#chatino

Gretchen: You took linguistics at school or how did you get from “These are so cool” to “I’m a professor doing this”?

Lina: Well, that’s another story. Linguistics, I think, for the first time, I heard about it when I went to college. I went to UC Berkeley – the University of California at Berkeley – as an undergraduate student. Linguistics wasn’t my thing, but I had a friend who was studying linguistics, and they had to take it for their major – not linguistics itself, but majors like cognitive science or computer science. I, in general, was interested in that. People had to take that to satisfy a major. I had a deaf friend who took a few linguistics courses. The problem was that they said it’s really hard. He actually had taken phonology and for some reason had to do a lot of lab work. He was talking about this and I thought, “Uh, maybe linguistics is the study of, yes, language but for spoken languages only.” That was my first impression.

Gretchen: How do you do phonology with a signed language? Maybe we’re getting off track here.

Lina: Well, yes, I didn’t know because phonology, I thought, was related to sound and no linguist for sign language. Right, I didn’t think there was linguistics of sign language and so I wasn’t sure what to do.

Gretchen: Okay. What happened next?

Lina: My major was comparative literature. I was fascinated with reading books during my whole upbringing, and I thought it was interesting to think about that for grad school. At the same time, I wasn’t sure. I met other grad students in comparative lit and it didn’t seem like they were having fun. Learning more languages is interesting, and that’s fun, but learning enough to become fluent in reading literature and then write papers about it and then give presentations and talks, I thought in the beginning, “Well, yeah, many languages are signed and spoken. Many don’t have written systems or components for them.” If I study only the written system, I think that’s the tradition of literature. If I wanted to study ASL, for example, then how would I do that in comparative lit? Yes, we do have ASL literature, which I can discuss briefly, but I wasn’t really sure what I should do. I dropped the idea of studying that and I thought about something else. 

After college, I met more d/Deaf people and it just so happened I was living in the Bay Area in San Francisco. There’s a diverse group of people, some of whom are d/Deaf migrants. They moved to the United States. They brought their own sign language. I met a lot of these people. I realised as they’re learning American Sign Language, you can realise and see at the same time that they have their own accents as their first language from whatever home country they are from and then learning American Sign Language. I can understand the concept of accent in sign language. Hearing people talk about accents from other countries – parallel idea.

Gretchen: If someone’s first language was British Sign Language or French Sign Language or something, then they would have a BSL or FSL accent in ASL?

Lina: Yes, yes. And I could see that. BSL – British Sign Language – and LSQ, did you say or…?

Gretchen: Well, French Sign Language or LSQ, which is the Quebec Sign Language – Langue des signes Québécoise.

Lina: Yes, yes, LSQ is special in its own right because the language emerged from LSF and ASL because it has regional contact. But there’s history to that.

Gretchen: I feel like I should know more about LSQ because I live in Montreal, but I don’t actually know anything about it.

Lina: It’s an interesting story because ASL is from Old French Sign Language. Many sign languages of the world tend to – bring through deaf schools. That’s how the language is passed on. That happened with LSQ and ASL. LSQ – well, let me hold that story.

Gretchen: Okay, okay, okay. We’ll get that later. We’re still in your life story. You met a bunch of d/Deaf friends. They spoke different sign languages. You were like “They have accents! This is so cool. I’m gonna study this.”

Lina: Yeah, pretty much. I just based my everyday life in socialising with various d/Deaf people and it was exciting. I was fascinated with their accent and, at the same time, the use of everyday language. I was fascinated with their structure, the function of the language, how people talked about various things in everyday life, and how they would tell stories, the poetry, how they expressed complex ideas, just the possibility of talking about anything in sign language. I wanted to study that. I thought, “Well, what can I do?” As I mentioned, I’m a serious nerd. I read a lot – total bookworm. I rolled up my sleeves and I looked for a book to see if there’s anything written about sign language – anything about ASL or otherwise. I found one book in fact – one book. I think it was called – I forget the exact title – it was about ASL and linguistics.

Gretchen: We can link to it in the show notes.

Lina: Oh, okay. That would be great. That’s how I found my PhD advisor because I read – and often all the linguistics books refer to other people’s work and what have you. I was reading and there was one chapter that talked about a person and how ASL marks first person singular and non-first person – second or third person, “you” or “she” or “he.” It just so happened they mentioned my PhD advisor Richard Meier, referring to his work on person that he has done. I thought, “This is very interesting” – his worked fascinated me – “maybe I should apply for the University of Texas in Austin and work with him.” I knew that he had also researched the acquisition of sign language for many years as well. 

I thought, “Hmm, that’s fascinating. I could learn about acquisition. I could learn about sign language.” My whole life I was fascinated with how d/Deaf people learn sign language because most of us, including me, we’re born to parents who are hearing, don’t sign, and we learn sign language, then, through meeting other d/Deaf children in school or social events, and got lucky that I met someone who had d/Deaf parents. I was a child when I met my first d/Deaf family, so to speak. I thought, “Wow! Well, yeah, it’s like hearing children. They learn language from their parents and then they actually just are d/Deaf.” It’s a rarity in our community.

Gretchen: You got interested in how d/Deaf kids learn sign language as kids versus with other kids around the same age – when they learn it from their parents or from other kids?

Lina: Yes, exactly.

Gretchen: Was that your research topic in grad school?

Lina: Yes, that was my enthusiasm in getting into grad school. I didn’t quite understand what the research meant. I thought, “Oh, it’d be fun to learn more.” So, I applied at Austin. I didn’t realise that grad school was a serious thing – a serious endeavour for sure. You literally started your career when you applied for grad school. Luckily, Richard accepted me. Then, that began my journey into research, I guess.

Gretchen: What did you end up doing your dissertation on?

Lina: Well, I thought I was going to research how d/Deaf children learn ASL in general terms. It was pretty vague at that time. Then, I took Richard’s class on introduction to linguistics of sign language. They talked about various sign languages and the emergence all over the world, and various sign languages that have popped up. We talked about Nicaraguan Sign Language. Many people know about that because it’s often referred to and cited in publications, perhaps on radio, and some in film. I was fascinated with the concept of how deaf children can make up their own language in a school, for example, at least in that context. Also, I had heard about other sign languages like ABSL, which is the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which is a very small area with a number of deaf people in Israel. The concept of language emergence not in a school per se –

Gretchen: The village sign languages?

Lina: Yes, yes, exactly, yes, like in a family.

Gretchen: There’s a really nice video on YouTube about Nicaraguan Sign Language, which we can also link to if people want the whole story on that.

Lina: Okay!

Gretchen: Yeah, you were looking at all these different kinds of sign languages emerging, and this turned into – I haven’t actually read your dissertation, I’m sorry.

