiring –

Pedro: That’s an interesting question. That’s something I was looking at, for example, for Chuj and for Q’anjob’al is that, so in Mayan languages, for example, there is this suffix that is known as the “status suffix” that appears after a verb. The idea of this status of something, like, it’s indicating what information is provided by the verb.

Gretchen: “Style” suffix?

Pedro: “Status.” “Status suffix.” It indicates whether the verb is a transitive verb or an intransitive verb. In this case, when we talk about intransitive verbs, it’s one participant of the verb. Transitive verb – two participants.

Gretchen: So, if you have something like “walk,” it’s gonna be intransitive, and it’s gonna have one status suffix. If you have something like, well, the classic example is “hit,” but I always find that very violent – you know, “hug” or something – that’s gonna be transitive. And it’s gonna have a different suffix.

Pedro: A different – yeah. In English, for example, that’s just one form of the verb. But in Mayan languages, or someplace, you have a specific morphology on the verb to indicate that, well, you are talking about an intransitive verb or a transitive verb.

Gretchen: So, if it’s just “I eat,” it’s gonna have one status suffix. If it’s “I eat an apple,” it’s gonna have a different status suffix to indicate that that’s there. Okay.

Pedro: I think, trying to answer your question, that all of this – I mean, there are all things that happen with this status suffix, but I haven’t seen children, for example, producing errors with these status suffixes. One thing that we have seen as maybe “errors” or children overgeneralising is the production of the status suffixes in a specific position. One thing that we know about status suffixes is that sometimes they appear at the end of a verb, and other times, they don’t. But in other times, they do. Then the question is, “What happened?”

Gretchen: And adults know this?

Pedro: An adult knows. But for a child, there are different variations on these status suffixes that a child has to find as a challenge. One thing that we notice is that these children, for example, produce these suffixes in non-final position – something that is not seen –

Gretchen: The adults only produce it at the end of the verb, at the end of the sentence?

Pedro: Yes and no. If they have what we call a “root verb” – consonant-vowel-consonant is the idea.

Gretchen: Consonant-vowel-consonant is a “root verb,” okay.

Pedro: When you have that verb with that “shape,” let’s say, that suffix doesn’t appear in the non-final position. But if you have something that is, let’s say, derived, then that suffix has to be there.

Gretchen: Okay. If you make the verb into something else by changing the tense or something –

Pedro: By changing the status of that word. You have the word “song,” for example, and then you make the verb “to sing,” then you add a morpheme to it so that this noun “song” becomes an intransitive. Because of that, then it’s a derived intransitive verb.

Gretchen: It’s a derived intransitive, and you need to have the suffix. Do the kids do this?

Pedro: They produce that. One thing that we noticed is that they make that difference between derived and non-derived intransitive verbs. Again, it’s like they are acquiring that, but that’s what we see as something problematic for them in acquiring those status suffixes.

Gretchen: They have some difficulties still.

Pedro: That’s, I would say, where we see them making those mistakes or having trouble with acquiring the suffixes.

Gretchen: Is there something that you’ve noticed that’s interesting about how kids are acquiring the languages you’ve worked on?

Pedro: In addition to looking at the verb morphology, I also studied how children acquire the nominal classifier – numeral classifier – in Q’anjob’al. In this case, some Mayan languages have a nominal classifier or a numeral classifier. In this language, for example, everything has to be classified. If you refer to a woman, for example, you’re going to use the classifier “ix,” and then “naq,” for example, for men. Then if you have other things like –

Gretchen: You know, a hat or something.

Pedro: Then it would be “chʼen,” for example.

Gretchen: That’s for objects in general, or are there several different kinds of objects?

Pedro: Well, for animals, for people, for objects, and things like that.

Gretchen: So, if you have a dog or something?

Pedro: That’s going to be different. That’s going to be “no’.” I was interacting with this child. He was a boy. Well, first, he was interacting with his grandmother. These classifiers were there. He was like “ix” or “naq” or “chem” or “ch’en” or “no’” – everything that was –

Gretchen: Everything that you would expect for all the different kinds of things that you can refer to.

Pedro: And then someone came to visit grandma. So, grandma left the conversation, so that left just the boy and myself. This is what happened. All of those classifiers were gone. There’s just one that stayed, which is “ix.”

