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Kaqchikel and Spanish Language Contact: The Case of Bilingual Mayan Children
Heinze Balcazar, Ivonne
Heinze Balcazar, Ivonne
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Abstract
This study examined the lexical and morphosyntactic
knowledge of Kaqchikel Maya children in the Kaqchikel and
Spanish languages. Eight bilingual children, who acquired
Kaqchikel at home and Spanish at school participated in
this study, whose main methodology was the elicited
production method. The collection and recording of the
data were conducted during three visits to Tecpan,
Guatemala.
My inquiry into the lexical knowledge of these
children showed that their lexicons were not twice as large
as that of a monolingual. Generally, they knew more
Spanish lexical items than Kaqchikel ones. All the
children borrowed from Spanish to various degrees from core
and noncore semantic domains. The children's bilingual
lexicons were organizationally complex and fluid, e.g.,
lexical items in lexical pairs were polysemous. Other
major findings are that LI lexical items were subordinated
to L2 lexical items and that Spanish loanwords in the
bilingual lexicon undergo cycles of phonological and
lexical change. Regarding verb morphology, it was found
that the children were more productive at inflecting
ergative case than absolutive case. Moreover, they were
more productive at inflecting ergative singular prefixes
than their plural counterparts.
The children were found to be at different
interlanguage levels in Spanish, but generally they had
better knowledge of accusative cliticization than reflexive
or dative cliticization. An important finding is that the
children's scores for both reflexive and dative clitics increased with the number of years in school. The data
demonstrated that the children acquired the properties of
L2 verbs in stages and that they transferred the
morphosyntactic properties of specific Kaqchikel transitive
verbs onto their Spanish equivalents.
It was found that the younger the child was when she
or he started school, the weaker this child was in
Kaqchikel, while the older the child was, the stronger
knowledge she or he had in Kaqchikel. Spanish and
Kaqchikel dominant levels of bilingual competence were
documented. The children with two years of school were
Kaqchikel dominant, those between 3 and 5 years were
Spanish dominant, while the one child with six years had
reached a state of equilibrium in her levels of competence
in both languages.
Description
The University of Kansas has long historical connections with Central America and the many Central Americans who have earned graduate degrees at KU. This work is part of the Central American Theses and Dissertations collection in KU ScholarWorks and is being made freely available with permission of the author through the efforts of Professor Emeritus Charles Stansifer of the History department and the staff of the Scholarly Communications program at the University of Kansas Libraries’ Center for Digital Scholarship.
Date
2004-05
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University of Kansas