Researchers building Aztec language dictionary

Researchers Stephanie Wood and John Sullivan of the Wired Humanities Projects at the University of Oregon have embarked on   a three-year research effort to document the Aztec language, Nahuatl. The language is in jeopardy due to dwindling numbers of native speakers, media expansion into remote communities and a lack of preservation efforts for indigenous cultures.

Wood and Sullivan received a total of $350,000 funding for the project from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. The grant will enable a team of faculty and students to incorporate the work of native-speaker collaborators studying and teaching at a university in Zacatecas, Mexico, guided by Sullivan, to create the first-ever monolingual dictionary for native speakers of Nahuatl.

"The thousands of documents recorded in alphabetic Nahuatl for about a 300-year period represent a rare primary-source base not known for any other indigenous culture across the Americas," Wood said.

There has never been a dictionary of Nahuatl language with definitions in Nahuatl. As a result, native speakers have lacked a crucial tool that could support their language in a written form, as well as verbal. As a result of Spanish colonization, which lasted from the early 16th century into the early 19th century, the focus of alphabetic vocabularies was translation.

"The goal of the project is to make content from an unparalleled documentary record of indigenous history accessible both to native speakers and scholars across the world," Wood said.