This project joins with community initiatives to document public performances of Ixil Maya traditional ritual discourse. These forms have been scarcely documented and include poetic forms, lexical items and grammatical structures not found in other types of Ixil speech. Practitioners of ritual dicourse currently use this highly conventionalized form in innovative ways to document recent Ixil history as part of a concerted effort to disseminate and preserve this information for their own community and for outsiders. Nonetheless, those trained in these highly specialized forms are very few and diminishing in number creating a sense of urgency among speakers for documentation of these discourse practices. Primary investigator: Maria Luz Garcia