Náhuatl and Mayan Language Renaissance Occurring in Mexico
yucatanmagazine.com
yucatanmagazine.com
My personal ties to this history aside, it’s fascinating to see how many Náhuatl words made it into Mexican Spanish and into English and beyond! [2]
Footnotes:
0: https://academic.oup.com/book/481
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenismo_in_Mexico
2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spanish_words_of_Nah...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Wo...
which has a very interesting discussion of how the native usage of these languages was affected by the Catholic Church and the children/descendants of immigrants.
Ages ago, there was an article on how earthen homes were traditional in many parts of South America (_not_ Pueblo) and the advantages of them --- folks lived quite well in this part of the world for millennia before Columbus and those who followed him --- and it is due to their innovations that Malthus' math was incorrect, which we should all recall the next time we have a potato chip, or eat anything made of maize.
I don't even know where could you have possibly gotten the idea that the Spaniards were respectful. Were you told the Leyenda Rosa in school?
Anyways, the Mexican government currently communicates in a variety of indigenous languages on official forms and so they’re certainly trying to reinvigorate those traditions now.
Could you explain where you got the idea that the Spanish as a whole respected indigenous culture in mesoamerica ?
Mexico is probably the most linguistically diverse country of the world with 68¹ indigenous languages spoken (I had thought India might be a close competitor where it seems there’s a different language in every state, each with its own alphabet, but Wikipedia says that there are “only” 22 scheduled languages in India).
We have a tendency to flatten indigenous cultures (like the bizarre mixing of culturally and linguistically distinct Native American cultures) and this is even more true of the Mesoamerican cultures where a diverse group like the Mayans is treated as a monolithic entity (as well as one that’s extinct) rather than as the diverse and living culture that it is.
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1. The Wikipedia article on languages of Mexico has differing numbers throughout the article, offering 68, 65 and 62 as the number of officially recognized languages (and maybe more options if I weren’t skimming so quickly).
Even a lot of things that we think of as "the" version of a language are often effectively a particular dialect out of a complicated tapestry of local dialects being something that "everybody" has to learn because it is the language spoken by your rulers. It happened to "win" because the people speaking that dialect also won the local military conflicts and became the language of the court.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Papua_New_Guine...
It seems to be very common across countries to have a bi-lingual population. But this is almost always the case where the native language is globally uncommon. So the population see the value of learning English/Spanish etc.
It also appears to be possible to keep languages healthy, active when there are many competing, but regional languages, not used anywhere else.
But it seems near impossible to revive a language where the majority already speak a globally useful language.
The alternative, unfortunately, seems to be to force the language through authoritarianism, like in the case of hebrew.
Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.
I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.
For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them. It similarly happened to native american tribes in the US and canada.
By my estimation, the two things that kill a language is the death of the native speakers of that language (discussed above) and the evolution of a language past what native speakers would recognize (Old/proto english and Latin for example).
Poland was not in the USSR. Polish remained the working language in the Polish People's Republic
> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate
Hindi-Urdu was never exterminated by the British. In fact, it was the British that helped make it the de facto language in most of South Asia.
Before the British, Dari was the working language of administration. When the British began co-opting local administrations in the 19th century, Hindi-Urdu was used as the primary register, and my family has ancestral documents showing this change (Dari/Farsi to Urdu/Hindi to English for land documents).
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The only dead language that I can think of that was revived was Hebrew, but modern Hebrew is entirely different from that which was spoken millennia ago, and is a mixture of litigurical Hebrew, Arabic (plenty of Mizrahi influence along with the Sabra movement during the start of Israel), Russian (heavily used for mechanical terms), and German (heavily used to scientific terms).
I don't want to touch that hot potato, but that region was extremely diverse, with a large Belarusian, Lithuanian, Yiddish (before WW2 sadly), German, and Ukrainian speaking populations. I don't think any ethnic group had an actual definitive majority in that region until after WW2.
Entirely different my ass. Modern Hebrew is closer to liturgical Hebrew than the language of Shakespeare is to that of Britney Spears. There are some areas with a great deal of borrowing of vocabulary but you could say the same thing of modern Russian or Japanese and no one would say they were “entirely different” from the language of 1800.
I do NOT appreciate that tone.
.להזדיין
> Modern Hebrew is closer to liturgical Hebrew than the language of Shakespeare is to that of Britney Spears.
Modern English and Shakespearean or Medieval English are very different, and I feel the difference between modern colloquial Hebrew and liturgical Hebrew are similar.
I just looked it up and it appears that wasn't something the USSR ever really did.
