The Role of Language in Ideological Construction of Mayan Identities in Guatemala
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper describes the ways in which Mayan identities are ideologically constructed through language practices. It explores language ideologies based on the analysis of metalinguistic commentaries and code switching incidents in Momostenango, a K’iche’ Maya town in Guatemala. This study demonstrates how the K’iche’ Mayan language serves as an icon that portrays and as an index that marks Mayan identities. I argue that social categories are constructed based on typification of certain forms of speech onto which ethnoracial distinction is projected.
منابع مشابه
The Discursive Construction of Ethnic Identities: The Case of Greek-Cypriot Students
This study examines how Greek-Cypriot students aged 12 to 18, an understudied group of students, construct their ethnic identity in a complex setting such as Cyprus and what motivates the students in the selection of ethnic identity labels. The choice to focus on students aged 12-18 was made on the hypothesis that young children, who did not experience the 1974 war in Cyprus, may have a differe...
متن کاملThe politics and semiotics of sounds--Mayan linguistics and nation-building in Guatemala.
This paper discusses the development Mayan linguistics as an authoritative field of knowledge in Guatemala. In particular, it links missionary linguists' and Maya linguists' activities with shifting nationalist agendas from the 1920s in to the late 1980s. It is argued that during the historical and intellectual moment that linguistics becomes an authoritative epistemology, phonetic analysis fun...
متن کاملA Socio-Cultural Study of Language Teacher Status
The present study pursued two goals: First, to discover the subscales underlying the teacher Status Scale (TSS); and second, to reveal the status of the teachers of Persian, Arabic, and English in Iranian junior high school students’ perceptions in order to determine the relative roles of national, religious, and western influences in the identity construction of the students. The data was coll...
متن کاملIdentity and Representation through Language in Ghana: The Postcolonial Self and the Other
Research related to colonialism and post colonialism shows how the identities of indigenous people were constructed and how these identities are reconstructed in our contemporary world. The thrust of this paper is that colonialism brought a shift in the linguistic structure of Ghana with the introduction of the use of English among Ghanaians. The coexistence of both Ghanaian languages and Engli...
متن کاملThe Discursive Construction of “Native” and “Non-Native” Speaker English Teacher Identities in Japan: A Linguistic Ethnographic Investigation
Recent poststructuralist theories of identity posit identities as being discursively constructed in interactions with society, institutions, and individuals. This study used a Linguistic Ethnographic framework to investigate the discursive identity construction of two English teachers, one ‘non-native’ English speaker, and one ‘native’ English speaker, teaching English in a tertiary institution...
متن کامل