Gretchen: So, he’s using “ix” for everything.

Pedro: “Ix” for everything. But this is not something that he’s just making up. It’s something that we can see in the other grammar.

Gretchen: Okay. Do other children do this as well?

Pedro: Other children do, but mainly boys – not girls.

Gretchen: Interesting.

Pedro: The thing is that this “ix” that replaces all nominal classifiers occurs mainly among men. People have argued that it’s mostly in informal contexts.

Gretchen: Right. So, because his grandma is gone, and you two are men together – well, he’s like, 3 years old.

Pedro: Exactly. It’s kind of like, “Okay, yeah, let’s use the ‘ix,’” replacing the others.

Gretchen: He’s sensitive to the sociolinguistic context of “Oh, women aren’t here anymore, so I’m gonna do this thing” –

Pedro: “With this guy.”

Gretchen: “With this guy.” Even at this young age.

Pedro: Exactly. He was about 2-and-a-half or 3 years old. This boy is able to distinguish both contexts. His grandma has come back in the conversation, and then those classifiers came back.

Gretchen: Wow. He’s really paying attention to this dynamic situation of whether his grandma is here or not changing how he talks.

Pedro: When to use all the classifiers and when to use just one classifier. For me, again, that’s a way to illustrate that these children, they’re exposed to the language, and they are exposed to this system of the nominal classifier, but in addition to that information, the social aspect of that nominal –

Gretchen: And the cultural context where if you just had kids who are trying to learn language in a classroom while maybe the teacher is a woman, and you don’t have all the different types of social situations.

Pedro: One of the things that’s important to emphasise, then, when we do language documentation is making sure that that interaction with that child doesn’t happen only with grandma, for example, but happens with the different gender – I mean, in this case, female/male, and also –

Gretchen: Ages.

Pedro: And there’s ages and the kids themselves.

Gretchen: Because maybe the kids are talking differently with each other than they’re talking with their grandparents or their aunts and uncles or the older generation. The researcher doesn’t necessarily know in advance which things the kids are gonna be paying attention to because maybe the kids don’t learn how to talk like the men until they’re older. You don’t know what age they learn that until you’re studying it.

Pedro: Exactly. I would say the take home message in this part of the conversation is documenting everything, basically, because you never know, I mean, what you will learn. I mean, you never know what will come with this child’s interaction.

Gretchen: I think sometimes when we’re analysing how kids talk, at least a lot of the studies that I see on big languages like English, they bring the kid and maybe one parent, the mom or something, into a lab and they have them talk in this controlled but also very artificial environment. You don’t have the environments of, “Well, somebody comes to the door, so grandma has to go answer the door” that lets you have this situation where you can illuminate this effect. Sometimes, if you do too much control, you don’t actually see the natural things that happen.

Pedro: That’s the difference that we see, I mean, in this case between doing an experimental study and a naturalistic setting, for example. I think when you do certain things in that natural setting, then you have the opportunity to see the language being used in different contexts, for example. In this case that we are discussing for the “ix,” I think it’s a unique illustration of the importance of documenting the language as a whole.

Gretchen: In the whole community, cultural context. I mean, of course, then you also have the thing of like, “Oh, if there’s some birds in the background or something.”

Pedro: Again, that’s the advantage and disadvantage of doing this kind of work. I think it’s good to do both, especially when we talk about Indigenous languages. You mentioned something important, “Okay, what do we know, for example, about language acquisition?” I think most of that information comes from the well-known languages. What happens to these less studied languages or languages that haven’t been studied at all, for example – how to bring those languages into discussing what we learn about language acquisition?

Gretchen: And there’s two reasons why that’s really important. One is because, for speakers of those languages, if they want to try to support using them in schools or using them in daily life or trying to revitalise a language that’s become less common in daily life, having the knowledge of “How do kids talk in this language? What are their first words like? How do adults normally talk to children in a bit of a different style?”

Pedro: I think we can say that it’s not just about the grammatical aspect of the language that these kids are acquiring, but at the same time, how they are acquiring that language, for example. I think one thing that it would be good to connect with language revitalisation is, like, let’s learn the language thinking like we are kids. Because a kid, for example, wouldn’t think about “Oh, is this the way to say it?” “Should I put this here?”

