Cholula Nahuatl class and encounter

[John Sullivan]

Dear listeros,
	I’m writing from Cholula, where IDIEZ, in partnership with the University of Warsaw, is entering the last day of our two-week Nahuatl Language and Codex Institute. Tomorrow and Sunday we will hold our second Interdialectical Encounter with the participation of 70 native speakers of Nahuatl from seven states (and Joe Campbell). I just wanted to share with you something particularly surprising that happened last Friday.
	An interesting aspect of the two-week course is the participation of eight young native speakers from the town of Soyatlan, Puebla. Even though the schools in Soyatlan are only in Spanish, the people in the town, including children speak Nahuatl. So, needless to say, the high school students who participated in the course have never read or written anything in their native language. Last Friday we transported our Institute to Soyatlan and held the advanced Classical Nahuatl component there. We projected a manuscript from Chalco, 1564, on the wall of a room used for catechism classes, and began to paleograph and interpret it. In attendance were high school students and a number of other community members, including some of the parents and grandparents of the students. The class was conducted monolingually, some of us speaking Huastecan Nahuatl and the people from Soyatlan speaking their variant. The surprise is that the high school students immediately began reading and understanding the manuscript — just like that! And one of the abuelitas picked up a copy of Molina’s dictionary and began thumbing through it. 
	We are now planning to formally expand our operations (teaching, research and revitalization of Nahuatl) in Puebla and Tlaxcala. And yes, the two-week Nahuatl Language and Codex Institute and the Interdialectical Encounter will held here again in January of 2015. 
Un abrazo,
John

John Sullivan, Ph.D.
Visiting scholar, Faculty of Artes Liberales
University of Warsaw;
Professor of Nahua language and culture
Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas;
Director, Zacatecas Institute of Teaching and Research in Ethnology
Tacuba 152, int. 43
Centro Histórico
Zacatecas, Zac. 98000
Mexico
Work: +52 (492) 925-3415
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Mobile (Poland): +48 73-380-9876
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idiez at me.com
www.macehualli.org

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