Language shift, youth culture, and ideology: A Yup'ik example (Alaska)

This two-phase study spans ten years within the life of a Yup'ik village in southwestern Alaska. Methods of linguistic anthropology and the framework of language ideology examine the peer cultures of two consecutive groups of adolescents who straddle the cusp of language shift. The first group consists of the community labeled "last real speakers" (RS), who used Yup'ik as a general peer language in the 1990's. The second group, described by the community as just "getting by" (GB), never acquired this overall level of general fluency in Yup'ik. Instead, the GB group evidenced widely varying Yup'ik skills and was the first group to display an English-dominant peer culture as adolescents in 2000. The study demonstrates how young people's increasing uses of English both reflected and shaped the interstices of linguistic resources, local beliefs, formal institutional policies, and language change. As GB peer culture tipped towards English, it quickly emerged as an "acid test" of language maintenance. Young people's increasing English use reverberated and intensified through peer language socialization processes, changing family and community dynamics. At the same time, members of the younger group commonly expressed Yup'ik language allegiance through metamessages and Yup'ik tokenism as a shared method of marking group identity. Connections between land and language emerge as a theme, and the last uses of extended Yup'ik within the younger group centered on male narratives of land-related adventure. The study traces the GB group's strategic moment-to-moment emphasis or erasure of language boundaries along lines of ethnicity, local or generational group membership, and gender, showing how spontaneous, informal interactions contributed to group linguistic patterns. Results illuminate the complicated and sometimes contradictory workings of language ideology within young people's peer culture by identifying the fluid nature of categories like status and solidarity, highlighting lateral socialization processes as an integral part of intergenerational language transmission, and filling in the roles of youth as contributors to evolving language ideologies.