■ Danny Law Department of Linguistics University of Texas at Austin dannylaw@austin.utexas.edu ■ Kerry Hull Department of Religion Brigham Young University kerry_hull@byu.edu Discourse in the Longue Dur ee: A View of Mayan Poetic Inertia Discourse is dynamic and emergent, yet certain elements of discourse can appear remarkably stable, enduring across centuries. This discursive inertia gives us evidence of discourse in the past, allowing us to put current discursive moments in a longue dur  ee context. Discursive inertia also begs avenues of investigation in its own right. We here discuss the common poetic patterns of chiasmus and difrasismo on one branch of the Mayan language family, consisting of Classic Mayan, documented in hieroglyphic inscriptions, Colonial Ch’olti’, and contem- porary Ch’orti’ Mayan. Texts from these languages share poetic discourse that speak to the long perseverance of discursive patterns. [discourse, poetics, Mayan languages, discur- sive inertia, longue dur ee] Introduction A n ethnographically grounded perspective on language energetically draws us to attend to specific moments of discourse, in situ. When we do this, both meaning and the discursive structures of language can be seen to be inescapably dynamic. “Discourse,” according to Sherzer (1987: 296), “is an elusive area, an imprecise and constantly emerging and emergent interface between language and culture, created by actual instances of language in use and best defined specifically in terms of such instances.” But underlying that roiling, evanescent newness is a meandering undercurrent of inertia, of continuity; threads of linguistic practice and discursive performance that endure. This paper will focus on that inertia: what exactly is maintained as we “language,” to use Becker’s (1995) phrasing. In other words, are some types of linguistic and discursive elements more or less “stable”? How might we conceptu- alize discursive inertia (as epiphenomenal? or a historical process in its own right?), and how we might go about studying discursive inertia empirically? In the realm of poetic discourse, what features are consistent over time, and what aspects are “emergent”? In the case of the Maya of Central America, the Spanish invasion introduced new linguistic forms. Hank’s work on Colonial Yucatecan documents has shown that Spanish/Catholic efforts toward conversion of the Maya brought about changes in “social practices, lived space, and language” (2010:5). But how did Maya poetics fair during the centuries of contact with Western poetic traditions? We seek to explore that question here by looking at the retention of certain poetic forms in Mayan languages spanning over a millennium. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 29, Issue 2, pp. 195–204, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2019 American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12220. 195