Nahuatl status

[Jose Maria Hernandez Gil]

Hello, this is my first post. I have some information and first hand
information that could be interesting. I'm a Spanish-speaking Mexican,
but I'm beginning to learn Nahuatl little by little.

Most statistic I have seen regarding Nahuatl put it at more than 1.2
million. This is the official government data from 1990, so today it
could easily be around 1.5 million (or more). It isn't small at all and
since the population growth rate of Nahuatl-speaking Mexicans is higher
than Spanish-speaking Mexicans, the percentage grows every census. Other
Mexican languages are in much, much worse shape.

Nahuatl as a homogeneous entity does not seem to exist as is. I liken it
to the Schwyzerdutsch in Switzerland. There is a lot of fragmentation and
sometimes the dialects are not intelligible (any additional information
regarding this?)

Written forms of Nahuatl seem to be very chaotic also. The original
people that used Roman script were not very careful and sometimes you see
the same words with multiple variants. Now days, there's also the problem
that some people use english based orthography while others keep the
original orthography. Personally, I prefer the "spanish" based one since
it seems more original and the actual similarities to Iberian Castillian
phonetics is limited at best (the j, c, z, x, tz and tl can confuse
Spaniards.)

Education in Nahuatl has begun to appear recently also, as well as the
other major Mexican languages.  As to the quality of the education I
can't say. Literature also seems to be begin to appear, I even heard that
a novel in Nahuatl won an international native language prize in Cuba a
few years back. There is no higher education in Nahuatl but I think it's
more from lack of demand than by design. Nahuatl (as well as other
Mexican languages) seem to enjoy quite a bit of usage in smaller towns
and villages government, but in larger cities they seem to take a back
seat.

Comparisons between Basque and Catalan would not be useful I think. Both
Euskadi and Catalunya are very industrialized off in comparison to other
regions of Spain, while the opposite is true for the Nahuatl speaking
regions of Mexico. Nor Breton and Corsican (which enjoy absolutely no
official status in France BTW). In Europe, only Irish or Rheto-Rumansch
could compare.

Yaoxochtil is right in the way most Mexicans view Nahuatl although I've
found it's mostly the older people. Younger Mexicans (>25 years) are more
proud of it and see it as a part of their heritage.

I've been to several places where Nahuatl is spoken. It seems to be a
very live language. People make CDs in it and you see little children
speaking it. I do not doubt it will survive, but I wonder as to how it
will live.

Some interesting links follow.

Chema


http://www.sedesol.gob.mx/ini/len9095.htm
http://www.inegi.gob.mx/poblacion/espanol/estudios/censo90.html
http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/Mexi.html



"if, as you say, our gods are dead,
 it is better that you allow us to die too.
 ...
 we cannot be tranquil,
 and yet we certainly do not believe;
 we do not accept your teachings as truth,
 even though this may offend you."

in tlamatinime