Lina: Oh, no, no, no, it’s totally fine. Please, don’t, actually.

Gretchen: Many people say this.

Lina: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. I was thinking, “Well, there’s so many interesting topics that I could research. How do I begin? Where do I start?” I didn’t realise that to be in the right place at the right time and meet the right person could definitely shape my future. I was thinking about my work and, obviously, Richard wasn’t working on Nicaraguan Sign Language at the time, so I thought, “Hmm” – well, my department was – well, I’m sorry – my old department. I have to back up.

Gretchen: Right, because you’re at UCSB now.

Lina: Exactly. It’s hard. My department chair told me, “Stop saying your ‘PhD advisor.’ He’s not yours anymore.”

Gretchen: Because you’re all grown up.

Lina: Exactly.

Gretchen: You met Hilaria Cruz, who we did another interview with for Lingthusiasm. And you also started working on Chatino Sign Language or the one that’s spoken in her community.

Lina: Yes, that’s correct. The University of Texas in Austin has a great program for training indigenous scholars. It just so happened that I met a friend, Hilaria Cruz, who was a few years ahead of me in the program. She’d written her name in IPA on the board. I thought, “Oh, interesting.” Through her I met her sister [Emiliana Cruz], who was also a PhD student at the time in anthropology. Somehow, I was learning about their life story and we got to know each other. We became friends, I guess. It just kinda happened. We’d see each other every once in a while. 

Then, the three of us were curious about one another because we’re all very different. They’re from a small community in Oaxaca, Mexico. I’m from Southern California. And I’m Deaf. It’s kind of a strange coincidence that we met. They seemed to be fascinated with seeing a d/Deaf person who studies sign language in the linguistics department. That was a new concept, I guess – a novel concept for many people in general at the time. Perhaps more for them because they have several deaf people in their family who clearly lead a different life than mine. They told me about some deaf people, and I asked them questions. But they couldn’t respond, and they said, “We don’t know. You’ll just have to come and visit and meet our family and see what it’s like.”

Gretchen: That’s so cute! I love that.

Lina: Yeah. That kind of conversation led to one thing, and it was the first opportunity that I thought – well, I’d never thought that I could fly to another country like Mexico and go in a van, afar, and travel about eight hours in a van to – maybe it was longer – and go a whole-day trip to the village. I wasn’t really sure, could I go? Could I do the work? I don’t wanna be one of those linguists who just shows up and says, “Hi! I’m here! I’m ready to study you.” We had that conversation. Hilaria and I talked about going to the village. Then, I went, and I continued to go. 

After a while, I felt ready to begin to work. That’s when the visits began. I watched Hilaria and how she worked with them. She recorded them speaking the language from the elders in the village, especially for the new year. It was a fun activity. They had some celebrations. The hours just continued all day and all night. It was really fun to meet some deaf people there. 

That led me to meet other deaf people in the village. It wasn’t just deaf people; it was the whole life of Chatino people and that experience of socialising with people and how they accepted and thought about deaf people. It was very natural. Deaf people don’t have access to education there. There’s no support for a use of sign language in schools – in the local schools – so maybe Hilaria may have mentioned that the schools only use Spanish as the language of formal instruction. That’s another problem on top of those who are deaf.

Gretchen: But they communicate with each other and with their family and friends up in the village?

Lina: Mostly just in the family. That’s another thing I learned but it took me a while to figure this out – years, in fact – that, well, who people talk with is really intentional. Anyone does not speak with everyone. It was interesting. Part of their social life is that everyone is organised within the family and the extended family. Everyone who is in the family, they have kinship. They are in this family unit. It’s like a speech community, when you go into and enter a speech community, you have a relationship with one another – some good, some bad, and some strongly political, different than my life here based on the type of relationship that we have in some ways. It’s very similar in that way for the Chatino people. For deaf people, their relationships in the village are strongly associated with family and kinship. That’s who they communicate with mostly. I was fascinated to see how they made up signs in order to communicate and to get what they needed for everyday life. It’s a little bit different than mine. I work within linguistics all the time. I use very abstract, sophisticated terminologies at times with my colleagues and my collaborators versus using language to make sure that people understand. With most Chatinos, they have their own language. They talk about what is relevant in their life. That was fascinating and that became my dissertation topic after a while, eventually.

Gretchen: You were figuring out what kinds of signs people use there, how the social structure fits into that, and all this different stuff?

Lina: Yes, exactly. The most fascinating part was how languages emerges there during interaction. That’s my focus – how it happened in a place that is not a school, not an educational system, it’s deaf and hearing people and family members in a group.

Gretchen: Because hearing people also use these signs as well?

Lina: Yes. If they socialise with deaf people mostly, yes. If they live with them, then they definitely do communicate with them – or if they work with deaf people.

Gretchen: Did you find that it was like the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language where they have a kind of village sign language because there’s a high proportion of deafness and they have this kind of village sign language? Or is it a different thing from that?

Lina: Well, it is different for many reasons. I think the community where ABSL emerged is special because it is a large proportion. It’s a village with a large number of deaf people who have been born there and have been in the same family – so a clan, if you will. People in the community of 3000+ people, there’s no other community like that that has ever been discovered. It’s quite special in that fact. Where I work is a very small number of people, maybe 10 deaf people in total, I think. That’s a big comparison to the Bedouin village sign language. Again, people that I study are mostly related. If you can analyse the family and look at the kinship and the relationships, then they are all socialising together every day. Deaf people in the family mostly have hearing people. They may have some relatives or other siblings. It’s not like there are deaf people like there are the Bedouin sign language where there are masses of deaf people within families.

Gretchen: Right, okay.

Lina: That means that, I guess, if you look at Chatino Sign Language or what I – in academia you need to name things as separate languages. It’s not really called “Chatino Sign language,” but people who use the language don’t have an official name for the language. They say, “My language” or “We’re just talking.” ABSL and Chatino Sign Language are quite different. Chatino Sign Language is much younger. The structure looks very different. They depend on the family that they socialise with. At the same time, we have overlap with family signs. Everyone knows one another. Language is common. The family signs feed one another if you can say that. The community has conventional gestures that kinda feed the family signs as well. Many things are happening at the same time.

Gretchen: Is it kind of like the home sign system that was at the beginning of Nicaraguan Sign Language – when Nicaragua established the first school for the deaf and all the people came from different villages and saw they each had their own home signs, and then they came in and developed Nicaraguan Sign Language because of the school?

Lina: That’s one way of looking at it, yes. My feeling is that home signs – what psychologists and linguists call “signs” of one deaf child in a family that they make up in the home – I think there’s a lot more diversity to how home signs emerge because, again, it depends on the interaction, whether you have one deaf child, or you have several deaf children, or deaf plus hearing interacting with one another using sign language.

