Mayan languages enjoy renaissance (fwd)

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Tue 13 Feb 2007
Mayan languages enjoy renaissance

By Mica Rosenberg
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=236772007

POPABAJ, Guatemala (Reuters) - As Mel Gibson stirs interest in
once-repressed Mayan languages with his bloody film 'Apocalypto', they
are enjoying a real life renaissance in Guatemala's mountains and
jungles.

A bilingual education drive in the mostly Mayan country is reviving 21
languages pushed aside since the Spanish conquest, some of which were
close to extinction.

Students at a school in the mountain village of Popabaj two hours west
of the capital simultaneously learn numbers and vocabulary in Spanish
and the Kaqchikel Mayan language.

"Learning both languages is important because Kaqchikel is beautiful and
we don't want to forget it," said 14-year-old Yessenia Saquec.

Her classmates presented an oral history project in Kaqchikel based on
stories from their grandparents.

The club-wielding, human-sacrificing stars of Gibson's movie speak
entirely in Yucatec Mayan, still used today by hundreds of thousands of
people in Mexico and Belize.

It is only one of 30 Mayan languages descended from a single,
4,000-year-old ancestral tongue and spoken by about 5 million people in
Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras.

Each of Guatemala's Mayan languages is being standardised with
dictionaries and school grammar books. The Internet has made it easier
to create and distribute them.

"There has been a significant growth of young people speaking Mayan
languages," said Maya lawyer Amilcar Pop. "This is a historic moment."

Linguist Michael Richards said he found a significant increase in
different areas of the country of young people 3 to 14 years old
speaking Mayan languages.

"There is an ethnic revitalisation going on," he said. "There is more
ethnic pride in homes as well as in schools."

REPRESSION

After the Spanish first arrived in Guatemala in 1523, colonisers and the
Catholic Church repressed the use of Mayan languages, painting the
speakers as ignorant and resistant to modernity.

Maya civilians bore the brunt of the violence in army massacres of
entire villages during a 1960-96 civil war between leftist guerrillas
and government forces that left nearly a quarter of a million people
dead or missing.

"Growing up we were afraid to speak our language in the street," said
Mayan publisher Raxche Rodriguez. "It drew too much attention, so we
only spoke it at home."

Bilingual educators who began to teach students in the early 1980s were
often singled out as guerrilla organisers and summarily executed for
their work.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and Maya human rights activist Rigoberta Menchu
is running for president this year to try to become Latin America's
second current indigenous head of state after President Evo Morales in
Bolivia.

Activists from her indigenous Winaq movement have pledged to campaign in
their homelands in native languages to better reach voters.

While Maya still suffer Guatemala's highest levels of poverty, hunger
and illiteracy, activists say that promotion of their languages and
culture has been easier since 1996 peace accords ended the civil war.

Over 3,000 bilingual schools have been set up nationwide by the
education ministry to give Mayan languages priority in the first three
years of school. Teachers in the program receive a 10 percent bonus on
their salaries.

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=236772007

Last updated: 13-Feb-07 20:03 GMT