September 14, 2013 Jonathan Holmquist, PhD, Department of Spanish
and Portuguese, Temple University: "Spanish / Kaqchikel-Maya
Contact: A Focus on Youth"
The speaker presented initial findings of a
collaborative research project that has been carried out by Dr.
Holmquist, a linguist, and his colleague, Hana Muzika Kahn, a
professor of comparative literature, both from Temple
University. The project examines aspects of Spanish /
Kaqchikel-Maya contact in the municipality of Parramos, which is
located between the cities of Antigua and Chimaltenango in the
Guatemalan central highlands. The basis for this presentation was
responses of 166 school age children to an orally administered
questionnaire concentrating on spheres, attitudes, and proficiency
in the use of both languages. Participating students are from
the 3rd, 6th, and 9th grades and are drawn from four schools, two
public and two private in the municipal center, or town of Parramos,
and from three schools in mountain villages overlooking the
town. The findings, in this case, focus on assessments of
knowledge of Kaqchikel vocabulary and of spoken Kaqchikel among
students of indigenous and non-indigenous, or Ladino/Mestizo,
background, among younger and older students, among students
residing in the neighborhoods of the commercialized town of Parramos
and in the agricultural villages overlooking the town. The
presentation also highlighted attitudes that may support
revitalization of Kaqchikel through its recent inclusion as a
subject of instruction in the schools.
Jonathan Holmquist, PhD, is a linguist in the
Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Temple University in
Philadelphia. His research interests are in areas of
sociolinguistics, dialectology, and language contact. The
fieldwork for his work has taken place in the region of Cantabria in
northern Spain, in west-central Puerto Rico, and most recently in
the highlands of Guatemala. He has published in a variety of
journals including Language in Society, Language Variation and
Change, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language,
Anthropological Linguistics, Spanish in Context, and the Modern
Language Journal. Recent publications include a chapter in The
Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics.
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