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Nahuatl in the Plural: Dialectology and Activism in Mexico Magnus Pharao

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Nahuatl in the Plural: Dialectology and Activism in Mexico Magnus Pharao Nahuatl in the Plural: Dialectology and Activism in Mexico Magnus Pharao Hansen, Brown University Paper given at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Thursday November 21st, 2013, Chichago, Ill. The dialectology of Mexican indigenous languages is notoriously messy: often inhabitants of two neighboring villages will speak unintelligible but closely related linguistic varieties - each labeled with the same language name by speakers, linguists and governments. For the language group often called Nahuatl spoken by more than a million speakers throughout central Mexico, the issue of diversity is further complicated by the existence of an immensely important prestige variety, sometimes called Classical Nahuatl, which was spoken and written around present-day Mexico City 400 years ago. Having been geographically extended by the process of colonization to cover almost all of Mexico in the 16th century, this colonial lingua franca today remains a language of scholarship and literature, emblematically tied to the indigenist ideology of the Mexican nation-state. This means that a range of dilemmas face activists and policymakers working with Nahuatl: whether to embrace diversity and promote local varieties, or whether to encourage unity between closely related—if often marginally intelligible—varieties. Each option comes with a set of political and practical drawbacks and advantages, and different groups of language activists pursue different strategies depending on their overarching objectives and values. In this paper, I describe how Nahuatl dialectology is implicated in different glottopolitical projects, and I argue that we lack basic knowledge about what makes a language variety valuable and to whom. 1.0. This is not Nahuatl! A few days after first arriving in Hueyapan, Morelos in October 2003 I was introduced to Javier, a teacher from the community. He was an elementary school teacher in Mexico City, but also taught Nahuatl language at a high school. He was a big gruff man, and when he heard that I had come to Hueyapan to study Nahuatl he became visibly agitated and launched into a diatribe: “No one speaks Nahuatl here! Nobody here knows how to speak real Nahuatl, they just know some words and mix it together with Spanish. If you want to learn Nahuatl you have to go somewhere else. Go to Mexico City, there you can learn real Nahuatl at the University. What people speak here is not Nahuatl!” I was taken aback by his aggressive denial that the people of Hueyapan, including his own mother—a traditional healer and a fluent speaker of the town's indigenous language—speak Nahuatl, and I wrote him off as an extremist who I would not visit in the future. Subsequently over the years, I heard the statement “this is not Nahuatl” many times in different contexts about different things that clearly present themselves as Nahuatl. Or someone might say “I don’t really speak Nahuatl, I just mangle it, but over in the neighboring town they speak real Nahuatl.” These kinds of statements have been observed by many linguists who tend to attribute them to the effects of ideologies of linguistic purism that attributes negative value to the speech 1 patterns of one’s own community relative to some other idealized form of speech. (Hill & Hill 1986, Flores Farfán 1999, Avilés Gonzalez 2009). But another person might visit one of Mexico’s many archaeological zones, most of which have descriptive information in one or more indigenous languages generously supplied by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia [National Institute of Anthropology and History], and upon reading the sign say “This is not Nahuatl! This is not how my grandmother spoke. This is not even intelligible.” Or they might say that, “What they speak over in the neighboring town isn’t real Nahuatl as we speak here. It’s just a deteriorated, adulterated version.” These kinds of positive, almost chauvinist evaluations of the speech of one's own community are less common in the literature on Nahuatl language attitudes, but in this paper I will argue that this kind of local-patriotism is a characteristic motivation of an important type of language activism, that is based less on political ideologies than on an subjective emotional connection to a specific linguistic variety. Gal and Woolard (1995) noted that “Cultural categories of communication such as named languages, dialects, standards, speech communities and genres, are constructed out of the messy variability of spoken interaction.” This construction takes place in an ideological field where the ideologies of native speakers, interested outsiders, colonizers, educators, missionaries, activists, linguists, and anthropologists interact. The topic of language ideologies has been particularly fruitful in engendering research regarding government language policy and the role of often- conflicting speaker ideologies in language endangerment and revitalization (Kroskrity 2009). But while almost all language revitalization projects involve multiple actors with differing ideologies, only relatively recently have linguists begun to examine how our own ideologies interact with those of native speakers, even though linguists and language educators are among the most important sources from which language ideologies flow into the public discourse (Collins 1998; Bucholtz 2003). Investigating what makes different people evaluate something as “Nahuatl” or “not Nahuatl” is significant because many people are currently investing time and energy in projects aimed at “saving” or “strengthening” the Nahuatl language in different ways. But what happens when this “Nahuatl” that they are working to save is someone else’s “not Nahuatl”? This question requires 2 what Kroskrity (2009) has called ”ideological clarification” - finding out what existing ideologies about the use of a language are in circulation. This is one of the aims of this paper. This kind of clarification, is in turn a requirement for language activists and speakers to begin to actively decide which ideologies should be used in forming the future of a language (Loether 2009). In this paper I look at how different forms of Nahuatl language activism have combined language ideology and practice in different ways, each with different results and based on different ways of understanding what makes a language valuable. Inspired by Errington (2003), I define three different types of Nahuatl language activism: nationalist, ethnopolitical and localist language activisms, each of which participate in different glottopolitical projects, and each of which I believe appeals to different groups of people. One argument that I make is that the label “Nahuatl,” and the way it is generally used as a signifier of a singular linguistic entity, erases the diversity of that exists among native speakers, and promotes an ideology according to which there is one proto-typical kind of Nahuatl with a particular linguistic “essence.” Just like the label English, is often used in attempts to discursively erase the actual spoken diversity of English varieties, or the use of the term “Chinese” to refer to the many unintelligible languages of China reflects either the ignorance of Chinese linguistic diversity or the political will to homogenize it. In the case of Nahuatl, this usage also promotes the false assumption that “saving Nahuatl” can be an overarching common goal of Nahuatl language activism, when in fact different people value different kinds of Nahuatl for different reasons. In the literature, language ideologies are often seen as a kind of superorganic virus that simply spreads between people through interaction, but involving little agency on behalf of those who deploy them. The question of the social or personal reasons why some people adopt one language ideology or another has largely been left unexplored. This motivates my larger theoretical argument, which is that while language ideologies arise from particular socio-political processes, the specific ideologies we adopt as individuals are a result of the interplay between our life experience and our linguistic experience, and that different kinds of experience motivate 3 different kinds of Nahuatl language activism. 2.0. Nahuatl in the Plural 2.1. The mosaic of Mexican indigenous “-lects” Since just after the conquest, political representatives of different sorts have frequently despaired at the great number of linguistic varieties spoken in Mexico. Since the early 16th century, Mexican language policy, built first on the practical necessity of communicating with dozens of foreign peoples in order to colonize them and later on the European model of the linguistically homogeneous nation, has mostly been a series of attempts to “deal with” that in different ways. Linguists have also been surprised at the way that Mexico presents a fragmented mosaic of indigenous languages including members of a handful of different language families and another handful of isolates. Few of Mexico’s indigenous languages are spoken in large contiguous areas with easy access between different communities of speakers, but many are scattered in hundreds of small communities geographically isolated from each other, either by rugged terrain or by zones where Spanish or other indigenous languages are spoken. In linguistic terms, most of Mexico’s indigenous languages are in fact not “languages” but dialect continua with only partial intelligibility between speakers of different varieties of what is usually labeled as “an indigenous language.” To further
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