I am from the village of Kewa, located between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico. I am a speaker of the Keres language, which is spoken in seven villages/communities in central New Mexico. Each village has its own distinct dialect; however, these dialects are mutually intelligible to various degrees based on location.

Keres is considered a language isolate and an endangered language (Ethnologue, 2024) with fewer than 10,000 speakers. The term “Keres” is not the word we use for our language; it originated during the Spanish colonial contact era. The Spanish encountered the word “Queres” and applied it generically to the Indigenous people and lands of our homelands. Our way of expressing what would be called “language” can be translated as “speaking” or, intriguingly, as “vomiting,” evoking the idea that speaking “comes from deep within.”

Each village/community is governed independently and practices sovereign rights as recognized through their historical “time-immemorial” experience and interactions with the Spanish colonial government, the Mexican government, the Territory/State of New Mexico government, and currently the United States government. These sovereign rights include self-governance, self-determination, language, culture, and religion. Because of these sovereign rights, our language is claimed as the “intellectual property” of each village.

Also because of each village/community’s sovereign rights, there exist various degrees of openness regarding the sharing of language and collaboration with researchers. Each community also dictates whether the language is written – my community has not sanctioned our language to be written. Our language is not written largely because of our experience with aggressive collection by anthropologists and ethnographers in the early 1900s, leading to no impetus to create a written language.

My language had not been taught in classrooms or schools; it had largely relied on daily use within the home and community to maintain its vitality. However, within the last 30 or so years, there has been a dramatic shift to English use by younger people. Around 2010, the elders and leaders of the community authorized the teaching of our language in schools.

Here at MIT, I wish to extend my knowledge of linguistics to build foundations for the future of our community’s language. I also want to explore ways of creating an orthography that suits the needs of our community and is not based on Western orthography.