Gretchen: “Should I put this suffix on this verb?”

Pedro: Exactly.

Gretchen: Kids don’t know what a suffix is.

Pedro: And it takes time for them to get to the production of the adult level. For instance, also the sound system that these children produce. Q’anjob’al, for example, has retroflex sounds like /ʈʂʰ/ or /ʈʂʼ/, for example, /ʂ/. And these kids do not produce them like –

Gretchen: They can’t produce them immediately.

Pedro: No, no, no. It takes time for them. I will say three-years-and-a-half or four. It takes that time to produce this retroflex. I think when we are in the context of revitalisation, those learners of a language will go through similar patterns of acquisition.

Gretchen: If you’re trying to re-learn Q’anjob’al as an adult and being stressed that you can’t produce the retroflex and say, “Look, it takes the kids four years. If it takes you four years, that’s really normal. You can keep practicing this and get better at it. If you can’t do it on the first day, then you still have hope.”

Pedro: That’s the importance of doing this kind of project and documenting how children acquire this kind of language. Then this information can be useful for other purposes.

Gretchen: Q’anjob’al also has the ejectives, which I’m not doing a very good job of pronouncing, but you’ve been saying it in the name of the language itself that “Q’anjob’al.”

Pedro: /qʼanxobʼal/, yes.

Gretchen: Do kids learn those really early, or are they a bit harder?

Pedro: It takes time for them as well. That’s another interesting question because what we have noticed is that these children, when they try to produce these ejectives, they would follow two strategies. One – either they produce the plain consonant.

Gretchen: So /kanxobal/ instead of /qʼanxobal/?

Pedro: Exactly. Or they would just produce the glottal stop.

Gretchen: Oh, okay, so /ʔnxobal/?

Pedro: Or something like /ʔanxobal/, but I’m just making this up. It will be something like this – either they use a plain or this glottal stop. It’s a process.

Gretchen: Extracting the two possible features that you would need to put together eventually.

Pedro: This has been reported for the acquisition of sounds in K’iche’ and Chuj, and I also see it in Q’anjob’al.

Gretchen: These are all Mayan languages that have –

Pedro: Mayan languages that have ejectives as well. Maybe someone will say, “This is our dialectal variation,” or “It’s just the kids,” I mean, because of individual differences, but no, it’s across –

Gretchen: It’s across a bunch of them. That gets us to the other reason why it’s really important to document kids acquiring lots of different languages – Indigenous languages – is that, when we’re trying to think, “What do we think about how kids learn language in general?” if we base those theories entirely on a few big languages that have other relatively similar typological features in some cases – English and Spanish are typologically related, and so if you’re coming up with a theory just based on English and Spanish, well, you know, that’s not very generalisable.

Pedro: That’s true. I think that’s one of the other things that we wanted to mention here, like how to include other languages to understand human language and also how these children acquire languages – human languages in the world, you mentioned, that sometimes haven’t been explored at all. It would be good to document those languages and have a better idea of what these kids do. But the other thing that I’m going to add here is that, yeah, we want to have a better idea of how these children acquire language, but at the same time, how this information can be used, again, for language revitalisation or for language maintenance or things that the community’s interested in. One thing that I noticed, for example, about this in Q’anjob’al is that these children, their first words have a basic shape which is consonant-vowel-consonant. This is really common in the whole Mayan languages, but these are the specific things that these children produce. If that’s the case, then is this information possible to use when we consider creating teaching materials for these children? It would be a good thing to have this because it’s going to be much easier if these children can read these words with this shape, for example.

Gretchen: Right. If you know what words they’re acquiring early, then you can say, “Oh, well, we’ll put those words in maybe the first books that we’re trying to have them learn because you don’t wanna try to have them read a book with words that they don’t understand, they’re not using already. You can use this small shape – because Mayan languages have, you know, quite a bit of prefixes and suffixes and things on the words but, of course, you have to start somewhere, and that’s just with – the roots are generally consonant-vowel-consonant, so they just produce the root first, and then they start adding things onto it.

Pedro: Exactly. They are good at identifying those roots in the input or in the adult grammar in this case, yeah. Also, I had the opportunity to collaborate with other people about trying to understand how these pieces are put in the verb. What we have noticed is that there’s the root, and then children are good at producing suffixes.