Gretchen: This one’s different because they have 10 deaf people, and they’re all interacting with each other, and so they can feed back into each other?

Lina: Well, yes and no. They don’t identify as deaf – culturally Deaf. It’s not a common [=universal] belief. I’m not saying that it means that they don’t have an identity. It just means they identify themselves as a family member first. Then, they identify as a member of their community second. Everyone recognises that they are different from other indigenous people who are not Chatino because of how they dress, the type of rituals that they perform in their daily life, etc.

Gretchen: That’s really interesting.

Lina: Also, I guess, to recognise the difference between them and other Chatinos within in the area. Deaf people do interact with their families, who are related. They visit one another. They will meet and talk, or they’ll go to the same family events, parties, community events, etc. If their family isn’t connected, then they have less chance of meeting another deaf person if they’re not in the family. If you have two deaf people meet at random on the street, they may say “hello” if anything.

Gretchen: Because you don’t talk to people outside the family?

Lina: They may not talk to one another. I’m sorry, say that again.

Gretchen: Because they don’t talk to people outside the family or there’s more restrictions on that?

Lina: I think it’s because maybe they don’t like each other.

Gretchen: Okay. Okay. That’s fair. That’s really neat. Since your dissertation, you’ve also kept going back to this community, were there this summer, and then you’re still doing more projects?

Lina: Yes, for my dissertation I did focus on – I have to remember; that was a long time ago – yes, eight girls – four deaf, four hearing – all girls, it just so happened. Of the eight, they are among five families, two types of groups that I study – deaf children with hearing parents and hearing children with one deaf parent. The communities don’t have deaf families. They don’t have two deaf parents with deaf children. They don’t have anything like that. That’s very rare in the world in general, even rare in ABSL, in that community. I studied how they interact and how the languages emerge, of sign language, how it happened. That was mostly my dissertation. I did go several summers, stayed one year at one time, and that was the only way for me to take full advantage of being immersed in the community and within the sign family. I went in each family. I stayed for a bit. I slept there. I ate with them. I visited with them. Then, I went to one of the ranches that they have and just did the daily activities and daily life with them. Then, I had to finish my dissertation. That took a while.

Gretchen: Yeah. You’ve also done some work on ASL as well, right?

Lina: Yes, after I graduated, I got a post-doc for two years at UC San Diego. I had an opportunity to work with Carol Padden, who is well-known for her work on ABSL and ASL. At that time, I took advantage of the opportunity to work on ASL. Let me back up. I have worked with Richard on ASL, focusing on verbs. I love verbs. It’s one of my favourite things. As a postdoc, I thought that was a wonderful opportunity to expand my research on ASL to collaborate with Carol Padden to compare Chatino Sign Language with ABSL, the use of space for grammar as a specific unit of study – for a unit of analysis. 

ASL specifically has something that I’ve noticed, which is very interesting, about things on the internet. More d/Deaf people are filming themselves using sign language and then posting it on Facebook, YouTube, and various social media sites. It seems to be exploding recently. People will film themselves in the car. They have privacy. They can talk, and post, and people watch, and then they film themselves sometimes in responding. You can see a huge explosion with signing videos.

Gretchen: Because you can study these videos?

Lina: Yes, yes. The data is there! I can see data before my eyes. It’s in action. I never thought for a moment that there could be another data given on the internet. It’s right there.

Gretchen: You don’t have to go out with a camera and film yourself.

Lina: Exactly. It’s a perfect point if you think about it. You can’t go into a library and look for grammar. You have to look for d/Deaf people. One challenge that is unique to sign language, I think, is to look for d/Deaf signers out there in general. For some researchers, they bring d/Deaf people into the lab and they film them signing. But for me, I don’t do that. 

As a Deaf signer, I feel that language happens in the natural when you’re communicating and interacting with people. It’s a hard role for me because when I go to see my friends, or go to a deaf event or a conference, and I see sign language research and people getting together to talk about things, they’re not just going up – I can’t bring a camera and say, “Here I am,” and film. I have to keep these things in the back of my mind. Interesting things do occur there. It’s a huge dilemma for me because I don’t want to bring d/Deaf people into a lab artificially and film them. I find what they do in a lab is not natural.

Gretchen: You have the observer’s paradox. Once you start observing something or filming it, that it changes.

Lina: Exactly. That’s an ongoing problem. I think everyone knows that it becomes – people are aware that they’re in a lab being videotaped. Deaf people are very well-adapted to being able to meet researchers or hearing signers and – what do you want from me? What can I do to accommodate you? How can I answer this question? 

It’s a common problem with some of my hearing friends who look at me as a signer with other d/Deaf friends. They say, “You don’t sign that way with me, as a Deaf person. Why are you signing that way?” I say, “Oh, I didn’t mean to. It’s not intentional. I code switch.” For hearing people, you change how you speak. I think some hearing people do that too. It’s not only a second language user thing. I think it’s just you have academic register, you have typical, everyday conversation and chat.

Gretchen: This is kind of like the classic sociolinguistic – you go into a department store and you ask someone, “Where is the shoe section?” You’re gonna write that down rather than bring them into the lab and say, “Excuse me, can you tell me where is the shoe section?” It’s gonna be a very different response.

Lina: Yes. Back to the internet data – and I thought, as I’m watching films, “This is a wonderful opportunity to research because d/Deaf people are filming themselves.” It’s very powerful.

Gretchen: They’re filming themselves for other d/Deaf people?

Lina: Exactly. I think the concept of monologues in how they film themselves is not exactly how I would describe the film I’m watching because they’re signing, and they’re talking, and they’re responding to what someone else has said. It’s a little bit different than a monologue. The point, I thought, when looking at this data is that I could use videos to analyse. I could look at them and what they’re saying, and they could pick whatever they wanted to say and do their own video. At the same time, they’re signing naturally and spontaneous.

Gretchen: This was the focus of your talk at the Five-Minute Linguist at the LSA last year, which was really good. I really enjoyed that.

Lina: Exactly. You remember that? I’m embarrassed about what happened because the first video that I showed didn’t quite work out.

Gretchen: You recovered really well. That’s the thing with live events. Yeah, we can link to the video of that, which is also online, if people wanna see what you found when you looked at YouTube and how people sign on YouTube.

Lina: Yes, what I talked about in the Five-Minute Linguist talk was showing how the video has evidence of how one verb “to look at” changes the meaning. You can see the different functions and the different form. That is what I found from watching all these videos. That verb and how to analyse it has kept me busy. I think the internet data helped me understand it much better because it truly represents language in the d/Deaf community.

Gretchen: I mean, it’s so cool because this is what I like about internet data as well. You can look for a new word on Twitter or something and like, “Look! There’s real people using it.” You don’t have to wait until it gets entered into a dictionary or until some lexicographer finally notices it and does it. It’s just right there – people using it.

