Corpora in the time of Cholera: The pandemic’s effects on language documentation

Abstract

This article presents a documentation project aimed at creating an open‑access corpus of Patzún Kaqchikel, an endangered Mayan language spoken in Chimaltenango, Guatemala. Started in 2019 in collaboration with the Patzún Women’s Cooperative Aj Su’m, the project originally sought to produce a trilingual (Kaqchikel–Spanish–English) book of recipes and oral histories. The COVID‑19 pandemic and subsequent travel restrictions forced us to pivot and present the collected recordings as a dual-format online archive: (i) a research-oriented corpus with time‑aligned transcriptions, translations, and morphological glossing, and (ii) a community-oriented web page featuring audio recordings, minimally-edited Kaqchikel transcripts, and Spanish translations. The collection includes over eight hours of semi-structured interviews recorded with 17 speakers of varied social and occupational backgrounds. Although the pandemic shifted the workflow toward a more academia‑centered model, the project demonstrates that collaborating with the community can simultaneously satisfy local and scholarly needs and enhance the value of language documentation for both speakers and linguists.