Indigenous Language Maintenance Research Articles

Language Attitudes as Insights into Indigenous Language Shift and Maintenance

ABSTRACT This study explores language shift and maintenance of Indigenous languages in bilingual contact situations. It specifically examines how factors such as language attitudes favour and deter the use, maintenance and transmission of Nahuatl. Data on language attitudes were collected by means of interviews which covered the linguistic background, language use, language significance, language shift, language maintenance, and evaluations of Nahuatl varieties. Fifty-two adults, comprising bilinguals and Nahuatl monolinguals, were interviewed in either Nahuatl or Spanish. The general themes identified in the interviews were pro-Indigenous attitudes, referring to the importance of Nahuatl to individuals and the community, purist attitudes, concerning Nahuatl use, and anti-Indigenous attitudes, questioning the relevance of Nahuatl for socioeconomic advancement. The findings provide insight into the intergenerational transmission, language use in the home and community, language education, speakers’ beliefs, and internal and external influences about Nahuatl in Mexico. They provide new insights into the perspectives of adults who represent the parent and grandparent generations, important groups responsible for the transmission of Nahuatl to the younger generations.

Language is land, land is language: The importance of Indigenous languages

This collaborative opinion piece, written from the authors’ personal perspectives (Anishinaabe and Gàidheal) on Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe language) and Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic language), discusses the importance of maintaining and revitalizing Indigenous languages, particularly in these times of climate and humanitarian crises. The authors will give their personal responses, rooted in lived experiences, on five areas they have identified as a starting point for their discussion: (1) why Indigenous languages are important; (2) the effects of colonization on Indigenous languages; (3) the connections/responsibilities to the land, such as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), embedded in Indigenous languages; (4) the importance of land-based learning and education, full language immersion, and the challenges associated with implementing these strategies for Indigenous language maintenance and revitalization; and (5) where we can go from here.

Growth of the Toluca Valley and its effect on the disappearance of indigenous languages from 1990 to 2010: A historical-linguistic approach

The central objective of this study is to investigate the effect of the population growth in the Toluca Valley in the maintenance of indigenous languages. The hypothesis of this paper is to analyze how the rapid growth of Toluca Valley along with the industrialization and urbanization processes have accelerated the vanishing of indigenous languages at an alarming rate; however, growth, in particular, does not correspond to the increase in the number of speakers of indigenous languages in the region. Through a historical and linguistic approach in the municipalities: Toluca, Metepec, Zinacantepec, Lerma and San Mateo Atenco, the diminishing and endangered path of indigenous languages (nahuatl, mazahua y otomi) is portrayed. The analysis period considered for the analysis runs from 1990 to 2010. Finally, the hypothesis is tested and accepted: The growth rate of the Toluca Valley has an inverse relationship with the maintenance of indigenous languages and development in the region. Therefore, some linguistic policies are proposed in order to maintain and enrich the linguistic and cultural development of those indigenous linguistic communities in the region.

"We Need to Make Action NOW, to Help Keep the Language Alive": Navigating Tensions of Engaging Indigenous Educational Values in University Education.

Despite centuries of contact and conquest, Indigenous communities persist in maintaining their cultures and psychologies. Key to this success in cultural survival is the maintenance of Indigenous languages, which contain distinct worldviews. However, Indigenous languages are at risk, with fewer and fewer fluent Elder speakers. Fortunately, there remain committed groups of community educators who carry out Indigenous language education. Current mainstream teacher education programs do not typically introduce the importance of Indigenous language education to teacher candidates, who are the next generation of K-12 teachers. We view this as highly problematic, and thus carried out a proof-of-concept project in which one U.S. university's American Indian/Alaska Native teacher candidates collaborated with, and learned from, Indigenous language educators during a two-week-long summer institute at the university. In our article, we share three main findings, based on qualitative analyses of daily-written student journals collected during the two-week pilot project: (a) Indigenous language education supports the social justice vision in the American Psychological Association's Multicultural Guidelines; (b) intergenerational educational opportunities are invaluable for affirming Indigenous psychologies; and (c) Indigenous community language educators do important survivance work. Our findings provide insight into how Indigenous language education is crucial for advancing education that honors Indigenous community psychological well-being.

