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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

in the Plural: Dialectology and Activism in

Magnus Pharao Hansen, Brown University Paper given at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 21st, 2013, Chichago, Ill.

The dialectology of Mexican indigenous is notoriously messy: often inhabitants of two neighboring villages will speak unintelligible but closely related linguistic varieties - each labeled with the same 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 , which was spoken and written around present-day 400 years ago. Having been geographically extended by the process of colonization to cover almost all of Mexico in the 16th century, this colonial 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, 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 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 complicate the picture, linguistic distance and intelligibility often do not correlate well with geographic distance, so that two linguistic varieties at opposite ends of the dialect continuum may well be spoken in neighboring towns, resulting in little to no between neighboring varieties of the same “language” (Suarez 1983, Egland & Bartholomew 1978). This linguistic mosaic is generally considered to be the result of the fact that Mesoamerican people have historically been organized into small local polities or city-states including several villages and an urban center, and at the same time the populations were highly mobile so that entire villages might move from one polity to another, over large distances. During the colonial period this pattern was largely maintained as indigenous groups moved along with the advancing , and as colonial patterns of resettlement of indigenous groups further complicated matters (Lockhart 1992).

4 Today some 6 million (about 6% of the population) speak one of the country’s many indigenous languages. At least one million of them speak something that is labeled “Nahuatl”. The Mexican census bureau INEGI which is in charge of counting the country’s indigenous population, defined as those who speak an indigenous language or live in a household where someone speaks one, groups these languages into 62 categories – one of which is Nahuatl. On the other hand, INALI, the Mexican National Institute of Indigenous Languages, establishes 68 “linguistic groups,” each representing a number of “variantes,” which according to the institute should be considered “as separate languages.” In 2008 INALI recognized 364 different “variants,” among them 44 in the Nahuatl linguistic group.

2.2. What’s in a name? Nahuatl, Mexicacopa, Mexicano, Macehuallahtolli In fact many speakers of what linguists call Nahuatl do not use the term Nahuatl at all about their language. The fact that the speakers themselves do not have a single all-encompassing label for the language, itself suggests that there is traditionally little solidarity between speakers of different varieties – and that there is no endogenous concept corresponding exactly to the linguistic concept “Nahuatl.” Many speakers refer to their language with the Spanish word, “mexicano,” which alludes to the fact that the Spaniards first associated the Nahuatl language with the language spoken by the of , which they themselves called Mexicacopa “like Mexica.” For other speakers the word Mexicano refers to Spanish, and yet others use it to refer to any indigenous language. Many call the language some variant of maseual tlahtol, “language of the commoners/Indians.” Ma:se:ual, which in pre-Columbian times meant “commoner” as opposed to the noble class of pi:piltin, is one of the ethnic classifications that Nahuatl speakers employ to distinguish themselves from Spanish speakers, but it usually includes all indigenous peoples as opposed to . Another ethnic classification is na:huatla:cah “Nahua people”, or “mexicaneros”, but none of these have universal currency among all speakers of the Nahuan languages, who tend to identify ethnically with their individual town-communities.

In their study of the Nahuatl speakers of the Malinche area in , Jane and Kenneth Hill (1986:90-93) discuss the nomenclature and opt to use Mexicano as a general term, because that

5 is what the people of Malinche do, because it symbolically ties the language to a privileged position relative to the Mexican nation, and because they claim that the term Nahuatl is a colonial introduction without deep roots among the speakers. This latter claim is incorrect, as the term is found in early colonial records. In Nahuatl, the word “Nahuatl” means “something clear or pleasant sounding” (Launey 1986:29) and the usage to refer to the language shared by the and many of their neighbors as nahuatlahtolli “the clear sounding language,” goes back to the early colonial, and probably also the pre-Columbian, period. Today Nahuatl has been adopted as standard in linguistic terminology, and is also used as an endonym by a considerable number of speakers.

2.3. Nahuatl diversity studies (a.k.a. dialectology) While the majority of Nahuatl scholars have dedicated themselves to the study of the colonial texts, some have seen the contemporary vernacular varieties as worthy of study. Early attempts at dialectal classification by (1937) and later Juan Hasler (1954, 1975, 1976) were based on a simplistic distinction between those dialects that have the /tl/ and those that correspondingly have /t/ or /l/. Later linguists found that this division is not historically significant, as all dialects originally had /tl/, and some have subsequently changed it to /t/ or /l/ - a change that is highly likely to have happened independently in different dialects (Campbell & Langacker 1978; Canger 1988:44).

