Kaqchikel Language Revitalization

The Spanish Conquest of Guatemala starting from 1524 was apocalyptic for the indigenous groups, with relentless warfare and diseases sweeping across the population. Europeans exploited the native people of their land and used their skills as farmers. During the Colonial period, Kaqchikel, like other Highland groups, endured forced resettlement and loss of their land base. Indigenous groups were relocated in nucleated towns called reducciones, built on a Spanish model. Linguistically and ethnically distinct groups were forged into a single community.

During the Colonial Period, the Crown strategized how to best castilianize the Indians. Language policies were created to forge the use of a single imperial language, along with incessant attempts to convert the natives. Spanish instruction was not widely successful because the process of evangelization was slowed and there were many logistical difficulties. Therefore, although contact with Spanish became more often, the Maya people including the Kaqchikels did not necessarily need to learn and use it.

For an extended period of time, the colonizers kept their culture and the dominant society separate from the Mayas. Among the factors of the segregation is the dominance of Spanish. For a person to have the ability to be integrated into the society, learning Spanish is a requirement.

In the modern era, Kaqchikel came into more frequent contact with Spanish in a completely unequal relationship. With language contact inevitably comes language shift, which impacts the stability of the lower prestige language to varying degrees from incipient bilingualism to complete language loss.

A few factors accelerated language shift from monolingual in Kaqchikel to bilingual or even monolingual in Spanish:

First, the industrialization and urbanization plays a huge role. As the means of production is owned only by Spanish-speaking people, Mayan-speaking people can only provide labor underthe supervision of Ladinos. Economic pressures drive people who live in the rural areas to urban centers like Chimaltenango for job opportunities, learning Spanish in the process.

Moreover, the Kaqchikel areas have had large demographic changes after Ladinos began to settle in Maya towns. This influx contributed the shift to Spanish and weakened the viability of the minority Kaqchikel language. Due to the close proximity of Kaqchikel territory to Guatemala City, the Kaqchikels are among the ethnic groups facing the greatest pressure from the Ladino settlement.

Educational policies in Guatemala forces the castellanization of Kaqchikel children. Stressing the use of the dominant language, elementary schools in Guatemala are often at fault of ethnocentrism. They forced Maya children to learn Spanish and explained to them the history that started from the Spanish Conquest.

The deadliest factor for the maintenance of the Kaqchikel language and other indigenous languages is their low prestige in Guatemala imposed by the dominant culture. Mayan languages are associated with rural poverty, backwardness, and "outdated" traditions like medicine, corn-farming, and Maya worships. Many Kaqchikel parents have also internalized these associations and stopped teaching their children Kaqchikel for their integration into the dominant culture.

Within a multilingual society, an individual's choice of language is largely decided by the social network. As more Spanish monolinguals were in the area, the opportunities to communicate in Kaqchikel decreased. Governmental policies in education and public service were also only available in Spanish, resulting in the shrinking of domains in which bilingual speakers use Kaqchikel: in the homes. In the final stages of the shift, parents shift to the dominant language, Spanish, with their children for their skills necessary to survive and advance in a Ladino-dominant society. When the new generation no longer speaks Kaqchikel, that is where language death begins.

"At home my emotional relationship to the Kaqchikel and Spanish languages was conflictive, since my parents had different views regarding the acquisition and use of these languages. Communication with my mother was in Kaqchikel and with my father in Spanish, while they spoke to each other in Kaqchikel. This complicated our family relations and interfered with communication, especially that of an affective nature. It is difficult for a young child to deal with a relationship with his father which is lacking in affection due to the need for progress. This is a particular case, one which typifies my childhood—namely, that my father spoke to me only in Spanish because of his good intentions to help me get ahead. My father’s attitude was the consequence of social and economic pressures exerted by the dominant group and, in particular, was the product of cultural discrimination springing from school and other government institutions. These were the sources of my father’s good intentions, of his ideas about what was “best for his son.”

--------Language Contact Experience of a Kaqchikel Speaker Wuqu' Ajpub'

Sources:

• Garzon et al. (1998)
• England (2003)
• Maxwell (1996)

The civil war in Guatemala (1979-1996) placed the discourse about ethnicity and multiculturalism to the center of national attention. During the civil war, an attempted ethnic cleansing was targeted towards the Maya people, and at least 200,000 Maya were killed by the counterinsurgency operations of the Guatemalan military government. In the Kaqchikel area, the genocide was most severe between 1978 and 1983.

In the mid-1980s, a wave of Maya cultural movement emerged in response to la violencia and against the political domination of the indigenous population. The torrent of violence against the Maya people has been answered by vocal Maya participation in the process of Guatemalan politics. They went petitioning, promoting, and demanding for governmental education programs and organized independent cultural societies.

Linguistic practices in Mayan languages are the most essential and salient marker of indigenous identity. In the sociolinguistic survey seen in Otzoy (1988), college-attending Kaqchikel women consensusly listed the Kaqchikel language as the single most important feature in maintaining the Kaqchikel identity. This result was true even of those people who did not speak the language or used it only semi-fluently. Issues of language ideology, language politics, and the concerns for the relationship between Mayan languages and Spanish were put to the forefront of the discourse.

The Kaqchikels were highly active in this revitalization movement of their language and culture. Importantly, they added a more quotidian and personal aspect to the political activities mentioned above. What is now heavily emphasized in the local-level movement of cultural promotion, the Kaqchikels commited to putting the idea they were advocating into practice. Against the constant pressure of castellanization and to diminish the usage of Kaqchikel, the Kaqchikel people presented dramas and read poems written in Kaqchikel; they spoke it out loud on street corners with friends; they insisted on using it in both private and public spheres.

However, the vocal force of cultural revitalization did not see itself as particularly political. It had no formal political representation, such as a political party or delegate elected on a Maya movement platform. By focusing on only cultural aspects of action, the Maya movement escaped the eye of the military because for them, "culture" is powerless and harmless, not enough to be a threat in the political arena. The pursuit to realize the goals of the Maya movement politically only formed gradually by the lead of Maya elites. At the same time, Maya movement's demands such as revalorization of the culture and languages began to become widely accepted in the population.

Meanwhile, the wave of cultural awareness and reaffirmation attracted many Kaqchikel to receive an education in linguistics. Since the 1970s, some members in the Kaqchikel community had access to linguistic training. They were able to understand the complexities of their mother tongue, and to explain what features make their language an ergative one. The Universidad Mariano Gálvez, funded largely by the United States, created the School of Linguistics in the Faculty of Humanities for students from the rural areas of the country, in addition to the Universidad Rafael Landívar. These institutions were able to provide undergraduate degrees in linguistics to the emerging indigenous intelligentsia. Additionally, NGOs dedicated to linguistic research like the Proyecto Lingúístico Francisco Marroquín (PLFM) and the Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib' (OKMA) were founded.

According to the account of Nora England, when the PLFM first began its training program in 1972, no one in Guatemala was aware of it. Right after the civil war in 1985, the PLFM received a sudden influx of participation from Mayas and all the subsequent courses received considerable attention. These programs were able to train numerous Maya scholars who have been working directly on their languages in both private and public institutions.

Sources:

• Garzon et al. (1998)
• England (2003)
• Maxwell (1996)
• Brown (1996)