Chile hosts workshop to preserve Latin America’s

native languages
MONDAY, 07 JANUARY 2013 20:13
WRITTEN BY ELIZABETH TROVALL

Indigenous speakers from seven countries unite to learn

techniques for recording their native language.

Monday marked the beginning of the week-long “Enduring Voices”

workshop aimed at preserving indigenous languages that are rapidly
disappearing. The initiative teaches representatives from these
diminishing cultures ways of recording their language and sharing it
before it is lost completely.

Monday Enduring Voices handed out media kits to workshop participants to

bring home and record their own indigenous communities. (Photo by
Elizabeth Trovall / The Santiago Times)
Twelve indigenous representatives from Chile, Peru, Guatemala,
Mexico, El Salvador, Paraguay and Bolivia will convene for five days at
the Santiago Library, where they will share their experiences as
cultural minorities and learn techniques for capturing their culture’s
oral history and spoken language. The twelve workshop participants
received recording kits on Monday to use throughout the workshop
and are expected to continue capturing their culture when they return
to their respective communities.

Dr. Gregory Anderson, a linguist with National Geographic, will help

facilitate the workshop. He said the importance of preserving these
languages is multifold. One reason to preserve these languages is to
capture information that would otherwise be lost forever.

“The vast majority of knowledge that has been accrued over millennia
by humans is stored in indigenous languages and this includes
knowledge about ecosystems and all kinds of different highly specific
and technical information systems and these are not translatable,”
Anderson told The Santiago Times.

Anna Luisa Daigneault is also facilitating the workshop with Anderson

as the Latin America Projects Coordinator at Living Tongues, an
organization that helps preserve indigenous languages worldwide.
Daigneault has seen firsthand the benefits of recording and translating
indigenous languages.

“I’ve seen in my work a lot of plant knowledge and agricultural

knowledge. For example, in the Amazon the indigenous people there
have a very advanced understanding of how the ecosystem works.
And a lot of the species of plants and animals that are there haven’t
even been fully studied by Western science,” Daigneault said.

One of the main recording projects of the Enduring Voices workshop

is the Talking Dictionary, which is an online archive of spoken words
in various indigenous languages worldwide. The dictionary translates
indigenous languages in more dominant languages like Spanish or
English. The workshop will help participants create dictionaries in their
respective languages.

With 40 percent of the 7,000 languages around the world at risk of

extinction, the recording tools are also intended to help spread
awareness of the languages and cultures themselves.

María Inéz Huenuñir, an indigenous Mapuche poet from southern

Chile, said she sees great opportunity in the workshop.

“It’s important to spread my Mapuche language through this project. I

am happy to be here sharing it with my fellow Latin Americans,” said
María Inéz Huenuñir, a Mapuche poet participating in the workshop.

Enduring Voices from National Geographic and The Living Tongues

Institute hosted the event in collaboration with Imagen de Chile, the
Santiago Library, and Rising Voices. This is the first Enduring Voices
collaboration to be held in Latin America. Similar workshops have
been hosted in India and the U.S.

By Elizabeth Trovall (trovall@santiagotimes.cl)

Copyright 2013 - The Santiago Times