Prestige, Power, and Potential for Language Shift: The Intrusion of Spanish into Tojolab’al Maya

Abstract

Narrative in Tojolab'al Maya, an indigenous language of Southern Mexico, incorporates Spanish as both loan words and code switches. Some loans are longstanding and well integrated grammatically, e.g. borrowed conjunctions (/ 'and', kwando 'when') (Brody 1989), but others are less firmly embedded in the vocabulary and grammar. The latter often signal a speaker's attitude toward the participants or the information being conveyed in a discourse. I here examine the loan vocabulary and longer code switches in terms of their placement and poetic function in a narrative genre (lo 'il). It finds that the differing degrees of usage of this vocabulary suggest differing levels of vulnerability of the indigenous Tojolab'al to shift toward Spanish, as well as greater acceptance of Mexican national goals. It supports earlier findings (Garcia-Martinez 1997, Furbee 1997) that increased use of such vocabulary suggests early stages of language shift. Examples derive from a corpus of 26 accounts in Tojolab'al of a miracle experienced in 1994 by a woman in the Tojolab'al community of Lomantan. These narratives come from the woman herself and from persons in other Tojolab'al villages, so they represent different degrees of closeness to and certainty about the miracle. Some communities are known to be progovernment, and some are less supportive of federal policies and more favorable to the goals of the revolt embodied by the Zapatista movement (Ross 1995). Speakers' attitudes toward the Lomantan miracle, which is itself a religious reflection of the revolt (Furbee 1998), can be interpreted as also reflecting the speakers' political stances with respect to Mexican federal government.