Current dialectologists divide the Nahuan dialect continuum into two broad dialect areas, an eastern and a western corresponding to two different migration waves as proto- entered . The Eastern languages correspond to the earliest migrants, and the Western to the late comers. At the intersection of these two areas one can identify is a central dialect area with its nucleus in the . This area represents a group of highly innovative western dialects, whose suit of innovations spread out from the urban center of Tenochtitlan beginning in the centuries preceding the Spanish invasion (Lastra 1986, Canger 1988, Dakin 2001). This classification is based on a suite of phonological, lexicographic and morphological traits, but there is considerable diversity within each of these macro-areas, in phonology as well as , and one might want to subdivide each group into many smaller regions – some as small as a single community (as for example both INALI and the do). Most dialects

6 have traits considered characteristic of all of the three areas, attesting to widespread dialect contact in the past.

2.4. How different are the many Nahuatls?

According to (2001) the scale of differences between the Contemporary Nahuan dialects can be compared to that between the daughter languages of Old English. In this comparison Eastern Nahuan (Pipil/Isthmus varieties) would correspond to Scots/Cumbrian [Northern English], the Western Nahuan (/Pómaro varieties) to Wexford English [Southern English], and Central Nahuan would correspond to Midlands English (including contemporary American, Irish and Estuary English). He also suggests on the same note that another comparison would be to the daughter languages of Vulgar Latin. Interestingly this would place the differences at the scale of national languages [say Western Nahuan/Portuguese, Central Nahuan/Occitan, Eastern Nahuan/Italian] rather than at the level of regional varieties of a single language. This shows how the evaluation of linguistic differences has political consequences. Is Nahuatl one “thing” like English or is it several “things” like the Romance languages?

The following examples give an idea of the type and scale of dialectal differences among the Nahuan languages:

There is widespread phonological variation, mostly in the form of differing patterns of allophony, voicing of unvoiced consonants in voiced environments or not, simplification of complex consonants, absence or presence of length, elision of certain in certain positions. But some phonological variation is much deeper: for example some varieties have turned the previous length contrast into a contrast of vowel quality, doubling the number of vowel qualities (, Pittman 1953), or turning the characteristic phoneme /tl/ found prominently in many varieties into either /t/ or /l/ or both in different environments, or some varieties have even turned the phoneme /kw/ into a /b/ (Pajapan Nahuat, Peralta 2005). Phonological differences of this magnitude obviously give the languages a quite different kind of auditive character and impedes communication considerably (for example intelligibility of Tetelcingo Nahuatl to its neighbors that conserve the length distinction is as low as 20% by some

7 estimates). Also in the area of prosody variation is significant, the best known dialects have predictable accent on the penult, but some varieties have undergone vowel elision making stress basically phonemic (Durango Nahuatl, Canger 2000), and others have introduced a pitch based distinction, in effect becoming tonal languages (Oapan Nahuatl, Guion et al. 2010).

Lexical variation is also widespread even in common and core vocabulary. For example there is widespread variation in the form of the second person , and in kinship terminologies, sometimes with the same term referring to different relations in different communities. Semantic drift in core vocabulary also makes for many ”false friends”, and further complicates interdialectal communication.

Grammatical variation is also common with some varieties having adopted new grammatical categories such as distinction in the pronominal system (Mecayapan Nahuat, Wolgemuth 2001), and many local variations in the tense/aspect system. Perhaps the most salient and widespread variation is the system of honorification, which some dialect lack entirely and which varies in its degree of elaboration and productivity in the dialects that have it (Johansson 1989). The honorific register employs grammatical processes that increase the of which exist in all dialects, meaning that honorific register forms are very difficult to understand and master for speakers of dialects that lack it. The productivity of complex polysynthetic also varies significantly between dialects (Flores Farfan 2001)

As can be seen, the linguistic differences between different Nahuan varieties are considerable. On the other hand most have some degree of mutual intelligibility between them, at least when the speakers are positively disposed towards trying to understand each other’s variety, and particularly with prior exposure to other varieties. But what most scholars neglect when they classify languages as similar or different is the way in which even minor linguistic differences can produce strong experiences in Native speakers, because they produce what Sapir called a different ”form feeling”(Sapir, 1949b:153) , giving the language a different ”taste”. Small objective differences may also have strong indexical implications, in terms of political and regional identities, which may lead to resistance to understand or adopt traits from other varieties.

