Language Loss and Linguistic Suicide: A Case Study from the Sierra Norte De Puebla, Mexico
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we propose the term “linguistic suicide ” to refer to situations where parents who are speakers of a minority language deliberately choose not to teach this language to their children and instead adopt a majority language in their home. In the case of speakers of Upper Necaxa Totonac, a language of East-Central Mexico, the principal reasons for the cessation of language transmission are the low prestige attached to the minority language and concerns about the children’s ability to achieve fluency in Spanish, the socially-and economically-dominant language. Although these considerations contribute in the short term to the decision by speakers to kill off their language, in the long run the speakers themselves often realize that this process is a self-destructive one. Language loss and language endangerment are most frequently discussed in terms of the forced or forceful extinction of a minority language under pressure from a dominant majority language. This type of scenario is particularly relevant in the Canadian context, where the term “language loss ” occurs in discussions of Aboriginal languages — where transmission of language between generations was interrupted by deliberate government
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".