Nahuatl status (ii)

[Leonel Hermida]

Hi,

I'm afraid the silence to my query indicates the situation of Nahuatl
is perhaps worse than I foresaw and nobody wants to be the first to
deal with it. After all, what countries were as long-sighted as the Danish
in Greenland (where they promoted Greenlandic (Eskimo) with a
tremendous success)? I remember to have heard when they came to
translate the phrase "lamb of God" in the Bible they had to resort to
"young reindeer of God"!  But people understood and Greenlandic is
thriving nowadays with its 40 or 50 thousand adherents...
But statistics don't offend and I think it is better discuss such a 'delicate'
subject than to ignore it. My own country has also done nothing with
the native languages spoken within its former colonies: zero times zero!...
Spain, France and Brittain did the same inside their frontiers, and only
this century did languages such as Basque and Catalan in Spain and Welsh
and Gaelic (?) in Brittain gain full status as ordinary written languages...
But it is my opinion that the world will be less rich if it allows languages
such as Nahuatl to die out when they can and should be kept alive. I don't
know if a language with less than 10,000 speakers can be reasonably
expected to survive in the modern world, but if 'Mexicano' has perhaps more
than 1,000,000 (as I have heard off-list, because it is known only by
'hear-say' as there are no reliable statistics, I presume), that will be a
disaster to let it die out... Worse still: a language which has a 'classical'
literature and such a facility to form new words would perhaps do better than
most can which have no such ability, in creating its own modern vocabulary!
The discussion of the means by which that can be done are off-topic and
cannot be discussed here. But the number of its speakers, its division into
dialects, and a rough indication of the 'status' of Nahuatl in the world to-day
can and should be spoken of here...

Best regards,

Leonel