Abstract
This article traces the project's founding, structure, and achievements over three years, documenting a community-led effort to create digital resources, including talking glossaries, keyboards, tools to help communities create textbooks for schools, and machine translation corpora for the 22 Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. Drawing on principles of communitybased language documentation and recognized under UNESCO’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL 2022–2032), the project confronts intersecting challenges of poverty, illiteracy, digital exclusion, and the ethical risks of data extraction by external actors. The author argues that meaningful language digitization should be guided by native speakers and community organizations, rather than external institutions, and that linguistic data carries cultural and ceremonial significance that requires rigorous consent and community collaboration. The project offers a replicable roadmap for Indigenous language communities worldwide seeking to enter digital spaces on their own terms.
Publication Date
8-5-2026
Keywords
Language preservation, language digitalization, Maya languages, Guatemala, Maya agency
DOI
10.62915/2688-9188.1215
