CHAPTER 11 LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES OF MESOAMERICA 409All languages are constantly changing. In time, a language changes so much that
speakers of its different dialects can no longer understand each other. In cases in
which we have written records over a long period of time, current speakers of a lan-
guage cannot understand texts in an ancestor of that language that date from about
1,000 years ago (such as Beowulf,c. A.D. 900) but have only a little difficulty with texts
from about 500 years ago (such as Thomas More, c. A.D. 1500).
We say that two languages are members of the same language family if they de-
scend from a single, common ancestor language. The ancestor languages that gave
rise to the different languages of Mesoamerica no longer exist, but we can draw con-
clusions about their properties by comparing the properties of the languages that are
descended from them and reconstructinga hypothetical ancestral form of the lan-
guage.
Linguists refer to these reconstructed versions of ancestor languages as protolang-
uages.The extinct language that gave rise to the modern Mayan languages, for
example, is called proto-Mayan;the ancestor of the Zapotecan languages is proto-
Zapotecan;and so on. Every indigenous Mesoamerican language is a member of one
of eleven such families: Some are families of several languages, whereas others (isol-
ates) consist of a single language. The locations of these units and their member lan-
guages are indicated in Figure 11.2. Their sizes, in terms of the number of languages
composing them, is quite varied. The Oto-Manguean group is the largest and most
diverse, consisting of at least forty distinct languages; the Cuitlatec, Huave, and Taras-
canfamilies have a single member each.
Two of the language groups listed here are connected to language families out-
side Mesoamerica. The Nahua group is a branch of a larger language family, Uto-
Aztecan, whose other branches are found much further to the north, in northwestern
Mexico and the southwestern United States. Many linguists believe that there is a
very diverse linguistic stock called Hokan whose members are distantly related to
one another. Most languages in this group are located along the Pacific coast of the
United States. If Hokan is a valid genetic grouping, Tol in Honduras and Chontal of
Oaxaca would be members of it. (Box 11.1 describes the history of one Native Amer-
ican language that falls on the margins of the Mesoamerican tradition, having ar-
rived after the Spanish invasion.)
The languages of Mesoamerica have been written in European script since shortly
after the Spanish invasion, early in the sixteenth century. The first of these records
were made by Franciscan priests as part of their attempt to Christianize the indige-
nous population of the Americas. Beginning in the 1930s, it was again missionary
linguists who mounted the first large-scale modern program of documenting
Mesoamerican languages. By now most linguistic research in Mesoamerica is carried
out by academic and independent anthropologists and linguists. Much of this work
has been done by individual linguists, and much of it as part of large-scale academic
projects. Some of these projects, as well as governments and private foundations,
have devoted considerable resources and efforts to training native speakers of
Mesoamerican languages as linguists. Today, several linguists working on indigenous
Mesoamerican languages are in fact speakers of those languages. All of these