Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Linguistic and Cultural Dimensions of First-Generation Language Shift

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

The phenomenon of language shift, in which a community ceases to speak their heritage language in favor of another (typically more socially and economically prestigious) language, has long been of interest to linguists and anthropologists. For immigrants to the United States and other countries, it is an often-repeated "rule" that language shift typically occurs by the third generation (i.e., the grandchildren of the original immigrants). This project, which trains a student in rigorous, empirically-grounded methods of data collection and analysis in cultural and linguistic anthropology, asks what factors might contribute to influence language shift among an earlier generational cohort. Additionally, the researcher explores whether there are grammatical, phonological or other patterns that can be identified in first-generation language shift, and how speakers navigate overlapping identities in the new cultural context. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in linguistics and anthropology, the project would improve scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to improve public understanding of indigeneity, language shift, and multilingualism. The project also broadens the participation of groups historically underrepresented in science, and contributes to the education of underrepresented groups. Under the supervision of Dr. Mary Bucholtz at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Anna Bax will work with a selected cohort of Mixtec women who grew up in Ventura County, California to understand how they variably use Spanish, English, and Mixtec for identity construction purposes. In Ventura County, the majority of the indigenous immigrant community is of Mixtec heritage and speak Mixtec languages, which are native to southern Mexico and differ radically from Spanish. This linguistic and anthropological project explores the question of how young women in this diasporic community, who may face gendered expectations to maintain their heritage language and culture, navigate the accelerated process of first-generation language shift. It seeks to address the following research questions: (1) How is Mixtec identity linguistically constructed, even as many community members are losing the ability to speak Mixtec entirely? How can Spanish and English linguistic resources come to symbolize Mixtec identity in the wake of this loss? (2) What strategies do individual participants use to navigate community language shift, and how do they balance their overlapping identities as indigenous Mexicans and as new members of American society? The researcher will take a case-study approach, using linguistic-anthropological and sociophonetic methods to explore how these young women maintain strong links to their indigenous identity, even as some of them have lost the ability to speak their heritage language. Participant-observation and ethnographic interviews will be conducted with this focal set of youth, as well as with key members of their social networks. In order to collect rich, detailed data about the participants' varying linguistic repertoires, they will also audio-record their own speech practices in naturalistic interaction in different social settings, so as to document shifts in their use of the focal linguistic variables and their performances of indigenous identity. The researcher will conduct a quantitative sociophonetic analysis of one Spanish and one English linguistic variable, with a focus on the connections of these variables to indigenous identity and how the use of the variables differs across social contexts. The participants' speech will also be compared to a corpus of local Chicanas' speech to understand the social construction of linguistic difference and/or similarity. Qualitative discourse-analytic methods will be used to understand the social meanings attached to these variables, as well as the meaning of participants' Mixtec code-switching practices. The results of this research will benefit local community centers who are invested in the maintenance of indigenous languages, and will be used to inform local public and educational policymaking about linguistic diversity. In addition, the project directly benefits the young indigenous participants, most of whom are current college students, by centrally involving them in STEM research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.