Gretchen: Ah. But not prefixes?

Pedro: Not prefixes, but for a reason.

Gretchen: What’s that?

Pedro: Stress.

Gretchen: Oh.

Pedro: Stress is also with these suffixes. You have the root and then the suffix.

Gretchen: And that’s the part they do first, and then they do the prefixes much later.

Pedro: Yeah, later.

Gretchen: Interesting.

Pedro: That’s the other thing that we have.

Gretchen: So, you work at the University of Toronto now.

Pedro: Yes.

Gretchen: What sorts of projects are you working on there?

Pedro: Well, my position is about language documentation and language revitalisation. One of the projects that I am currently working on is about the revitalisation of Itza’, another Mayan language spoken in Guatemala, in the northern part of Guatemala, in Petén. It’s a language that has been considered an endangered language because it has less than 40 speakers.

Gretchen: Wow. Less than 40.

Pedro: And most of them are elders. I think this week I was asked about how old is the youngest, and I said, “Well, 70-something.” Children are not acquiring that language anymore. But the goal in this project is how to teach the language and how to bring the language back. That’s one of the projects that I am doing – how to do that. One thing that we are doing with the community is two main things, 1.) is developing a workshop on teaching them how to teach the language.

Gretchen: Right. Because just because you can speak a language doesn’t mean you know how to teach it.

Pedro: That’s one of the things that we did. What would be the best method? We’re using a method that has been used in other contexts, so let’s try to use this for the revitalisation of Itza’, in this case, not for all Mayan languages, but for Itza’ because of the condition of it.

Gretchen: Because Q’anjob’al still has lots of speakers.

Pedro: Lots of speakers, yeah, so it’s different from Itza’. So, that’s one thing. The other thing we are doing – and for me this is really important because we are developing pedagogical material that we are using for the same purpose, but the unique thing for this grammar is that we have students at the University of Toronto who are involved in creating information about the grammar. In this case, these students are doing research about the subject of Itza’, but because they are preparing this material for non-linguists, for example, it’s an opportunity for them, okay, they have to understand the structure of the language but then how to share that information with people who are not linguists.

Gretchen: Who wanna become speakers and don’t have background in grammar or any of these theoretical concepts, but they just need to know how to talk to people.

Pedro: For me, these students have this opportunity to learn to speak the language and then also the opportunity how to share that information with these people, but in addition to that, having the opportunity to work with Indigenous communities and also doing language revitalisation.

Gretchen: And trying to accomplish the community’s goals rather than, okay, I have this research agenda, I’m just gonna show up, extract some information, and then go off and get a degree and have a career without benefitting the community.

Pedro: I think that’s something that I tried to tell the students. Okay, it’s good that you are learning this. You’re doing your research. But at the same time, this is the impact that you are making with your work. Maybe you cannot see it now, but later, you will realise, “Oh, this is what” – it takes time to understand what you are doing. Again, I consider this as an opportunity for the students to be involved in this situation. The other part is, in addition to the workshop on teaching methods, we are also working with community members about the different lessons that we are putting into this grammar. How can we do this? Or how do we do this? Or how do we say this? Basic expressions.

Gretchen: So, if you wanna have a lesson about foods, you wanna make sure you’re using the foods that are in the local area that they wanna be able to talk about not some sort of food that nobody’s actually eating in this place.

Pedro: Exactly. But again, just by doing that, it’s a long process. It has been a long process. We have been working on this grammar, I think, more than a year, and we are not even done. But still, that is helping us to understand how to work with the community, but at the same time, how to work with the elders who have the knowledge of the language, for example. I was telling some of the colleagues a while ago saying that, okay, I was asked whether this pedagogical grammar will be going on under review. I said, “Well, it’s going under review at the moment with the elders.”

Gretchen: Right. It’s not necessarily going under peer review by academics, you’re having the true experts, which is the elders, look at it and say, “What do we think? Do we think this is a reasonable reflection of our language?” How is it like for you as a speaker of a different Mayan language to go into a different community? Do you think this makes it complicated for you or interesting?

