Senior Editors: (to be determined)
Principal Data Entry: (to be determined)
Website Design: Ginny White, Jamil Jonna, Aaron Lopez
Launch date: Academic Year 2010–11 (proposed)

Objectives: As envisioned by the Wired Humanities Projects of the University of Oregon, in collaboration with linguists, ethnohistorians, and art historians who work with manuscripts in the Zapotec language, this dictionary will be a continuously expanding, online, searchable, and (eventually) trilingual dictionary (Zapotec-Spanish-English) that includes early (colonial) and modern (endangered) languages.

The dictionary’s databases include fields that support a wide range of orthographies and sources, so that users will most easily be able retrieve a rich array of information, including audio and possibly video attestations from modern speech and examples of usage in excerpts from historical documents from New Spain. The dictionary will incorporate vocabulary from the work of colonial priests, harvest terms from the recent translations of colonial manuscripts (originally written by indigenous notaries and scribes, 1540-1800), and will elicit language from modern speakers, all under the interdisciplinary guidance of scholars with specializations in linguistics, language teaching, anthropology, and history. It is our policy not to mine more than 10% (Fair Use) of any published work of recent times without permission.

This multipurpose tool is intended to document and preserve language, help re-establish literacy for modern speakers, train them for professional work, and pave the way for the translation of manuscripts for the historical and cultural-heritage benefits they will offer the world. 

The Zapotec dictionary project is currently seeking interns with an interest in Oaxacan peoples and cultures of past and present, who are bilingual or trilingual and might be able to form partnerships in Mexico.  We hope to incorporate the research of Juana Vásquez Vásquez and Angeles Romero Frizzi, linguists affiliated with universities and bilingual schools in the state of Oaxaca, and native speakers. 

We are earnestly seeking funds to underwrite this project.  For further information, please contact: Stephanie Wood, swood (at) uoregon.edu, tel. (541) 346-5771.