| Manuel Segovia Jiménez is one of the world’s last speakers of Ayapaneco. / SAÚL RUIZ |
The race to save Mexico’s dying languages
The country’s wealth of 68 indigenous tongues is almost unmatched anywhere else
When Fidel Hernández goes back to his home village of Chicahuatxla, the houses suddenly sprout mouths, eyes and backs. There is nothing odd about this. It happens automatically every time the bus emerges out of the Mexico City sprawl and heads down south to his native state of Oaxaca.
At this point Fidel, a PhD student at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, leaves behind the doors, windows and ceilings of the Spanish language and steps into the universe of Triqui, a tonal language of which there are 25,883 speakers, according to the official count.
Triqui is part of what might be Mexico’s greatest yet least-known treasure: its linguistic diversity. The country is home to 11 linguistic families that branch out into 68 languages, which in turn have 364 dialects. Such a profusion of tongues is to be found nowhere else in the world save for Papua New Guinea, Brazil and parts of Africa.
But this diversity is in grave danger of extinction. Barely seven million indigenous people actively use their own languages, and most are speakers of Náhuatl, Yucatecan Maya, Mixteco, Tseltal, Zapoteco andTsotsil. Out of 364 existing dialects, 259 are likely to disappear, according to the National Institute of Indigenous Languages.
In many cases, the languages are doomed: 64 of them have fewer than a hundred speakers.
One of these is Manuel Segovia Jiménez, a 79-year-old peasant from Ayapa, in the state of Tabasco. Don Manuel, who gets up at 5am and works out in the fields until 2pm, is one of just seven speakers of NnumteOote, the “true language,” also known as Ayapaneco. It is the most endangered language in Mexico. He is the only person who continues to use it at home on a daily basis.