Pedro: It’s really interesting for me because I always consider this as an opportunity to work with another group of Mayan speakers but also an opportunity to help them because, I mean, as Mayan speakers or as Indigenous speakers, for example, we go through the same situation. For me, it’s really important to consider that. But I also feel like I have built this good relationship with them and to work in this project. But one thing that I would like to mention is that even though I am a Mayan speaker, even though I am from Guatemala, one thing that I have tried to emphasise is like, showing respect for them. Again, they are different cultures. I mean, we’re Mayan, but our way of living is not the same. I think I try to respect that, like, yes, I am from there, but that doesn’t mean I have impulse things.

Gretchen: It doesn’t mean you know everything already.

Pedro: No, no, no, no. I always say this – I am also learning with them. I am helping. We are developing this project. But we are learning together. That’s the approach I take when working on these kinds of projects.

Gretchen: And you’re also coming in with the backing of a big Canadian research institution and this sort of stuff which puts you in a different situation.

Pedro: I think it’s a lot of responsibility. I think one thing that I am learning is that, yes, we have to do language revitalisation, but I think there’s another component that we have to consider that’s about the research aspect of that. One thing that I noticed about what I am doing is working in the infrastructure of the project, building that relationship, working with elders, working with the different activists in the language, for example. I think that’s the first step. Now, we are doing this, but as for research, you asked me, I don’t have much to say, but again, I think building that infrastructure, it takes time. But if I try to think a little bit more, I would say, well, we have some results of this project. I could mention two. One of them is that we have trained some speakers of the language about the teaching method. They are using this method to teach the language. We are about to finish up this pedagogical grammar for the language. I think those can be considered as “results.”

Gretchen: That’s balancing the way that you have to talk to funding agencies and universities and these bodies that care about results that you can report in a list somewhere while also saying, “Okay, but we actually care about the results that the community members care about, which is having more people able to speak the language,” which is not actually what the research institutions are trying to fund. So, there’s lots of different people who have different priorities that you’re trying to balance between.

Pedro: But for me, that’s an opportunity of how to communicate those ideas and how to make that balance. Sure, research will come. Research will grow.

Gretchen: But the relationship –

Pedro: But the question, “Is it easy to start?” It will take a little bit of time. I think one of the things I would like to mention here, a “keyword,” I would say, is to be patient. Sometimes, we want to see really fast.

Gretchen: Results really fast, yeah.

Pedro: It takes time, yeah. That’s one thing that I see. I also see that this project will grow, and I think there will be more students who will be more interested in working in the project. That’s my hope.

Gretchen: I hope so, too. If people wanna know more information about Q’anjob’al or Chuj or any of the other research that’s being done on Mayan languages, is there somewhere where they should start for more information?

Pedro: I think if you are interested to know more about, in this case, the work that I do, I would recommend exploring my personal website. You can go to linguistics, the University of Toronto, and then you will find my personal website.

Gretchen: We’ll link to that from the description as well so people can follow that for more information.

Pedro: Thank you.

Gretchen: If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would that be?

Pedro: That’s a good question. I would like to say the following – when you do linguistics, it’s good to start with something small. It’s good that you start with that something small and then start asking questions that maybe you don’t have answer to that question, but you will find answers to that question. I hope I can connect that or relate that to what I mentioned in the discussion that we had today. Remember, I said that I started studying the verb in Q’anjob’al – and I am not done exploring that. Start with something small. But the other thing is that, yes, as a linguist, for example, or as a researcher, you have your own agenda, but try to reflect a little bit about, also, the community’s agenda and the community’s needs. I think that’s important to have that in mind and also important for you to build a relationship with that community that you are working with.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get redesigned IPA posters, “Not Judging Your Grammar, Just Analysing It” stickers, t-shirts that say, “Etymology isn’t Destiny,” and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. Our guest, Pedro Mateo Pedro, can be found at pedromateopedro.ca. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include an interview about what it's like to transcribe all of the Lingthusiasm episodes as a linguist, using linguistics in the workplace beyond academia, and a very special Lingthusiasmr bonus episode where we read The Harvard Sentences to you [ASMR voice] in a calm, soothing voice. [Normal voice] Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Pedro: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 83 #transcripts #podcasts #child language acquisition #language revitalization #mayan languages

26 notes · View notes