CoBiVa Awarded NEH Grant 2020

On Tues. Apr. 7, 2020, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Dr. Katherine Christoffersen (UTRGV, Project Director/Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Ana Carvalho (University of Arizona, co-PI), and Dr. Ryan Bessett (UTRGV, co-PI) a Humanities Collections and References Resource grant for their project entitled “Bilingual Voices in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands” in the amount of $59,975.

This multi-site project will document language in the Rio Grande Valley and in Southern Arizona through the further development of two website-based collections of interviews with community members, the Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) and Corpus de Español del Sur de Arizona (CESA).

Dr. Christoffersen and Dr. Bessett of UTRGV completed their PhDs at the University of Arizona with Dr. Ana Carvalho who created the Southern Arizona corpus. Inspired by her work, the three submitted a proposal to NEH in July 2019. Dr. Christoffersen expressed that the research team is excited to move forward on the project and continue documenting language in the Rio Grande Valley.

“Linguists have known for decades that code-switching, using Spanish and English together, is a highly sophisticated skill,” said Dr. Christoffersen. “Through the systematic study of language, we hope to increase this understanding and the prestige of code-switching and local language varieties among students and community members.”

The awarded funding will be used to test various technologically-aided transcription methods, such reporting on the accuracy and speed of revising auto-generated transcripts. The team is particularly excited to fund students’ participation in research through the grant. They will disseminate project findings at conferences, publications, webinars, and workshops, which they hope will inspire the creation of more community-based, community-driven corpus projects.

Beyond their importance for further scholarship, the corpora are valuable local resources for community members, and especially for teaching Spanish to Heritage Language Learners.

“Bilingual dialects are commonly stigmatized. This is especially true of the Spanish spoken along the US-Mexico border,” explained Dr. Bessett. The research team hopes that local teachers will use CoBiVa as a tool in Spanish and dual language classrooms. “By bringing a corpus of local, bilingual Spanish into the classroom, it legitimizes the linguistic variety and elevates its status in the community. In addition, by comparing this bilingual corpus to monolingual ones, students are able to see that many of the forms they use which they interpret as ‘incorrect’ are actually found in monolingual communities as well.”

The CoBiVa website ( www.utrgv.edu/cobiva) includes a blog that will feature updates on the project. Other sections of the website include a list of presentations and publications related to the project. Pending a short online request form, anyone can have open access to the actual collection of revised, anonymized interviews with audio files, clickable transcripts, and background and demographic information on the interviewees. Drs. Christoffersen and Bessett plan to have 50 interviews and audio files posted on the website by December 2020.

Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa): This project documents the Spanish and English spoken in south Texas, specifically in the Rio Grande Valley. Graduate and undergraduate students, under the PIs’ supervision, collect, transcribe, and analyze interviews with local speakers. This digital oral corpus provides material for multiple linguistic analyses of local language varieties and subsequent comparisons with other varieties, as well as a pedagogical tool for teaching Spanish as a Heritage Language. The website is utrgv.edu/cobiva.

This project has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.