Linguistic rights

[Anthony Appleyard]

  Mark David Morris <mdmorris at indiana.edu> wrote:-
> ... I believe that until democractic access to resources is made
> ... available to indigenous people within their own culture and their
> ... own language there will not be a fair place for indigenous cultures. ...

Similarly in Britain, the fortunes of the Welsh language turned much for the
better when Griffiths translated the Bible into Welsh and so made unnecessary
one big way that Welsh-speakers were routinely exposed to the English
language, and this codified the language and astablished a standard form and
tried to stem the inflow of English loanwords. Similarly in the 19th
century the Sokol movement saved Czech from becoming merely a patois domimated
by German. But that was before the modern public media and its mass exposure
to dominant languages came. How big are the various Nahuatl (and Maya and
Zapotec etc) speaking communities compared to the "critical mass" where it
becomes practical to translate newspapers and books into Nahuatl/etc, and dub
popular films and videos into Nahuatl/etc, and so on, to cut down as far as
possible the routine exposure to Spanish? Where "one community" means any
group of dialects that are similar enough to each other for their speakers to
understand each other.