MEXICO: 64 DIALECTS AT RISK OF DYING OUT
Country is home to 364 Indian dialects; parents don’t pass language on to children
Sixty-four of Mexico’s 364 Indian dialects are at “high risk” of dying out, with less than 100 speakers of each remaining, the head of the country’s National Institute of Indian Languages said Tuesday.
Institute head Javier Lopez Sanchez said that in many cases, speakers of dying dialects are dispersed and no longer live in a single community.
Lopez Sanchez said many parents aren’t passing their languages on to their children, and in communities in Mexico’s north, Indian children may have a passive understanding of their parent’s language but are unwilling or unable to speak it.
“There are entire communities where the children don’t speak their Indian language,” he said. As an example, he noted that among the Yoremes in Sonora state, the remaining speakers are all older than 40.
Many of the endangered dialects are in Baja California, and some are in southern Mexico.
Mexico has 68 Indian languages, but there are 364 distinct dialects, which are versions of a language that have significant differences.
Expert Francisco Barriga said that even Yucatec Maya is having trouble despite being Mexico’s second-largest largest Indian language group, with about 800,000 speakers.
Yucatec Maya is the largest contiguous language group, meaning it is present throughout the hundreds of square miles of the Yucatán Peninsula. Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire, is the most widely spoken Indian language in Mexico, with about 1.5 million speakers, but it is highly fragmented geographically and its different dialects are sometimes not mutually understandable.