1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910460622703321

Autore

Romero Sergio

Titolo

Language and ethnicity among the K'ichee' Maya / / Sergio Romero

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Salt Lake City : , : University of Utah Press, , [2015]

©2015

ISBN

1-60781-398-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (176 p.)

Disciplina

305.897/423

Soggetti

Quiché Indians - Ethnic identity

Quiché Indians - Languages

Quiché language - Social aspects

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Accent and ethnic identity in the Maya highlands -- Orthographies, foreigners, and pure K'ichee' -- "Each town speaks its own language" : the social value of dialectal variation in K'ichee' -- A "hybrid" language : loanwords and K'ichee'-Spanish code switching -- "Ancestor power Is Maya power" : the uses and abuses of honorific address in K'ichee' --The changing voice of the ancestors : missionaries, poets, and pan-Mayanism.

Sommario/riassunto

"This book explores the articulation between "accent" and ethnic identification in K'ichee', a Mayan language spoken by more than one million people in the western highlands of Guatemala. Based on years of ethnographic work, it is the first anthropological examination of the social meaning of dialectal difference in any Mayan language. Romero deconstructs essentialist perspectives on ethnicity in Mesoamerica and argues that ethnic identification among the highland Maya is multiple and layered, the result of a diverse linguistic precipitate created by centuries of colonial resistance.In K'ichee', dialect stereotypes--accents--act as linguistic markers embodying particular ethnic registers. K'ichee' speakers use and recombine their linguistic repertoire--colloquial K'ichee', traditional K'ichee' discourse, colloquial Spanish, Standard Spanish, and language mixing--in strategic ways to



mark status and authority and to revitalize their traditional culture. The book surveys literary genres such as lyric poetry, political graffiti, and radio broadcasts, which express new experiences of Mayan-ness and anticolonial resistance. It also takes a historical perspective in examining oral and written K'ichee' discourses from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including the famous chronicle known as the Popol Vuh, and explores the unbreakable link between language, history, and culture in the Maya highlands. "--