Thread by @dapiridoobman

Final #HDLS14 plenary: Catherine Rhodes, UNM prof, on Institutionalizing jach maaya in the Yucatan Today — as language fortification (cf revitalization); these languages are VITAL, but they’re being FORTIFIED

Rhodes starts with a DOPE vignette about jach maaya, or pure maaya; she used one term for airplane, her interlocutor used a spanish-origin term & commented “oh you use jach maaya [pure maaya]”
I yelped in excitement, as I investigate analogous discourses in Malayalam! #HDLS14

sorry i can’t livetweet this bc my thoughts are all “SAME!” and “!!!!!” so basically if you thought that language boundaries are anything other than dynamic, emergent, socially constructed/ideological, please see this work among others for an alternate view! #HDLS14

Rhodes shows us yet another example of how ideologies of language purity result in languagelessness being imputed on speakers employing certain types of language mixing, and how the institutionalization of Maya is intertwined with this #HDLS14

!!!! Rhodes discusses how knowledge of Maya language and culture has economic value, as it is associated with authenticity, and seen as valuable for jobs in tourism (ie for how authenticity is performed for the white/external gaze) #HDLS14

Rhodes: while the Mayan linguistics program she studied pushed against monoglossic ideologies, these heteroglossic ideologies are not valued in other contexts, and can often even be a barrier. #HDLS14

Rhodes discusses a challenge very common tensions between purity and language maintenance, which also connects to students’ own views of the place of the Mayan language and themselves in the present and future #HDLS14

Rhodes: Students are rejecting neoliberal multiculturalism and commodification of their (imagined) pasts; discussing how students are negotiating new terms to describe themselves #HDLS14