Kaqchikel and Spanish Language Contact: The Case of Bilingual Mayan Children

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.