Lina: Yes, exactly. It’s also a good opportunity to see what signs d/Deaf people are inventing or how they’re playing with signs, nuances, talking with deaf friends about certain things that they’ve seen on Facebook, or teaching me new signs, new concepts. I think that that is how language spreads and changes because it’s true for spoken language as well. Languages change – and written too.

Gretchen: It’s great to actually have high-quality video that people can send back and forth to each other rather than TTY or something.

Lina: Yes. I’m impressed that you know what “TTY” means and used it effortlessly.

Gretchen: Haha I was like, wait, did I get that acronym right?

Lina: Yeah, thinking about my first quarter – I just finished my first quarter at UC Santa Barbara – one undergraduate student who was learning about ASL, I suggested that they could watch a DVD. They said, “Oh, can I watch it online?” And I thought, “Yeah, okay. DVDs are old now.” Talking about VHS – what’s that? I mentioned VHS and I thought, “Oh, what is VHS – oh, never mind, never mind, never mind.”

Gretchen: Imagine shipping VHS to each other to communicate in video. The internet’s a lot easier.

Lina: Yeah. Back then, d/Deaf people had to communicate through TTY. The problem with TTY is that it looks like a small typewriter. You have one line that has the words and then you wait for the person to say, “Go ahead.” Then, when they’re done, it’s your turn, and you type back. They do have – had – paper, a little printout that you could read. I remember one common joke is sometimes you read it, and you didn’t understand, and then you would wait until you met the person again, and then you’d show them the paper and say, “What did you say here? What does that mean? Tell me. Sign it to me.” Then, they’d do it and then it’d be totally clear because you’re like, “What does this mean?”

Gretchen: It’s like really bad texting.

Lina: I think that’s a good parallel, yes. Then, the internet emerged, and texting is so different now – and easy. We still can text, and then now we can add video texting. We can add emojis.

Gretchen: Gifs.

Lina: Yes, exactly. Oh, gifs – love my animated gifs.

Gretchen: I noticed you use a lot of gifs on Twitter.

Lina: Yeah. Well, people do, too.

Gretchen: Oh yeah, everyone does.

Lina: I think what’s fascinating is that people sometimes say, “How do I interpret that gif?” So, we talk about it. It’s the same thing with emojis because I noticed that the iPhone is adding new emojis all the time. I send something and my friend, regardless of hearing or d/Deaf, would look at it and go “What’s that? Are you cold or what? What does that mean?”

Gretchen: It’s like TTY, you’ll have to wait till you see them in order to find out.

Lina: Yeah. Yeah. The availability of the video – or rather for that kind of thing through technology – is something that we cherish. We can communicate so easily now. If we can’t physically meet a person face to face, then it’s much easier. Back then, we had to physically get together to communicate with one another.

Gretchen: It’s so great.

Lina: Yeah. The internet allows me to possibly research on a new level. I still love interacting with d/Deaf people in person. But it allows my research to be conducted easier. I don’t have to bother d/Deaf people in their daily life, ask them to come to the lab, and then film them and feel like they’re staring at me or the camera. It’s artificial. At the same time, I do tell people, “Oh, I love your video that I saw online. Do you mind if I use it?” Sometimes, they’re like “Oh, yes! Thank you. You like my video? That’s so exciting,” and they feel really good about themselves.

Gretchen: That’s so good. It’s so exciting to get to do this episode as a video because we had a number of requests to say, “Can you do something about signed languages?” We didn’t wanna do that in audio. That’s weird. I’m really happy that you were able to join us. I think that pretty much brings us to the end of where we’re going, but if there was one thing you could leave people knowing about linguistics or about signed languages or anything you work on, what would that be?

Lina: Wow. I have so many messages. Let me pick one. Well, it is 2019. I think the world is changing. Deaf children have, in some ways, more opportunities than they did before. Here, at least in the United States, deaf children can go to any school. We have interpreters available to them. They can also learn to speak and hear with technology sometimes, more than they used to in the past. I wrote a book chapter about that.

Gretchen: We’ll link to it.

Lina: Yeah. The opportunity for d/Deaf children to learn with cochlear implants, to speak and listen, is fine. I don’t think it means that that should happen to preclude learning sign language because deaf people and the deaf community want to tell the world we are not opposed to the concept of deaf children learning to speak or to use any residual hearing. We love bilingualism. We love bimodal people who can write, who can sign, who can talk. The more communication, the better! 

But to learn sign language is vital. There is no harm in learning sign language as a child. One argument that I’ve heard time and time again is people in the world don’t sign. They say, “What should we learn for?” You can make the same argument for many spoken languages that are not around the world. Why learn to speak Chatino? Well, if you think about it, the argument breaks down so easily because at no point will learning multiple language harm anyone. You can apply that to sign language. Maybe you don’t think about it in that view, but if you think about it as a language that we can claim as ours and make it special to us as deaf people, emergent sign languages represent a beautiful facet of biodiversity. 

I love signing because it’s fun, but I feel that it’s something special about me. It represents who I am. I want people to understand that it’s not about the language that they need to know for living in the world or travelling to a specific society, but it represents who you are. You can decide to use it or not. I think for deaf children at large, they should have the opportunity to learn sign language. Then, it’s up to them whether they use it or not. When you interview people about spoken language of various different ones – a beautiful IPA scarf, I love. I had it. And weird symbols. It’s just beautiful. But I would ask the audience to think for a moment what makes language a language that’s not related to sound or sign. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a very, very long time.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com or check out the show notes below. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. 

I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. You can follow our guest Lina Hou on Twitter @Linasigns. 

To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can rate us on iTunes or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio and video producer is Claire Gawne, and our editorial producers are Emily Gref, A. E. Prevost, and Sarah Dopierala, our music is by The Triangles. Special thanks to the Linguistic Society of America for providing a room for this interview, Daniel Midgley for filming, and Mala Poe for interpreting. Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

Gretchen: Wow.

Hilaria: At the time, there was just one school in that little town, just one elementary school for – I would say, I'm just guessing, 5,000 people. There were many children. There were some children that went to school in the morning. There were some children that were going to school in the evening. Since I did not know that much Spanish, my father took me there and introduced me to this class. The teacher was nice, and then I – just as a warm-up, he let me go there for a few mornings. I would just go, just for a few hours.

Gretchen: How old were you?

Hilaria: I think that I was about seven.

