Mexican Language Research Articles

Resisting neoliberalism: testimonios of language teachers as social activists

ABSTRACT This study examines the testimonios of Mexican language teachers who experienced the violent and institutional imposition of neoliberal policies at the main university at the state of Puebla. Through the analysis of testimonios, language teachers narrated their own trajectories to resist the implementation of the neoliberal policies, such as the restriction of teaching freedom for educators, the elimination of the right to free education for students, and the current subjugation educators experience at the site of study. Based on the Foucauldian concepts of sovereign and institutional power, along with governmentality, this article analyzes the activism of language teachers, and the oppression and re-signification that neoliberal elites have carried out to silence dissident voices. While current research regarding neoliberalism and language teaching has focused on pedagogic materials and neocolonial publishing houses, the creation of learners’ subjectivities, and social-class perpetuation through language instruction, second language research has not extensively concentrated on way neoliberalism has impacted the professional development of language teachers. In this regard, the present article aims to raise awareness about the way neoliberalism has been normalized as a tool for suppression among language educators in Mexico.

Unveiling the discourses of coloniality: Mexican Student-Teachers’ language awareness in personal stories and language practices

ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH (English) language teaching in Mexico occurs within ‘coloniality. Hence, it is imperative to raise the critical multilingual language awareness of future language teachers in terms of colonial practices. In order to promote decolonizing pedagogies, this paper presents the results of a critical-ethnographic-action-research study, whose main goal was to unveil the discourses of coloniality present in the daily lives and personal stories of 37 student-teachers enrolled in a language teaching BA program while connecting the student-teachers to language teaching in general and the position of Spanish and English vis-à-vis Indigenous languages in Mexico in particular. The data originates from student-teachers’ stories about (self)discrimination, their collection and analysis of memes, videos circulating in their social media, samples from their language textbooks, and a written piece in which the student-teachers identified and reflected on words and phrases stemming from coloniality. Based on an iterative and recursive analysis of the data and utilizing a decolonizing theoretical lens in connection to race theories in Latin America, this paper addresses three emergent themes: (1) race and physical appearance; (2) colonial linguistic hierarchies; and (3) awareness of the discourses of colonial difference.

Language teachers’ knowledge and perceptions of the implementation of CLT in a Mexican language centre

This study explores the knowledge and perceptions that language teachers hold of the implementation of the communicative language teaching approach in their teaching context, a language centre of a public university in central Mexico. To collect data, a questionnaire was disseminated among teachers of different languages including Spanish, Nahuatl, Italian, German, French, and English. Data on teachers’ knowledge of the approach were included to discuss the reported use of CLT in their teaching activities. Then, inferences were made based on the contextual elements surrounding each language. The findings in this study provide evidence that there may be specific factors in each language that may foster or hinder the implementation of CLT principles.

The experiences of Mexican language teachers in transnational contexts

ABSTRACT The article examines the transnational mobility experienced by two language teachers of Mexican origin, one who migrated to the United States and the other to the UK. Drawing on autobiographies and in-depth interview data, the analysis shows the complex relationship of different factors in shaping how the participants experienced their transnational mobility processes. These factors include differences in their sense of agency, the link between their bilingualism and their professional identities, and the emergence of different positionings regarding their previous and current work contexts. The article concludes by outlining the implications that the findings have for policy and practice.

Emotions and Sociocultural Context in Foreign Language Teacher Identity

The present article analyses the influence of previous learning experiences, emotions, and socio-cultural context on the development of teacher identity. The life history of a Mexican language teacher in the middle of her career is explored, in order to understand how previous learning experiences, emotional events, and culture have shaped her teacher identity and professional development. It presents analysis undertaken on the autobiographical narrative of the subject, Renata, the results of which show the determining influence of culture and previous learning experiences in the construction of a teacher identity. This article aims to make professionals in foreign language teaching aware of the usefulness of personal narratives to understanding the teaching practice and supporting professional development.

Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region by Norma Rosas Mayén

Reviewed by: Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region by Norma Rosas Mayén Álvaro Ramírez Rosas Mayén, Norma. Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region. Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2021. Pp. 189. ISBN: 978-84-9192-170-7. The Afro-Mexican population of the Costa Chica region of southern Mexico, that unjustly remained invisible since the end of the colonial period, has lately drawn the attention of scholars, generating many ethnological and anthropological monographs. Norma Rosas Mayén’s Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region is the latest study that brings to light the rich cultural landscape of this geographical area. She, however, shifts the focus to the linguistic heritage found among the Black population of Collantes and La Boquilla in the state of Oaxaca, two of the nearly thirty-seven Afro-Mexican towns of Costa Chica which straddles the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca. The book comprises six chapters and an appendix. The first three chapters center on socio-historical, theoretical, and methodological matters. While the last three take up the analysis of linguistic data the author gathered during her field work. In the opening chapter, Rosas Mayén lays out a brief history of the presence of Afro-Mexican Spanish in Mexico, emphasizing our lack of knowledge concerning the language of the slave population due to their oral tradition and illiteracy. The few written examples that exist come from colonial legal documents and literary texts such as “villancicos” written by writers from the dominant class, perhaps as imitations that ridiculed the language of the slaves. Nonetheless, the author is interested in exploring the degree to which a creolized variety of Spanish existed and whether there are remnants in Mexico. Additionally, Rosas Mayén cites the urgency of researching and recording this Spanish dialect as globalization and migration are quickly transforming the linguistic characteristics that define “el español negro de la Costa Chica.” Like many other Indigenous languages in Mexico, she believes this Afro-Mexican Spanish is in danger of extinction. In Chapter 2, “Creole Genesis and the Rhizomatic Linguistic Model,” the author briefly reviews seven theories of the etiology of Creole languages highlighting their theoretical advantages and disadvantages. She underscores the lack of agreement among scholars on the genesis of Creole; then, moves on to postulate theories that explicate the absence of creolized Spanish in the colonies. Next, she traces the socio-historical trajectory of Papiamentu in Curaçao concluding that it is a Creole language that emerged from a mixture of Portuguese and other languages in West Africa. From there, it migrated to Curaçao with the slaves, New Christians, and Sephardic Jews, where it was lexified toward Spanish. Rosas Mayén finishes by positing a view of language based on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rhizome theory. She proposes that languages exist in a rhizomatic ecological system that privileges a horizontal structure of connections linking them all together. Thus, allowing for linguistic development with multiple points of connection. Rosas Mayén proposes that this model can best help appreciate the multilinguistic origins of Papiamentu and other Afro-Spanish varieties such as those found in la Costa Chica. [End Page 641] In the following chapter, “Methodological and Historical Remarks,” the author refers to the scarcity of studies of Afro-Mexican Spanish in the Costa Chica. Then she presents a thorough explanation of the methodology she employed in her study and a description of the subjects and geographical area where she conducted her research. She closes by giving a brief history of the Afro-Mexicans in Oaxaca. Interestingly, Rosas Mayén contrasts the folkloric version the people tell of their arrival on a ship from where they claim to descend, and the quasi-historical information known. In this point she appears to contradict herself when she asserts Blacks arrived from West Africa, yet later she posits that scholars have not been able to specify exactly from where Afro-Mexicans of this region originate. Chapter 4, “Phonological Characteristics of Costeño Spanish,” details the sounds that distinguish this costal variety of Spanish. Rosas Mayén notes an...

Economics of minority groups: Labour-market returns and transmission of indigenous languages in Mexico

This study demonstrates a series of links between minority language skills, their economic return, and transmission across generations among Indigenous Mexican groups. We begin by estimating the differential in employment likelihood and wages between monolinguals of the dominant language (Spanish), relative to bilinguals who also know a local minority language. This effect of bilingualism on labour-market outcomes is identified using census and labour survey microdata and a matching procedure that ties individuals closely by ethnicity and socioeconomic cline. This enables us to separate language from ethnicity and reduce the bias driven by unobservable factors, compared to existing research. We find that, for indigenous Mexicans, retaining the minority language along with Spanish improves employment prospects, overturning earlier results. Next, we investigate whether languages that are associated with larger labour-market benefits are also more likely to be passed on from parents to children, using intergenerational microdata. We find this to be the case, even after a rich set of controls on socio-economic environment. The results support a view that even in the absence of institutional support, minority languages may sustain themselves over generations in an ecological niche supported by labour-market specialisation.

Voices silenced by written texts: indigenous languages encountering standardization

ABSTRACT This article examines ways in which Indigenous teachers and students draw on diverse language repertoires while deciphering, writing, and translating texts in multilingual educational spaces. Recent normalization of orthographies tends to homogenize indigenous languages in Mexico, while silencing and excluding actual language repertoires, thus reproducing the colonial asymmetry that has privileged Spanish only in public domains. The authors draw on data from three multilingual settings to compare languaging practices surrounding work with texts. Analysis reveals the multivocality that surfaces in speech and offers insights into the power of orality to counter the dominance of standardized spellings and meanings. Attention to oral polysemy leads students and teachers to question the standardized versions and determine better ways to render in writing their own heterogeneous language repertoires for local use.

