NAHUIZALCO, El Salvador – A group of children who now participate in an immersion program in Nahuat, the language of the Pipil people and the only pre-Hispanic language that still exists in El Salvador, is the last hope that that language does not die.
“This effort aims to keep Nahuat alive and that is why we focus on the children, that they continue and preserve that important part of our culture,” Elena López told IPS, during a short break so that the children she teaches that language they could taste a snack.
López is part of the Cuna Náhuat project, which since 2010 seeks to preserve and revitalize this language in danger of extinction, through early linguistic immersion. She is one of the two teachers who teaches it to children from three to five years old, at the headquarters in Nahuizalco, a municipality in the department of Sonsonate, in western El Salvador.
At risk of disappearing
“When a language dies, the support of indigenous cultures and territories goes extinct with it,” states the report Revitalization of Indigenous Languages, according to which the 500 Amerindian languages that are still spoken in Latin America are all in a situation of greater or lesser threat or risk.
“This effort aims to keep Nahuat alive and that is why we focus on children, so that they continue and preserve that important part of our culture”: Elena López
In Mesoamerica, which covers Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, 75 of these languages are spoken, the study says.
Except for Mexico, Guatemala is the most linguistically diverse, with its 24 languages: the most spoken is K’iche’, from the Mayan stock, and the least spoken is Xinca, of unknown origin.
Brazil is the most ethnically and linguistically diverse country in Latin America, with between 241 and 256 indigenous peoples and between 150 and 186 languages.
25% of these languages are at risk of extinction, if something urgent is not done about it, the report details. It is estimated that in Latin America, he adds, there live more than 50 million people who self-identify as indigenous.
“These languages are losing use value (…) families, increasingly, interrupt the natural intergenerational transmission of the languages of their elders, and a slow but sure process of moving towards the hegemonic language is observed, and the speakers make the Spanish or Portuguese is their predominant language of use,” the report states.
The causes of the danger of these Amerindian languages disappearing are varied, the report points out, such as the interruption of intergenerational transmission: the language is no longer being passed from generation to generation.
And that is precisely what the Cuna Náhuat project aims to revive, by focusing on children of the indicated ages, who can take advantage of learning from Nahua speakers who did receive the language from their parents and grandparents and speak it fluently.
Teacher López is one of those people. He belongs to the last generation of speakers who assimilated it naturally, as their mother tongue, speaking from a very young age with his parents and grandparents, in his native Santo Domingo de Guzmán, also in the department of Sonsonate.
“That’s how I was born and raised, speaking it at home, and we never stopped speaking it, with my sisters and brothers, but not with people outside the home, because they discriminated against us, they treated us as Indians but in a derogatory way, but we never stopped talk about it,” said López, 65 years old.
Indeed, for reasons of racism and classism, indigenous populations have been marked by rejection and contempt not only by the political and economic elites, but also by the rest of the mestizo population, which resulted from the mixing of indigenous people with the Spaniards who arrived in these lands in the 16th century.
“They have always looked down on us, they have discriminated against us,” Elsa Cortez, 43, the other teacher who teaches at the Cuna Náhuat de Nahuizalco, explained to IPS.
And she added: “I feel satisfied and proud, at my age it is a luxury to teach our little ones.”
Both López and Cortez said they felt grateful that the project had incorporated them as teachers, without them having experience in the area of teaching, and in a context in which discrimination and social rejection, in addition to age, make it more difficult find formal employment.
Before joining the project, Cortez dedicated himself full time to making comales, which are a type of circular clay plates that are placed on the wood stove to cook corn tortillas. He also baked, and still bakes, bread on the weekends.
López also worked making comales and prepared some local foods, which he sold in his neighborhood. He now prefers to rest.
Not everything is lost
When IPS visited the headquarters of Cuna Náhuat, in Nahuizalco, the little ones, three years old, carried out a pedagogical exercise: they went in front of the rest of the class, made up of a dozen boys and girls, and introduced themselves by saying their name. , surname and other basic greetings, in Nahuat.
Later they identified, in Nahuat, the figures of animals and elements of nature that were shown to them, such as “mistun” (cat), “qawit” (tree) and “xutxit” (flower). The students belong to the new admission cycle, which began in February, and will spend two years there.
Five-year-olds are the most advanced. Together, both groups totaled around twenty boys and girls.
At the end of their time at the Cuna, they will go to regular school, with the risk of forgetting what they have learned. However, to keep them connected with the language, the project keeps Saturday courses open where they already see writing and grammatical aspects.
There is a group of 15 children, but mainly girls, who started at the beginning of the project and who are now teenagers who speak the language fluently, and some even teach it online.
The initiative is promoted by the Don Bosco University of El Salvador, and is supported by the town councils where they operate, in this case, Nahuizalco and Santo Domingo de Guzmán. The Santa Catarina Masahuat headquarters will also reopen soon
Santo Domingo de Guzmán concentrates 99% of the very few Nahuatphone speakers in the country, who number around 60 people, Jorge Lemus, director of the Nahuat/Pipil Language Revitalization Program of El Salvador and main manager of the Cuna Náhuat project, told IPS.
“I have seen in three decades how Nahuat has been declining, and how the people who speak it have been dying,” stressed Lemus, also a professor of linguistics and researcher at the School of Languages and Education of the Don Bosco University, a center of the Catholic order of the Salesians.
According to the academic, the last three languages that existed in El Salvador in the 20th century were Lenca, Cacaopera and Nahuat, but the first two already disappeared in the middle of that century, and only the last one survives.
“The only one that has survived is Nahuat, only in very precarious conditions, now there are perhaps about 60 speakers of the language, when I started working on the subject there were about 200 and they continue to disappear,” Lemus said.
The only way to rescue the language, he added, is to create a replacement generation, but not with adults, who can learn it and continue speaking Spanish, but with a group of children who can learn it naturally.
The expert clarifies that, although they come from the same linguistic stock, the Nahuat spoken in El Salvador is not the same Nahuatl spoken in Mexico, and in fact the spelling is different.
In Mexico, Nahuatl has more than a million speakers, in the Central Valley, he noted.
In El Salvador, in 1932, the Pipil people stopped speaking their language in public spaces for fear of being murdered by the government forces of General Maximiliano Hernández, who that year brutally repressed an indigenous and peasant uprising, which demanded better living conditions. .
At that time, society was dominated by aristocratic families dedicated to coffee cultivation, whose production system plunged a large part of Salvadorans into poverty, especially peasants and indigenous people.
Lemus maintained that, for a language to decisively re-emerge and become a vehicle of daily communication, a titanic effort from the State would be needed, similar to the rescue of Basque in Spain; Maori, in New Zealand or even Israel’s resurrection of Hebrew, which was already a dead language.
But that is not going to happen in El Salvador, he noted.
“The most realistic thing we want to achieve is that the language does not disappear, that this replacement generation grows and multiplies. If we have 60 speakers right now, in a few years we will have 50 or 60 speakers from this new generation again, and that they will keep it alive in the communities and that it will continue to be spoken,” he stressed.
For her part, teacher López wants to work on that goal to leave her legacy to the country.
Speaking in Nahuat, she said: “I really like teaching this language because I don’t want it to die, I want the children to learn and speak it when I am already dead.”
ED: EG
2024-05-04 05:57:29