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Hilaria: I would just hang out for a few hours, and I would just take off and go back to the boarding house, where my parents were also staying with us. And then the teacher says, “Oh, this is fine. But I think that you are ready to begin your regular classes now. So you are going to come to school from 2:00 to 6:00.” Then I began to get really sad, because I did not want to go to school because I used to get bored, just to sit down there and just not understand what the teacher says. Then I began to go to these evening classes, and I was not happy. So then I decided that I want to go back to the morning class, because it was the same teacher teaching first grade in the morning and then in the evening. I will go back, and he will welcome me. “Aha, yes, come in.” I will go for two, three hours in the morning, as much as I wanted. Then, I will go back again, back home, and, to me – that was the happy medium for me. At some point, then, he stopped me, and he says, “No, no, no, no. You cannot set up your own time. You must come back here, to school.” So I –

Gretchen: You go to school, you play the rules.

Hilaria: Yes. To me school was just horrible. But I guess I persisted, and I got really bored, and I guess I passed, and then I – when we got to sixth grade there was – I guess in that school it was only a middle school, but, actually, my family and I were not happy in that town because that was the first place where I encountered racism against Native people. Because in my community, I was just a member of society, right? But when we got to school, kids began to pinch me, and they will call me “india” and things like that. So I will come back to my father and say, “Why is it that these kids are saying this to me? Why is it that they are pinching me and pounding me?” Because I just did not understand.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Hilaria: Then my father would say, “But you know, every time they tell you that, just be proud of yourself.” But how can a kid to be proud of – how can you be proud if somebody is stopping you, right? That was my experience in that town. It was like a frontier town. There was a lot of racism towards the Chatino people, who live in the outskirts of that town. So then I told my father and my siblings too, “You know what? We're not happy in this town.” Then he told us, “Well, I understand that you're not happy. Let's go to the city.” We went to the city. And there was a more cosmopolitan – we lived in a small area of the city where there were a lot of migrants from indigenous communities, so it was better. I continued my education. My father and I talked, and he encouraged me to continue college because he told me that in college, it'll be a lot of fun. That in college, I will be able to talk to other people, and meet a lot of people, so I was excited about going to college. I continued my education because I wanted to meet interesting people in college. That was the whole goal.

Gretchen: It’s a good goal. I like that goal.

Hilaria: I wanted to have interesting conversations, meet interesting people in college.

Gretchen: Yeah. That's great. I like that.

Hilaria: I think that my father was really smart for doing that.

Gretchen: He knew you very well.

Hilaria: Yeah, I think so. So my goal was to get to college, and have wonderful conversations, and meet interesting people.

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Hilaria: I continued going to college. Then, in 1991, I came to the United States. I began to hear conversations about linguists working with Native American languages, reviving these moribund languages, and then I began to think, “You know what? Maybe linguists will be able to help me create an alphabet for the Chatino language.” Because I was very curious about how to represent the Chatino languages, but the only thing that I was familiar with was the Spanish alphabet.

Gretchen: Right.

Hilaria: But since these languages come from such different linguistic families, Spanish does not have all of the symbols to be able to represent a tonal language, let's say like Chatino. We would try to write it down, but when it came time to read it, we could not read it.

Gretchen: It’s kind of unsatisfying.

Hilaria: So there was something missing there. I began to think, “You know what? This sounds very interesting. I think that linguists could help me maybe find a way to write the Chatino language.” I began to write to different linguists. I would write them letters and say, “Yes. Could you please help me develop an alphabet for my language?”

Gretchen: And this is 1991, so you're writing letters.

Hilaria: Ah, well it was –

Gretchen: Or emails maybe?

Hilaria: – letter. It was letter. I was writing emails around 2000, or something like that. It wasn’t in 1991. So I began to write these letters in 2000. My sister, Emiliana, also was on the same path. It was interesting because my sister Emiliana – I would talk about all these things, and I said that I was the first one, but, quietly, she had the same idea. She was more proactive. Well, we were both working on our own ends.

Gretchen: Oh, interesting.

Hilaria: Yeah. So Emiliana was in Oaxaca City then. She had a little coffee shop down there. And there walks in this American guy, whose name is Joel Sherzer. The professor Joel Sherzer, he used to teach at the University of Texas in the anthropology department. Joel Sherzer is a wonderful, very friendly guy. Joel Sherzer began to strike up a conversation with Emiliana, and then Joel asked Emiliana, “Tell me about you. What are you interested in?” 

So then Emiliana says, “Well, you know what? I would love to be able to study my language.” And Joel says, “Well, that sounds very interesting. Tell me more about it because we at the University of Texas are very interested in working with native speakers of Mexico. Actually, we're creating a program. Why don't you come and visit us –

Gretchen: Oh my god.

Hilaria: – at the University of Texas?” So Emiliana went to Texas. She joined the anthropology department at the University of Texas. Emiliana began her program at the University of Texas, and we were just all very excited because then we met Anthony Woodbury, who was very interested in working with us with Chatino. And then Emiliana says, “Well, you know, in our studies of Chatino we need linguists. I think that you should join the linguistics department.”

Gretchen: So she recruited you to do the 'stics part?

Hilaria: Yeah! So then I say, “Sure! Yeah, I would love to do that.”

Gretchen: Okay. Is she your older sister?

Hilaria: She’s younger.

Gretchen: Oh, wow!

Hilaria: Well, she always tells me what to do. So that is how I joined the linguistics department. I was doing fieldwork with them. I was not a linguistics student or anything like that. I was just like – I accompanied them because I was just so excited they were studying Chatino, and this is something that I always wanted to do. So I began to do fieldwork. I pay my own way, and I just wait over there.

Gretchen: Oh my god. So you were like the consultant? They were asking you questions about Chatino?

Hilaria: No, no, no, no.

Gretchen: You were just doing it with them for fun?

Hilaria: I was just doing it for fun. No, but they also did – and this was in the summer of 2003 – they did fieldwork. I mean, Emiliana was in school. I was not. I was just like a labourer, someone who was so excited about this, you know? Because this was always what I wanted to do, right? I was just so excited about it. So Emiliana told me, “Hey, we're going to go down there, and we're going to do fieldwork.” And I said, “I’ll come.” I pay my own way. I went there. 

Since Emiliana had placed this idea of me that I needed to study linguistics, then I asked Tony, “Hey, do you think that I could join the Linguistics Department?” And then he says to me, “Well, you're going to have to apply, but if you're ready to work hard, we might accept you.”

Gretchen: Did you speak English at this point?

Hilaria: Yes, I did.

Gretchen: Oh, okay.

Hilaria: So that's how I began to study linguistics.

Gretchen: Oh, that's cool. So then you became a grad student at University of Texas.

Hilaria: This is how I began a graduate [degree] in linguistics at the University of Texas in Austin.

Gretchen: Oh, cool. That's really neat. And then you wrote a dissertation about Chatino and learned a lot of stuff, including how to write it?

