←back to thread

148 points bryanrasmussen | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.24s | source
Show context
dhosek ◴[] No.44006888[source]
I don’t know much about Náhuatl, but the term “Mayan Language” is a bit misleading as there are actually numerous Mayan languages, something I’d never really thought about before I did a service trip to Chiapas and Guatemala in the early 90s and was exposed to the Jacalteco language which is just one of many Mayan languages.

Mexico is probably the most linguistically diverse country of the world with 68¹ indigenous languages spoken (I had thought India might be a close competitor where it seems there’s a different language in every state, each with its own alphabet, but Wikipedia says that there are “only” 22 scheduled languages in India).

We have a tendency to flatten indigenous cultures (like the bizarre mixing of culturally and linguistically distinct Native American cultures) and this is even more true of the Mesoamerican cultures where a diverse group like the Mayans is treated as a monolithic entity (as well as one that’s extinct) rather than as the diverse and living culture that it is.

1. The Wikipedia article on languages of Mexico has differing numbers throughout the article, offering 68, 65 and 62 as the number of officially recognized languages (and maybe more options if I weren’t skimming so quickly).

replies(3): >>44007091 #>>44007305 #>>44007800 #
fdgjgbdfhgb ◴[] No.44007305[source]
While Mexico is certainly very linguistically diverse, it doesn't even come close to Papua New Guinea's over 800 languages [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Papua_New_Guine...

replies(1): >>44008332 #
1. danans ◴[] No.44008332[source]
What's interesting about Papua New Guinea's linguistic diversity is how it correlates with its topography. Sometimes steep mountain ranges have effectively separated peoples from each-other for thousands of years, to the point that their languages sometimes became mutually unintelligible even if they were only separated by a very small distance. This phenomenon also occurs in other parts of the world (the Caucuses, the Himalayas), but TTBOMK nowhere else to the degree of Papua New Guinea.