Indigenous Language Dictionaries

Indigenous Language Dictionaries

The Nahuatl Dictionary, a searchable, online database has interfaces in Nahuatl, Spanish, and English plus advanced searching for ethnohistorians and linguists. It incorporates the first ever Nahuatl to Nahuatl dictionary (a project of the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas (IDIEZ) and its affiliated US non-profit, Macehualli Educational Research, both directed by John Sullivan), plus the Analytical Dictionary of Frances Karttunen, the Vocabulario of Fray Alonso de Molina, and thousands of attestations of word usage from manuscripts dating from the 1540s to the 1830s.  The project was funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2009–2013) called “Documenting Endangered Languages.” While many people still speak Nahuatl today (including collaborators on this very project) the language is severely endangered by discrimination against indigenous-language speakers, rural-to-urban migration patterns, and the bombardment of media in Spanish and English. It is our hope that the dictionary will be a resource to native speakers wishing to deepen their understanding of their own language and to people who are learning to speak and/or translate Nahuatl.

We have cloned, emptied, and are beginning to refill the database in  order to make additional indigenous language dictionaries.  These have never had grant funding, and have relied primarily on volunteer labor.  See, for example, the Zapotec Dictionary and the Mixtec Dictionary. We have hope for the P’urhépecha (Tarascan) and Yucatec Mayan dictionaries, too.