Náhuatl and Mayan Language Renaissance Occurring in Mexico

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.

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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).

Right: Maya is a "language continuum" in the sense that geographically proximate speakers tend to understand each other well, and intelligibility goes down as you move further away from any given individual on the continuum

Oh! So it’s like how there’s many Italian “dialects” that become less mutually intelligible the farther away you go?

Prior to general travel for everyone being affordable, and broadcast media like television that can go everywhere, languages were affected by the same forces everywhere. So you'd get that effect pretty much everywhere in the world.

Even a lot of things that we think of as "the" version of a language are often effectively a particular dialect out of a complicated tapestry of local dialects being something that "everybody" has to learn because it is the language spoken by your rulers. It happened to "win" because the people speaking that dialect also won the local military conflicts and became the language of the court.

Indeed, the French taught in schools is Parisian French, but French as its spoken, e.g., in the south sounds noticeably different.