[HN Gopher] Nahuatl and Mayan Language Renaissance Occurring in ...
___________________________________________________________________
Nahuatl and Mayan Language Renaissance Occurring in Mexico
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 143 points
Date : 2025-05-13 16:08 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (yucatanmagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (yucatanmagazine.com)
| jf wrote:
| I've been paying more attention to Nahuatl 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 Nahuatl 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 Nahuatl 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...
| internet_points wrote:
| where would we be without
| https://hisdarkmaterials.fandom.com/wiki/Chocolatl
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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.
| mapt wrote:
| I'm sure you know, but even seeing the distinction between
| "Classically Mexican names" and "Nahuatl 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.
| Findeton wrote:
| 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.
| jordigh wrote:
| 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 Bartomole 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
| jaoane wrote:
| Complaining about the pink legend whilst you parrot the
| points of the black legend...
| blovescoffee wrote:
| First, 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 wrote:
| Only 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.
| thunder-blue-3 wrote:
| 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.
| zeryx wrote:
| 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
| WillAdams wrote:
| Well, there are stories such as this:
|
| https://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/11/mexican-marines-
| recon...
| johnisgood wrote:
| 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.
| harimau777 wrote:
| 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.
| johnisgood wrote:
| 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?
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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.
| ty6853 wrote:
| 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.
| speakfreely wrote:
| > 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| 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.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| 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.
| sarchertech wrote:
| 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.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| 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 cosmica_ ,
| 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 Nahuatl. And
| it's worth noting that the Jesuits worked to preserve the
| native languages of the New World. You see this with
| Nahuatl. 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.
| stmichel wrote:
| I couldn't have written a better response than this,
| absolutely fantastic.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| I was not suggesting "going back" to some sort of
| medieval past. Aboriginal languages and cultures do exist
| and they are oppressed. They are not fictional. Oddly,
| your arguments sound like Putin's points on Ukraine and
| "fictional" Ukrainian culture. 40 years ago, they all
| spoke Russian, and the moment they tried to unite around
| an indigenous, a more deeply connected culture for them,
| they got attacked by a colonial power.
| sarchertech wrote:
| 40 years ago about 2/3 of Ukraine were native speakers of
| Ukrainian and primarily spoke Ukrainian at home (close to
| the same number as today).
|
| A little over 1% of Mexicans speak Nahuatl (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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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.
| neilshev wrote:
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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).
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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).
| asimpletune wrote:
| Parts of Poland were annexed by the soviets and became part
| of Ukraine and Belarus.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Well yes but people who identified as Polish (e.g.
| upper/middle class and urban residents) were deported or
| a given a chance to leave west.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Entirely different my ass
|
| I do NOT appreciate that tone.
|
| .lhzdyyn
|
| > 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.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| tvdh `l hd`h. ny msyym kn
| stackedinserter wrote:
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| It was "strongly encouraged" in the way that English is
| "strongly encouraged" in any US company. 3/4 of the
| company can speak Hindi but in all hands meeting everyone
| speaks English because it's the only language that
| everyone in the room understands and speaks (poorly,
| lol).
| cobbzilla wrote:
| 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.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Russian was and is used because it's a common
| denominator, like English here in Canada. French is
| actually forced into our education, media and public
| jobs. But yet, English is a standard language in
| companies, government and so on. Does it mean that Canada
| "exterminating" French?
|
| > 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.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > 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.
| pqtyw wrote:
| By the 20th century. The Irish language was quite alive and
| Irish speakers made up a majority in several major areas
| before the Great Famine (which obviously and not at all
| surprisingly disproportionally affected Irish speakers due to
| the pseudo-genocidal policies of the British government)
| alephnerd wrote:
| Makes sense. I thought it had died out by the early 20th
| century, but based on census data it didn't die out but did
| see a rapid decline.
|
| That said, I was thinking post-famine.
| eschulz wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapotec_languages
| dhosek wrote:
| I don't know much about Nahuatl, 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 wrote:
| 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
| doubletwoyou wrote:
| Oh! So it's like how there's many Italian "dialects" that
| become less mutually intelligible the farther away you go?
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| Indeed, the French taught in schools is Parisian French,
| but French as its spoken, e.g., in the south sounds
| noticeably different.
| williamdclt wrote:
| Not wrong, but note that the difference is much less than
| language differences between different English speakers
| in England, even at short geographical distances.
| fdgjgbdfhgb wrote:
| 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...
| danans wrote:
| What's interesting about Papua New Guinea's linguistic
| diversity is how it correlates with its topography. Sometimes
| steep mountain ranges have effectively separated peoples from
| each-other for thousands of years, to the point that their
| languages sometimes became mutually unintelligible even if
| they were only separated by a very small distance. This
| phenomenon also occurs in other parts of the world (the
| Caucuses, the Himalayas), but TTBOMK nowhere else to the
| degree of Papua New Guinea.
| benced wrote:
| The 22 in India are just the ones the government recognizes and
| sometimes communicates in. There's way more (low hundreds I
| think).
| stackedinserter wrote:
| 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.
| macintux wrote:
| 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 Nahuatl a new global
| language.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| > Russian
|
| If anything that's one language that has been mainly only
| losing influence over the last 30+ years.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Understandable, 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"!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-16 23:01 UTC)