“We speak a topsy-turvy language”: Self-declared language purism versus language use among the speakers of Western Huasteca Nahuatl

The aim of our study is to investigate possible relevant relationships between declared attitudes toward Spanish borrowing and actual language use among speakers of Nahuatl in the Huasteca Potosina in Mexico. The main source of our quantitative data was a survey collected from 121 speakers, which included questions on attitudes toward borrowing, self-assessed language proficiency, and demographic background, as well as a section inviting respondents to choose between more puristic and more Hispanicised sentence options. Twenty participants of the survey also took part in a visual stimuli-based language proficiency assessment experiment in which we tested for the presence of Spanish loanwords. The results of the quantitative study were confronted with qualitative data involving interviews and participant observation. The analysis of the quantitative data revealed strong negative attitudes toward Spanish borrowing in Nahuatl and a correlation between declared purism, i.e. negative attitudes to borrowing, and preference for puristic sentence options. However, declared purism had little reflection in actual language use in the proficiency assessment experiment. This study demonstrates that use of a variety of materials and careful methodology are needed in order to make advances in this topic.