Indigenous languages

Second Thoughts–Segundo pensamientos

/ R. Newell Searle / Leave a comment


This winter, I tutored two oaxaquenosin English to help them gain a professional edge in digital communications and psychology. Now I have second thoughts about what I’ve done. The men’s parents are among the third of Oaxaca’s people who speak one of 16 languages used in that state. Zapotec, Mixtec, Mixe, Mazatec, Náhuatl and Chinantec are the largest groups. Smaller groups, like Chontal, are dwindling to a few elders. My students wished they spoke Zapotec but their parents didn’t teach them because of prejudice against indigenous speakers. Even without bias, Mexico’s 63 indigenous languages struggle to to exist against the barrage of Spanish published and electronic media.

Este invierno, enseñé inglés a dos oaxaqueños hombres para ayudarles ganan ventajas profesionales en las comunicaciones digitales y la sicología. Ahora, tengo segundo pensamientos sobre que hice. Los padres de los hombres son entre la tercera parte de oaxaqueños que hablan uno de las dieciséis lenguas usada en esto estado. Zapoteca, mixteca, mixe, mazateca, náhuatl y chinanteca son los grupos más grandes. Grupos más pequeños, como Chontal, están muriendo con las muertes de los ancianos. Mis estudiantes desearon aprender zapoteca pero sus padres los no enseñaron a causa hay prejuicio contra hablantes indígenas. Aún sin discriminación, las sesenta tres lenguas reconocidas por el gobierno deben de luchar para existir contra una riada de español en todas modas de comunicación.

Friends in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, a poet and a teacher.
Amigos de la Sierra norte de Puebla, una poeta y una maestra.

A friend in the Sierra Norte of Puebla is a radio announcer and a poet of Totonaco. His poems express with eloquence the values and spirit of his people. Radio and writing in his native tongue are his tools for making his native language the equal of Spanish in daily use. Another friend, formerly my Spanish coach, studies Náhuatl for her master’s degree. During my visit, we spent five hours in class. I came away understanding that indigenous languages offer many alternate insights into what it means to be human.

The Mexican government supports indigenous radio stations.
El gobierno mexicano soporta los canales de radios.

Un amigo en la Sierra norte de Puebla es un locutor de la radio y un poeta totonaca. Los valores y espíritu de su pueblo están expresados en sus poemas con elocuencia. Los poemas y la radio son sus instrumentos para poner la utilidad del lenguaje nativo en un base igual con español. Otra amiga, anterior mi instructora en español, estudia náhuatl por su maestría. Durante mi visita, pasamos juntos cinco horas en la clase de náhuatl. Salí entendiendo que las lenguas indígenas ofrecen perspectivas alternativas en siendo humano.

Until recently, the dominant political cultures in Mexico and the U.S. regarded the perpetuation of indigenous cultures as barriers to ‘civilizing’ the people (as whites or Europeans). Indigenous tongues that were suppressed before are largely ignored except as quaint artifacts for tourism. Now, the greatest threat to indigenous languages seems to be mass communications in Spanish (and English) and as the principle avenue for good jobs. Can an economy function with multiple languages? Europe does. Do indigenous languages have the capacity to express today’s technologies? I think so.

Lessons in Nahuatl.
Las lecciones en nahuatl,

Hasta hace poco, las culturas políticas dominantes en México y lo EUA pensaban que la perpetuación de las culturas indígenas fue una barrera a civilizando la gente (como los blancos o europeos). Los lenguajes nativos que estuvieron suprimidos antes están ignorado principalmente ahora salvo como artefactos pintorescos para turismo. Ahora, se aparece que las amenazas más grandes a las lenguas nativas pueda ser las comunicaciones masivas en español (e inglés) y también como la vía principal para empleo bueno. ¿Podía una economía funcionar con lenguas múltiples? Europa hace. ¿Tienen los lenguajes nativos la capacidad suficiente para expresar las tecnologías de hoy? Creo que, sí.

Indigenous languages are as capable as English, Spanish or Mandarin for communicating modern technologies. One has only to study Mesoamerican ruins or the development of food crops to see their technology was often more advanced than that of Europe. The Mayas discovered and used the concept of zero centuries before Europeans. Like biological species, these languages and and cultures are distinct and integral parts of human ecology.

Las lenguas indígenas tienen tan muchos capaces como inglés, español o mandarino para comunicar las tecnologías modernas. Se tiene que solo estudiar las ruinas o el desarrollo de cosechas Mesoamericanas para ver que su tecnología era igual si no más avanzada a menudo de lo que en Europa. Las mayas descubrieron y usaron el concepto de cero siglos antes los europeos. Esas lenguas y culturas asociadas son partes distintas e integrales de la ecología humana así son las especies biológicas.

To lose a language is to lose its culture and its people. The extinction of an indigenous tongue subtracts from humanity’s larger fund of wisdom. Allowing indigenous tongues to atrophy and die is as barbaric as burning books. Spanish and English are the keys to powerful economic forces. There’s anything nefarious in learning English per se. But, the pressure and resources available to learn it for economic gain outweigh any countervailing efforts to cultivate indigenous languages. This troubles me. I can’t teach English without feeling like an agent of a globalism that may accelerate the suffocation of native tongues.

