Playing at being bilingual: Bilingual performances, stance, and language scaling in Mayan Tzotzil siblings' play

Abstract

The present study documents the everyday bilingual practices of Mayan children, using Tzotzil Mayan and Spanish at play. It is based on a video-ethnography of bilingual peer language practices framed within larger research on language socialization in the everyday lives of Mayan children in the South of Mexico.The study examines how the children, whose first language is Tzotzil, staged bilingual scenarios through the use of parallel bilingual constructions (e.g., alignments, adjacency pairs, recycled discourse templates) in several domains of activity (e.g., broadcasting news of an earthquake, farewells, birthday parties, and commercial advertisements). Their bilingual ludic practices challenged regimented and conventional patterns and associations between language and activity domains. An analysis of the micro-interactional processes in the bilingual interactions (e.g., changes of footing, frame shifts, keying, and stances) reveals how children can invoke and reorder language scales and values. It is argued that language scales are neither neutral nor pre-established, but are rather the outcome of the dynamics of situated interaction.Findings demonstrate how the children's ludic creation of novel bilingual spaces reveals how peer language socialization in postcolonial contexts might contribute to rescaling, revaluing, and revitalizing native languages.