I don’t know much about Náhuatl, but the term “Mayan Language” is a bit misleading as there are actually numerous Mayan languages, something I’d never really thought about before I did a service trip to Chiapas and Guatemala in the early 90s and was exposed to the Jacalteco language which is just one of many Mayan languages.
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).
While Mexico is certainly very linguistically diverse, it doesn't even come close to Papua New Guinea's over 800 languages [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Papua_New_Guine...
Right: Maya is a "language continuum" in the sense that geographically proximate speakers tend to understand each other well, and intelligibility goes down as you move further away from any given individual on the continuum
Oh! So it’s like how there’s many Italian “dialects” that become less mutually intelligible the farther away you go?
Prior to general travel for everyone being affordable, and broadcast media like television that can go everywhere, languages were affected by the same forces everywhere. So you'd get that effect pretty much everywhere in the world.
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.
I’ve been paying more attention to Náhuatl after reading “The Aztecs: A Very Short Introduction” [0] and seeing the names of my great uncles and great aunts in there (e.g. Xochitl, Nezahualcoyotl) which opened a mystery of sorts. My grandmother and her older brother had very classically Mexican names and the four younger siblings had Náhuatl names, but why? My great aunts didn’t know but I suspect that the answer is related to the “Indigenismo” movement in Mexico [1], which may also be behind the linguistic renaissance that this article describes.
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...
I'm sure you know, but even seeing the distinction between "Classically Mexican names" and "Náhuatl names" strikes me as weird, since the place we get the word "Mexico" is the "Mexica" tribe that were the dominant of the three Nahua tribes that constituted the Aztec Empire on colonization.
I'm most of the way through:
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.
And remember that this is possible because the Spanish did respect the old culture. Actually it was the mexicans after their independence that tried to remove it.
The hell, respect the old culture? They couldn't completely stamp it out, more like it, but there was no respect there. Some native culture survived despite the Spaniards' attempts, but there was no respect whatsoever. The closest thing to "respect" was stuff like Bartomolé de las Casas thinking that it was cruel to enslave the natives because they weren't strong enough, so it would be better to bring Africans to America and enslave them instead (which he later also regretted, but the damage was done).
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?
It's nice to think about how there are millions of people in Mexico who speak indigenous languages to one degree or another. Years ago I visited my grandfather who was in a nursing home in Mexico City, and there was a young girl working as an aide who must have been no more than 18 years old. My aunt told me that the girl barely spoke any Spanish. Noticing my immediate confusion, my aunt replied with one word I had never heard before: Zapotec.
Uncomfortable truth: time for developing new universal languages is over. Somebody can learn Nahuatl or whatever out of interest, but if they don't speak it to their kids (and make kids speak it between themselves), it will end with this very person.
"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.
How does your point about the death of local languages relate to "time for developing new universal languages is over"? I don't think anyone is trying to make Náhuatl a new global language.
I always pay attention to efforts of restoration for endangered languages. Unfortunately, it seems to be an awfully difficult thing to do. In my home country, Ireland, we have been trying for around a century to restore/preserve Irish. But it has gone fairly poorly. It seems that falling below a critical mass of speakers, the language is nearly always considered 'useless'/'ancient'.
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.
A counter to this that I'm aware of is Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both during its heyday yet they've mostly completely revived despite the effort.
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).
USSR didn't try to "exterminate" Ukrainian, where did you get this? We spoke Ukrainian all my childhood, it was taught at school, there were TV shows, magazines and newspapers in Ukrainian. It was alive and very actively used, at least in 80's.
I know some Ukrainians who say the exact opposite— Russian was taught in schools, all the big important jobs went to Russians, at firms where Russian was spoken, government business was conducted in Russian, and so on. It’s curious how these accounts can be so different, so I’m going to choose to believe the folks I’ve met in person on many occasions.
I had a Ukrainian friend and I thought he'd told me that Russian was strongly encouraged. I thought the state had a stronger policy towards making sure everyone spoke russian.
I just looked it up and it appears that wasn't something the USSR ever really did.
It would have been the normal thing to do. But the USSR went the other way because it was committed to the idea of being several separate soviet republics, so it pushed the idea of Ukrainian language and culture as something distinct from Russian in order to present the idea of a Soviet Ukrainian Republic as something distinct from the Soviet Russian Republic.
> Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both
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).
Parts of Poland were annexed by the soviets and became part of Ukraine and Belarus.
> Parts of Poland were annexed by the soviets and became part of Ukraine and Belarus
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.
Completely irrelevant to whether the Polish language and cultural identity was suppressed. Most of historic Prussia is now part of Poland. No one claims that German was suppressed in East Germany.
> 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).
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.
> Entirely different my ass
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.
> A counter to this that I'm aware of is Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both during its heyday yet they've mostly completely revived despite the effort.
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.
Irish is different as it was largely dead by the 19th century.
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.
> Irish is different as it was largely dead by the 19th century.
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.
Mexico has so many greater problems to discuss than a few people learning the ancient tongue. 2 days ago a beauty influencer was shot dead on a live stream, and female (and male) mayors have been gunned down regularly. I couldn't care less about what they're speaking over there, I hope they take care of their basic human rights and giving their citizens dignity first.
What do you expect the average Mexican to do about that? The Cartels have substantially more power than the state.
I think it's great that they're reclaiming some power by relearning their ancient languages that were nearly destroyed by their colonizers
> The Cartels have substantially more power than the state.
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.
Mexicans could start with liberalizing their gun laws since all the bad guys already have them. Zapatistas and other local resistance groups aren't afraid to fight them when they have weapons, and some of the communities that actually have gotten their hands on guns have managed to make it more trouble than it's worth for the cartels.
Well, there are stories such as this:
https://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/11/mexican-marines-recon...
Well, the cartels have more power as you get away from the Valley of Mexico. Much of the power distribution in Mexico is related to geography afaik. When terrain is difficult to cross, enforcing a monopoly on power is difficult. For another example of this problem, see Afghanistan.
What kind of power are you speaking of? "Cultural power" or something? Does it mean much in practice in this context? I fail to see what its reclaim would achieve against fighting cartels.
Human beings are highly irrational. Increases in cultural power often gives them a sense of greater empowerment that causes them to take increases in political power. That's why dictatorships seek to suppress and control cultural practices that could lead to empowerment such as martial arts, religion, meditation, language, art, gender nonconformance, etc.
I don't disagree, and I see how that would go about, but does it have any immediate effects? Is it not more of a long-term thing?
human rights and dignity are not something to be given (by whom?) but to be fought for. and the most important weapon in that fight is building a community. discovering your identity and making a connection to the community you live in is a big part of that. and learning your ancestral language is a way to make that connection.
> Mexico has so many greater problems to discuss than a few people learning the ancient tongue. 2 days ago a beauty influencer was shot dead on a live stream
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.
People without past have no future. Connecting to your ancient traditions is a form of empowerment. Look at what happened to Jews with Hebrew. It helped rebuild a united identity and contributed to Palestine's de-colonization effort. I hope people of the Americas will do the same and free themselves of the Spanish colonizers.
Most genetic studies show the average Mexican has around half and half Native American and European ancestry with about 5% African ancestry. 99% of Mexicans speak Spanish and 94% speak only Spanish.
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.
Mexicans are indeed a new people drawn from both native and European stock and a fusion of those cultures. There is a notion of Mexicans (or even Latinos) as la raza cósmica, which is deeply connected with Our Lady of Guadalupe, regarded as "the first mestiza". This mestizo identity is core to Mexican identity. It isn't colonial even if colonialism served as a vector and a catalyst for it.
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.