Content license

The license

Nahuat.com’s language content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Nahuat.com is not a business, and says so in its license. Money is a delicate subject in the communities this language lives in, and the project’s work with them rests on that being plain. The same license is used by teaching material made for Nahuat, such as Achtu Taksalis (University of Alberta, 2023).

Summary of the license · Full legal text

What it covers

Everything this project writes that makes up the dictionary and its teaching material:

• Dictionary entries and their headwords
• Translations, glosses and definitions written here
• Example sentences
• Phonetic transcriptions
• Audio recordings this project makes
• The compilation itself: the selection and arrangement of all of it

What you may do

Copy it, publish it, translate it, print it, teach with it, build lessons and apps on it. Three conditions:

Credit. Name this project and, where a recording is involved, the speaker and the person who recorded it.

Not for money. Do not sell it, or use it in something you charge for.

Share alike. If you adapt it, release your version under this same license, so the next person has everything you had.

For non-commercial use you do not need permission and you do not need to ask. For anything else, ask: Nahuat.com can grant permission for what it holds, and is glad to hear from a teacher, a school or a publisher. Telling us is welcome either way, and if something here is wrong we would rather hear it.

What it does not cover

The source code of this application, which is licensed separately. The software is a tool; the language material is the thing being preserved.

Text quoted from a source, as its author wrote it. Where this dictionary shows an author’s own definition, note or etymology, that text remains theirs: it is shown by their permission and is not licensed onward by this project. A word, and the fact that it means what it means, is not anyone’s property; a paragraph an author wrote about it is.

Recordings received under another license keep that license, which is stated beside the recording with its credit. The recordings imported from Wikimedia Commons — the elders of Santo Domingo de Guzmán, recorded by Timumachtikan Nawat for Wikitajtaketzalis on Lingua Libre — are CC BY-SA 4.0, and so are the copies this project makes to play them on the page. The same holds for any text or material received under its own license.

Recordings and images used with their makers’ permission remain theirs: they are shown with their credit and no license, and this project does not license them onward.

Images and illustrations, which are licensed one at a time. Most come from other open collections and arrive under their own terms, stated beside each one, which are the ones that govern. Photographs of people and places also carry the interests of the people in them, which nothing on this page settles.

How to give credit

Reuse requires credit. A reasonable form:

Nahuat — an interactive dictionary and learning companion, https://nahuat.com, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

For a recording, credit the people first:

<speaker>, recorded by <recorder>, via nahuat.com, <the recording’s license>

Audio recordings: a request, not a condition

Recordings this project makes carry this same license, like everything else: you may reuse them for anything not for money, crediting the speaker and the person who recorded, and sharing alike.

The recordings of the elders of Santo Domingo de Guzmán that come from Wikimedia Commons keep the license they arrived under, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In both cases the license lets you reuse the audio without asking. We are asking anyway.

These are recordings of real people speaking a critically endangered language, most of them elders, made in towns where the language survives because someone kept speaking it. They exist because of long relationships between the speakers and the people who recorded them. And rights to a person’s recorded voice are not this project’s alone to grant, whatever a license says.

So if you want to reuse the audio, please get in touch first: the speakers and their communities have an interest in how their voices travel, and we may be able to tell you something you would want to know.

Why non-commercial

The project’s standing with the communities it works with matters more than the reuses the non-commercial condition blocks, and Nahuat.com can still grant those, one by one, for what it holds.

Non-commercial is not what protects a speaker, and is not offered as that: no license stops the world copying a voice. What protects a speaker is asking them at recording time, writing down what they agreed to, and being able to take a recording down.