Linguistic Motherwork in the Zapotec Diaspora: Zapoteca Mothers’ Perspectives on Indigenous Language Maintenance

This article explores Indigenous Mexican mothers’ perspectives on multilingualism and Indigenous language maintenance in their children’s lives. Drawing on interview data from a larger qualitative study of language and ideology among multilingual children in Los Angeles, California, the article examines the perspectives of four Zapotec mothers who have children in a local public school with a Spanish-English dual language program. The interview data highlight what these women think and do with respect to the maintenance of the Zapotec language in the lives of their school-aged children. Critical Latinx Indigeneities and the feminist notion of linguistic motherwork are used to highlight the intersectional nature of these women’s efforts to construct and sustain indigeneity in diaspora.

Language Maintenance Through Comic Strips

AbstractLanguage, both spoken and written, is an evidence of human civilization as it tells the culture of its users. A language extincts when its speakers were also gone without passing it into their future users. Or else, their descendants shift their language to another so that the previous one is no longer used. The extinction of many indigenous languages in Indonesia shows that their users choose to use another languages that give them more benefit than those indigenous languages. For example, instead of using indigenous languages as their mother tounge, Javanese people choose Indonesian (the official language) or even English (the international language) as their first language. Language maintenance is then needed to do to preserve the languages and the culture embedded in its use. One of the ways to do it is by using it through mass media since they have strong influence toward people. This research describes indigenous language maintenance through printed mass media, particularly through comic strip on newspaper, tabloid and magazine. Comic strip is one of the sections in printed media, usually newspaper, using spoken language written on its panel that sometimes using part of indigenous language in the conversation of its characters. The writer shows how and comic strips at printed mass media indirectly preserve spoken Javanese.

El sincretismo como estrategia de pervivencia de las lenguas originarias en México

En este trabajo se identifica el concepto de sincretismo como una denominación alternativa de las estrategias de los pueblos originarios para sostener su identidad lingüística en un contexto marcado por presiones sociales, así como por condiciones internas y externas de los sistemas lingüísticos. Se parte de una consideración axiomática de interacciones orales de hablantes de lenguas originarias y del hecho de que cinco siglos después de la colonización y de políticas de lenguaje desfavorables para las comunidades indígenas, más de la mitad de las lenguas originarias de México, cuenta aún con una vitalidad importante. Se conformó información que justifica la existencia de un sincretismo visible en la morfología léxica y en la alternancia de códigos, los cuales constituyen los medios de la estrategia de reproducción social de carácter simbólico que empodera y equilibra el ecosistema sociolingüístico. Se concluye que, en medio de una situación sociolingüística compleja, las comunidades de habla indígenas aplican una dinámica interna de pervivencia identitaria asumida en las transformaciones de su lengua, al tiempo que enfrentan la dinámica externa de las presiones capitalistas que se van imponiendo gradualmente mediante la lengua mayoritaria.

Language planning and language ideologies in Guernsey

AbstractThe Bailiwick of Guernsey is a small, semi-autonomous archipelago in the English Channel. Although it is a British Crown dependency and part of the British Isles, it has its own parliament and does not belong to the United Kingdom or the European Union. This unusual geopolitical situation means that the nation-state has little relevance. It is only recently that the indigenous former vernacular has been accorded any worth, at either grass-roots or government level: as its vitality declines (increasingly rapidly), its perceived value for individual and collective identification has grown. Although public opinion overtly supports indigenous language maintenance, and increasing its vitality is a stated aim (e.g., a government Language Commission was announced in 2012), effective top-down measures to increase the number and fluency of speakers appear to be low on the agenda. This article explores the implications of this socio-political background for language policy. It discusses language-related activities which reveal a lack of ideological clarification and strategic direction at all levels, compounded by issues of control, epistemic stance and language ownership.

Sustaining and revitalizing traditional Indigenous ways of speaking: An ethnography-of-speaking approach

This article makes a case for greater attention to traditional ways of speaking in Indigenous language maintenance and revitalization initiatives. It contends that traditional Indigenous communicative practices are overshadowed in many language revitalization programs by Euro-Western language ideologies and communicative norms that pervade language instruction. Through examples of speech by Lakota people, this article shows how the ethnography of speaking can usefully illuminate traditional Indigenous ways of speaking. It is posited that this “ethnography-of-speaking turn” promises to stimulate approaches to language revitalization that are more consistent with sustaining and revitalizing Indigenous cultures.

