Episode 29: Jaime Pérez González on Tseltal & Mocho’ language documentation in Mexico

This month’s episode is with Jaime Pérez González is a Tseltal (Maya) researcher, writer, and translator from Tenango, Ocosingo, Chiapas, Mexico. He is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his master’s in American-Indian Linguistics at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS, Mexico). His MA thesis Predicados expresivos e ideófonos en tseltal won the 2013 Wigberto Jiménez Moreno Prize, awarded by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) for the best master’s thesis in linguistics. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literatures at the Michoacan University of San Nicolas de Hidalgo (UMICH, Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico).

Since 2008, he has worked on different Tseltal language documentation projects as a collaborator and as a research assistant, and as a researcher. Among the topics he has worked on during these projects are Dialectology and Lexicography (building dictionaries). He started to work on Mocho’ (a cousin Mayan language) in 2015, and he is currently the Principal Investigator of the project “Documentation of Mocho’ (Mayan): Language Preservation through Community Awareness and Engagement” sponsored by the Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP). His research goes from Descriptive Linguistics, Language Documentation and Language revitalization. He has written about fieldwork methodologies, and he is currently working on a Descriptive Grammar of Mocho’. 

Jaime working with the Mocho’ community

Things mentioned in this episode:

Listen here, or on your favorite podcast app! Field Notes is available on Apple Podcasts app (iPhone), Google Play Music (Android), Google Podcasts app (Android), StitcherSpotifyPodbeanPodcast RepublicCastboxPlayer FM, and several other apps via RSS.

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