UCLA

In the face of global language contraction, unlikely allies are emerging to support language maintenance and revitalization. This dissertation demonstrates that the interest of many speakers in revitalizing the indigenous Mexican language Highland Oaxaca Chontal is connected to their faith as Jehovah's Witnesses, a new religious movement rooted in the global North. At the time of research, Witness religious meetings were the only high-status context - and the only public context - in which Chontal was consistently used. Moreover, new indexical connections between language and religion position knowledge of the language as a moral imperative rather than a matter of individual choice. That is, local Jehovah's Witnesses have begun using more Chontal as speaking this language has come to index devoutness.

This religion is highly centralized and standardized: Witnesses obeyed instructions to use Chontal because these instructions bore the authority of the Watch Tower Society institution. This dissertation proposes the concept of the globalizing textual community, which synthesizes understandings of community from throughout social science literature, in order to explain how religious identity can supersede national, ethnic, and linguistic identities. In particular, I consider how members define their language practices as shared across externally imposed boundaries between language varieties. I build on Anderson's (1983) fundamental insight about the affordances of written texts to consider how translations are framed as commensurate or even identical, using community members' own logic as a guide.

A textual regime of shared reading and shared literacy practices unites this community. If written texts afford standardization not only of content but also of literacy and mediational practices, translation represents the potential to challenge it. One chief mechanism for minimizing these challenges is the transidiomatic authoritative discourse of the "pure language." Other mechanisms include a variety of mediational performances (Bauman 2004) of written texts, institutional regulations and consequences, and textual ideologies.

This dissertation explores both the particular ethnographic case and the institution behind many of this community's language ideologies and religious practices. I demonstrate that the enactment of Witness religious texts and the moral weight this enactment carries are, ultimately, inseparable from the language in which it is carried out.