Indigenous Language Learning and Maintenance Among Young Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children

Internationally, cultural renewal and language revitalisation are occurring among Indigenous people whose lands were colonised by foreign nations. In Australia, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are striving for the re-voicing of their mother tongue and the re-practicing of their mother culture to achieve cultural renewal in the wake of over 250 years of colonisation (Williams in Recover, re-voice, re-practise. Sydney, NSW AECG Incorporated, 2013).While 120 Indigenous languages are still spoken in Australia today, little has been documented regarding the extent to which languages are learned and maintained by young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. The current paper offers a unique insight by drawing upon a large-scale dataset, Footprints in Time: the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC), to describe patterns of language use and maintenance among young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Of the 580 children followed longitudinally from the first wave of the baby cohort of LSIC (aged 0–1 years) until wave 4 (aged 3–5 years), approximately one in five (19.3 %) were reported to speak an Indigenous language. Children in the study were learning up to six languages simultaneously, including English (both Standard Australian English and Aboriginal Australian English), Indigenous languages, creoles, foreign languages (other than English) and sign languages. Social and environmental factors such as primary caregivers’ use of an Indigenous language and level of relative isolation were found to be associated with higher rates of Indigenous language maintenance. These findings have important implications for identifying ways of supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children to learn and maintain Indigenous languages during early childhood, especially for children who may not have the opportunity to learn an Indigenous language in the home environment and for children living in urban areas.

Language and Literacy Planning and Local Contexts: The Case of a Rarámuri Community

On the basis of a ten-month ethnography of a Raramuri school and community, this article contributes to the understanding of the role of sociolinguistic and socioeconomic contexts in creating Indigenous-language maintenance programs. Employing concepts of micro- and macrolevel variables in language endangerment and language vitality scales, it provides an example of how these variables should inform language and literacy planning (LLP). It also discusses how LLP for Indigenous communities needs to embrace a biocultural diversity perspective. [Raramuri, Tarahumara, language maintenance and shift, language policy and planning, bilingual education, indigenous education, Mexico]

Indigenous Language Usage and Maintenance Patterns among Indigenous People in the Era of Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Mexico and Guatemala

AbstractIn both Mexico and Guatemala, indigenous languages are at risk of extinction. Because languages influence people's ways of thinking and help them identify with particular ethnic groups, indigenous language loss can result in severe problems that extend well beyond the demise of these languages. Although current multicultural reforms offer indigenous people unprecedented opportunities, these seemingly positive changes may actually threaten indigenous languages and cultures. Using the latest demographic census data, I present how socioeconomic, demographic, and community factors negatively correlate with indigenous language usage. I contend that indigenous language maintenance will become more difficult because neoliberal multiculturalism endorses indigenous cultural rights without putting forth other necessary changes. Establishing effective language preservation strategies requires us to recognize dangers hidden in the current multicultural agenda, to rigorously ask how we can destigmatize negative images attached to indigenous cultures, and to combat centuries-long oppression and discrimination against indigenous groups.

Lenguas e identidades en los Andes: perspectivas ideológicas y culturales (review)

