Mary Eunice Romero
Katrin H. Lamon
Resident Scholar 2000-2001
Language Shift and the Socialization of Pueblo
Children
When children learn their first language, they not only learn to communicate,
they also acquire cultural and social values, beliefs, and practices that are
embedded in the language itself. In subtle yet profound ways, language functions
as a tool of socialization, transmitting a culture's essential ways of being
to each generation. What happens to this link between language and culture,
however, when a people's mother tongue is replaced by another language—the
phenomenon known as "language shift"?
Mary Eunice Romero is exploring this transition in her
dissertation, Language Shift and the Socialization of Pueblo Children.
Her study examines the shift from native language to English in Cochiti, New
Mexico, a Keres-speaking Pueblo community, in relation to its socialization practices.
Romero, who is from Cochiti Pueblo, has witnessed the power of language to preserve
and maintain the Pueblo traditions that have evolved over centuries, as well
as the consequences of a community's gradual embrace of a new language.
Language shift occurs because of internal and external
changes in a speech community. In Native American communities, language shifted
for a variety of reasons, ranging from the nineteenth-century U.S. Federal Indian
Policy of English-only boarding schools that aimed to eradicate native languages
and cultures, to the recognition that English will open job opportunities and
facilitate interactions outside the community. What may get lost in this transition,
Romero asserts, is the social and cultural knowledge necessary for becoming a
competent member of the Cochiti world—knowledge that is transmitted through
the language itself.
Romero's three-part study is based on 32 months of field
research in Cochiti Pueblo, 35 miles south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. To gather
information about traditional child-rearing practices, she conducted interviews
with elders who were socialized into the community at a time when the culture
and language were fully intact. Because the Cochiti language is unwritten, the
elders hold particularly valuable information. Romero then conducted a second
set of interviews with the young-parent generation about their own socialization
practices. In addition, she observed home and community adult-child interactions.
In the final stage of her research, Romero has constructed a language history
that illuminates the relationship between language shift and the socio-cultural
patterns of socialization.
Affiliation at time of award: Ph.D. Candidate, Education,
Language, Literacy and Culture, University of California, Berkeley
Return to Resident Scholars
2000-2001.
