Lingthusiasm Episode 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’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 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.
This month’s bonus episode 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. Support the show on Patreon to get access to this and all 19 bonus episodes.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
Chatino language (Wikipedia)
Lengua Chatino resources website (mostly in Spanish)
A video story told aloud in Chatino by Hilaria Cruz
Hilaria Cruz’s page at the University of Kentucky
Hilaria Cruz’s website
Joel Sherzer
Tony Woodbury
Hilaria’s PhD thesis (Linguistic poetic and rhetoric of Eastern Chatino of San Juan Quiahije)
Automatic Speech Recognition (Wikipedia)
Alexis Michaud
Oliver Adams
Tlingit, Ojibwe, Hupa languages (Wikipedia)
Here’s a photo of the children’s books that Hilaria Cruz and her students made! Books 1-6 (from left) are in Chatino. The rightmost book is in Hupa and the second from right book is in Ojibwe.
From the description on the ASREL Retreat website (Automatic Speech Recognition for Endangered Languages):
This retreat will foster a dialogue between computer scientists working on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) specifically neural networks, native speakers of endangered languages, and linguists doing research on endangered languages to address the issue of the “bottleneck” of language transcription and discuss the use of technology in the transcription of language data.
Tools and technologies to automate and expedite the transcription and translation of oral texts from endangered languages are urgently needed. Most researchers working with endangered languages process their materials manually. Some researchers estimate that it takes roughly from 1 to 50 hours to prepare one hour of spoken text manually.
ASR technologies can significantly reduce the workload of transcribing large collections of speech recordings in these lesser-studied languages. Automating the process will enable the transcriber to become more of an editor, accelerating the overall transcription process. Implementation of ASR technologies could free up time for linguists, language activists, and speakers to create materials for teaching and learning the language, rather than spending countless hours transcribing.
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening, and stay tuned for a transcript of this episode on the Lingthusiasm website. To received an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
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Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are Emily Gref and A.E. Prévost, our production assistants are Celine Yoon & Fabianne Anderberg, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
It was so fun to get to talk with Hilaria about all her fantastic work!

















