We received sad news today. On January 4th 2019, the last speaker of Tehuelche passed away. Her name was Dora Manchado, and she was beloved by her community and those who knew her. Tehuelche [teh], also known as Aonekko to local community members, or Patagonian to historians, is a language from the southernmost tip of South America. It was the language that Magellan heard when he encountered speakers in Patagonia in 1520.

Anthropologist Javier Domingo (Université de Montréal) had the opportunity to work with Dora Manchado for the last few years of her life. We know Javier because we have been collaborating with him on the first-ever Tehuelche Talking Dictionary. Here are Javier’s reflections about Dora’s passing:

“Despite history, the Tehuelche language was still remembered by Dora Manchado, who passed away only a few days ago. She was regarded as the “last speaker” of this language as well as the spirit of the Tehuelche ethnic recognition and revival.

I had the pleasure (and the hard task) of working with her as an anthropologist. Dora was probably a “very bad informant” and thanks to this beautiful quality, she taught me that language is not something that can be written down, stored, or “saved”.

She knew perfectly well that language not only means interaction, but also trust, complicity, naughtiness, and intimacy. She proved to me that language means sharing, and company. Thanks to the recordings she made, the rest of the community members now have, if they want, the possibility of affirming their past and reconstructing their identity.

Nakl, Dora, pai ‘eneguem.”

– Javier Domingo, January 7th, 2019.

You can also view Javier’s original blog post about Dora’s passing here on the Tehuelche community’s website, which includes an excellent video he created using recordings of her voice.

As we look back in 2018, we’d like to thank all of the researchers and community collaborators who work with us day-to-day on documentation programs and digital projects underway around the world! Our work is detail-oriented and grueling, and despite the challenges that we face, as well as the ongoing threat of language extinction, we continue to move forward with perseverance and enthusiasm.

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In particular, we’d like to thank our field research team in India: Bikram Jora, Opino Gomango and Luke Horo. All of their hard work, dedication and insight continue to make documenting the Munda language family possible. Thank you to Gutob speakers Bondu Kirsani, Tankadhar Sisa, Kamla Sisa and Radha Kirsani, as well as field assistants Gajendra Pradhan, Sujesh Gomango and Satosh Padni for their great work on the recent Gutob language documentation project, which was funded by grant award number 1500092 from the National Science Foundation (“Documentation of Gutob, an endangered Munda language of India”). The NSF’s support is gratefully acknowledged.

We’d like to give a shout-out to our colleagues in Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, China, Russia, Nigeria, Chile and Peru who we have collaborated with in person and afar on various documentation projects, workshops and events this year.

Thank you to our US-based colleagues such as Jacob Bowdoin for working on the new mobile-friendly Talking Dictionary app (coming in 2019!) and to intern Jessica Golden from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for working on the Munda Languages Initiative web page and the Talking Dictionaries Map.

THANK YOU to all of our amazing online volunteers who have helped with digital tasks such as transcription and research: Katie Li, Shelby Sands, Murilo da Silva Barros, Henry Wu, Hannah Bishop, Michael Horlick, Dylan Charter, Dave Prine, Theresa Usuriello, Juhyae Kim, Edward Hess, Amatullah Brown, Zainah Asfoor, Gillian Gardiner, Virginia Vázquez, Sarah Agou, Charis Nandor, Corinne Van Ryckeghem, Leena Dihingia, Thorin Engeseth, Priyanka Pradeepkumar, Wojciech Zeyland, Jacquelyn Duffy, Vasiliki Moutzouri, Durgesh Rajan, Andrea Macanovic, Anna Peckham, Charlie Baranski, Cheyenne Wing, Kevin Sanders, Pranav Merchant, Li-Fang Lai.

Thanks to the people and organizations who we have collaborated with on various events and campaigns this year: Nick Montgomery at Roanoke College, Eddie Avila at Rising Voices, the team at Portland State University, Boise State, and countless other people we worked with at conferences and workshops all around the world.

Also, we’d like to say thank you to our generous donors who continue to support our work: Kamal El-Wattar, the Carpers and many others. Thanks to the Zegar Foundation for funding our current major project documenting the fragile knowledge domains of the Birhor people in India.

Onward to 2019!

We would like to wish a warm welcome to our newest associate, Dr. Luke Horo! We are pleased to have him on our team in the role of Institute Fellow and Post-doctoral Researcher for the South Asia region. Horo will help take the lead on phonetic analysis on upcoming projects.

Horo, whose heritage language is Mundari, defended his PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology–Guwahati in 2018. He is the only adivasi (indigenous) scholar with a specialty on laboratory and field phonetics currently active in India and has done the only experimental phonetic study on any variety of a Munda language to date and the only documentation of Assam Sora.

Dr. Horo has presented papers at a number of international conferences in Singapore, in Siem Reap, and in Korea in 2018, as well as a host of domestic and international conferences in India. Several such papers have appeared in print already, with others under review or in press. Dr. Horo has taken part in field expeditions with Dr. Greg Anderson and Dr.  Bikram Jora among Gutob speakers in Odisha, and among speakers of the North Munda language Korku and the isolate language Nihali in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra states.