Endangered Words and Invulnerable Worlds: Spatial Language and Social Relations in Cheran, Michoacan, Mexico

Abstract

With many of the world's 6,909 languages becoming endangered at an alarming rate, studies of linguistic variation are of importance to various stakeholders from laymen to scholars. Spatial language proves an important domain since it links grammar, cognition, and culture. While some hold that spatial language encodes uniform concepts, recent research suggests that language-dependent concepts are potentially instrumental in cultural behavior across social contexts. This dissertation examines spatial language use and social relations among speakers of the critically endangered Cheran dialect of P’urhépecha, a Mesoamerican language isolate of Michoacán, Mexico. Based on 28 months of cumulative ethnographic fieldwork, the dissertation describes two primary means of spatial reference, grammatical and discursive, as sharing an underlying part-whole pattern. It argues the part-whole pattern also underlies many cultural practices.