On April 23-25, our department will host the first-ever international workshop on Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi). This NSF-funded conference will bring together specialists from Europe, North America, Mexico and Guatemala, to discuss the unique properties of Mayan languages — and the light they shed on language in general. FAMLi features 15 presentations, a poster session, and invited talks by Judith Aissen, Heriberto Avelino, Ximena Lois, B’alam Mateo-Toledo, and Norvin Richards. A particularly exciting (and unprecedented) feature of this workshop is the fact more than half of the presentations will come from linguists who are also native speakers of Mayan languages. The organizing committee is headed by our own Jessica Coon, currently writing her dissertation on Chol, a Mayan language of Chiapas, Mexico, and Robert Henderson, a third-year graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and specialist in the Mayan languages of Guatemala — as well as fourth-year grad student Kirill Shklovsky, Tseltal specialist and designer of the FAMLi logo, and Katie Franich of Boston University.
The official languages of the conference are English and Spanish, but all speakers have been encouraged to include English in their handouts. We hope you all can make it!!