Sources of convergence in indigenous languages: Lexical variation in Yucatec Maya.

Linguistic variation in space reflects patterns of social interaction. Gravity models have been successfully used to capture the role of urban centers in the dissemination of innovations in the speech community along with the diffusion of variants in space. Crucially, the effects of the factors of a gravity model (distance and population size) depend on language situation and may result from different sources, in particular processes of vertical and horizontal convergence. In the present study, we investigate lexical variation in contemporary Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of Mexico, spoken in a situation of generalized bilingualism. This language situation lacks some crucial ingredients of vertical convergence: no variety of Yucatec Maya has the status of a standard variety: the language of administration and education is Spanish (diglossia-with-bilingualism). The present study finds evidence of convergence processes that can be exclusively attributed to horizontal convergence. The lexical distance between speakers decreases in and between urban centers, variants with a large distribution are more likely in areas with a maximum of interactions with other areas. Even Spanish variants are distributed in the sample with a pattern that reveals processes of horizontal convergence: their distribution is accounted for through an areal bias (widespread in areas with a stronger exposition to Spanish) rather by influences from the urban centers (as centers of administration/education) to the rural areas in their surroundings.

Perceptual Categorization of Hñäñho-Specific Vowel Contrasts by Hñäñho Heritage Speakers in Mexico

For a large proportion of Mexican Indigenous speakers, it is common for the use of their native languages to shift across generations towards Spanish, the majority language in Mexico. This specific population can be defined as heritage speakers (HS) of their indigenous language, since many of them are Spanish-dominant bilinguals with a strong connection to their minority native language and culture, both of which they might only maintain in their family home where they were raised. The present study investigates the perceptual sensitivity of HS of Santiago Mexquititlán Otomi (Hñäñho) towards sounds of their native language to examine if these HS can accurately categorize Hñäñho vowels or whether their categorization is influenced by their dominant Spanish vowel system. Twelve Hñäñho HS (HHS) and twelve Mexican Spanish monolinguals (MSM) listened to the Hñäñho-specific vowel contrasts /a – ɔ/ and /ɔ – o/ and categorized them among the vowels of their respective mother tongue. Our results indicate that HHS correctly categorize vowels /a/ and /o/, which exist in both Hñäñho and Spanish, but do not accurately categorize the Hñäñho-specific vowel /ɔ/. Moreover, HHS and MSM showed similar patterns in terms of the proportion of /ɔ/ categorized as either /a/ and /o/. These results have implications for the maintenance of language-specific vowel contrasts and the vowel system of a minority language, such as Hñäñho, in the context of language shift towards Spanish in Mexico.

The maintenance of Japanese as a heritage language in Mexico: evidence from Japanese pre-war migrants and newcomers

Abstract This article reports the first sociolinguistic investigation of heritage language maintenance in two distinct types of Japanese migrant community in Mexico City – pre-war labour migrants and recent self-movers. We investigate which social factors most strongly contribute to the preservation of Japanese oral language ability in these two communities. The results confirm the significant effects of languages used in the home and educational domains upon the maintenance of their heritage language in both old and new migrant communities, while highlighting the community-specific effects of both age and languages used in the workplace among the old community and those of contact with relatives and friends in Japan in the case of the newcomer community. We argue that these differences indicate that in the older community, where a strong solidarity network has been developed but where contact with relatives in Japan has been mostly lost, the use of Japanese in the workplace is most likely to help them maintain it, whilst in the more recent newcomer community with more loose-knit Japanese networks within Mexico, frequent interaction with their relatives and friends in Japan serves to strongly support the retention of their high language ability. This article concludes that heritage language use in both home and school is indeed the fundamental determiner of migrant heritage language survival, whereas different factors, such as the use of the heritage language in the workplace and contact with relatives and friends in the homeland, may aid in its preservation, depending upon the recency of the community’s arrival as well as the strength of community’s network.

Cross-speaker repetition and epistemic stance in Tzeltal, Yucatec, and Zapotec conversations

As a turn-design strategy, repeating another has been described for English as a fairly restricted way of constructing a response, which, through re-saying what another speaker just said, is exploitable for claiming epistemic primacy, and thus avoided when a second speaker has no direct experience. Conversations in Mesoamerican languages present a challenge to the generality of this claim. This paper examines the epistemics of dialogic repetition in video-recordings of conversations in three Indigenous languages of Mexico: Tzeltal and Yucatec Maya, both spoken in southeastern Mexico, and Lachixío Zapotec, spoken in Oaxaca. We develop a typology of repetition in different sequential environments. We show that while the functions of repeats in Mesoamerica overlap with the range of repeat functions described for English, there is an additional epistemic environment in the Mesoamerican routine of repeating for affirmation: a responding speaker can repeat to affirm something introduced by another speaker of which s/he has no prior knowledge. We argue that, while dialogic repetition is a universally available turn-design strategy that makes epistemics potentially relevant, cross-cultural comparison reveals that cultural preferences intervene such that, in Mesoamerican conversations, repetition co-constructs knowledge as collective process over which no individual participant has final authority or ownership.

