A Tale of Two Mam Children: Contact-Induced Language Change in Mayan Child Language

Mayan languages have been in contact with Spanish for nearly 500 years and yet maintain much of their structural integrity. The arrival of bilingual schools and television has now altered the circumstance of language use within many Mayan households. This article compares children’s and mothers’ production of verb, existential, and negation constructions in Spanish and five Mayan languages, with a special focus on Mam. Mayan children may have vocabularies with up to 20% Spanish-derived lexemes and still not exhibit significant structural changes in their grammars. A two-year-old Mam child growing up with intense pressure to use Spanish exhibited changes to verb, existential, and negation constructions that were not evident in the language of other Mayan-speaking children. Verb use and negation appear to be especially sensitive indicators of such change. Contact-induced structural change shows how children’s emerging grammars accommodate new structural elements.