Language Choice among Mayan Handicraft Vendors in an International Tourism Marketplace

Abstract

Ethnographic research on the effects of globalization has demonstrated a wide range of impacts, negative and positive, on indigenous peoples throughout the world (Appadurai 2002; Friedman 2003; Gregory 1998; Little 2004; Zorn 2004). Sometimes, globalization has radically altered their economic and political lives, transforming their cultural identities. Related linguistic or language-oriented research has looked at the impact of globalization from the position that most indigenous languages are threatened and may become extinct without some sort of intervention; language standardization is often part of this (Garzon et al. 1998; La Ponce 2004; Mandal 2000; McCarty 2003; Whaley 2003). Although there are counterarguments that attempt to explain the perpetuity of some languages (Mühlhäusler 2003), most (i.e., cited above) either look at the intrinsic nature of the language, its structure, or the agency or volition of the speakers—the language can survive if the speakers want it to persist. A more productive approach is to look at the material conditions in which languages are used, not just language structure or the agency of speakers. Approaches based on structure or agency tend to divorce languages from the lived realities of the people who actually speak them, ignoring why they continue to speak their languages, give them up, or in the case presented here, increase the number of languages that they speak. This argument will