The Chocoloteco resist dying out.

Para perder un lenguaje es para perder su cultura y gente. La extinción de una lengua resta del fundo grande de la sabiduría humana. Para permitir la atrofia y muerte de lenguas nativas es tan bárbaro como quemando los libros. Español e inglés están integrados como llaves a las fuerzas económicas poderosas. No hay nada nefaria en aprendiendo inglés por sí mismo. Pero, la presión económica y los recursos disponibles para aprenderlo son más grande que cualquier esfuerzas compensatorias para avanzar las lenguas indígenas. Esto me molesta porque me siento como un agente del globalismo podía acelerar la sofocación las lenguas nativas.   

Saving the mother tongue

/ R. Newell Searle / Leave a comment

Have you ever thought of what your life would be life if you were the last person in the world who speaks English? How would you feel without anyone with whom to share the particular words, phrases and memories of your family and life? That’s a question millions of Mexicans face daily. Many are among the last speakers of their mother tongue. Here is an answer to their plight.

In word and costume a distinct people

In word and costume a distinct people

Hundreds of people gather in the Zocalo of Oaxaca, Mexico, to observe the International Day of Maternal Language. The wide-spread limbs of an immense laurel tree casts a pool of shade over the participants seated and standing around the low stage. Television cameras aim at the stage and a camera drone buzzes overhead. I stand with a man from Ixtlán de Juárez, a mountain town of Zapotec speakers. He also speaks Spanish.

Most in the crowd wear modern clothes but the presenters wear traditional costumes. A women robed in a long, embroidered dress and walks to the on-stage microphone. She smiles; her teeth gleam against her brown face; the red and gold embroidery on her black dress glows where sunlight hits it. She seems to be aflame. Speaking in Zapotec and then in Spanish, she announces the poets and declamadores who will speak.

The poets step to the microphone, each one dressed in the traditional clothing of their pueblo. One by one,  the poets pour out the soul of their people. In Mixe and Zapotec, Maya and Mixteco, Zoche and Chinanteco, their voices rise and fall, taut with urgency and passion. They gesture to the heavens, to the crowd and to themselves. Hands move to accent words I don’t understand. Each poem describes a particular Mexico; poets the heart of their people who speak their tongue, who were—and still are—formed by those languages. In words, gestures and tone of voice, they reach out to us, their listeners, imploring us to enter their world, their language, their culture, their people, their heart.

The young must carry Mixteco into the future.

The young must carry Mixteco into the future.

This isn’t Sunday entertainment for tourists. Theirs is a mission to advance recognition and use of their languages as integral parts of the 21st century Mexico. Today’s program involves only six of the 68 languages officially recognized by Mexico’s government. Recognition alone doesn’t guarantee linguistic survival. Indigenous language speakers still face discrimination from non-indigenous speakers. For this reason, many ambitious youths avoid their ancestral idiom to get ahead. Some languages will die with the elderly who still speak them and this will be a loss for all of humanity.

In Oaxaca alone, one resident in three speaks an indigenous tongue. Spanish, the language of the conquista, is common in business, government and education but it is secondary for millions of Mexicans. Why do they or we care about these tongues? Aren’t they relics of the past—not part of the modern world? After all, a modern society needs a common language—Spanish.

No, they aren’t relics. They are living languages of vital cultures. Yes, indigenous people can and do use Spanish but a second language isn’t a mother tongue and doesn’t touch the roots of our identity—individually and culturally. I’m a native English speaker and bi-lingual in Spanish. Although I speak, read and write Spanish at a high level, Spanish is not and never will be the language emanating from deep in my soul because I wasn’t formed by it. I can’t express my deepest emotions in Spanish. My Mexican friends experience the same thing with English. Who we are spiritually, emotionally, authentically is tied to our mother tongue.

Again, how would you feel if you were the world’s last English speaker? It may feel like the isolation of traveling in an alien country, cut off from English and the emotional nurture it provides. It is one of  the greatest of lonelinesses. Losing the language, culture and fellow speakers  is like that—magnified a hundred-fold. We take our mother tongue for granted at our peril.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God”—so opens the Gospel of John. The opening phrase of ‘the Word’ contains a profound truth. Things don’t have a specific reality to us unless they have a name, a word, to distinguish one thing from another. And words, taken together, are a language. And language is a map for navigating a particular cultural universe, a cosmos of concepts, precepts, and beliefs.

Language—the Word—is humanity’s great creative force. It extends far beyond transacting business and exchanging information. Each tongue has an attendant culture, the structure of the language and vocabulary uniquely expresses wisdom, a distinct worldview of a people distilled from millennia of experiences. Each language and its attendant culture is like a seed containing infinite human possibilities.

This afternoon, in the shade of the laurel, the poets scatter their seeds, seeking good soil where the the indigenous languages with their wealth of ancestral wisdom, values, and precepts will find support, take root, and thrive into the 21st century.