5 ms·
Náhuatl and Mayan Language Renaissance Occurring in Mexico
- jf 1y agoI’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 https://academic.oup.com/book/481 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenismo_in_Mexico https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenismo_in_Mexico 2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spanish_words_of_Nahuatl_origin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spanish_words_of_Nah...
- Findeton 1y agoAnd 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.
- jordigh 1y agoThe 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? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_legend
- jaoane 1y agoComplaining about the pink legend whilst you parrot the points of the black legend…
- blovescoffee 1y agoFirst, understand that Mexicans are a diverse group of people, some with very “Spanish” lineages. Second, the Spanish intentionally erased very large portions of indigenous culture. The Spanish colonizers absolutely did not “respect” the old culture except for very specific and unique instances. I’m not sure how you can possibly say as much? It’s essentially genocide erasure. 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 ?
- jdgoesmarching 1y agoOnly on this website could you have someone confidently state that the genocidal colonizers of Spain “respected the culture.” This is so wrong and offensive it could be part of Grok’s system prompt.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- internet_points 1y agowhere would we be without https://hisdarkmaterials.fandom.com/wiki/Chocolatl https://hisdarkmaterials.fandom.com/wiki/Chocolatl
- WillAdams 1y agoI'm most of the way through: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Word 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.
- mapt 1y agoI'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.
- thunder-blue-3 1y agoMexico 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.
- em-bee 1y agohuman 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.
- zeryx 1y agoWhat 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
- WillAdams 1y agoWell, there are stories such as this: https://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/11/mexican-marines-reconstruct-death-of.html?m=1 https://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/11/mexican-marines-recon...
- johnisgood 1y agoWhat 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.
- harimau777 1y agoHuman 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.
- neilshev 1y agoI 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.
- cogman10 1y agoA 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).
- alephnerd 1y ago> 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). --------- 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).
- eschulz 1y agoIt'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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapotec_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapotec_languages
- dhosek 1y agoI 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. ⸻ 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).
- canvascritic 1y agoRight: 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
- doubletwoyou 1y agoOh! So it’s like how there’s many Italian “dialects” that become less mutually intelligible the farther away you go?
- jerf 1y agoPrior 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.
- stackedinserter 1y agoUncomfortable 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.
- macintux 1y agoHow 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.
- stackedinserter 1y agoMy point was that if the language is not big enough to be "global", it's moving into language museum, where it becomes esoteric curiosity and a party trick.
- pqtyw 1y ago> Russian If anything that's one language that has been mainly only losing influence over the last 30+ years.
- stackedinserter 1y agoUnderstandable, when those who speak it get bombs dropped on their roofs for the sake of "protection Russian-speaking population". It's safer to not be "russian-speaking population"!
- ogogmad 1y agoWhat about a revival of the Mayan hieroglyphs, in some limited form?