Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Zapotec Language Activism And Talking Dictionaries, K. David Harrison, B. D. Lillehaugen, Jeremy Fahringer , '06, F. H. Lopez

Linguistics Faculty Works

Online dictionaries have become a key tool for some indigenous communities to promote and preserve their languages, often in collaboration with linguists. They can provide a pathway for crossing the digital divide and for establishing a first-ever presence on the internet. Many questions around digital lexicography have been explored, although primarily in relation to large and well-resourced languages. Lexical projects on small and under-resourced languages can provide an opportunity to examine these questions from a different perspective and to raise new questions (Mosel, 2011). In this paper, linguists, technical experts, and Zapotec language activists, who have worked together in Mexico …