Browsing by Subject "Indigenous languages"
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Item Built upon the Tower of Babel : language policy and the clergy in Bourbon Mexico(2016-05) Zakaib, Susan Blue; Deans-Smith, Susan, 1953-; Twinam, Ann; Butler, Matthew; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia; McDonough, KellyThis dissertation provides the first in-depth analysis of the “Bourbon language reforms”—a series of royal and ecclesiastical policies aimed at spreading the Spanish language in New Spain (now Mexico), enacted primarily between the 1750s and 1770s under the rule of the Bourbon dynasty. The limited scholarship on these reforms has assumed that a monolithic Bourbon state sought to mold a monolingual, Spanish-speaking empire. It has also suggested that creoles (American-born Spaniards), mendicants (Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars), indigenous peoples, or some combination thereof responded by uniformly opposing the Bourbon state’s oppressive measures. I challenge both of these arguments by analyzing the central Mexican Catholic Church’s “language regime”—not only official policies, but also their historical context, and predominant ideologies about indigenous languages and their speakers—between 1700 and 1821. I demonstrate that indigenous languages were deeply integrated into the inner workings of the Church—not only its religious services, but also its bureaucracy and hierarchy. Native language competency helped to determine clerics’ career paths, forge socioeconomic hierarchies within the Church, and shape political disputes between warring royal and ecclesiastical factions. This key role of native languages in the Church helped induce the Bourbon language reforms. In spite of the reform effort, however, native languages continued to play a critical role in ecclesiastical administration through the end of the colonial period. This was due in large part to the fact that the Bourbon state did not seek uniformly to eradicate these languages; indeed, royal and ecclesiastical authorities could not even agree on precisely what their language policy should entail. Few priests (creole or not) felt the need to resist a reform effort that was contradictory, piecemeal, and of limited consequence for the Church. Contrary to many scholars’ assumptions, these findings indicate that modern Mexico’s linguistic inequality is not a persistent vestige of colonial policy. Instead, 18th-century language policy was only an early step in a centuries-long process leading to today’s particular brand of linguistic discrimination.Item Linguistic inheritance, social difference, and the last two thousand years of contact among Lowland Mayan languages(2011-05) Law, Daniel Aaron; Stross, Brian; England, Nora C.; Epps, Patience; Stuart, David; Hanks, William; Woodbury, AnthonyThe analysis of language contact phenomena, as with many types of linguistic analysis, starts from the similarity and difference of linguistic systems. This dissertation will examine the consequences of linguistic similarity and the social construction of difference in the ‘Lowland Mayan linguistic area’, a region spanning parts of Guatemala, Southern Mexico, Belize and Honduras, in which related languages, all belonging to the Mayan language family, have been in intensive contact with each other over at least the past two millennia. The linguistic outcomes of this contact are described in detail in the dissertation. They include contact-induced changes in the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the languages involved of a type and degree that seems to contravene otherwise robust cross-linguistic tendencies. I propose that these cross-linguistically unusual outcomes of language contact in the Maya Lowlands result, in part, from an awareness of the inherited similarities between these languages, and in part from the role that linguistic features, but not languages as whole systems, appear to have played in the formation of community or other identities. This dissertation investigates two complementary questions about language contact phenomena that can be ideally explored through the study of languages with a high level of inherited similarity in contact with one another. The first is how historically specific, dynamic strategies and processes of constructing and asserting group identity and difference, as well as the role that language plays in these, can condition the outcomes of language contact. The second is more language internal: what role does (formal, structural) inherited similarity play in conditioning the outcome of language contact between related languages? These two questions are connected in the following hypothesis: that inherited linguistic similarity can itself be an important resource in the construction of identity and difference in particular social settings, and that the awareness of similarity between languages (mediated, as it is, by these processes of identity construction) facilitates contact-induced changes that are unlikely, or even unavailable without that perception of sameness. This proposal carries with it a call for more research on contact between related languages as related languages, and not as utterly separate systems.Item The phonology and morphology of Zacatepec eastern Chatino(2015-05) Villard, Stéphanie; Woodbury, Anthony C.; England, Nora C; Epps, Patience L; Law, Danny; Sicoli, Mark AThis dissertation presents an analysis of the phonology and some aspects of the morphology of Zacatepec Eastern Chatino (ISO 639-3: ctz), an Otomanguean language of the Zapotecan branch spoken near the Pacific coast of the State of Oaxaca, Mexico. It is based on primary data obtained from fieldwork conducted by the author (from 2006 to 2013) in the community of San Marcos Zacatepec, district of Juquila, Oaxaca, Mexico. Zacatepec Chatino is only spoken in that small community of about one thousand inhabitants. There are only about 300 speakers left, all above 50 years old. This variety of Chatino finds itself in an advanced language shift to Spanish, and as a result its vitality status is considered severely endangered. The description of Zacatepec Chatino is important within the study of Chatino languages in general, as contrary to most other Chatino varieties, it conserves all non-final syllables of its roots. This fact makes it a centerpiece for the Chatino language puzzle as its transparent morphology tells the story of the evolution of more innovative Chatino varieties. Indeed, beyond simply revealing lost segments/morphemes, it provides polymoraic structures that host clear sequences of tones that are not discernable in the monosyllabic/monomoraic varieties. The phonological analysis begins with a presentation of the segmental sound system, including two of the three contrastive supra-segmental features: nasalization and vowel length. Nasal vowels and long vowels are described together with oral vowels whereas tone, is dealt with in detail in a separate chapter. Directly following the segmental analysis, a chapter is devoted to the phonotactics of the language. Tone, being the hallmark of Otomanguean languages, is an area of the phonology that is described in great detail. The tonal system is intricate as it involves four levels of pitch represented in five mora-linked tones and three unlinked (floating) tones arranged in many tonal sequences which become the signatures for lexical classes. Furthermore, polysyllabicity allows for many moraic shapes resulting in a variety of possible phonetic realizations of the tonal sequences which mark the tonal Classes. The other highlight of this dissertation is a chapter dedicated to the description of the inflectional system, an area revealed to be quite com plex at the morphological and the morphophonological level. Nevertheless, despite its prima facie maze of irregularities, this intricate inflectional system actually presents a high rate of predictability in its segmental (aspect prefixes) and tonal conjugation Classes. This chapter describes the different patterns of inflection (segmental and tonal) for three different parts of speech: the verb, the inalienable noun, and the predicative adjective. The last chapter is devoted to the description of the numerical system which is interesting because the numerical phrases do not always follow the tonal sandhi rules of the language, and often result in idiosyncratic tonal patterns. It is important to document and describe this ancient numerical system as the language is in advanced language shift to Spanish. Its usage is loosing ground very rapidly and usually, when speakers need to count or utter a number (especially one above 15), they code-switch to Spanish. This work is a first step towards a comprehensive documentation of Zacatepec Chatino, which as of today, includes a large corpus of natural discourse recorded within the community by native speakers (about 170 hours), a collection of transcribed and translated texts, and a lexicon and verb database with full paradigms for more than 300 verb roots. The corpus is archived with open access at the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America, University of Texas at Austin, and at the Endangered Languages Archive, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.