nahuatl status (ii)

[Dino Borgeche]

Dear Leonel

According to official Mexican statistics, Nahuatl is slowly growing.

1.197.328 were registered as nahuatl speakers in 1990

1.325 440 were registrered as nahuatl speakers in 1995

(source:Instituto Nacional Indigenista
 http://www.sedesol.gob.mx/ini/basica.htm)

The actual number might be somewhat higher, bilingual Meztisos are not
included in this number and I guess INI is likely to underestimate the
number of speakers...

Dino



>Date: Tue, 07 Dec 1999 11:19:47 +0000
>From: Leonel Hermida <leonelhermida at netc.pt>
>To: nahuat-list <nahuat-l at server.umt.edu>
>Subject: Nahuatl status (ii)
>Message-ID: <00f601bf40a5$325b77e0$c0b912d4 at mop93410>
>
>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
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>End of NAHUAT-L Digest 874
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