8 3.0. Nahuatl in the Singular

3.1. The ideology of Nahuatl and the erasure of diversity:

A language is of course “a dialect with an army and a navy”, but Haugen (1966) analyzes the process through which the languages of Europe were created as a part of the rise of the Nation state as the dominant political system. Haugen argues that the label ”a language” is an artefact of the glottopolitical process of standardization which entails three stages: first selecting the dialect features to be taken as the standard; secondly codifying it (establishing an orthography and setting down the grammatical standard and a dictionary); and third promoting it (for example through an system) until it meets acceptance in the population of speakers. The process that led to the idea of a unified Nahuatl language, has taken a very similar form. Among the many dialects of Nahuatl spoken in Mexico, the dialect of Mexico Tenochtitlan the capital of the was already in widespread use as a vehicular language in communication between indigenous groups across Mesoamerica before the conquest. Canger (2011) has recently argued that the Tenochtitlan variety was itself a koiné like variety that arose among the urban dwellers that flocked to the city from different regions speaking different dialects. With the invasion the colonizers seized on this same variety for the same purpose, further supporting its spread (Pizzigoni 2012; Christensen 2012; Schwaller 2012; Yannakakis 2012). The language was furthermore codified by missionary linguists already beginning in the 16th century, and during the first century of the colony priests was required to study Tenochtitlan Nahuatl before being sent to the provinces, regardless of which language was spoken at their destination. And for more than 50 years from 1570 to 1624 Tenochtitlan Nahuatl had official status in the colony of by royal decree (Suárez 1983:165; 2006: 371; Brice Heath 1972). The ideology of that constructs Nahuatl as a language has a long history.

3.2. The language ideology: Nahuatl as a language of nationalism and scholarship

9 With independence in 1821, Nahuatl was converted into an object of textual study by non- indigenous intellectuals. During the colony, the mestizo class, one of the racial castes of colonial society, had been considered an ambiguous half-breed that fit neither here nor there in the colonial legal fabric. But after independence the mestizo came to symbolize the unity of the European and Indian races, and even the criollos, of pure Spanish blood but born in the colonies, turned to the treasure trove of colonial Nahuatl literature for the construction of a national identity and mythology (Miller 2004). Here they found the legend of the foundation of Tenochtitlan (by then Mexico City), which became a center piece of the national mythology (Gutierrez 1999:137-42), and the other central text of Mexican Nationalism, the legend of the apparition of the virgin of Guadalupe was composed in Nahuatl by a criollo cleric (Sousa, Poole & Lockhart 1998). We can take this point in time, as the moment when Nahuatl became in the National consciousness of Mexico, in the words of Walter Mignolo (1992:193) ”a language (i.e. an object) of the past, rather than a languaging activity of millions of people, suppressed by national languag (ing) es.”

With the turn of the 20th century, post-revolutionary nationalism continued the interest in colonial Nahuatl as an important object of scholarly study and general erudition. Pre- indigenous civilization was likened to ancient Greece in intellectual sophistication and the phrase “classical Nahuatl” was invented to describe the Nahuatl variety of the colonial documentary sources. While the pre-Hispanic past was elevated to a classical tradition by such scholars as Ángel María Garibay and Miguel Leon-Portilla (Payás 2004), the contemporary indigenous communities were redefined as a rural proletariat, whose adherence to catholic superstition and lack of Spanish skills kept them on the margins of the modern nation (Bonfil Batalla 1987). They had to be integrated into the nation (Gutiérrez 1999), and to achieve this, the deteriorated vernaculars required replacement with either “pure” classical Nahuatl or Spanish. This ideology carried the project of hispanization that was the dominant language policy through the 1940s – 1990s, and which was carried out through a cooperation between the Mexican education system and the North American missionary organization the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Hartch 2006).

