24: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz
As English speakers, we take for granted that we have lots of resources available in our language, from children\u2019s books to dictionaries to automated tools like Siri and Google Translate. But for the majority of the world\u2019s languages, this is not the case. \n\nIn 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\u2019s books to high-tech speech recognition tools which will make it easier to create more resources like this in the future. And she\u2019s also making these resources available for other underrepresented languages! \n\n-- \nThere were two big announcements at the top of the episode: \n\nThe 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. \n\nWe are also thrilled to announce we\u2019ll be doing a liveshow in Sydney! We\u2019ll be at GiantDwarf on Monday the 12th of November. \n\nFor tickets to both, check out lingthusiasm.com/show \n\nWe also have new merch! \n\nThanks 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. \n\nWe also have new scarf colours, and t-shirts that say \u201cI want to be the English schwa. It\u2019s never stressed.\u201d Check out our Merch page for more details. lingthusiasm.com/merch\n\nThe bonus episode this month was about hyperforeignisms! We take an international tour through how our minds deal with the interesting edge cases of words that are kinda-English and kinda-other-languages. Listen to it and 18 previous bonus episodes, and support the show at patreon.com/lingthusiasm \n\nTo see the links mentioned in this episode, including the photos of the Chatino children's books, check out the shownotes page at https://lingthusiasm.com/post/178291633331/lingthusiasm-episode-24-making-books-and-tools