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News Article
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The Death of Xwja
A native language dies in Mexico
By Lauren Villagran Special to El Paso Inc.
11/2/2008
SANTA MARIA IXCATLAN – In the mountains of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, a language lies on its deathbed.
Fewer than a dozen people still speak the indigenous language called Ixcateco, a roughly 1,300-year-old tongue known as Xwja – pronounced “sh-wah” – in its own vocabulary. The speakers are elders of the pueblo Santa Maria Ixcatlan and the last bearers of a language that will die when they do.
Ixcateco is not alone in its infirmity. Of the 364 variants of indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, about a third are in danger of disappearing, meaning that less than 1,000 speakers of each remain, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Languages, or INALI.
Languages, like animal species, have always disappeared. But the rate at which indigenous languages are disappearing in Mexico and around the world has increased markedly in the past 50 years, according to linguist Michael Swanton, coordinator of linguistic programs at the Francisco D. Burgoa library in Oaxaca City.
Among the causes: the globalization of commerce and communication, migration and, in Mexico, education policies that have long favored Spanish over multilingualism.
“When the last speaker dies, all the knowledge that person has is lost and it is lost forever,” Swanton said. “It’s a humanities legacy that disappears without any trace.”
Recording Ixcateco
Ixcatlan sits at the end of a difficult white gravel path that begins outside of the last sizeable town, Coixtlahuaca, and twists for 25 miles over the sierra – eroded hilltops that eventually give way to greener hillsides of palm trees, agave and wildflowers.
Swanton makes the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Oaxaca City twice a month to meet with 81-year-old Pedro Salazar Gutierrez and 75-year-old Cipriano Ramirez Guzman. During these visits, the men gather around Swanton’s laptop in Pedro’s one-room log house and painstakingly record their lexicon.
Salazar articulates a series of sounds in Ixcateco, his voice frail but clear. The word means bitter, he said. It can also mean mesquite or cord, depending on the tone of voice. Ixcateco, belonging to the Otomangue family of languages and the Popoloca branch, is a tone language characterized by a syntax in which verbs come before nouns.
Ramirez takes his turn, pronouncing the Ixcateco word for the flower zempaxochitl, a yellow-orange blossom traditionally used to decorate altars on the Day of the Dead. Swanton takes notes with a pencil, asks questions and corrects his work.
The men go back and forth in this way for hours as they describe their world in Ixcateco: the names of local flowers, the words for cow milk, goat milk and so on. Swanton takes notes as they speak. Later he’ll digitally record the men repeating the vocabulary introduced that day.
Swanton says there is little hope of recouping the language, which has been in decline for at least 100 years. But Salazar and Ramirez say they’re working with Swanton in hopes that one day, should the young people want to learn Ixcateco, a public record will exist.
“It seems as if the best of the pueblo is going to disappear, is going to be lost,” Ramirez said. “For my part, I feel a little sad. But what can one do?”
Causes of death
The decline of Xwja began with the Spanish Conquest, as it did with other thinly spoken indigenous languages in Mexico, but the real damage was done by government policies in years following the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920, according to Benjamin Smith, professor of Mexican history at Michigan State University.
The revolution was accompanied by a new vision of Mexican identity, he said, one that defined Mexicans as mestizos and held that indigenous people should be incorporated into this vision.
At the same time, the revolutionary state began to expand education in the countryside, but that education was almost exclusively – and in many parts of the country, remains – Spanish-centric.
Salazar and Ramirez both recount memories of being scolded for speaking Ixcateco in the classroom. It wasn’t until the 1950s that federal policy concerning indigenous people slowly began to evolve toward tolerance of, and later support for, indigenous languages and traditions.
In addition to an education system that pushed speakers of indigenous languages to speak only Spanish, indigenous groups have also contended with the less direct but equally compelling pull of Spanish as a language of opportunity.
“All languages are equal on a philosophical level,” said Swanton. “No one has ever found a grammar that is superior to any other grammar. But let’s take an honest look: Spanish is the national language of 30 countries. It is one of the foremost commonly spoken languages on the planet and the second most commonly spoken mother tongue. It’s a valuable tool for people to have.”
Endangered worldwide
The situation in which many of Mexico’s indigenous communities find themselves – striving to preserve or save their native tongue from extinction – is hardly unique.
“Mexico presents the same situation of language displacement as Africa, as the rest of the world: the loss of linguistic and cultural diversity in the world,” said INALI Director Fernando Nava. “There is nothing particular about Mexico.”
According to UNESCO, more than half of the world’s some 6,000 languages are threatened with extinction, and languages are disappearing at the rate of one every two weeks.
Those concerned with preserving the world’s lingual diversity give similar reasons for the importance of doing so. A language that dies with its last speaker leaves no remnant; linguists aren’t left with ruins to study later like those left to archaeologists. When a language disappears, so does the unique perspective that the language embodied.
“The world is a mosaic of visions, and every vision is incarnated by a language,” said Carlos Tello Diaz, Mexico’s delegate to UNESCO in Paris. “In this way, when a language dies, a vision of the world disappears.”
For his part, Cipriano Ramirez Guzman has decided to take what action he can: He has volunteered to teach Ixcateco to Ixcatlan’s schoolchildren, for free.
Comments or questions about this story? E-mail news@elpasoinc.com
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