Chapter 5 – The ethnography of language and language documentation
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in front of a house compound that was deserted and locked up tight, but
nobody would be there to notice. In fact, I learned that in general threats to
negative face hardly counted at all in the Mexicano communities. I learned
as well that when there is any possibility of a “No” in a matter where an
insincerely-uttered “Yes” would create inconvenience of a kind intolerable
even for these people, that intermediaries were sent to pose the question. So
I did have a reasonable understanding about what was going on, and even
published an article on the local culture of politeness (Hill 1980). I didn’t
make the mistake of thinking of local people as rude and inconsiderate. But
now comes the tough part – I found it practically impossible to tell the little
white lies about keeping appointments that everybody else used. If some-
one said, “Next week, let’s go and visit the church at Ocotlan, my daughter
needs a ritual cleansing and you can take us there in your pick-up truck,”
and I knew that next week I was expected in Mexico City at a professional
conference, I would carefully – politely, in my terms, incredibly rudely in
theirs – explain that I had a previous engagement but might be able to visit
the Virgin of Ocotlan another time. I knew the Primero Dios routine per-
fectly well, understood its deep cultural foundations, and simply could not
do it. In my cultural calculus, which I could not seem to set aside, the threat
to negative face – the idea that someone might be inconvenienced if I didn’t
show up – was truly dire, while saying “No” politely to someone’s face was
a very minor matter. Although I attempted the Primero Dios routine occa-
sionally when I thought the matter at hand was a fairly light one, I suspect
that I acquired a reputation as a rather rude, stuck-up, and negative person,
but I simply couldn’t help it. The American linguist Doris Bartholomew,
who worked for 40 years with Otomi speakers in a part of Mexico near my
own field site, told me that she finally learned to accomplish this particular
flavor of social lie with a straight face, but that it pained her every time.
The lesson of this case is that diversity in usage is not merely colorful, or
interesting, but that it can be very, very hard to live with, even for a person
with extensive anthropological training.
A second foundational presumption of the ethnography of language is,
of course, that speech communities are not linguistically homogeneous, but
are “organizations of diversity.” The idea of the speech community as an
“organization of diversity” is a very useful one for students of minority
languages who encounter communities that are at the very least bilingual.
Especially important, of course, is the distribution of the linguistic resources
of the minority language versus the other language or languages across the
repertoire of possible speech events and acts, across genres, across the kinds
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Jane H. Hill
of speakers and addressees, across channels, across affective keys, and the
like.
This organization of diversity has very practical consequences for our
work. Again, we can note the problem of “naturalization” of difference. I
never really learned Nahuatl very well when I was working in Tlaxcala, the
reason being that hardly anybody ever spoke it to me until I had been re-
turning to the communities off and on for almost a decade. This seemed
reasonable; I speak halfway decent Spanish, and so do they, so it was just
easier for everybody to use that language and that was how I initially
thought about what was going on. But in fact this was much more than just
a matter of “least effort.” People spoke Spanish to any stranger or outsider,
no matter what their native language might be. It was quite astonishing to
go to a public market and hear obviously indigenous sellers speaking heav-
ily accented and even ungrammatical Spanish to equally obviously indige-
nous buyers throughout all the stages of the bargaining process until the
very end of the event, when the deal was clinched and a few words of Na-
huatl would be exchanged to express the solidarity that came in the moment
of a successful transaction.
The sociolinguistic conventions that distributed Nahuatl and Spanish
across the local contextual landscape would have had the most profound
effect on my fieldwork had I been documenting grammar rather than lan-
guage shift, since they would have made it very difficult for me to hear
certain kinds of constructions or access certain lexical domains. I think it
has been shown that gaining a speaking competence in a language under
investigation is a prerequisite to truly sensitive description and analysis.
But it was very difficult to do that in the Nahuatl communities. I did try,
but without much success. I had the opportunity once to talk to a local vet-
erinarian who had learned to speak Nahuatl, not only to facilitate his work,
but because he was deeply interested in the language and its history. He
discovered, however, that people did not respond well to him when he
spoke it to them. He said, “When I speak it, they don’t respect me.” He had
unwittingly run afoul of a convention of metaphorical switching that in-
volves the use of Spanish even by Nahuatl speakers when they discuss
technical topics, and, unfortunately, also of linguistic insecurity associated
with Nahuatl, the idea that people who speak it are not as good as people
who speak Spanish. If his interlocutors were relative strangers, he was
probably even insulting them by suggesting that they did not know Spanish.
Finding contexts for speaking the language in such circumstances requires
the most careful analysis of how the various languages in a community are