O espanhol de uma comunidade estudantil Tsotsil e Tseltal da região Altos de Chiapas, México : entre a reestruturação da língua colonial e os letramentos de sobrevivência

Abstract

This research examines so-called ethnic Spanish to understand the written and oral production of bilingual Mayan students from a non-deficit perspective. The study uses an ethnographic qualitative method, which, as a field of multiple interpretive practices (DENZIN; LINCON, 2006), includes interaction with research participants and the researcher's self-analysis as part of the study setting. The twenty-two research participants (11 Tzotzil’s and 11 Tzeltal’s) each wrote two written texts in Spanish, answered a semi-open-ended questionnaire and two brief oral interviews. The written and oral productions, which constitute the corpus of this research, were produced at the Intercultural University of Chiapas. Data collection was carried out in two stages, between February and May 2019, January, and March 2020, at the central headquarters of the university, in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas (Mexico). Five categories were analyzed, broken down into: a) morphological phenomena, b) syntactic phenomena, c) semantic phenomena, d) features arising from literacies and, finally, e) phonetic and phonological changes, present in oral and written productions. To contrast these grammatical features of the Mayan languages with Mexican Spanish, we build on Haviland (1981), Laughlin (2007), Aissen (1987), Polian (2013, 2017, 2018), Brown (2007), and López (2010, 2017). To verify the changes of the features in Spanish, we relied on Fernández-Ordoñez (1999), Company (2001, 2006), Company and Flores (2017). In turn, Palacios (2005), Tesoro (2006, 2010), Hernández (2020), Hernández and Palacios (2015), and Galván and San Giacomo (2014) provided subsidies to understand the results of contact between Spanish and Amerindian languages. To understand the morphosyntactic features in such productions, we made use of some key concepts of Second Language Acquisition, such as interlanguage, fossilization, cognitive acquisition processes (SELINKER, 1972), language transfer (GASS; SELINKER, 2008), and multifaceted bilingualisms. As this diatopic variety of Spanish in contact is also formed by the absence of socially shaped literacies from childhood to deal with written sources during life, we inclined to analyze the statements of young people from the studies of new literacies, based mainly on Barton and Hamilton (apud, BARTON; HAMILTON; IVANIC, 2000), Street (1995, 2014), Heath (2011) and in its Hispanic-American strand, on the contributions of Zavala (2002) and Casanny and Castellá (2010). The results demonstrated how students restructure a typologically distinct language by combining the existing similarities between their respective languages and Spanish, in which the subtle and pervasive influence of the native language is noted (CORDER apud GASS; SELINKER, 1994). This restructuring of the Spanish language creates a consolidating diatopic variety, which, although highly stigmatized, has correspondences in Spanish through historical and intense contact with non-Indo-European languages, whose linguistic transfers are bidirectional. Despite the survival literacies, the ineffective educational policies aimed at Indigenous peoples, and the existing barriers in relation to the hegemonic language and culture, the testimonies revealed the awakening of critical literacies (SHOR, 1999).