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

语言转移现象，即一个群体停止使用他们的传统语言，转而使用另一种语言（通常在社会和经济上更有声望），长期以来一直是语言学家和人类学家感兴趣的问题。对于美国和其他国家的移民来说，一个经常被重复的“规则”是，语言的转变通常发生在第三代（即原始移民的孙辈）。这个项目训练学生在文化和语言人类学中严谨的、以经验为基础的数据收集和分析方法，探讨哪些因素可能影响早期世代群体的语言转变。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背景下处理重叠的身份。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成果来提高公众对土著、语言转换和多语言的理解，从而提高科学认识。该项目还扩大了历史上代表性不足的群体对科学的参与，并有助于对代表性不足群体的教育。在加州大学圣巴巴拉分校的Mary Bucholtz博士的指导下，Anna Bax将与一群在加州文图拉县长大的米斯特克女性合作，了解她们如何在身份建构的目的下不同地使用西班牙语、英语和米斯特克语。在文图拉县，大多数土著移民社区是米斯特克人的遗产，说米斯特克语，这是墨西哥南部的土著语言，与西班牙语截然不同。这个语言学和人类学项目探讨的问题是，在这个散居社区中，年轻女性可能面临着维护其传统语言和文化的性别期望，她们如何在第一代语言转变的加速过程中导航。它试图解决以下研究问题：(1)即使许多社区成员完全失去说米斯特克语的能力，米斯特克语的身份在语言上是如何构建的？在这种损失之后，西班牙语和英语语言资源如何成为米斯特克身份的象征？(2)个体参与者使用什么策略来应对社区语言的转变，以及他们如何平衡作为墨西哥土著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，使用语言人类学和社会语音学的方法来探索这些年轻女性是如何保持与土著身份的紧密联系的，即使她们中的一些人已经失去了说传统语言的能力。参与者观察和人种学访谈将与这组重点青年以及他们的社会网络的主要成员进行。为了收集丰富、详细的语言库变化数据，参与者还将录音自己在不同社会环境下的自然主义互动中的言语实践，以记录他们对焦点语言变量的使用变化和土著身份的表现。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的联系，以及这些变量在不同社会背景下的使用差异。参与者的演讲还将与当地墨西哥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。定性话语分析方法将被用来理解附加到这些变量的社会意义，以及参与者的Mixtec代码转换实践的意义。这项研究的结果将有利于投资维护土著语言的当地社区中心，并将用于为当地公共和教育政策制定提供有关语言多样性的信息。此外，该项目通过集中参与STEM研究，使年轻的土著参与者（其中大多数是在校大学生）直接受益。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.