In the face of immense pressure from Spanish, the national language, a group of educators in Michoacán are committed to prioritising P’urhepecha in two local primary schools where P’urhepecha is... Show moreIn the face of immense pressure from Spanish, the national language, a group of educators in Michoacán are committed to prioritising P’urhepecha in two local primary schools where P’urhepecha is the dominant community language. The history of educational initiatives among the P’urhepecha people illustrates the inconsistent and primarily assimilationist educational environment faced by indigenous populations in Mexico, providing context for the schools’ efforts, which encourage literacy skills in both languages. We analyse the biliteracy development of a group of 4th grade students, qualitatively analysing written production in both P’urhepecha and Spanish, with a focus on patterns in orthographic conventions, lexicon (including borrowing and language mixing), sentence structure, and morpho-syntactic complexity. The students clearly have more developed writing skills in P’urhepecha than in Spanish, producing longer, more coherent texts in their mother tongue, and using more variation in vocabulary and tenses. Yet in both languages, the students find creative and unconventional ways to represent oral language in writing. Through this initial analysis of 24 student essays, we consider the interrelationship among literacy skills in two languages, the impact of this educational initiative in terms of biliteracy development, as well as practical implications for educational practices at the bilingual schools. Show less
Bellamy, K.R.; Parafita Couto, M.; Stadthagen-González, H. 2018
This thesis considers Purepecha from the perspectives of genealogy and contact, as well as offering insight into word formation processes. The genealogy study re-visits the most prominent... Show moreThis thesis considers Purepecha from the perspectives of genealogy and contact, as well as offering insight into word formation processes. The genealogy study re-visits the most prominent classification proposals for Purepecha, concluding on the basis of a quantitative lexical comparison and a typological comparison of affix ordering that there is no signal of relatedness between Purepecha and any other sampled language. The two language contact studies address possible interaction between Purepecha and other languages at long-distance, regional and local levels. The lexicon of metallurgy, the most convincing archaeological evidence for long-distance interaction, does not support this contact scenario although the lack of observable loanwords in this domain may reflect the largely non-verbal nature of technology transmission. At the regional and local levels Purepecha also displays very few borrowings from the prehispanic period. This paucity of borrowings is reversed in the modern period, with Spanish exerting a heavy influence in all domains. The shift in borrowing pattern is explained by huge socio-political change since the imposition of Spanish. The word formation studies focus on the varying semantic transparency of roots and suffixes, with a specific emphasis on olfactory language. They also introduce the notion that roots may be precategorial in nature. Show less