CORONEL-MOLINA, SERAFIN M. AND LINDA L. GRABNER-CORONEL. Lenguos e identidades en los Andes: perspectivas ideologicas y cultureles. Quito: Abya Yala, 2005. 426 pages.Lengtias e iticntuiades en los Amies: perspectivas ideologicas y culturales is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the complex relationships between language, social identity, and educational policies in the Andean region. It is divided into three sections: Language Maintenance, Ideology and Identities, and Deconstructing Socio-Cultural Identities.The first section, on language maintenance, covers a wide variety of topics ranging from Comajoan's contribution on the application of Fishman's model of inter-generational transmission to Quechua in Peru1 to a proposal by Coronel-Molina that views digital media as a forum that offers great potential for the revitalisation of Quechua and Aymara. Other contributions in this section include a proposal by Zuniga, Cano, and Galvez to develop educational policies on language and culture that incorporate the input of regional authorities, grass-root organizations, teachers, and community members in rural and indigenous Andean areas in Peru; an overview of the sociolinguistic status of Quichua in the Argentinian Northeast by Alharracin and Alderetes; and a contemporary view of the attempts by the newspaper EL Lapiz to construct a multilingual and multicultural identity for Venezuela in the nineteenth century. The common thread that runs across this section is the continuous search for social spaces for indigenous languages in the Andean region. While in countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru the Quechua languages have gained some terrain in the arena ot educational policy, the situation of Quichua in the Argentinian northeast described by Albarracin and Alderetes, and also confirmed by language changes experienced by the northeastern varieties,- is illustrative of a generalized lack of institutional support from the educational authorities throughout the region. There is a lack of interest in the inclusion of the varieties of Quichua spoken in the provinces of Jujuy, Tucuman, and Salta in the educational system and very limited interest in the provinces of Santiago del Estero, Catamarca, and La Rioja. This is so even in the province of Tucuman, where a community of immigrant Bolivian Quechua speakers keeps the language alive in the region through the transmission of radio programs in the area.The degree of variation in the situations described by the authors in this section is indicative of the different challenges that maintenance and revitalisation have historically faced and continue to face in Andean societies. Avendano's piece on Febres Corderos's attempts to incorporate some aspects of the now-extinct indigenous languages of Merida in Venezuela as part of the construction of national identity illustrates the early efforts that were made in the region to preserve indigenous languages. These efforts were not always successful, as the example of indigenous languages in Merida illustrates; but in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, new possibilities have emerged for revitalization that are grounded in the actual participation of indigenous communities in the elaboration of language and culture policies. In contrast to the grim picture for the survival of Quichua in the Argentinian northeast outlined by Alharracin and Alderete's paper, Comajoan's and Zuniga, Cano, and Galvez's reports contain proposals to further strengthen the maintenance of indigenous languages in Peru. Of theoretical relevance for the field of language maintenance is Comajoan's discussion of the relative weight that intergenerational transmission and educational policies have in the revitalization of indigenous languages. Although he recognizes the valuable effects of educational policies that foster the development of indigenous languages, he also points out that they must be accompanied by language policies that affect other aspects of social and communal life as well. …

Language and religion: a case study of two Ambonese communities

Both within the Ambonese community, and in scholarly discourse, it is frequently noted that Muslim villages in Maluku have retained their indigenous languages (bahasa tanah ‘language of the land’) whereas Christian villages have not. This article sketches the historical and sociological background of this difference, principally an outcome of colonial and religious policy by the Dutch administration. On the basis of current evidence of linguistic vitality in two communities on Ambon Island, one Christian (Allang) and one Muslim (Tulehu), we suggest that the crucial factor in the maintenance of indigenous languages in Muslim villages was not religion itself, but the lesser engagement of these communities with colonizers and other outside influences vis-a-vis Christian villages. Now that such influences are having a significant impact on Muslim communities, the trajectory of language loss is similar to that already experienced in Christian villages. We also discuss changing attitudes to indigenous languages as a result of the recent intercommunal violence in Maluku and suggest that these attitudes may have an impact on the fate of the surviving languages.

Language Policy, Indigenous Languages and the Village School: A Study of Bilingual Education for the Tarahumara of Northern Mexico

In 1991, the Bilingual Bicultural Education Program (BBEP) was launched in Chihuahua, Mexico, as a way of responding to the educational needs of the indigenous Tarahumara populations and the growing threat to their language and culture. Using a conceptual framework based on the literatures of curriculum inquiry, language shift and maintenance, and literacy studies, this 10-month ethnographic case study examines the sociocultural contexts of the implementation of the BBEP in a federal school serving Tarahumara and the role of the school and the BBEP in indigenous language maintenance. Specifically, the paper reports and discusses findings on how state-developed BBEP goals relate to the teachers' and parents' expectations of school and literacy and biliteracy. As the findings show, the school is the place of children's first intense contact with mestizo culture and language and the agency where children are expected by parents and teachers to acquire Spanish oral and literacy skills.