Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

Publication Date

Summer 7-29-2025

Abstract

This study intends to provide preliminary answers to issues regarding cross-generational linguistic and sociocultural dynamics of immigrant speakers of Mexican Indigenous languages (MIL) who live in rural, agricultural areas of the Pacific Northwest. This research focuses on where they originate from, the languages they speak, how language contact manifests itself in the linguistic and cultural identity of these speakers, the language attitudes of immigrants who arrived in the US as monolingual adult speakers of a MIL and had to learn Spanish as a second language in the US, how these attitudes and cultural/linguistic identities are different from those of their US-born and/or raised children, and how these factors shape language usage domains. Members of this understudied community live alongside groups whose dominant languages are Spanish, English and Russian. After a broad fieldwork effort in the area surveying 343 households to find Tu’un Savi (Mixteco) speakers and their children, data from 14 Ñuu Savi adults ages 24-55 and 18 children ages 6-22 of Tu’un Savi-speaking parents were collected using sociolinguistic and ethnographic methods, then analyzed within heritage language and sociology of language theoretical frameworks. Results indicate that Spanish has a crucial utilitarian role at home between Tu’un Savi- speaking parents and their children, but that that language is mostly absent in all other close, intimate relationships for both generations (e.g., communication with siblings), with parents using Tu’un Savi and their children using English instead. Data indicate that the cultural and linguistic identities of both generations also diverge. Two proposed models summarize how these attitudes and identities shape language usage domains, one describing the effect of attitudes and identity on usage domains in an intergenerational feedback cycle, the other describing the linguistic divergence in the trilingual households of this speech community. Issues of race, literacy, compulsory education, attrition, racial positionality of the researcher in a marginalized community of people of color, novel code-switching varieties, the living context of this community as an Agribusiness colony, and the risks of assuming that all those born and raised in Mexico have Spanish as their first and dominant language are also discussed as they pertain to this language and speech community.

Degree Name

Spanish & Portuguese (PhD)

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Spanish and Portuguese

First Committee Member (Chair)

Damian Wilson

Second Committee Member

Melissa Axelrod

Third Committee Member

David Dinwoodie

Fourth Committee Member

Eric Campbell

Language

English

Keywords

Language maintenance, language contact, language attitudes, linguistic and cultural identity, usage domains, Mixteco, Spanish, English

Document Type

Dissertation

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Available for download on Thursday, July 29, 2027

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