Meanwhile, students at the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico study classical Nahuatl taught by distinguished scholars, and the Spanish speaking urban elite give

10 their children classical Nahuatl names such as Xóchitl, Tizoc or Cuauhtémoc in honor of ancient Aztec princes (Meanwhile, rural Nahuatl speakers are more (stereo)typically called María/Mario, Juán/Juana or Leobigild@). Clearly, classical Nahuatl, its grammar undefiled by contact with Spanish and its sources only accessible to the dedicated scholar, occupies the role as the proto- type relative to which all other varieties are judged in the public discourse. In relation to classical Nahuatl, the rural vernaculars spoken by the native speakers are “not Nahuatl.”

Through this process the distinction between classical and vernacular Nahuatl has been mapped onto the divide between the upper and lower classes of Mexican society, which is not just an economical and educational/cultural divide, but also largely a racialized one (Nutini 1997; Nutini & Isaac 2009).

Clearly, at the base of the Mexican nation, lies a linguistic hierarchy that privileges Nahuatl over other indigenous languages, and which privileges an urban, literary, variety of Nahuatl dialect mastered by mostly non-indigenous scholars, over the rural vernacular varieties spoken by all of the language’s native speakers. This language ideology can be called the mestizo ideology of Nahuatl, and it informs a specific kind of language activism.

4.0. Types of Language Activism: Which Nahuatl should be revitalized and why?

Kroskrity (2009) points out that ideological conflict is often an impediment for successful language revitalization, when speakers, linguists and other stakeholders may disagree about what course should be taken for the future of a given language. He proposes that a process of “ideological clarification,” in which language ideologies are mapped and becomes objects of explicit analysis, facilitates the process of coordinating different ideologies and carrying out a project of language renewal. In the following, I characterize three different Nahuatl language ideologies and show how they are implemented in different types of projects, and tend to be favored for different reasons.

• Nationalist language activism is aimed at saving Nahuatl by changing vernacular varieties of Nahuatl to a putative original state generally equated with colonial documentary Nahuatl. This

11 ideology sees diversity as detrimental, because it signifies departures from an original source. This privileges an implicit language ideology that sees colonial documentary Nahuatl, often called classical Nahuatl, as the prototype, and sees diversity as possibly problematic deviations. A further result of this ideology is that ownership of Nahuatl is removed from its native speakers who tend not to have access to the colonial standard, and gives it to the generally upper class, non-indigenous scholars who do. This type of activism seems to be particularly attractive to non- Indigenous Mexicans, perhaps because it gives them access to partake in the often idealized image of the indigenous past, and because it bolsters a feeling of national unity and solidarity.

This type of activism was typical of the post-revolutionary indigenist period, where politician- cum-ethnologists such as and Jose Vasconcelos, who combined a profound interest in the pre-Columbian past and a genuine interest in the wellbeing of the indigenous population with the conviction that the cultural of the Indians into the national culture was both a necessity for the stability of a Mexican nation, and in the best interest of the ethnic minorities (Gutiérrez 1999). An example of how Nahuatl language activism based on this ideology looked is the neo-Aztec revitalization project of Juan Luna Cardenas. He arrived in Hueyapan in the 1940s and established a movement to teach true, classical, Nahuatl to the Nahuatl-speaking youth of the community, and to re-establish the worship of the ancient Aztec Gods. At the same time, the ministry of education established a “Cultural Mission” aimed at establishing a healthier culture among the rural indigenous communities – teaching good manners, as well as a number of romantic songs in Nahuatl to the community members (Friedlander 1975). This revitalization effort had a lasting effect on the speech community, one effect was the beginning of an ideology that is still common among many community members that sees classical Nahuatl as the standard of comparison for the “quality of Nahuatl” and which either condemns the local Nahuatl for its failure to live up to this standard, or raises it above other varieties because it is closer to classical Nahuatl than many other varieties. At the same time many of the cultural elements of that were introduced in this period are still known and cherished in the community, both the songs of the cultural missions and the songs of the poet Lino Balderas, who was a disciple of Luna Cardenas and wrote in a dialect mixture of Hueyapan Nahuatl and classical Nahuatl.

