24: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz (Patreon)

As English speakers, we take for granted that we have lots of resources available in our language, from children’s books to  dictionaries to automated tools like Siri and Google Translate. But for  the majority of the world’s languages, this is not the case.  

In  this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Hilaria Cruz, a  linguist and native speaker of Chatino, an Indigenous language of Mexico which is spoken by over 40,000 people. Hilaria combines her work  as an Assistant Professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville, Kentucky  with creating resources for her fellow speakers of Chatino, everything  from paperback or cloth children’s books to high-tech speech recognition  tools which will make it easier to create more resources like this in  the future. And she’s also making these resources available for other  underrepresented languages!  

There were two big announcements at the top of the episode: 

The  first is that we have a date for our liveshow in Melbourne! We will be  at the State Library of Victoria on Friday the 16th of November. Tickets  on sale soon through our EventBrite. 

We are also thrilled to announce we’ll be doing a liveshow in Sydney! We’ll be at GiantDwarf on Monday the 12th of November. Tickets available through their website. 

We also have new merch! 

Thanks to Lucy Maddox  for bringing Space Babies to life! Check out the art in this post. A  portion of the proceeds from the Space Baby merch will be donated to the  Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity. We also have new scarf colours, and t-shirts that say “I want to be the English schwa. It’s never stressed.” Check out our Merch page for more details. 

For all the links mentioned in this episode, visit: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/178291633331/lingthusiasm-episode-24-making-books-and-tools