Linguistic Prejudices in Interviews: An Analysis of Research Projects in a University in Mexico

Abstract

Traditionally, social research in Mexico has not adjusted so much to a multilingual phenomenal reality as to a monolingualistic social imaginary representation. This means that when researchers analyze their reality, they do so under personal biases; thus, ignoring and hiding the daily multilingual reality. To find out how these linguistic prejudices and biases affect the methods applied, the authors of the present case study analyzed 77 postgraduate theses carried out in 2002-2019 at Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico. These theses applied interview techniques to speakers of national indigenous languages. The results show their study designs tend to linguistically homogenize populations based on a monolingual nationalist imagined community. A prevalence of more than 90 % in the application of linguistically minoritizing interviews evidences the pervasiveness of monolingual attitudes in the academy that limit methodological results and discriminate against studied populations. This means that the detection of linguistically minoritizing interviews can serve as another indicator to assess the university as an entity that exercises linguistic pressure on the communities being studied.