Bilingual youth’s language choices and attitudes towards Nahuatl in Santiago Tlaxco, Mexico

Abstract

The younger generations are considered one of the principal agents in the maintenance or shift of any language. In the cycle of the language maintenance, children learn their mother tongue, and pass it on to the future generations. The cycle is broken when they no longer speak the mother tongue. The language choices they make are particularly interesting in bi-/multilingual contact situations. This paper explores the language choices and attitudes of bilingual youth in the Nahuatl-speaking community of Tlaxco in Mexico. Bilingual participants, aged 12–17, completed a language questionnaire on their language use with 21 interlocutors and attitudes towards Nahuatl and Spanish. Results showed that the youth used Nahuatl predominately with only one interlocutor, their grandparents, although they expressed favourable opinions about Nahuatl. With other interlocutors, the language use was evenly distributed between only Spanish and both languages. These results indicate a need to expand the domains in which Nahuatl is used, starting with the parents in the home front. This study is the first to assess language use and attitudes of bilingual youth in Tlaxco.

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