How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro
A new episode of Lingthusiasm!
Young kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they don’t live next to the kinds of major research universities that do most of the academic studies about how kids learn languages. Figuring out what these kids are doing is part of a bigger push to learn more about language learning in a broader variety of sociocultural settings.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages with Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro, who’s an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, a native speaker of Q'anjob'al and a learner of Kaq'chikel. We talk about Pedro’s background teaching school in Q’anjob’al and Spanish, which sounds kids acquire later in Q’anjob’al (hint: it’s the ejectives like q’ and b’), and gender differences in how kids speak Q’anjob’al. We also talk more broadly about why this work is important, both in terms of understanding how language acquisition works as a whole and in terms of using the knowledge of how children acquire Indigenous languages to create teaching materials specific to those languages. Finally, we talk about Pedro’s newer revitalization work with a community of Itzaj speakers and the process of building a relationship with a community that you’re not already part of.
Transcript available soon.
Announcements:
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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Lingthusiasm episode: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas
Lingthusiasm episode: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz
How diverse is child language acquisition research? Paper by Evan Kidd & Rowena Garcia (open access)
Lingthusiasm bonus episode ‘103 ways for kids to learn languages’
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Lauren & Gretchen