Mecapalapa Tepehua

Mecapalapa Tepehua (ISO code: tee) is a language of Mexico that belongs to the Huehuetla branch of the Totonac-Tepehua linguistic family. It is spoken in the town of Mecapalapa, Puebla, Mexico. This linguistic family is composed of the Tepehua and Totonac branches (see MacKay & Trechsel 2014 and references there). The Tepehua branch consists of three main languages and their respective varieties: Pisaflores and Tlachichilco Tepehua are located in Veracruz, and Huehuetla Tepehua is located in Hidalgo and Puebla (see Figure 1). In comparison with Totonac, Tepehua has been poorly studied (see a comprehensive list of references in MacKay & Trechsel 2012). Representative works include Watters (1988), on Tlachichilco morpho-syntax with a brief phonological survey; Gutiérrez, Jiménez & García (2013), on a Tepehua-Spanish vocabulary, which is a vocabulary for the Tepehua variety spoken in Tlachichilco; MacKay & Trechsel (2013, 2018), providing detailed accounts of the phonological structures of Pisaflores and discussion of previous reconstructions of proto-Totonac-Tepehua sounds; and Kryder (1987) and Smythe (2007), offering a detailed description of Huehuetla phonology.

(SARS-CoV-2) COVID 19: Genomic Surveillance and Evaluation of the Impact on the Population Speaker of Indigenous Language in Mexico

(SARS-CoV-2) COVID 19: Genomic Surveillance and Evaluation of the Impact on the Population Speaker of Indigenous Language in Mexico

CONSTRUCTION AND ANALYSIS OF THE ASSOCIATIVE FIELD OF THE CONCEPT IDENTITY IN THE MEXICAN LANGUAGE PICTURE OF THE WORLD

The article is focused on the construction and analysis of the associative field of the concept. The main aim of the given investigation is to demonostrate the results of using the associative experiment in the study of the semantic content of the concept IDENTITY in the mexican language picture of the world. The research has been done in the framework of modern cognitive linguistics. As a result of the experiment more than one thousand word-reactions have been received. To describe the content of the concept under study, generalized results obtained in free and directed types of associative experiment were used, since the combined features have an index of frequency of use, which allows them to be correctly placed in the final model of the concept model. Semantic associations to the word-stimulus identidad were grouped according to the thematic proximity, thus defining a specific thematic associative group. The semantic components of the associations combined in this way were arranged according to quantitative characteristics. Thus, verbal correlates of associative fields that exist in the minds of respondents were obtained. The experiment made it possible to describe the macrostructure of the concept IDENTITY in the mexican language picture of the world and to reveal its linguistic and cultural aspect. In the linguistic picture of the world of Mexico, personal identity lies in its inseparable connection with the desire to have rights, freedom, personality, security, dignity (tener derechos, libertad, personalidad, seguridad, dignidad). The national identity is defined in the light of such concepts as mestizaje, machismo and indigenismo, and is interpreted as duality (una gran dualidad), great diversity (una diversidad enorme), another way of life (una manera distinta de vivir), equal opportunities (igualdad de opportunidades).

Environmental adaptation in language

Abstract We argue that the human ability to linguistically describe spatial locations, relations and paths is likely to contribute importantly to human survival, and that consequently the relation between linguistic elements and structures used in spatial reference, and the environment in which humans navigate, ought to be of concern for evolutionary studies of language. We make the case for systematically studying the correspondences between the structures of human spatial language and the spatially structured practices of human groups within specific landscapes, and for considering this relation within a diachronic framework, as a process of cultural and linguistic adaptation to the physical environment. The last section presents the research design of the Nahuatl Space Project, which investigates the possibility of environmental adaptation of spatial language in four varieties of the Nahuan languages of Mexico.