Hilaria: Yeah. So one of the things that I wanted to do was to describe the poetics of Chatino where, at the time, I would call it poetics. One of the things that I grew up with, and what Joel Sherzer called verbal art, is what he calls it.

Gretchen: Speech...

Hilaria: He wrote a book on speech play and verbal art. This is the title of a book that Sherzer wrote, but basically he used to call it verbal art.

Gretchen: Verbal art. Oh, yeah.

Hilaria: So what he meant by verbal art is just to take into account the different types of speech styles that exist in one community. And one of the things that I saw in growing up in San Juan Quiahije is that there are so many different types of discourse. We have ceremonial discourse. We have political discourse. We have dialogues, you know, exchanges. I wanted to record some of those discourses because some of those – so what gets transmitted in many of those discourses is the need to preserve tradition. For example, there's always a pair of lines that the orator says. This is our tradition. This is what the elders left for us since the foundation of the community, since the foundation of the mountains, and to leave this tradition will be seen as bad. So as a Chatino speaker, every time I hear these ceremonial speeches, they resonate with me a lot. So I wanted to record us. The first assignment that I had in the first moment when I was in graduate school was I proposed to record political speech. I went back to my community. I recorded political speech, and the change in the authority. I did my master's thesis on that. And then for my dissertation, I did an ethnography of speech. I described the different patterns and structures –

Gretchen: Oh, like all the different genres?

Hilaria: The different genres. And it was describing the ecosystem of the different styles –

Gretchen: Oh, that’s interesting!

Hilaria: – of speech in the community. And I worked with very gifted and talented speakers. This is something that I really wanted to do, and it was a lot of work, but it was, I think, very important work. So I have the basis now to be able to continue that kind of work for other people to do the same.

Gretchen: Yeah. So we can we can link to your dissertation. But that's also how you got into, “Oh my gosh, it's really hard to work with audio data.”

Hilaria: That is right! Because it was hard for two reasons to be able to transcribe speech. I was, of course, a native speaker of the language so I knew what they were saying, but the problem was, when it was time to commit this language onto paper, that I was just a beginning writer. I mean, we were just in stages of developing the alphabet for the language, and then also learning linguistics. And then Anthony would worry. He is very meticulous at what he does, so he will say, “Well, what is the alphabet that you want to use?” There were like two or three choices of alphabet, so if you're going to choose one, you're going to have to be consistent. I was just beginning.

Gretchen: That is so hard for a beginner too.

Hilaria: It was just – it was tough. But another thing that I noticed was that it was just very time-consuming to be able to be transcribing these texts. This is something that I began to realise when I began to transcribe this text. In my dissertation, I offer transcriptions of five to six ceremonial texts. All of these are semi-long texts.

Gretchen: You mean long speeches?

Hilaria: Yeah, these are long speeches, and different genres.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because I know when we're doing – for the podcast, we make transcriptions for the podcast. We put the audio onto YouTube, actually, and we use YouTube's automatic speech recognition to create the first draft of the transcript. And then we have a person who goes in and corrects it because there’re all these corrections you need to make. For one thing, YouTube never recognises the name of the podcast, Lingthusiasm, because it's not a real word.

Hilaria: Yeah.

Gretchen: And so it gives us these crazy things about, like, “link Suzy azzam.” Like, who is Suzy? Why is she here? But we're lucky because we have automatic –

Hilaria: You’re lucky!

Gretchen: – transcripts.

Hilaria: At least! At least you have – this is news to me. This is the first time I heard the process by which you do transcription.

Gretchen: But it still takes hours, and we're still paying a human to do hours of detailed work making the transcripts, even though we cut out half of it by having an automatic thing create the first draft that that person can then fix.

Hilaria: That is so interesting. I wish I had a tool like that for Chatino, you know? At least something that could help me – just to give me a little help so I won't get carpal tunnel.

Gretchen: My gosh! Yeah, I bet. And it's probably hard for you to hire Chatino-speaking research assistants here in the US because I don't imagine there are a lot of them.

Hilaria: Well, it's not only that, but since in Mexico, as part of the creation of the nation state, their policy has been to integrate indigenous people into this national language, which is Spanish. So then when students go to school, the language of instruction is Spanish.

Gretchen: Right.

Hilaria: They don't know how to read and write in Chatino.

Gretchen: So even if they're speaking Chatino, you have to teach them how to read and write first?

Hilaria: Yes, that's right. If they can be of, you know, help.

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. And that's part of what you're doing this weekend?

Hilaria: That is right, yes. So then what happened, we continued to do research at the University of Texas, and we developed a very strong program of Chatino studies there. We used to call ourselves the Chatino Gang. There have been like eight dissertations on different Chatino languages that came out of the University of Texas from one or two very sporadic works in Chatino. There were like eight very in-depth studies. And one of those works was by Lynn Hou and Kate Mesh. They were studying sign language and gesture. Lynn Hou is a signer herself, and she will use transcribers in any spoken language, whether it’s English, Spanish, or Chatino.

Gretchen: Right.

Hilaria: So she was doing her dissertation on language acquisition in socialisation of deaf children in San Quiahije, in my community. She asked me to transcribe the audio interviews that she was doing with the families. And these were really lengthy interviews. But then I took that very seriously because, like I said, I'm Lynn's ears, and I have to do this transcription really faithfully so she can get access to this language. So in taking that work really seriously to allow her access, I began to do the transcription. But then, at that point, it became to me much more important to be able to have some tool that could help me because it was just a lot of work. So then I made a comment on Facebook, “Hey, you know what? I see that automatic speech recognition, it's just very developed in English and all of these languages, how can we get a tool to be able to transcribe this text in Chatino?” I really don’t care. I would love to just have a tool that says things in Chatino because they were repeating these things, “cha, cha,” all the time, and it was just like, “Oh my god. I just want to have something that could at least recognize a few words so that I don't have to type all of these words.”

Gretchen: I mean, because the estimates that I've seen for how long it takes to do a transcript are like one hour of transcriber work for one minute of audio.

Hilaria: Yes.

Gretchen: And that's the kind of work – so if someone has an hour of audio data, that's 60 hours of work to try to transcribe that one hour.

Hilaria: That's right. No.

Gretchen: Which is ridiculous!

Hilaria: Yeah, it’s very labourious. So then I began to ask people. In talking with some linguists, they will say, “Well, it's very difficult to do speech recognition in small languages,” because the models such as forced alignment, which is a model that they had been using at the time, needed hundreds if not thousands of hours of text, and we did not have that.

Gretchen: That’s the whole point of it being a small language, you don't have those kinds of resources.

