Linguistics Faculty Receives NSF Research Funding

Dr. Mark Sicoli Awarded National Science Foundation Documenting Endangered Languages Research Grant

Dr. Mark Sicoli, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, has been awarded an 18-month, $121,000 grant for the project “Preserving and Enhancing Access to the Survey of Zapotec and Chatino Languages.” He is developing a linguistic archive for the preservation and online dissemination of the transcribed-recordings of the Survey of Zapotec and Chatino Languages, his prior project that documented the languages spoken in over 100 towns of Oaxaca, Mexico (2007-2010). The current project hosts a postdoc in Linguistics and involves Georgetown undergraduate research assistants.

Zapotec-Chatino is a diverse language family with a 2500-year history involving the earliest writing and state-level social organization in the Western Hemisphere. More than half of the documented varieties will be extinct within a generation. The project will produce materials that can be used for language maintenance and revitalization efforts and for broadening our understanding of human cognition, language, and culture.

Further information regarding Professor Sicoli’s research can be found on his web site: https://sites.google.com/a/georgetown.edu/mark-a-sicoli/home.