Language and Ethnicity among the K’ichee’ Maya by Sergio Romero (review)

The K’ichee’ language is best known to the world as the original language of the Popol Vuh. Romero’s book is an historical ethnography of K’ichee’, a Guatemalan Mayan language with over one million speakers. It represents an especially complex linguistic situation in that K’ichee’ has multiple dialects (including one, Achi, that is considered by its speakers to be a distinct language, and another, the Cunén variety, that is considered by one linguist to be a separate language), ethnic identifications, speech genres, and registers, and has been in long-term contact with Spanish as a resisted but dominant colonial language. Dialects differ enough to cause difficulties in the effort toward standardization of the language. Thus, Romero’s book is not an ethnography of speaking in the sense of Hymes (1974, Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach), although many of the same factors, such as speech community and norms, are considered.

Studies of K’ichee’ have been plagued historically by the conflation of ethnonym, or name of an ethnic group, and glottonym, the name of a language. Throughout, Romero uses the concept of “boundary work” put forth by Andreas Wimmer (Ethnic Boundary Making, 2013) to distinguish different linguistic and social/ethnic groupings and associated practices at different time periods. He recognizes that “learning K’ichee’ involves the acquisition of at least one set of socio-indexical rules embedded in a specific regional deictic space” (p. 57). Throughout, but especially in chapter three, the speech of the community of Santa María Chiquimula is presented as a mini-case study, contrasting its distinctive phonology, lexicon, syntax, discourse practices, pragmatic norms, and linguistic ideology with those of other regions and dialects.

The linguistic and sociolinguistic detail Romero presents is sensitive and highly informative, especially with regard to influences from Spanish and honorific forms and their use. However, it would have been helpful to have not just a partial view of the K’ichee’ sound system, as seen in various tables, but a full phonological inventory, perhaps annotated for the dialect differences noted. On the lexical level, it is surprising that important cultural terms such as named ritual roles and categories of people go unremarked as having been borrowed from Spanish, for example, prinsipalib’ for “elder” (p. 6) and naturalilb’ for “indigenous” (p. 5). In terms of orthography, the author takes the trouble to mention (p. xv) that he uses the historically introduced grapheme “4” for the glottalized [k’], but apparently does so only when referencing historical texts that used that convention.

Romero takes K’ichee’ from the earliest written forms used by the colonial Church through its transformation by linguistically trained Protestant evangelists (especially the Summer Institute of Linguistics) in the 1930s to governmental use of the Protestant version of the language in translating the constitution (1985), to the creation of the Academy of the Mayan Languages of Guatemala (1986) and its struggles in developing the unified orthography, and up to more recent difficulties in the efforts to standardize the language, paying continual attention to the use of neologisms and linguistic purism. The author finds the modern pan-Mayan movement’s concentration on language to have deep roots, in that “the secular tension over the form and content of writing in Mayan languages [in early colonial times] explains the centrality of pan-Mayan demands for institutionalized indigenous control over writing norms in pan-Mayan struggles in the 1980s and 1990s” (p. 14). Romero identifies K’iche” as emblematically formative of the pan-Mayan movement, and presents a unique view of that movement through examination of the work of two K’ichee’ authors: Adrián Inés Chávez’s idiosyncratic translation of the Popol Vuh has been taken up as scripture by many pan-Mayanists, while Humberto Akabal’s poetry demonstrates the ongoing creativity in the use of the K’ichee’ language.

The book’s...