Abstract
AbstractHaving survived a 36-year genocidal war, as well as 500 years of colonial and neocolonial domination, the Maya of Guatemala have developed strong and explicit strategies to maintain their languages and to define their own language communities. In this article, I explore how these language ideologies have changed over time from precontact interactions, colonial and republican eras into the early 1930s, through the violence of the civil war, into a period of paragovernmental interaction, and finally into a dichotomous era of standardization/revitalization and language shift. I explore the dynamic tensions between the national promotion of Mayan languages, through the Ministry of Education and the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala, and the neoliberal regime’s emphasis on economic advancement and social simplification. These national trends are compared with more local grassroots language movements, their ideologies, and language regimes.
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