Yaqui-Mayo language shift

Abstract

The process of language shift and maintenance of Yaqui and Mayo against Spanish is analyzed through an empirical study of the social network of four families (in each group a more conservative family in the use of the native language, and the other using more Spanish in everyday interactions). This interpretative analysis integrates a multidisciplinary system that incorporates the model of political ecology, along with the postulates and methodology of the ethnography of communication, linguistic conflict, social networks and the relationship between language and identity, through ideology. This empirical approach follows the model of linguistic anthropology, giving an account of the dynamic relationship between the social phenomenon and the linguistic one. A microanalysis allows us to observe the external, and mainly internal, processes articulated to the linguistic conflict developed within the family social networks. Thus, it is possible to do an objective approximation to the heterogeneous linguistic practice of the members of each family, and the social networks they are immersed in. In this sense we require not only a synchronic approach, but also a diachronic one, in order to construct brief lingual life histories of the members of the families, in which the matriarchs have played a very important roles in the process of language shift and resistance. Moreover, within each family, there is a considerable variety in the uses and functions they give to each language, linked to identities established by ideologies in permanent elaboration.