Heritage speakers: A concept applicable to the Indigenous people in Mexico?

Abstract

The aim of the present work is to findout whether the concept of heritage speakers (HS) — bilingual speakers of a minority mother tongue and a dominant majority language —adequately describes the linguistic reality of indigenous bilinguals in Mexico, a scenario in which it has not been widely explored. To this end, we studied the particular case of Hñäñho (Santiago Mexquititlán Otomi) speakers who reside in Mexican cities. In five academic research papers carried out on this population over the past twenty years, we identified all the prototypical features of HS (use of Hñäñho as a family language, different degrees of bilingualism, competence in the majority language, and a shift of language dominance, among others), but also features that are seemingly specific of Mexican Indigenous bilinguals (social, cultural, and linguistic conflict; discrimination; miscegenation; castilianization), determined by the cultural, historical, and sociopolitical situation of the country. Based on this, we propose a reconceptualization of the basic notion of hs as Mexican Indigenous heritage speakers (HHIM, in Spanish) to reflect the sociolinguistic complexity of Indigenous language speakers living in the Mexican context.