Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Linguistic and Cultural Dimensions of First-Generation Language Shift

长期以来，语言学家和人类学家一直对语言转换现象感兴趣，即一个社区不再使用他们的传统语言，转而使用另一种(通常在社会和经济上更有声望的)语言。对于移居美国和其他国家的移民来说，语言变化通常发生在第三代(即原始移民的孙辈)，这是一个经常重复的“规则”。这个项目训练学生在文化和语言人类学中严谨、以经验为基础的数据收集和分析方法，询问哪些因素可能会影响上一代人之间的语言转移。此外，研究人员还探讨了在第一代语言转换中是否存在语法、语音或其他模式，以及说话者如何在新的文化语境中驾驭重叠的身份。除了为语言学和人类学研究生的培训提供资金外，该项目还将通过广泛传播其研究结果来提高公众对土著、语言变化和多种语言的理解，从而提高对科学的理解。该项目还扩大了历来在科学界任职人数不足的群体的参与，并有助于对任职人数不足的群体进行教育。在加州大学圣巴巴拉分校Mary Bucholtz博士的指导下，Anna Bax将与在加利福尼亚州文图拉县长大的一群Mixtec女性一起工作，了解她们如何以不同的方式使用西班牙语、英语和Mixtec构建身份。在文图拉县，大多数土著移民社区都有Mixtec血统，说Mixtec语言，这些语言原产于墨西哥南部，与西班牙语截然不同。这个语言学和人类学项目探讨了这样一个问题：在这个散居海外的社区中，年轻女性可能面临着维护其遗产语言和文化的性别期望，她们如何驾驭第一代语言转变的加速进程。它试图解决以下研究问题：(1)当许多社区成员完全失去说Mixtec的能力时，Mixtec身份是如何从语言上构建的？在这一损失之后，西班牙语和英语语言资源如何成为Mixtec身份的象征？(2)个体参与者使用什么策略来引导社区语言的转变，以及他们如何平衡他们作为墨西哥原住民和美国社会新成员的重叠身份？研究人员将采取个案研究的方法，使用语言学-人类学和社会发音的方法来探索这些年轻女性如何在其中一些人失去了说传统语言的能力的情况下，仍然与她们的土著身份保持着密切的联系。将对这一重点青年及其社交网络的主要成员进行参与者观察和人种学访谈。为了收集关于参与者不同语言习得的丰富、详细的数据，他们还将对他们自己在不同社会环境中自然互动中的言语实践进行录音，以记录他们使用重点语言变量的变化和他们对土著身份的表现。研究人员将对一个西班牙语和一个英语语言变量进行定量的社会语音分析，重点关注这些变量与土著身份认同的关系，以及这些变量的使用在不同的社会背景下是如何不同的。参与者的演讲还将与当地奇卡纳人的演讲语料库进行比较，以了解语言差异和/或相似性的社会结构。定性的话语分析方法将被用来理解这些变量所附带的社会意义，以及参与者混合语码转换实践的意义。这项研究的结果将使投资于维护土著语言的地方社区中心受益，并将被用来向当地公众和教育决策提供有关语言多样性的信息。此外，该项目通过让年轻的土著参与者集中参与STEM研究，直接使他们受益，其中大多数是在校大学生。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The phenomenon of language shift, in which a community ceases to speak their heritage language in favor of another (typically more socially and economically prestigious) language, has long been of interest to linguists and anthropologists. For immigrants to the United States and other countries, it is an often-repeated "rule" that language shift typically occurs by the third generation (i.e., the grandchildren of the original immigrants). This project, which trains a student in rigorous, empirically-grounded methods of data collection and analysis in cultural and linguistic anthropology, asks what factors might contribute to influence language shift among an earlier generational cohort. Additionally, the researcher explores whether there are grammatical, phonological or other patterns that can be identified in first-generation language shift, and how speakers navigate overlapping identities in the new cultural context. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in linguistics and anthropology, the project would improve scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to improve public understanding of indigeneity, language shift, and multilingualism. The project also broadens the participation of groups historically underrepresented in science, and contributes to the education of underrepresented groups. Under the supervision of Dr. Mary Bucholtz at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Anna Bax will work with a selected cohort of Mixtec women who grew up in Ventura County, California to understand how they variably use Spanish, English, and Mixtec for identity construction purposes. In Ventura County, the majority of the indigenous immigrant community is of Mixtec heritage and speak Mixtec languages, which are native to southern Mexico and differ radically from Spanish. This linguistic and anthropological project explores the question of how young women in this diasporic community, who may face gendered expectations to maintain their heritage language and culture, navigate the accelerated process of first-generation language shift. It seeks to address the following research questions: (1) How is Mixtec identity linguistically constructed, even as many community members are losing the ability to speak Mixtec entirely? How can Spanish and English linguistic resources come to symbolize Mixtec identity in the wake of this loss? (2) What strategies do individual participants use to navigate community language shift, and how do they balance their overlapping identities as indigenous Mexicans and as new members of American society? The researcher will take a case-study approach, using linguistic-anthropological and sociophonetic methods to explore how these young women maintain strong links to their indigenous identity, even as some of them have lost the ability to speak their heritage language. Participant-observation and ethnographic interviews will be conducted with this focal set of youth, as well as with key members of their social networks. In order to collect rich, detailed data about the participants' varying linguistic repertoires, they will also audio-record their own speech practices in naturalistic interaction in different social settings, so as to document shifts in their use of the focal linguistic variables and their performances of indigenous identity. The researcher will conduct a quantitative sociophonetic analysis of one Spanish and one English linguistic variable, with a focus on the connections of these variables to indigenous identity and how the use of the variables differs across social contexts. The participants' speech will also be compared to a corpus of local Chicanas' speech to understand the social construction of linguistic difference and/or similarity. Qualitative discourse-analytic methods will be used to understand the social meanings attached to these variables, as well as the meaning of participants' Mixtec code-switching practices. The results of this research will benefit local community centers who are invested in the maintenance of indigenous languages, and will be used to inform local public and educational policymaking about linguistic diversity. In addition, the project directly benefits the young indigenous participants, most of whom are current college students, by centrally involving them in STEM research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.