Native Languages in Mexico. Challenges for the 21st century

Mexico is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. This has its origins in pre-Hispanic times, when a relatively stable multilingualism prevailed, associated to a quite different structure of domination from the one established within today’s globalization. As it is widely known, the misnamed “Aztec empire” managed to impose its power over large Mesoamerican areas. This had to do with a structure of subordination linked to the payment of tributes which, as long as the peoples provided to Mexica rule, they could thus maintain a relative linguistic and cultural independence, many of these linguistic and cultural traits were directly incorporated and presented as part of the Mexicas’ “authentic” cultural tradition. However, the linguistic policy of the Mexica State did not seek homogenization and subsequent linguistic and cultural assimilation of the populations that occupied its territory, which did happen since the Independence period, increased during the Mexican Revolution (periods during which many native languages were lost), and lasts until our days.

Such multilingual and multicultural Mexican historical situation has left an indelible mark in many areas of our country’s social and cultural life. Although there are several Spanish variants like those from Yucatán or Oaxaca, the one spoken in the Valley of Mexico is the variant mostly recognized as “Mexican Spanish”, linked to “standard” Spanish in Mexico, and has had a distinctive and lasting influence of what the Spanish missionaries used to call “Mexican language”, náhuatl, which to this day native speakers in diverse regions precisely name mexicano, among other denominations such as nahuatlatohli, macehualcopa or macehualtlatohli.

This does not only refer to isolated words from the large lexicon corpus of Mexican Spanish, which undoubtedly mostly distinguish it (as is the case of the influence of Romani “Gypsy” language in that of Madrid Spanish), but to the total physiognomy of the Mexican variety of Spanish, which turns it into a very clear, articulated and full kind of Spanish. Although it is far from being incorporated as an educational resource in the country’s schools, it is a suitable tool for Spanish teaching in the international arena that has gone practically unnoticed.

Today more than ever, native languages in Mexico and around the world face a host of diverse threats linked to the colonial heritage that unfortunately survives and is deeply rooted in many sectors of Mexican society, with lacerating expressions of racism and discrimination. While the effects of globalization, state monolingualism and the subsequent linguicide forces that occupy wide and vast spaces of public life in our country have had a highly negative impact on the vitality and presence of the indigenous languages, against these odds, native peoples have also managed to find strategies for linguistic and cultural vindication and revitalization. In this sense it raises a series of important challenges, to the extent that even UNESCO has declared the decade that begins in 2022 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages that shall accompany the sustainable development agenda promoted by the UN.

MEXICAN MULTILINGUALISM: BETWEEN SILENCE AND VINDICATION
Hard data concerning the large linguistic Mexican diversity places our country worldwide as one with great linguistic diversity or superdiversity, and therefore is regarded as such around the planet, linguistically speaking. The National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI from its Spanish initials) recognizes eleven language families; whilst some others have disappeared or else diminished in scope. Within the officially recognized Mexican language families, four of them are called “isolated”: the Cmique itom (Seri), the Chontal from Oaxaca, the Umbeyats (Huave) and the Purépecha (Tarascan). Isolated is sort of an incorrect classification: no language lives in a bubble without having contact with other languages and, of course, with other cultures and sociolinguistic groups. The term refers to the fact that these languages have no known kinship and each represents a linguistic family itself (such as Euzkera or Basque in Spain has none other related language).

Another source which brings us closer to this large diversity is Ethnologue, Languages of the World, the academic face of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which in turn is the intellectual arm of the Wycliff Bible Translators, a global organization dedicated to the translation of the New Testament into as many languages as possible. Ethnologue recognizes more language families present in Mexico and is actually more attached to the complex Mexican linguistic diversity probably because of its interest in translating the New Testament sustained in it´s Babel-like view as opposed to the nationalist ideology of the Mexican State that limits its vision to the category of “national languages” when referring to native Mexican languages.

This entails that certain languages are excluded such as Seminole, the only creole language in the national territory which emerged as a consequence of the Maskogo exodus, an afro-descendant people that fled from the United States at some point in time to settle in our country, specifically in Coahuila, near Nacimiento de los Kikapúes (another group with a similar history of forced migration escaped from slavery and forced labor associated to it, that prevailed in the early 19th century in the US when it had already been abolished in Mexico). However, only recently (2012) did the Mexican State recognize the Maskogo people, who in their time came to an agreement with that same State, according to which they would repress the assaults of Apaches and other groups at the northern frontier. They represent a population whose multilingual condition arose from the multiple territories they have occupied and the different populations that have conformed them, including speakers of languages from the West African diaspora, Creek, Spanish, English.

Another language and people even less recognized by the Mexican State are the Romani (“Gypsy”), whose population has been made totally invisible, with some remnants in the port of Veracruz and Mexico City. If we add languages of Indo-European or Eastern origin, Arabic or Hebrew, that refer to differentiated identities as markers of the ethnic frontiers that characterize these groups, we will get an idea of the large multilingual Mexican complex.

