Nora England Papers

Nora England (1946-2022) was a distinguished linguistic anthropologist well known for both her academic achievements and her activism in support of language documentation, revitalization, and reclamation work among Mayan communities in Guatemala. In 1971, while in graduate school at the University of Florida, she joined the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín (PLFM), a language documentation project in Guatemala that established a research center for Indigenous people to work on their own languages. England’s role was to coordinate research on Mam languages. This work led to her dissertation and well-known book A Grammar of Mam, published in 1983. The work she did with the PLFM set the trajectory for the rest of her career.

In 1990, England co-founded OKMA (Oxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’), an Indigenous academy devoted to teaching and research on Mayan languages based in Antigua, Guatemala. OKMA trained many native speakers of Mayan languages in linguistics, including in the documentation of their own languages. The group produced comparative vocabularies, grammars, and literacy manuals in many different Mayan languages.

England held several academic appointments during her career, including Mississippi State University and the University of Iowa, before moving to UT Austin in 2001, where she was a full professor in the Department of Linguistics as well as the first director of the Center for Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. Shortly thereafter, she founded the Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA) in 2003. CILLA is significant for two reasons: it was the first linguistics conference held in the U.S. that allowed presentations to be conducted in Spanish and Portuguese, in addition to English, and it has always featured keynotes given by native speakers of a Latin American Indigenous language.

England’s lifelong dedication to the training of Maya People in linguistics and language documentation led to two awards: the MacArthur “genius” grant in 1993 and the Guatemalan Messenger of Peace award in 2019. In recognition of her solidarity with the Mayan people, her friends and collaborators gave her a Mayan name: Ixkeem, “the woman weaver of words,” demonstrating how highly regarded she was within the communities she worked with.