Temporal reference in Lakandon Maya

The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides grants worldwide to for the linguistic documentation of endangered language and knowledge. Grantees create multimedia collection of endangered languages. These collections are preserved and made freely available through the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) housed at the library of SOAS University of London.

Lakandon Maya is an endangered and underdocumented language belonging to the Yukatekan branch of the Mayan language family. The Lakandones have been the subject of many publications devoted to their religious traditions and their forest dwelling way of life, but surprisingly little work has been done describing their language. The present investigation proposes an extensive documentation of the linguistic practices of Lakandon speakers with a focus on the use of deictic time words/expressions and their meanings. The results of the investigation will consist of a grammatical sketch, a dictionary of 3000+ entries, and a corpus of annotated texts. Primary investigator: Henrik Bergqvist

Project Details


Location: Mexico, Mexico, Philippines, Central America, South-Eastern Asia, Mexico, Asia, Americas, United States of America Organiser(s): Endangered Languages Documentation Programme Project partner(s): SOAS, University of London Funder(s): Arcadia Funding received: £20,990.00 Commencement Date: 01/2001
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