12 The mestizo ideology and purist language activism that elevates the classical variety today has a presence in certain groups of urban Mexican society, such as the danzantes and concheros who perform neo-Aztec songs and dances, and organizes in a social system based on the pre- Columbian calpulli system (Rostas 2009). It also exists on the internet where fora dedicated to the Nahuatl language are often exclusively inhabited by Northern Mexicans without ties to any contemporary indigenous groups. The Nahuatl language is also frequently used as a racial or ethnic symbol among Mexican groups in North America, including both organizations and certain Mexican gangs such as the sureños . Common to these groups is that classical Nahuatl is used by people with no direct connection to an indigenous group as a way of affiliation with a particular aspect of the Mexican nation, and its past. Most such activists consider this use as a way of expressing solidarity with indigenous groups rather as a way of appropriating indigenous culture – and consider that by engaging with the indigenous culture and language in this way they are part of an indigenous community, based on a cultural or biological heritage or phenotype (Villareal 2011).

• Ethno-political language activism is aimed at revitalizing Nahuatl, by connecting Nahua speakers to a heritage from which they have been disconnected by providing indigenous intellectuals access to the colonial sources, and by promoting a pan-Nahuan solidarity between native speakers of different varieties. This type of activism recognizes the validity of contemporary diversity but, in order to promote cross-regional solidarity between speakers, tends to de-emphasize its importance and scale. This type of activism seems to be more attractive to indigenous intellectuals and indigenous political radicals, perhaps because it promotes a possibility for class-based politics. However the ideology is basically the inverse of nationalist activism and has the same risk of pomoting ideologies of homogeneity and supremacy.

This kind of “lumping” activism has been driving the pan-Mayan movement in , as American linguists associated with the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín worked to document the Mayan and simultaneously educated several generations of native speaking linguists, who in turn came to play a decisive role in the Mayan Language Academy of Guatemala (ALMG), and in the development of a pan-Mayan ethno-nationalist movement (Warren 1998, England 1998, 2003, 2007). Interestingly however, the number of named Mayan

13 languages has grown after the establishment of the Mayan Language Academy, in some cases because communities have successfully petitioned to have their local varieties recognized at the level of language, rather than being lumped together with communities of speakers with whom they have political disagreements (e.g. Achí was split from K’iche and Chalchiteko was split from Awakateko, both primarily motivated by political disagrements between a minority and a majority group (England 2003; Romero 2012:E23; Law 2013)).

For Nahuatl, the first project employing this type of activism is the IDIEZ project founded by the American ethno-historian John Sullivan, who studied classical Nahuatl with philologist and historian James Lockhart (described in Sullivan 2011). In collaboration with researchers at the University of Warszaw, IDIEZ is now launching a series of monolingual publications in different contemporary varieties of Nahuatl, with the stated aim of revitalizing the language. Another goal of IDIEZ is to make the colonial documentary sources available to native speakers, through providing education and workshops in colonial Nahuatl. Most of the indigenous intellectuals who participate in the IDIEZ project are speakers of the Huastecan variety of Nahuatl, which Sullivan also himself speaks fluently. Sullivan clearly distinguishes between colonial/classical and modern Nahuatl, but frequently he uses the phrase “modern Nahuatl” in a way that equates it with the Huastecan variety, ignoring or downplaying the degree of diversity among other contemporary varieties (For example throughout the 2011 paper, the phrases ”Modern Nahuatl” and ”Modern Huastecan Nahuatl” is used seemingly indiscriminately as the former is frequently used to refer to IDIEZ' work with the latter, and the diversity of contemporary varieties is never mentioned). One area in which this neglect of diversity comes to the fore is in the choice of championing a single standard orthography based on the neo-colonial orthography of J. Richard Andrews, which is otherwise used primarily in publications by American historians. This choice is motivated by the wish to facilitate the access of speakers of modern varieties to the colonial documents, but Andrews’ orthography is designed specifically to represent the colonial variety and not for the many contemporary varieties that have quite different phonemic inventories,. Andrews’ orthography, for example, uses the letter to represent the of colonial Nahuatl (in spite of the fact that colonial texts seldom use this letter to represent the glottal stop). This orthographic choice would be difficult to reconcile with those dialects that have both

14 phonemic /h/ and /Ɂ/ such as for example the dialect of Mecayapan. It also lacks any symbols for the voiced stops /b, d, g/ that are either phonemic or important in many varieties. Some varieties also have vital local orthographic traditions with different conventions, such as those developed by SEP (the ministry of education) and SIL and local educators such as bilingual teachers and activists may be invested in these orthographies.

