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ABSTRACT
Recent work in linguistic anthropology highlights the role of linguistic ideologies, or cultural conceptions of language, in transforming social relations and linguistic structure and use. This article examines the links between language attitudes and uses in their institutional and interactional contexts on Rapa Nui, a Polynesian island community that is part of the Chilean nation-state. By the 1970s, a sociolinguistic hierarchy and functional compartmentalization of languages between Spanish and Rapa Nui-what I will describe as "colonial diglossia"-had become established in the community, which was rapidly becoming bilingual. Language shift toward Spanish has continued to advance since then. However, rising Rapa Nui syncretic language practice and consciousness, combined with the political successes of a local indigenous movement and changes in the local economy, are now contributing to the breakdown of colonial diglossia, generating better conditions for the maintenance of the Rapa Nui language.
[Keywords: language ideology, language maintenance, language shift, bilingualism, ethnolinguistic minority]
ON RAPA NUI, as in many other ethnolinguistic minority communities such as those where Mexicano, Maori, Hawaiian, Occitan, and Dyirbal were spoken, colonial languages and, later, state languages were imposed from above by politically and economically dominant groups. State-sponsored institutions, such as the formal education system and politico-administrative offices, disseminate the state language and, in some cases, act to suppress minority language(s). After Chile annexed the remote Polynesian island of Rapa Nui in 1888, it promoted cultural and linguistic assimilation gradually over the first half of the 20th century, leading the community on a path of language shift toward Spanish. This process became greatly accelerated after the mid-1960s arrival of a large Chilean civil administration and the opening of regular air passenger travel to the island. The habitual monolingual use of Rapa Nui came to be replaced by increasing use of Spanish and new syncretic Rapa Nui speech styles, and more and more Rapa Nui children are growing up as native Spanish speakers.
As colonial or postcolonial state governments integrate subject ethnolinguistic groups, the functions of languages tend to become compartmentalized into institutionally based domains of use and a system of sociolinguistic distinctions typically develops that mirrors and reinforces social hierarchies. State language use becomes privileged and its "authorized and recognized" users (Bourdieu 1991) exert authority in both formal institutional settings...