A poster designed for the program.
There are currently 7,164 languages worldwide; however, this number is decreasing each year. According to Ethnologue, a research center for language intelligence, about 44% of languages are endangered, and more than 90% of current languages will be extinct by 2050.
But, there is an effort to fight against language extinction. One of these efforts is based at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder).
With a grant from the Office for Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship (PACES), Associate Teaching Professor Rai Farrelly and Assistant Professor Ambrocio Gutiérrez Lorenzo are working together with community members and CU Boulder students to support and sustain efforts to revitalize the use of the variety of Zapotec within Teotitlán del Valle, Mexico.
Beginning with her graduate studies in Utah, Farrelly was involved in efforts to revitalize Shoshone and Goshute through developing materials and training teachers. Farrelly realized not only the importance of language documentation and revitalizations, but also the difficulties involved with such an endeavor. For example, due to the oral tradition of most Indigenous languages, there is often a lack of a written form—and therefore, a lack of written teaching materials. “The pedagogy piece is important,” said Farrelly. “You have to document the language, write the grammar, write the dictionary. And, without a way to teach it and materials through which to deliver it, it’s kind of just a place for linguists to learn about the language.”
Farrelly and Gutiérrez Lorenzo, a Zapotec speaker and community member, are colleagues in the Department of Linguistics at CU Boulder. They joined forces to develop a Global Seminar based in Teotitlán del Valle, where CU Boulder students had a chance to not only learn the variety of Zapotec in the community, but also assist teachers of Zapotec in assembling and creating materials.
Isabelle Altman is one of the master’s students at CU Boulder who attended the 2024 Global Seminar, gaining not only valuable insight into language revitalization in practice but also the importance of collaboration on such a project. “I consider myself to be a documentary and revitalization linguist,” said Altman. “However, I didn’t realize the importance of language learning, pedagogy and curriculum design in a revitalization endeavor. I got to collaborate with students with a variety of specialties, including Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), linguistics and documentation. I believe that this collaboration between different areas allowed this project to be especially strong and effective in our creation of materials and connection with the community around us.”
As a prior research collaborator with Gutiérrez Lorenzo, Altman joined the Global Seminar to expand upon her academic career but found she appreciated the community-engaged approach of the project, stating that not only is it “unique” but also “extremely valuable.” Altman reflected, “By connecting and collaborating with the community in question, decisions can be made that involve everyone, but more importantly the community and its speakers. At the end of the day, the language belongs to its speakers.”
This Global Seminar provided Farrelly with another rich opportunity for community-engaged scholarship, an approach she has long appreciated. “The most important thing about community-engaged scholarship is that it’s driven by the community,” Farrelly explained. “A lot of academics come in with an idea of what they want to do, plow into communities and make decisions, then say ‘Thanks!’ and leave. PACES puts a lot of emphasis on mutual exchange, mutual benefit.”
Language Revitalization, especially the approach taken by Farrelly and Gutiérrez Lorenzo, relies heavily on input from the Teotitlán del Valle community. The community determines its needs and goals, guiding the direction of the project while collaborating with CU Boulder students to create much-needed materials and strategies for teaching the language. The students, in turn, gain valuable skills and a new level of empathy and understanding of Mexico that “feeds into their awareness and understanding of what’s happening right now” in the U.S.
“With the PACES grant, what we’re able to do is hire two graduate students in linguistics to build this online Zapotec resources hub where we’re having three entrance points: one for linguists or people interested in the language, one for the teachers of the language and one for students,” said Farrelly. “So, it’s going to be this really cool repository of materials and language, hopefully audio files and just different resources for Zapotec.”
The online hub has been a great source of collaborative work, both between CU Boulder students from different disciplines and community members within Teotitlán del Valle. Angelica, a collaborator within the Teotitlán community, uses the PACES stipend to continue teaching the Teotitlán variety of Zapotec year-round using the resources within the online hub.
Along with creating colorful posters and books to teach Zapotec, Farrelly, Gutiérrez Lorenzo and their team hope to expand their Zapotec Learning Hub and generate some excitement about the language. On a larger scale, she hopes that the team will create “some model or mechanism that really works with Zapotec” and can encourage other linguists and communities to apply what she has learned for revitalizing other endangered languages around the world.
But why does it matter if some languages are lost?
“Language is such a big part of our identity,” said Farrelly. “What’s encoded in all of those languages is a lot of information—about nature, animals, cures, the history of the world—that will all get lost if we lose the language. We lose the essence of a lot of cultures, of ways of being.”
This summer, Farrelly and Gutiérrez Lorenzo will again lead their Language Revitalization Global Seminar to Teotitlán del Valle, where they will continue to develop materials and teaching approaches to revitalize this specific variety of Zapotec within the community. For more information, visit the Global Seminar page.