The same day as my local contact and I arrived here in San Juan (Wednesday 5th after waiting several days for a 4 x 4 pickup to cross the river) and made arrangements for sleeping, working and eating we went to see the tribal council of the San Juan tribe which resides in this community of that same name and presides over around 10 communities belonging to this tribe. We approached the council to present the purpose of our stay here: that I, a linguist from a country in Europe called Denmark, had formed a small project with the primary purpose of studying and documenting the Tol language for posteriority, and also with the secondary and more general purpose of supporting ongoing efforts from within the community, and particularly within the council, to strengthen and maintain the language. Members of the council are particularly concerned about the very scarce resources available for schooling in Tol and we discussed the possibility of using the knowledge base that this current project will produce to make efforts to expand both pre-school, school and high school teaching in tol, by way of applying for funds in various places to hire and train indigenous teachers, and also to produce more text book material than what little has already been produced. Next, at my request, the council pointed to a suitable research assistant who was both considered a good speaker and an agreeable fellow, and in addition is one of the very few people who can read and write the language. This man was hired onto the project on a contract running until Christmas by which time both I and the council agreed that the contract might be renewed if the collaboration had been fruitful – so far this has certainly been the case.
The language survey is the first stage of 3 major stages that the present project can be divided into – the other two consist of the collection, transcription and analysis of various genres of natural speech (more on this later) and finally the archiving of materials in bundles containing, video and audio recordings, still images and metadata files in order to preserve the data and make it available to whichever extent desired by the speech community.
The language survey has several functions built into it and this is not only reflected in the choice of questions, but also in the choice to carry it out solely in the language under study, meaning that our first task, or rather the first task of Federico, the name of the local research assistant, was to translate the 50 questions or topics of the interview questionnaire into tol. This took about 4 hours and after lunch we went and tried it out by interviewing the highest authority of the tribe, the cacique who is 111 years old. We were received in the friendliest manner and although the cacique is hard at hearing the interview went well and I experienced live conversation in tol for the very first time – what a thrill!
Since then we have interviewed 12 other men and women of varying ages and from a number of different communities and translated these interviews into Spanish in our laboratory which is also my bedroom. Interviewing sometimes has its difficulties because some questions concern concepts which are not very familiar to most tol speakers who are mainly corn and bean farmers who live off the land and their domestic animals, in some of the least accessible regions of this planet. For instance the concept of having an opinion about language usage is entirely foreign to most, as is the idea of valuing one language over another, such as Spanish vs. tol as a primary means of communication. Nevertheless, the survey is turning out some interesting data, both in terms of certain near-universal tendencies as wells as the occasional individual opinions and observations. When asked “what language do they speak with your children at school” one woman was at a loss informing us that “I don’t know because I haven’t gone” – luckily her daughter was right there and the woman asked the girl right away and was able to give the answer which is the most common one: “With the teachers we speak in Spanish but with our classmates we just speak Tol”.
