Historical information: Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec (TdVZ) is an endangered language spoken in Teotitlán del Valle, approximately 25 kilometers east of Oaxaca City, the capital of Oaxaca state in southern Mexico. Government estimates as of 2010 stated that there were 198 monolingual speakers and 3,601 bilingual speakers. Although the language is categorized by Ethnologue as being 'developing' because the community is in the process of implementing an orthography and of creating a literature, one can observe that the youngest generation is not becoming fluent in the language. While there is bilingual education available in preschool and high school, these programs do not effectively teach the language to students. Instead, most children become fluent in Spanish, the regionally dominant language and the language used in the elementary school. The materials in this collection were developed primarily by Julia Nee as part of ongoing fieldwork during her time as a graduate student at UC Berkeley. The orthography used in field notes reflects the orthographic standards adopted by the community's language committee, and explained in the document "El Alfabeto del Zapoteco de Teotitlán del Valle" archived in this collection. All audio was recorded on an H4N Zoom digital recorder. Funding for this research has come from an Oswalt Endangered Language Grant administered by the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Scope and content: Audio recordings of elicitation sessions and of conversational texts; field notes; ancillary documents
Repository: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
Preferred citation: Anonymous, Efraín Lazo Pérez, Trinidad Martinez Soza, and Julia Eileen Nee. Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec, 2016-02, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley, http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7297/X2M32SZ0.
Repository: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
Preferred citation: Benita and her Balloons storybook, 2016-02.173, in "Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec", Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley, http://cla.berkeley.edu/item/25933.
Description: Photos of pages from two books created by students in the Zapotec winter language camp, based on the book "Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?" ("Oso pardo, oso pardo, ¿qué ves ahí?) (Martin & Carl, 2002). Photo of Julia Nee working with students to create the book.
Repository: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
Preferred citation: Images of children's books based on "Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?", 2016-02.195, in "Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec", Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley, http://cla.berkeley.edu/item/26193.
We acknowledge with respect the Ohlone people on whose traditional, ancestral, and unceded land we work and whose historical relationships with that land continue to this day.