CHAPTER 11 LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES OF MESOAMERICA 423languages are learned by children, but only after they learn Spanish as a second lan-
guage. This situation was usual as of 1950 among the lowland Chontal of Oaxaca.
The Impact of Spanish on Native Languages
The above mentioned language choices are often tied up with ethnic identity. Bilin-
gual speakers may choose to speak Spanish rather than an indigenous language in
some contexts because they wish to identify in one way or another with those outside
the native community. And when parents speak to their children in Spanish, this
choice may reflect a shifting of certain kinds of social commitments, or even of eth-
nic identity, from the local, indigenous community to a wider regional or national
level.
The potential for breakdown of ethnic identity, however, can be overempha-
sized. The relation between language and ethnicity may have been closer in the past,
before Spanish began to replace native languages in large portions of most native
groups. Today, however, language, culture, and ethnic identity cannot be equated.
With the replacement of native languages by the processes just described, a native lan-
guage may come to be spoken by a minority of members of the once-associated cul-
tural and ethnic groups, with Spanish now the dominant language. Even so, those
who have grown up in the community as monolingual speakers of Spanish may have
a strong sense of community identity, and the indigenous language of the commu-
nity may still serve as a shared, unifying symbolof group identity. For example, almost
all of the 26,000 Sayuleños consider themselves to be Indian, and they know that
they have always been different from everyone else, even though only a small pro-
portion of them speak the Sayula Popoluca language. Similarly, in the town of San
Lucas, near Antigua, Guatemala, no one speaks Kaqchikel any more, but the women
still wear clothing that only indigenous people wear. Nonetheless, when a commu-
nity’s native language is in the process of disappearing, this condition is always a
source of distress for a significant proportion of the population: There is a feeling
that something important in their lives is being lost.
Since the arrival of the Europeans in Mesoamerica, then, native languages have
suffered greatly in terms of numbers of speakers and social status. Many languages
have become extinct, and very few of the millions of speakers of indigenous lan-
guages in Mesoamerica have been literate in native languages. However, in the last
few decades, there has been an upsurge of interest in and attention to the native lan-
guages of the area. In Guatemala several million persons speak Mayan languages,
and as a result of the combined efforts of native speakers and linguists, efforts are now
under way to provide bilingual education in Spanish and in local Mayan languages
(Q’eqchi, K’iche’, Kaqchikel, Tzutujil, Poqomam, Mam, and others). Such efforts
require the production of textbooks and reading materials in Mayan languages;
whereas the goals of the project are to increase literacy in both Spanish and native
languages. A standardized orthography for use in such materials, proposed by the
Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala, has been given official status by the gov-
ernment. Box 11.3 provides a parallel example of how the Zapotec language is being
promoted in present-day Mexico.