EUGENE, Ore. -- (Oct. 9, 2009) -- The Wired Humanities Projects at the University of Oregon will engage in a three-year research project to document the Aztec language, Nahuatl. Spoken by millions of people today, 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.

According to Stephanie Wood, the Wired Humanities Projects (WHP) director, the project's approval is important because funding for humanities research is highly competitive for limited resources. WHP received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation to underwrite three years of research for $350,000.

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 co-principal investigator John 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," said Wood.

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," said Wood.

WHP is a digital humanities center founded at the UO in 1997 to create digital libraries, online resources and collections for researchers and teachers to use in advancing their scholarship.

About the University of Oregon
The University of Oregon is a world-class teaching and research institution and Oregon's flagship public university. The UO is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization made up of the 62 leading public and private research institutions in the United States and Canada. The University of Oregon is one of only two AAU members in the Pacific Northwest.

Contact: Julie Brown, 541-346-3185, julbrown@uoregon.edu
Source: Stephanie Wood, Director, Wired Humanities Projects, 541-346-5771, swood@uoregon.edu
Link: Wired Humanities Projects, http://whp.uoregon.edu/

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