> I’m going to choose to believe the folks I’ve met
It's totally up to you who to believe. Just make sure that what they say matches reality. And reality is that Russian is still used in majority of Ukrainian companies as standard language, even after 30+ years of independence. We work with contractors from Ukraine and they all communicate in Russian perfectly well.
Ukrainian and Belarusian were both standardised and made official languages of education and administration under the early Soviet Union, with substantial state investment. Policies did later shift toward Russification, especially under Stalin, but even then Ukrainian continued to be used widely. There was no consistent Soviet attempt to “exterminate” Polish. Poland remained outside the USSR, and while the Soviets repressed Polish culture during occupations, they never pursued linguistic elimination in the way the Russian Empire once had.
> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.
Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani was one of the main administrative and cultural languages under the Raj, particularly in the north. It coexisted with English and was used extensively by colonial authorities. Far from trying to wipe it out, the British helped entrench it across large parts of India. In Congress India, Hindi has been promoted heavily by the state, often to the frustration of non-Hindi speaking regions.
> I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.
Agreed.
> For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them.
“Arguably.” In Ireland, British policy during the famine amounted to criminal negligence or depraved indifference, but not genocide in the strict sense. In Wales, there was systematic suppression of the language, especially in education, but nothing close to genocide.
Russian Empire, possibly, but not Soviets. Are you confusing those periods?
On the other hand, Mayan languages and Nauhatul remain actively spoken across Southern Mexico and Guatemala.
I remember a decade ago the USCIS went on a hiring binge for Mayan interpreters becuase there was an influx of Guatemalan undocumented immigrants due to the economic collapse following their domestic instability.
Absolute bollocks. Irish is still a living language in daily use today , albeit the last monoglot almost certainly died before 1950. Of the Celtic languages Cornish is at best a zombie, revived on the basis of its incredibly close relationship to Breton. Manx has been on life support or at death’s door for 70 years, but there was still at least one fluent nerve speaker when it became something more passed on in classes than in daily life. Welsh is in relatively good health and Irish and Scots Gaelic are living languages used in daily life in small, marginal areas.
> On the other hand, Mayan languages and Nauhatul remain actively spoken across Southern Mexico and Guatemala.
Yes. The Spanish spread them with their empire after the empires that first spoke them were conquered.
That said, I was thinking post-famine.
"Grand" languages like English, Spanish, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic are gravity centers that attract and absorb dust like indigenous languages or even bigger ones like Finnish.
The process is the same: less and less content and therefore reasons to use the language, then it becomes uncool "rural thing" for young people, then their kids use it just to talk to grandmas, then it may be forcibly taught at schools, then cycle repeats with positive feedback and then it's gone and exists only in youtube channels with 10k subscribers.
So unless you push people back to their villages and fragment society, this trend won't reverse.
If anything that's one language that has been mainly only losing influence over the last 30+ years.
I think it's great that they're reclaiming some power by relearning their ancient languages that were nearly destroyed by their colonizers
https://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/11/mexican-marines-recon...
This is a common misconception. The state can absolutely dominate any cartel in Mexico, they just choose not to for political reasons.
> relearning their ancient languages that were nearly destroyed by their colonizers
Nahuatl is actually a colonizer language. The Aztecs brutally subjugated other native peoples, so brutally in fact that those groups were extremely eager to ally with the Spanish to overthrow the Aztec empire.
I’d love to know what Spanish decolonization in such a place looks like.
There is no objectively correct demographic language or culture for a given location. You have to pick a point in time to go back to and there is no way to do that that isn’t arbitrary.
The idea of "going back" to some kind of pre-Spanish Mexico is nonsensical, and it would entail the very negation of Mexican identity and the invention of a fictional identity. Such "decolonization" movements are ahistorical. And frankly, I doubt most Mexicans would want a "return", whatever that even means.
Of course, this is different from learning Náhuatl. And it's worth noting that the Jesuits worked to preserve the native languages of the New World. You see this with Náhuatl. You see this in Paraguay where the Jesuits immediately began codifying and preserving Guarani in their missions, and where it is still widely spoken today.
A little over 1% of Mexicans speak Náhuatl (the most common indigenous language).
There is no comparison here.
If by decolonize you just mean stop oppressing minority cultures and languages then that sounds great. But decolonization is the wrong word for that.
Yucatan ain't Jalisco. That's like saying Alaska shouldn't support indigenous Alaskan languages because there is racial animus or police brutality in Mississippi.
Mexico is a federal state like the US, that's why it's the Estados Unidos Mexicanos/United States of Mexico.