Abstract
A speech community is constituted as much by boundaries as by a core (Fishman 1989). Language standardization politics are an important means of defining both the center and the margins of a community, as well a key mechanism for maintaining speech community identification over time. In this chapter, I explore the standardization politics in the Isthmus Zapotec or Diidxazá (hereafter IZ or Diidxazá2) speech community in southern Mexico, with a focus on the who and when of language standardization. An array of actors across social scales drive processes of planning, implementing, or negotiating standardization politics or, indeed, language politics of any kind (Canagarajah 2005; Ricento and Hornberger 1996), as illustrated throughout this volume. Building on this participatory understanding of language politics, I examine some of the social actors who are involved in the creation of a written standard for Diidxazá and interrogate the implications of standardization for the past, present, and imagined future of the speech community.
Access the chapter on the homepage of Standardizing Minority Languages: Competing Ideologies of Authority and Authenticity in the Global Periphery.