Hilaria: Yes. So then I began to think, “Well, how can we make it – how can we speakers of minority languages make it, or facilitate, or invite these people who are doing this automatic speech recognition research to be able to do collaborations and to help us create tools?” So then I went to several meetings, and I met the people who ran Linguist List, Damir Cavar and Gosia Cavar. It seems like they have some interest in doing ASR, and it seems like when I talked to them, and I told them about the problem, that they said, “Oh yes, I think that this could be possible.” It seems like it wasn't a challenge for them. They invited me to IU, Indiana University, and one of the interesting things that we did with Damir and Gosia there, which I did not encounter before, was that Damir thought that we could entice people who were doing computational linguistics if we offer some data in open access.

Gretchen: Okay.

Hilaria: So then what I did there was that we had a little recording, and then I re-spoke many of the texts that I had transcribed for my dissertation first. I re-read them. Then we put them again into ELAN, and then we put all their – we annotated them with parts of speech, and cut and paste.

Gretchen: So you re-spoke them like in an audio booth so you'd have higher sound quality? Or was it just slower?

Hilaria: Well, we didn't have an audio booth. It was just a nice recorder.

Gretchen: Like a nice quiet room compared to being outside where they weren’t even recorded the first time?

Hilaria: Yes, it was a nice recording. And we had a good tape recorder basically.

Gretchen: Oh, okay, okay.

Hilaria: So I re- spoke them in a –

Gretchen: Like high quality, slow...

Hilaria: Yeah, something like that. I tried to re-read the text. And so we compiled a corpus of 3.5 hours, which we put in this program called GORILLA, where people can just download it, and they can use it to do any type of research that they want to. I thought that that was very clever and – because Damir says, “Well, we need to allow people to have a nice corpus so that they can use it if they wish to add a different language into their models.”

Gretchen: And so do people start using it?

Hilaria: This is how I came into contact with the people that I'm working with right now. At some point – also, Alexis Michaud, who works on a group of languages called Yongning Na, he was also asking the same question. He's a linguist, he's a phonetician, and he was working with these languages, and he also wanted to do some automatic speech recognition for the languages that he was working with.

Gretchen: Where are they spoken?

Hilaria: In China.

Gretchen: In China. Okay.

Hilaria: Yes. The Na languages are spoken in China, so he also put some high-quality data out –

Gretchen: Out there on the internet, yeah.

Hilaria: Yeah, out there in the internet. And that is how he got connected with Oliver Adams, who is one of the co-organizers for this conference that I'm doing right now. So Oliver Adams got in touch with...

Gretchen: Alexis.

Hilaria: With Alexis. So they began to do this collaboration, but then it came time when they wanted to fit the model with another language that was also a tonal language. We had this corpus that we had developed with Linguist List, which was –

Gretchen: Chatino.

Hilaria: – Chatino with open access with one speaker, me –

Gretchen: Which is also a tonal language.

Hilaria: Which is also a tonal language.

Gretchen: It’s completely unrelated to this language in China.

Hilaria: Yeah, and actually it’s spoken by a comparable size of population, like 40,000 people, kind of like that, 40-50,000 people. So that is how we began this collaboration.

Gretchen: And so is the idea to make tools that could work regardless of what the language is? Or you have to kind of – so it'll work on Yongning Na, it'll work on Chatino, it'll work on some other language, it doesn't matter? Or is it to figure out how much data you need to train a very small amount of data, and then it works specifically on the language?

Hilaria: Yes. Well, actually the methods that Oliver Adams is using is neural networks.

Gretchen: Oh, okay.

Hilaria: Yes. So he developed this software called Persephone. With Persephone, then, you can input data on – I guess in this case he was interested in tonal languages, so maybe he developed some tools so that the model could recognise tonal languages. That's why he fed two tonal languages into the model, to see what kind of outputs they had. It seems like with the corpus that Alexis was working with, the output was just excellent, because he used more data. But the output in Chatino was also very good. It's very promising.

Gretchen: So it's useful for you to take a first draft of a transcript or something?

Hilaria: I think that it’ll be very useful. I have not used it to transcribe new data, and this is the reason why at the retreat we're going to find out how can we, who are not technologically savvy people, start using and training these models with new data.

Gretchen: So at the retreat the goal is to bring together the automatic speech recognition people and the minority language documentation people and say, “Okay. How can we help each other? How can we make these tools that’ll work for everything?”

Hilaria: How can we collaborate? How can we make tools for language documentation? Yes. Because on the one hand, we linguists are not – we don't know how to operate these models, and the engineers, they know how to work these systems. So the two of us are going to come together, and we're going to have an honest conversation. We linguists will say, “How would you like us to prepare our data so you can use it for your models?” They will tell us and vice versa, “This is what we need.”

Gretchen: And you have people working on multiple different languages, and multiple different technology-type things, all together?

Hilaria: Yeah, that's right. In my conversations with Oliver Adams, right now our tools for major languages are very advanced. A lot of the problems have been solved. Actually, there are many sub-specialties within that field. For example, one of the interests that Oliver Adams has is multilingualism in ASR. So for him, this is so interesting because we're going to have different speakers. We're going to have speakers of Chatino languages, speakers of Mayan languages. Basically, what Oliver Adam says is that many of the differences sometimes could even be anatomical. He should explain what he means more, but...

Gretchen: So for multilingual automatic speech recognition, is that an automatic speech recognition tool that works for multiple languages at the same time?

Hilaria: Yeah, I think so.

Gretchen: So if you're speaking in Chatino one minute and Spanish another minute, and let's say you also happen to speak a Mayan language, you could speak to it in any of those languages and it would be able to pick up, correctly, whatever you were doing?

Hilaria: You know, I’m really new in this field, so I really cannot speak –

Gretchen: This is the hope, maybe.

Hilaria: Yeah, yeah. I think we need to ask the ASR people these particular questions.

Gretchen: Yeah. But it would be great if it would work for multiple languages. That would be really cool.

Hilaria: Yes, yes. Actually, this is the new frontier.

Gretchen: Yeah, that’s right. Because there's six, seven thousand languages in the world, and there's what, maybe ten that you have really good automatic speech recognition tools for right now?

Hilaria: That’s right, yes. Yes. But the thing is that, still, for minority languages, there are certain requirements that need to be there in place first. Like with Chatino, it was easy to do this because I have prepared the corpus. There is an alphabet we have for Chatino. So we have research in Chatino now, but many of those languages do not have this research available. So even if you have a sound file that is not transcribed in one language, it will not be useful for someone to –

Gretchen: Because you do need some training data.

Hilaria: Yeah, you do need training data, and also, you need a person to evaluate the output of the model.

Gretchen: Right. Because then you can't fix it if it’s...

Hilaria: That's right. For example, in the way we work with Oliver, it was that he put this data in, and then I as a person, as a speaker, I went out and just evaluated the output of the system. It has to be reciprocal.

