Internal Classification, Linguistic Ecology, and Typological Variation in Central Totonac, an Endangered Mesoamerican Language Family

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Author(s) / Creator(s)
- Beck, David
SSHRC Awarded IG 2018: The project will document languages belonging to the Central Totonac branch of the Totonacan language family, which are in danger of extinction. Languages contain irreplaceable records of a people's knowledge of their natural environment and their cultural, social, and political history. They encode the unique way in which their speakers organize and understand the world, and provide invaluable insights into the cognitive processes of the human mind. As languages disappear, linguists of all specializations lose the typological data we need to develop, test, and validate claims about the universal features of human language, its variability, and its acquisition. Data will be collected in five communities and will include linguistic surveys and comparative word-lists, audio and/or video archives, annotated transcriptions, phylogenetic reconstructions, and ethnographic analysis of social and economic factors underlying language shift.
Date created

2017-10-08
Subjects / Keywords
Type of Item

Research Material
DOI

https://doi.org/10.7939/R3VT1H535