Language socialization and shift in an Isthmus Zapotec community of Mexico

The history of indigenous languages in Mexico has been one largely of gradual displacement by Spanish; nevertheless many communities persist in using their ancestral languages despite widespread ideological forces favoring the national language, Spanish. Increasingly, this resistance is supported in some communities by countervailing ideologies linked with cultural revitalization efforts. The present research explores such a case among the Isthmus Zapotec of Oaxaca. The study has two broad theoretical aims. First, it examines the roots and development of the ideological forces in favor of indigenous languages. Why have these countervailing forces arisen in this community, how are they sustained and developed? Here the focus is on the extraordinary long-term culture-historical persistence of pro-Zapotec attitudes among the local population and the rise in the twentieth century of several intellectual and political movements supporting the maintenance of Zapotec. Second, the study explores the interplay of competing practices and ideologies in order to identify the crucial dynamics affecting long-term language maintenance in such a case. Here the research emphasizes the key role played by the intergenerational socialization context. On first glance, in the Isthmus Zapotec case there seem to be important contradictions between the expressed ideological support for Zapotec and everyday practices that support language shift. The apparent contradiction stems from the way the various practical and ideological pressures come together in the socialization context. On the one hand, parents attempt to reconcile the competing ideological pressures by sequencing the acquisition of the two languages so as to produce eventual bilingualism; on the other hand, the practical realities of the family and the community keep this strategy from producing the expected results and in present form ultimately cannot deflect the steady pressure towards Spanish. As a result, parental strategies designed to promote bilingualism are contributing to the unintended consequence of language shift. Efforts to promote the long-term maintenance of Zapotec and other similarly situated indigenous languages will have to attend to this language socialization dynamic