Borders traversed, boundaries erected: Creating discursive identities and language communities in the Village of Tewa

• Endangered language communities challenge the criteria for “speech communities”.
• I analyze an indigenous community’s struggle to maintain its emblematic language.
• Phenomenological criteria provide resources for viewing community building.
• Community building involves border crossing between contemporary and ancestral.
• Boundary creation is also a key feature of this endangered language community.

Today the Village of Tewa, First Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in Northern Arizona experiences unprecedented linguistic diversity and change due to language shift to English. Despite a wide range of speaker fluency, the now emblematic Tewa language that their ancestors transported from the Rio Grande Valley almost 325 years ago, is widely valorized within the community. However Language factions have emerged andtheir debates and contestations focus on legitimate language learning and the proper maintenance of their emblematic language. Boundary creation and crossing are featuresof discourses that rationalize possible forms of language revitalization and construct communities across temporal barriers. The theoretical implications of these discourseson both local and theoretical notions of language/speech community are explored.