This plurality multiplies if we think of the constant diversification most of these languages have experienced throughout their history, especially, contemporary history. Around 10 percent of the Mexican population speaks an indigenous language. This represents more than ten million people, even if censuses record less probably due to the speakers’ denial of their native status as a result of the neocolonial heritage that has imposed and continues to impose strong tendencies of racism, discrimination and exclusion towards these peoples, and also as a result of the own limitations of the census itself.

Very few native languages maintain a certain degree of linguistic uniformity such as Maya from Yucatán or Purépecha, so that they may be considered a single language without greater linguistic diversification. In this sense, based on the criterion of intelligibility or mutual comprehension amongst speakers as opposed to what is usually listed in official surveys which place Nahuatl as the language with the largest number of speakers, Yucatán Maya takes in fact the lead within the Mexican multilingual concert with approximately a million native speakers. That is if we consider Nahuatl as a continuum of different languages or a Nahuatl continuum.

Languages that still have hundreds of thousands of speakers include evidently Nahuatl, spoken by approximately one and a half million people with varying degrees of comprehension among them, around one quarter of a million live in the Huasteca region and the rest are scattered throughout the country. There is also the case of other languages like Tu’un savi or “language of the rain”, mostly known as Mixteco and Diixazá or Zapoteco, either one with over two hundred thousand speakers. Both of these languages have a pronounced linguistic diversification that allows us to refer to them in terms of different languages, that is to say, Mixtec or Zapotec languages, with tens of languages each.

The areas with the largest linguistic diversity in Mexico are located in the states of Oaxaca, Yucatán, Chiapas, Veracruz and Guerrero. In contrast, there are languages in Mexico spoken by a handful of people, for instance, the Yumana languages of the Baja California peninsula. The extreme case is Koahl —with only one speaker of this language considered a variant of Kumiai— that are critically threatened and require urgent revitalizing interventions such as the ones outlined below.

THE LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL REVITALIZATION, MAINTENANCE AND DEVELOPMENT PROJECT
This project (PRMDLC from its Spanish initials) has been active in Mexico for more than three decades. Based on the idea of direct collaboration between speakers and researchers, it conducts collaborative workshops to encourage a high level of participation. The starting point is the recovery of the peoples’ language and culture through the production of culturally appropriate materials, recreating them in prestigious media such as television where indigenous children rarely hear their languages. A primary objective of PRMDLC is to establish a (re)vitalizing corpus of printed, audiovisual and multimedia materials in native languages, amongst other formats produced and consumed by the speakers themselves and at the same time reach a wider audience.

The PRMDLC offers workshops to encourage and strengthen permanent revitalization through self-developed activities such as language and music games, working from the social community base. Speakers are credited as the first and foremost collective authors of multimedia products that include short stories, riddles and tongue twisters, books, documentaries, games and different music genres, from rap and rock to Jarocho music). Thus, participation is appreciated and fostered as a means to dignify languages and cultures.

The PRMDLC workshops are organized as follows: participants are summoned in events such as the local patron Saint festivals which represent good occasions that bring many people together, including immigrants who have moved to big cities or even to the US, and also attract visitors from neighboring towns. Children attend workshops with their siblings, parents or grandparents, dynamics that encourage intergenerational ties. They are invited to watch an animated film, afterwards, local champions who lead the workshops invite the audience to repeat a tongue twister or ask if anyone knows another similar version of the stories. This activity encourages spontaneous participation and reinforces other dynamics. Participants can express themselves freely. In principle, there is no time limit (sessions may last from two to five hours) which allows a relaxed atmosphere different from the typical school dynamics. By using animated riddles, the audience necessarily engages in active participation. Children become extremely motivated in trying to answer riddles that are not evaluated as “right” or “wrong”, for example, in the Nahua riddle Maaske mas tikwaalantok pero tikpiipiitsos (“No matter how angry you are, you will kiss it all at once”), the answer can vary from a bottle to an aatekoomatl or “drinking water pumpkin”; various answers are possible.

Riddles, tales and tongue twisters are powerful means for preserving linguistic and cultural traits that invite to interact and play verbal games, not to mention tongue twisters —culturally specific language games— that fuel cultural interconnection and continuity. This way the PRMDLC develops an indirect method of linguistic revitalization, which means people’s involvement is open to spontaneity, it is never forced and takes place in “natural” and culturally sensitive forms. It stimulates the intergenerational transmission of “endangered” languages. In this sense, it entirely depends on the children to participate or not, as opposed to the kind of participation practiced in regular school contexts which actually works as an inhibitor of indigenous knowledge and languages and therefore favors assimilation.

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