About ILAS

What is ILAS?

Indigenous Languages of the Americas and their Structures (ILAS) is a project dedicated to supporting community-centered language revitalization, reclamation and maintenance. This project is carried out by members of the Saguaro Group, housed at the University of Arizona Department of Linguistics.

The primary goal of the ILAS project is to produce a series open-access textbooks for language workers, with a focus on Indigenous languages of the Americas. The aim of these books is to enable community language workers — including knowledge-holders, rememberers, speakers, learners, teachers, revitalizationists, reclamationists, activists, administrators, policy-makers, researchers and linguists — to use linguistic concepts and tools in their work, and to make previously published work on Indigenous languages more accessible.

The Saguaro Group functions as the editor for ILAS series of textbooks, determining the general content and structure of the books, and ensuring coherence and relevance of the final products. Specific sections of the books are written by contributing authors, often Saguaro Group members.

The first book in the series will be about sound & sign patterns (phonetics/phonology) & word structures (morphology). Other volumes about the structure of sentences (morphology/syntax), and meaning (semantics) & usage (pragmatics/discourse) will ideally follow this initial effort.

Contact

Use this form to get in touch with questions, concerns or feedback on the ILAS textbook series. If you are interested in getting involved with ILAS, or joining the Saguaro Group, please contact Sasha Santiago at asa@email.arizona.edu.