Gretchen: And so what's – in 20 years when this is amazing and everything works great, what's the vision for how this works? Is it so people who speak Chatino can say, “Okay, Google,” to their phones in Chatino and it will reply back?

Hilaria: Well, I mean, people can give it many uses, right? I don't know if I can say what kind of uses people can give it if we were able to get to that point. But on a personal level, I would love to be able to have a tool that could help me transcribe text that I have. Because, actually, we have hundreds of hours of recordings of Chatino text, and it'll be wonderful to be able to have these transcriptions. And the results of these transcriptions could be fed into ongoing dictionaries to study the syntax of the language, to study morphology, or all the different aspects of the grammar.

Gretchen: Or to make books or these kinds of things in the language.

Hilaria: Or to make books in the language. For example, we have recorded many stories that – they're sitting there. We haven't been able to transcribe them. It would be nice if we had a nice transcription with the story, so then we can work with our artists and make children's books, and develop all of these materials to promote the language.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because you've made some books already, right?

Hilaria: That is right! We just had some books published with the help of many people. And I'm just so proud of this because this is one of the first times that I have seen children's books in Chatino. They are so beautiful, colorful.

Gretchen: They're really beautiful. You were showing them to me earlier and they’re really lovely.

Hilaria: This is a project that I did with my students in our language revitalization class that I taught in the winter 2018 at Dartmouth College. So one of the first things that we did was to do the drawings on cloth books. Each student developed their own theme, and they put it on cloth books. Then we had an exhibition, and then the exhibition was a success. It was really beautiful. People loved it.

Gretchen: The cloth books look so cool! They're soft and you can – you know, a baby couldn't destroy them.

Hilaria: That's right. And then I got some funding from the Neukom Foundation to do the publication in a different format of these books. One of the students had to draw pictures for many of the books because the originals were just images that students pulled out –

Gretchen: From the internet somewhere.

Hilaria: – from the internet somewhere, because we were not thinking forward about publications and things like that. But when we realised that we needed to publish them, and that Neukom was offering some funding to publish them, we realised that we did not want to get –

Gretchen: You didn’t want to get sued.

Hilaria: Yeah, sued! So now we have these new books with completely new images, and they are –

Gretchen: And they're lovely. And they're Creative Commons, and they're Open License.

Hilaria: That's right.

Gretchen: So you had a few of those books be translated into other languages that don't have enough children's books?

Hilaria: That's right. Because I had native speakers of North American languages in my class. I had my student who spoke Tlingit. There was another student who spoke Hupa, and Ojibwe. And when they saw this, they realised that they wanted to do the same version in their own languages.

Gretchen: That’s so cool.

Hilaria: It was just really amazing. So all of these books just came out.

Gretchen: So now there's this little link between the Tlingit speakers, and the Hupa speakers, and the Ojibwe speakers, and the Chatino speakers. They'll all have the same pictures in their books with the words in their own language.

Hilaria: It is just so amazing, you know? I went back to Mexico, and I took the cloth books down to Oaxaca, and there was this friend from my community who came to visit. I was visiting my mom in Oaxaca. He came to visit. And then I sat down with him, and I read him one of the children's books. And then at the end he says to me, “It is so sad,” he says, “that our language is getting lost.” That is – so really, the books really bring these conversations about the importance of language.

Gretchen: And if the kids are – because, probably, a lot of the kids still kind of speak the language at home, but then when they go to school and the only language they see written down is Spanish, whereas if they could see also written versions of Chatino so they could be bilingual, and know that there's people who care about the language, and give it more prestige, and these kinds of things.

Hilaria: That is right. I grew up in Mexico hearing that indigenous languages were not languages because they did not have a writing system. That is why I wanted to develop an alphabet to show that this is a legitimate language. By having these cute little books, it's –

Gretchen: And they look very professional, too. Like, they’re shiny. And they look very professional.

Hilaria: That’s right. Yeah. We wanted to make Chatino look good. So in this conversation that I had with this person from my community, I said to him, “One of the worries that I have,” I said, “if I distribute this book in the community, is that many of the books that I see, like textbooks that the schools give for free, they all end up in the toilet." So then I said, “One of the worries that I have is that my book will end up in the toilet.”

Gretchen: Yeah.

Hilaria: He said to me very seriously, “You know what? I'm going to tell you one thing.” He says, “I read the Bible. I do not take the Bible in the toilet. The Bible in my house has a special place. This book will be next to the Bible.”

Gretchen: What a compliment!

Hilaria: Yeah.

Gretchen: That is so meaningful.

Hilaria: It was just really beautiful, yes.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Hilaria: So I want to use these books to promote the language. One of the things that I would like to do, since this is a personal endeavour, and I don't have the backing of the state, I don’t have unlimited resources.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Hilaria: I would like to enlist families in the community to read the books, and then take videos of them interacting with the books and reading them with their children, take videos, and then, with their permission, upload them on social media, and in this way promote reading.

Gretchen: And they can see it. Because I think this is the thing is the technology space seems like it's so dominated by just a few languages, and to say, okay, this can be a language of technology, and this can be a language of writing and of the future that you can keep passing on to your kids.

Hilaria: That is right. Yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Hilaria: I sometimes put little videos saying little phrases in Chatino. There are a lot of Chatinos who have migrated to the States. And they have children, and some of them are teaching Chatino to their children. Apparently I have some toddlers that follow my little videos.

Gretchen: Oh my gosh!

Hilaria: They just watch it over and over, and they repeat the words.

Gretchen: Oh my god, you’re like their teacher, or their grandma.

Hilaria: Yes. But I wish I could do more. It's just very sporadic.

Gretchen: Yeah. But that's still so cool. So if you can get other people making videos as well, maybe that helps.

Hilaria: Yes. Yeah, just make these books in different forms, like make little –

Gretchen: Or digital versions of them or something.

Hilaria: – animation, or things like that, yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah, that's very cool. I've taken a photo of the books already. So we will share a photo of the books, and we'll also link to whatever website or something you have set up for those. People can go see them, and you can see what they look like.

Hilaria: And you know what? One of the most important things about this is that this – as you say, these books have a Creative Commons License. So if someone out there would like to create children's books, they can use the same images, and just put their own text, and use the same things to publish their own books for their own language.

Gretchen: Yeah, that's really great. Hopefully you'll get photos being sent in from around the world of people doing that.

Hilaria: That would be amazing.

Gretchen: That would be amazing. Send Hilaria your photos if you end up using them.

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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch.

 I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLingthustic.com. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. 

To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Can't afford to pledge? That's okay too. We also really appreciate it if you could rate us on iTunes, or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. 

Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are Emily Gref and A.E. Prévost, and our production assistants are Celine Yoon and Fabianne Anderberg, and our music is by The Triangles.

Hilaria: Stay Lingthusiastic!

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