Please join us for a meeting of the Language Variation & Change workshop this Friday, November 8, at 3:30-5pm in Rosenwald 301. A light reception will follow.

How de-Castilianized is this Maya? Bilingualism and the emerging Yucatec Maya standard
Christopher Bloechl, University of Chicago

This talk describes a feature of standardized Yucatec Maya that would appear to be at odds with the linguistic prescriptions of the register’s users. Yucatec Maya educators, authors, and media professionals typically avoid using Spanish loans that are in common usage among vernacular speakers. And yet, I explain, the de-Castilianized register is shaped extensively by conventions of Spanish grammar and discourse. Standardized Yucatec Maya employs a variety of syntactic and pragmatic calques of Spanish constructions that are motivated not simply by linguistic purism, but rather by the Spanish-Maya bilingualism of the register’s architects and users. While the calques facilitate Yucatec Maya’s entrance into discursive domains historically dominated by Spanish, they also reveal a noteworthy (and less noticeable) process of Castilianization at work amid the ongoing de-Castilianization of the language. Charting the process helps us account for formal differences between the standardized and vernacular registers, and the social differences with which they are linked.