CHAPTER 11 LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES OF MESOAMERICA 419All of these characteristics typify the Mesoamerican language families, and all
are uncharacteristic of the languages beyond the borders of the pre-Hispanic
Mesoamerican region. They are ways of speaking and thinking about the world that
are part of what unifies Mesoamerica culturally. Other characteristics that are wide-
spread in Mesoamerica are found also in languages in adjacent areas; they charac-
terize but do not distinguish Mesoamerica as a linguistic region. For example, kinship
terms and body parts are normally possessed, and when they are not possessed, a
special prefix or suffix is added. Semantic equivalences typical of the region, but also
found outside it, include the use of the same word for “hand” and “arm;” that is, the
concepts are not distinct.
Still other characteristics are widely shared among Mesoamerican languages and
are rare or absent across its borders, but are missing in only one language family. In
such cases, Mayan is most often the family in which the characteristic is missing; this
family begins the southeastern border of the ancient Mesoamerican world.LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE
Dialects of Native Languages
Almost all indigenous languages in Mesoamerica occur in more than one form. In
some areas, linguistic diversity is so great that every town has its own dialect or even
its own language. This is the case, for example, in much of the Guatemalan highlands.
For example, since the late 1700s, when lists were made of the languages spoken in
each town, Uspantek has been spoken in just one community; and, in general, each
distinct town in the Kaqchikel region has a distinct form of Kaqchikel. The situation
is similar for many of the Oto-Manguean languages, especially in Oaxaca. In other
areas, linguistic diversity is quite low. The Yucatec language, for example, covers a
large part of the Yucatán Peninsula.
Dialect differences are social as well as linguistic facts. When distinct forms of a
language are found in different areas, people from one area may have difficulty un-
derstanding people from other areas. But this difficulty is not equally great for all par-
ticipants; more often than not, tests of mutual intelligibility of dialects indicate that
speakers of, say, dialect A understand speakers of dialect B more than speakers of di-
alect B understand speakers of dialect A. Where does this asymmetry come from? It
often appears to reflect the density of communication.
Communication is pursued most with those one understands the best, all other
things being equal. This structuring of communication has two effects. Linguisti-
cally, changes in poorly understood dialects are less likely to be noticed and adopted
than changes in well-understood dialects, and so the least similar dialects become in-
creasingly dissimilar. Socially, decreasing communication among communities rein-
forces social distance between them. This is a major trend in dialect evolution; it is
the source of the origin of new languages from old, and of the development of lan-
guage families out of parent languages. When this event happens, the effect of the
communication bottleneck is that the most closely related languages tend to be lo-
cated next to one another. The geographic pattern of location is consistent with the