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Overview: Summer Intensive Maya Language Immersion Program This language program is based on intensive langauge immersion and close mentoring of students in the Maya language program. The enrollment for any level of Maya is restricted to four students. Participants therefore receive the highest quality of training based native speaker language assistants who work one-on-one with Maya learners and small classroom learning and mentoring with Dr. Quetzil Castañeda, a recognized leader in Maya language pedagogy. Read Student Evaluations and Comments from Previous Field Seasons Comment on the Correct Name of the Maya: Maya, Mayan, Yucatec Maya, Yukatek Mayan? Summer: Six Week Program Start: Individuated Program allows Variable Start in June Tailored to Your Needs Credits: 8 credit hours, undergrad or graduate, for Beginning Level 1
Courses: Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced Levels (1-3) are available Cost: Direct Enrollment Tuition
$3950 Room & Board: Lodging in Posada Olalde, with meals: $1100 Single Course Materials are included in Cost:
Immersion Field Trip: The program includes two periods of total language immersion (8 days total) conducted in a Cruzob Maya community in the region of Jose Maria Morelos. These homestay based experiences are conducted in communities such as Sacalaca and Tusik. This unit is supervised by a bilingual native speakers of Spanish and Maya from these communities who also work directly with each student on a daily basis to develop communicative proficiences. These language instructors are advanced or graduated students in the Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo. FLAS Grants / Foreign Language and Area Studies Grants Graduate students in any Arts & Science fields of study are eligible to apply for a FLAS from their home institution if their university has a Latin America and Caribbean studies program that is recognized as a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center. Students who are not at universities at such federally funded may technically apply for FLAS grants at one of the established NRC for 2010-2013; however review committees of such applications tend to give low priority to applicants who are not based in their university. Check here for a list of Latin America and Caribbean studies programs that were designated NRC for 2010-2013 with the mandate to distribute FLAS grants to USA undergraduate and graduate students. Undergraduate students are eligible for FLAS grants so long as they have completed the Beginning Level of study and are requesting support to study Intermediate level (second year) or higher. Graduate students are eligible to request support for FLAS funding for any level of language study. Visit FLAS Criteria. Please be aware that each National Resource Center at the different universities have established different deadlines for submission of year-long and intensive summer applications.
Juan Castillo Cocom Scholarship
Eligibility: Out of Pocket: Personal items, consumibles, incidentals, laundry, non-program travel including lodging and meals, transportation to and from airport or other Mexican City to Pisté are all out of pocket expenses to be paid for directly by the participant. _________________________________________________________________________________ Home-Stays: Lodging: OSEA partners with the Posada Olalde a Maya family-run posada that offers superior linguistic immersion and cross-cultural experience. Victor Olalde, owner and tour guide, has been a friend and collaborator of OSEA for over 20 years. He has significant cross cultural experience with OSEA students and tourists and he has often worked as the Student Liaison for OSEA. This experience helps make the Posada Olalde a particularly welcome place to stay; it provides both a home-stay experience with the privacy, creature comforts, and ease of a hotel. The Posada Olalde is ideally situated within 2 blocks of the OSEA Headquarters, one block from the main road, and 20 minutes walking distance from Chichén Itzá. Maya or Mayan Language? Yucatec Maya or Maya? The Maya are called Maya. This is their proper name. To call them the "Yucatec Maya" is not appropriate despite more than a century of anthropological conventions of calling them by this name. To use "Yucatec Maya" to refer to the Maya is to use the scientific-technical name of the language spoken by that people as the name of the ethnic group itself. It is not a little denigrative to use this term as it effectively puts a people in a museum display case as a lab microscope. "Yucatec Maya" is not equivalent to the phrases Italian American, Texan American, or African American. Actually the term is equivalent to calling African Americans "Eubonic Americans" because these people speak "Black English." In either case it is not appropriate. Further, "Yucatec Maya" is therefore not equivalent to phrases such as "Texan American" which identifies a group of people by their shared geographic location in a place, in this case a place called Texas. It seems like it is the same kind of label if Texan American is used as a racial-ethnic label to refer to the ethnic group derived from the white-German descended immigrants that came from the Mid-East states like Ohio to colonize Texas in the mid-19th century; and therefore to use this label as a means to distinguish from the African Americans, Mexicans and Mexican Americans who are ALSO Texan Americans in the geographic sense. But, actually neither Texan American nor Yucatec Maya are very appropriate terms to use in this sense. What is the proper spelling, Yukatan or Yucatán? Yucatec or Yukatek?
In Guatemala the Mayan linguists of the ALMG created a standardized orthography by which to write the Mayan languages of Guatemala. The Maya did not participate in this process of creating a standard set of rules for writing Mayan languages and do not subscribe to its norms. Remember, the Maya afterall are not Guatemalans nor do they live in Guatemala! The Mayans who are from Chiapas and Belize also did not participate in establishing this convention. As one might imagine, the non-Guatemalan Mayans have not subscribed to this convention except as an individual choice. Nonetheless, there are US academics, especially among archaeologists, who have adopted the ALMG to write any and all words in any Mayan language, including Proto-Mayan and Maya (i.e., Yucatec Maya). Although this seems like a politically correct and respectful adoption of a norm that was defined by an Indigenous group, others might view this as a continuation of neocolonial imposition. While it is respectful of the Guatemalan Mayans, it is overtly disrespectful of the Mayans in other nations who use their own orthographies. For example, to spell Yucatán "Yukatan" and Yucatec "Yukatek" is blatantly respectful of the established and accepted Mexican conventions of spelling the proper names of places and languages in Mexico. Further, the Maya -- that is, to be redundant, Maya from Yucatán -- have not agreed upon a single standard orthography for writing Maya, including the orthography established by Mayans of Guatemala. There are instead about 2 or 3 different orthographies currently in use and another 4 or 5 that have been used within the last 20 years. While there is no single standard there are many agreed upon conventions. Not only are there differences in the orthographies used by Maya linguists today, but one is likely to find variation in the way a Maya linguist currently writes Maya today and how she or he wrote Maya 3 years ago. _________________________________________________________________________________ Enrollment
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