Use of indigenous language

In this way, indigenous languages become a subcultural capital (Thornton, 1995) within the mainstream society. The use of the dominant language and its relationship with the market forces, as Bourdieu argues is the language of the state that ‘becomes the

theoretical norm against which all linguistic practices are objectively measured’ (1991, p. 45). In this way, policy towards indigenous languages has not been a priority among linguistic policies in Mexico, it has rather been a continuation of colonialism.

Although ethnic identities are more complex than the use of a specific language, the data shows that language use is a recurrent category for indigenous children. Five main patterns appear in the data that help in the understanding of the ethnic identification of indigenous children:

a) Use of indigenous language within the family (between parents, with parents or grandparents or between other family members)

b) Self-definition as indigenous (when children answered to the question: do you consider yourself indigenous?)

c) Kinship (the heritance of grandparents and parents)

d) Place of origin of their parents and the attachment to their communities of origin

e) Reflexive identification: when children did not recognise themselves until there was a linguistic detonator (question or reflection in the conversation) that made them change their mind and later on, identified themselves as indigenous.

The analysis of this second part of the dissertation is divided into these five categories. This chapter gives account of the use of indigenous language in children’s contexts (school, family and communities of origin). Chapter 5 discusses the categories of self- definition, kinship, place of origin and what I call ‘reflexive identification’, meaning the processes of affirmations and denials that children expressed at different moments of the fieldwork regarding their ethnic identification.

4.2 Use of indigenous language

Indigenous languages are disappearing at a rapid rate. Many scholars across continents have argued that:

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‘[T]he culture and the imaginative expression of the indigenous communities all over the world are in a phase of rapid depletion, as they are surrounded by marked forces indifferent to diversity, states unwillingly to protect and safeguard them and forms of knowledge that look upon the knowledge of indigenous as being obscure’ (Devy, 2016, p. 1).

Bodra (2016) argues that two languages die each month and in the next 100 years, more than half of today’s languages will disappear, especially the most vulnerable ones such as the indigenous languages; and with the languages, the knowledge constructed by peoples over centuries will also disappear. The main research aim of this thesis is to understand the processes of identity formation of indigenous children in relation to their schooling experiences within these contexts that seem indifferent and unwilling to protect languages and ethnic identities. Language and ethnicity become central in this analysis, as they integrate many performed and veiled characteristics of how children embody their ethnic identities; this chapter attempts to highlight these dynamics.

This chapter presents an analysis of the levels of proficiency reported by the children. The levels of language proficiency of indigenous children reveal that their mother tongues are in real danger of disappearing. The data has been analysed and grouped looking at three levels of language use:

1. Children who said they understand and/or speak in their parents’ language; 2. Children who said they understand and/or speak some words in their parents’

language;

3. Children who said that are not able to communicate effectively in their parents’ language.

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Table 4.1 Patterns on the use of indigenous languages (IL) within families Purepecha (n=13) Totonaco (n=3) Mazahua (n=1) Nahuatl (n=5) Total (n=22) B n=7 G n=6 B n=2 G n=1 G n=1 B n=2 G n=3 B n=11 G n=11 Grandparents live and speak IL at home 3 4 0 1 1 0 2 3 8 Father speaks IL 3 2 2 0 1 2 2 7 5 Mother speaks IL 5 1 2 1 1 2 0 9 3 Parents speak IL to other family members 6 3 2 0 1 1 3 9 7

Children say they understand a few words in IL

5 3 2 1 1 0 3 7 8

Children say they feel ashamed when people know about the language of their family 3 0 2 0 1 1 1 6 2 Children are motivated to learn the IL in order to communicate with other family members

2 3 0 0 1 1 2 3 6

There are limitations in using a self-reporting approach to establish the proficiency levels of these children in their mother tongues, but there is no more accurate way to measure them. In addition to this, some children are undergoing a process of defining their own ethnic identity, and denying or recognising the use their parents’ language might be part of the process of re-defining themselves as indigenous, as will be shown during different conversations with them in the course of the fieldwork.

Although fluency is a very ambiguous term, the data shows that none of the indigenous children are ‘fluent’ in their parents’ languages. None of them said they felt comfortable speaking in their parents’ languages. Fifteen of them (68%, seven boys and eight girls) understood or spoke some words in their parents’ languages, and the remaining 32% reported that they neither understood nor spoke their parents’ language. This language loss is a product of unequal power dynamics, as Dorian (1998) explains:

‘[…] it’s relatively rare for a language to become so exclusively tied to prestigious persons and high-prestige behaviours that ordinary people become too much in a awe of it to use it or are prevented by language custodians from doing so. By contrast, it’s fairly common for a language to

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become so exclusively associated with low-prestige people and their socially disfavoured identities that its own potential speakers prefer to distance themselves from it and adopt some other language’ (Dorian, 1998: 3).

During the first set of interviews, most indigenous children felt uneasy when talking about their parents’ languages, either by saying that they did not know how to speak it very well or by explaining how their parents were too busy to teach them how to speak it. As will be discussed in the following chapters, schools are not a secure setting for children to talk about their language use.

Even though all indigenous children are regularly exposed to an indigenous language at home, there are social and economic pressures that undermine their learning process; most of the children in the study understood some words that their parents spoke, but were not able to maintain a conversation in the language. As Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco argue:

‘[t]o see language as a mere tool for communication is to miss its deep affective roots. By losing competency in the language of origin, the child of immigrants may also lose much of the sustenance that the culture of origin provides’ (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001, p. 106).

The following sections of analysis are divided according to the children’s social field: home, communities of origin and neighbourhoods. The school was not a field found to be related to language use; on the contrary, children seem to avoid and deny their families’ indigenous language when they are in school, as will be discussed in the next sections.