Ideologies behind the scoring of factors to rate sign language vitality

This article examines ideologies underlying the rating of sign language vitality. The discussion is based on a 2011 survey by UNESCO and the International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies, and a newer survey by UNESCO, released in 2018. Ideologies of biodiversity and culture that appear in discourse about language vitality generally are examined. Three of the factors used to determine the vitality scores of 15 sign languages during the first survey (Safar and Webster, 2014; Webster and Safar, 2019) are considered from an ideological perspective. Further ideological issues that surfaced during this survey are then explored through a case study on endangered village sign languages in Mexico. Lastly, some ideological aspects of UNESCO's 2018 survey are scrutinised, including its accessibility to deaf signers, emphasis on hierarchical globalist structures, and presentation of sign languages as bounded entities that fit into binary categories. We find problems with framing sign languages within endangerment ideologies and relying on academic perceptions of ‘language’ that differ from the beliefs of language communities themselves. These vitality surveys provide a starting point for more robust mixed-methods assessments, which should take more account of sign language communities' own perspectives.

The Perception of Postalveolar English Obstruents by Spanish Speakers Learning English as a Foreign Language in Mexico

The present study deals with the perception (identification and discrimination) of an English phonemic contrast (/t∫/–/∫/, as in cheat and sheet) by speakers of two Mexican varieties of Spanish who are learning English as a foreign language. Unlike English, Spanish does not contrast /t∫/ and /∫/ phonemically. Most Spanish varieties have [t∫], but not [∫]. In northwestern Mexico, [∫] and [t∫] find themselves in a situation of “free” variation—perhaps conditioned, to some extent, by social factors, but not in complementary distribution. In this variety, [∫] and [t∫] are variants of the same phoneme. The present study compares the perceptual behavior of English learners from northwestern Mexico, with that of learners from central Mexico, whose native dialect includes only [t∫]. The results of a word-categorization task show that both groups of learners find cheat and sheet difficult to identify in the context of each other, but that, relative to the other learner group, the group of learners in northwestern Mexico find this task to be particularly challenging. The results of a categorical discrimination task show that both learner groups find the members of the /t∫/–/∫/ contrast difficult to discriminate. On average, accuracy is lower for the group of learners in northwestern Mexico than it is for the central Mexicans. The findings suggest that the phonetic variants found in one’s native dialect modulate the perception of nonnative sounds and, consequently, that people who speak different regional varieties of the same language may face different obstacles when learning the sounds of their second language.

Linguistic Re-Formation in Florida Heartland Schools: School Erasures of Indigenous Latino Languages

By law, language information of students in U.S. schools must be identified during enrollment. This information affects language screening, federal reporting, provision of services, and so on. In the Florida Heartland, analyses of observations, records, a language inventory (survey), and interviews show that some students and parents’ languages identified during registration are not recorded accurately. Raciolinguistic enregisterment played a role in registrars recording languages as others and in their differential questioning practices; employee training, policy, and the records system design also affected this linguistic re-formation. In the end, Indigenous Mexican languages were under measured by a factor of 19—for every 19 students whose parent spoke an Indigenous language, only one was recorded. Suggestions for improvement are provided.

Brief version of the coping health inventory for parents (CHIP) among family caregivers of children with chronic diseases

BackgroundThe Coping Health Inventory for Parents (CHIP) has demonstrated good psychometric properties in several language forms and has been used to assess the coping behaviors of families facing disease. However, the CHIP has not been validated in Mexico among families of children with chronic conditions, where it could be useful for research and intervention. The objectives of this instrumental study were to obtain a version of the CHIP for the Spanish language in Mexico, establish the factor structure of the Mexican version of the CHIP, probe its internal consistency reliability, and assess its concurrent construct validity.MethodsA nonprobability sample of 405 family caregivers of children with chronic diseases responded to a battery of measurement instruments that included the CHIP, the Beck Anxiety Inventory, and the Beck Depression Inventory. The sample was randomly divided into two parts. In one subsample (190 participants), an exploratory factor analysis was performed using a principal component analysis and oblique rotation. In the second subsample (215 participants), a confirmatory factor analysis was performed using maximum likelihood estimation.ResultsThe scale was reduced to 16 items (CHIP-16) with factorial loads greater than .50. The empirical criteria used to determine the number of factors converged on the following five factors: belief and trust (McDonald ω = .85), spouse/partner relationship (ω = .79), home care (ω = .77), family involvement (ω = .75), and security/stability (ω = .79). The overall internal consistency was good (ω = .88). The five-factor model showed acceptable fit indices and high parsimony. The mean CHIP-16 scores and the Spouse/partner relationship scores among the caregivers with anxiety were greater than those among the caregivers without anxiety. The mean home-care scores among the women were greater than those among men.ConclusionsThe 16-item version of the CHIP showed good internal consistency and construct validity; thus, the CHIP-16 is a useful instrument for measuring and assessing coping in family caregivers of children with chronic diseases.