In the literature of linguistic justice, there is still room for sociolinguistic discussion. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate by the mean of introducing into the analysis a number of sociolinguistic parameters that have been hitherto used for the interpretation of linguistic repertoires, mainly in minority contexts. In fact, the necessary holistic view-driven by the need of rendering justice to the speaker-should lead the researcher to consider the whole set of linguistic varieties present in the repertoire of the communities, at any level of use: international, super-national, national, local. The paper will show and justify the motivations of these parameters and the (social) rules that control their use arguing that their consideration can draw important hints for a better understanding and implementations of issues of linguistic justice.
Mazatec (Popolocan, Eastern Otomanguean) became world-renowned following an article by Pike & Pike (1947) and the famous chapter VIII in Pike (1948) on the Huautla variety, which inspired several other seminal studies by on this extremely relevant language as far as phonological typology is concerned. However the early monographs and sketches, which have had a major impact on modern linguistics (laying the premises for the syllabic constituency theory, the theory of tones and tone sandhi as well as their functions in inflectional systems), only take into account a minute proportion of this language's inner diversity. The ALMaz project is an attempt to both revisit second-hand data on Mazatec varieties all over the area where it is densely spoken (especially using Kirk 1966 lists of over 700 cognates as a data base), and to gather and process new data on Mazatec diatopic and diastratic variation, using computational geolinguistics.
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