It remains to be seen what choices will be made if the IDIEZ project comes to publish texts in varieties that present such difficulties. Similarly it remains to be seen whether the additional goal of fomenting the emergence of an ethnic consciousness among the different groups of Nahuatl speakers realizes.

• Localist language activism is aimed at bolstering or salvaging local varieties that are considered threatened, and to connect local varieties to the formation or maintenance of a local identity and localist political projects. This ideology tends to emphasize diversity, and forgo possibilities of ethnic solidarity between speakers of different varieties. This kind of activism appears to be espoused prominently by the Mexican government, but also by a wide variety of Nahuan town-communities, and by many native speakers.

Local patriotism has a long history in Mesoamerica, and ethnohistorians frequently point out that in pre-Columbian times, town-community (Nahuatl a:ltepe:tl, Yucatec Maya kah, ñu, Old Otomí andehent’øhø) affiliation was the main source of political identity for Mesoamericans, and not ethno-linguistic affiliation. In the pre-Columbian period this local isolationism increased already existing dialectal variation at the town-community level, as community speech patterns diverged over time. In the post-conquest period this divergence was exacerbated by the fact that communication between indigenous communities was increasingly carried out in Spanish. Local community patriotism persists in many rural communities in Mesoamerica, particularly in indigenous communities that often still have communal land holdings and a social organization system based on “usos y costumbres,” often revolving around a cargo system in which adult community members are expected to participate. At the same time many rural communities have frequent conflicts over land and water rights with neighboring communities that often come to take up the role as the main “other” against which the

15 community identifies. In this way the town-community is often the main source of social identity for Mexican indigenous people, moreso than the particular linguistic group to which they belong, as the prevailing ethno-national ideology would have it. This does vary a lot though, and some ethno-linguistic groups, particularly small ones inhabiting continuous territories, have a much more developed sense of ethnic solidarity than Nahua speakers tend to have. And some Nahuatl speaking regions have developed ethno-regional forms of solidarity, such as the Nahuas of the Upper Balsas region in , who developed increased ethnic solidarity in response to a governmental hydro-electric project that threatened to dislocate several Nahua communities in the region (Flores Farfán 2011).

The Mexican National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI) publishes a catalogue of indigenous languages, including as many variants of each of the linguistic groups as possible as well as a list of all the locations in which each is spoken. Variants are grouped geographically and also by their self-identified endonyms. This creates a list with 44 Nahuatl varieties in the 2008 catalogue. The reasons INALI take a “splitting” approach seems to be at least twofold: first, because the varieties are in fact different, and second, because the speakers themselves consider their own varieties to be different from others. INALI also distributes support for language- related projects at the community level, but does not seem to be working on establishing any language-wide projects either for regions or for all speakers of a linguistic group.

With or without the support of institutions such as INALI, CDI (the commission of development of indigenous communities) or the newly founded Intercultural Universities, or local government, several Nahuatl-speaking communities have established their own revitalization projects aimed at strengthening their local varieties. Avilés Gonzalez (2009) describes one such project in the community of Santa Catarina, Morelos, and I myself am participating as a consultant in a project in the community of Hueyapan, Morelos. I know of other such projects in Tetelcingo and Xoxocotla, Morelos and in Alta, in the , and in the Malinche region of Tlaxcala (Messing & Rockwell 2006) and in . All of these projects are community-based in the sense that they do not involve any collaboration between communities, and in that they aim specifically at reinvigorating the particular variety that is traditionally tied to one town-community. Often this is prompted by a sense of loss as the languages fall out of use

16 among the youth of the town, and it is often driven by local activists who for some reason consider the local variety to be valuable and worthy of being “saved.” Such projects often involve offering classes to youths taught by community members, and in producing small textbooks or , sometimes in collaboration with linguists, and sometimes written by community members with or without linguistic training. This type of project seems to particularly draw participation from speakers who grew up speaking the language, and who often have a limited educational background, and little acquaintance with larger indigenous issues beyond the boundaries of their community. The value of the language is often formulated by participants in terms of the connection that the language embodies between the place, the people who have historically inhabited it, the ancestors, and the ways of understanding and experiencing and acting in the world. Native speakers may feel that the value of the language resides in the way that it encodes highly local meanings, such as words for particular plants or foods that are traditional to the place, particular local sayings or narratives, or in the way that particular social relations are encoded in the language.

