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LSoRB Program The purpose of this paper is to explore the changes that have resulted in Texistepec Popoluca (TX), a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken in the Mexican state of Veracruz, through borrowing from Spanish. As with many Native American languages, TX has been in intensive contact with Spanish and now faces language death, being spoken by only the older members of the Texistepec community. The data consists of three texts that I collected during the summer of 1994. The presence of Spanish is widespread in these texts, affecting various levels of Texistepec grammar. As is common in dying languages, lexical replacement is extensive, in both basic and non-basic vocabulary. On the discourse level, Spanish discourse markers, such as 'bueno', 'entonces' and 'pues', occur frequently. Spanish "vulgarities" which function as interjections (e.g. ¡hijola chingada!) are abundant as well. Spanish function words, such as coordinating and subordinating conjunctions (e.g. 'y', 'para que', 'porque', etc.), have also been borrowed, affecting various syntactic constructions of TX.
TX morphological and phonological structure remain relatively unaffected. TX morphology is freely added to Spanish loanwords (e.g. 'fosforo-baa' "match" + "diminuitive"); however, Spanish bound morphology is confined to Spanish loanwords. Phonemic distinctions not native to TX are present in borrowings but have not been extended to native vocabulary. Changes that often characterize dying languages, e.g. loss of phonological contrasts and phonological rules, morphological reduction and phonological and morphological diffusion from the dominant language, are not readily apparent in TX. The absence of morphological interference is reminiscent of Scottish Gaelic, another dying language (Dorian 1978). While intensive contact with Spanish has led to language shift among the TX community, the language itself exhibits only "slight structural interference" (Thomason and Kaufman 1988) from Spanish. However, as code-switching from TX to Spanish occurs frequently, Spanish constitutes a significant part of Texistepec discourse.