The ideologies employed by the activists who work in such projects may vary in the degree to which they contain a chauvinist element. Some projects are based on the premise that the local variety is the only true and pure language, and its worthiness of being saved is measured against that of other varieties. This approach is even antagonistic to the possibility of cross-community collaboration. Others simply define its worth by the fact that it is “ours”, and recognize that other varieties have equal worth to their own communities, which enables some degree of collaboration and solidarity between communities.

In this way the localist “splitting” approach does have the risk of foreclosing the possibility of any joint political project between speakers of different variants. And under a cynical perspective, this may be the reason why this approach is the main approach of the Mexican government- it promotes a kind of multiculturalism that is harmless from the perspective of the nation-state (Hale 1997, 2002). The existence of ethno-linguistic diversity and lack of ethnic coherence has for example been been used to argue against the existence of collective rights for indigenous ethnic groups by indigenist social scientists (Gutiérrez 1999:105).

17 4.1. What makes a language variety valuable and to whom?

In the interest of “ideological clarification”, I have described three different ways in which the Nahuatl language is appreciated and taken as an object of language activism. I have tentatively associated each type of ideology with a particular “type” of person with a particular kind of experience. This association is at this point highly impressionist, and has the character of a hypothesis, but in the course of the next couple of years I will undertake further investigations into the reasons why different people choose to actively engage with Nahuatl.

What I take as my point of departure is the fact that we all meet languages in different contexts, and the context of meeting a language influences how we relate to it. Some speakers learn a language at home, some in the streets with friends, never making a conscious decision or encountering the language as a named linguistic entity. Others encounter the language as a named entity in the media or in a classroom where they may or may not be of their own free will. These types of experiential differences underlie the different language ideologies that we end up adopting.1 In the absence of media, education and other circulation of named languages, we are only exposed to local, even individual, varieties of language, and they are inevitably what become carriers of linguistic identity and the vehicle of subjectivity.2

The notion of “a language” is an abstraction that requires analytical knowledge of and exposure to variation and the explicit decision that that variation is inconsequential and can be subsumed under a single label. Nonetheless for L2 learners who meet languages in educational contexts mediated by writing and language labels such a stance is the default. “Y is a dialect of ” is a consequence of L2 learner ideologies that begin from the assumption of the existence of “a language” that is spoken by people in other locations that we may never encounter. But the native speaker begins from a very different set of assumptions – namely the need to find patterns

1. Actually I should like to say that in this case too, the words you utter or what you think as you utter them, are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life. (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value 1984 p. 85e) 2. “The true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals, and on the subjective side, in the world of meaning that each one of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself through these interactions. (Sapir 1949a:515 [1932])”

18 of similarity and difference in the array of utterances to which she is exposed. Which similarities and differences become socially relevant depends less on how linguists classify them, than on the subjective experiences tied to those patterns in the speaker’s mind.

Consequentially, my hypotheses moving forward will be that we can expect different linguistic ideologies, in the sense of different ways of valuing speech varieties, from L1 speakers and L2 speakers. The latter will favor a more political system of valuing, whereas the former will tend to valorize language in terms of its relations to subjective experiences. Whether this is the case is an empirical question.

5.0. Concluding reflections As linguists who usually engage with named foreign languages mediated by literature, it is often easy to forget that the difference between learning “a language” and “learning to use language” exists, and that it informs our own ways of engaging with languages. We may forget that people do not speak languages, but idiolects, all of which are composed of bits and pieces from other people’s idiolects. It is only when we as scholars choose to abstract from this underlying idiosyncratic variation that we can see how idiolects cluster into genealogies and geographic groups that we can choose to call dialects or languages. For the native speaker, depending on their experience, the need to establish such a classification may never arise.

Language ideologies as explicit discursive flows that regulate the value of “a language” and the ways that it is used tie different kinds of –lects together, give languages their political and academic lives. But being a speaker socialized into relating to the world through a specific set of words and grammatical constructions, ties those words and constructions, whether named as a language or dialect or not named at all, to the subjective experience of social reality. In recent linguistic anthropology, this latter aspect has been neglected when we attend to the social significance of language.

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