Mayan has already become extinct among the natives of Mérida and in the rest of the state Yucatán it will be a dead language in about 20 years, says a UADY specialist.
“The municipality of Tahdziú and the communities of San Pedro Chacabal (Motul) and San José Oriente (Hoctún) are the last fortifications of the Mayan language in Yucatán, that is, where parents transmit Mayan to their children”, says César Can Canul, coordinator of the Mayan Language department at the Institutional Language Center (CIL) of the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY).
“Tahdziú ( Southern municipality) is the last Mayan fortification, although the original language is already beginning to be threatened there as well; In San Pedro Chacabal many heads of families speak Mayan but emigrate to Cancún, so they do not teach it to their children. The same thing happens in San José Oriente, where people emigrate to Quintana Roo and Mérida, mainly,” Can Canul explains.
According to Can Canul, a linguist from the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico City, the south and center of Yucatán are the last bastions where Mayan is transmitted to the new generation.
specialist affirms that the Mayan language has already become extinct among the natives of Mérida and in about 20 years, it will probably no longer be spoken in Yucatán.
Learning the Maya language by “acquisition”
César Can Canul, coordinator of the Linguistic Corpus of the Mayan Language project, specifies that a language is acquired or learned by “aquisition” when learned empirically.
The coordinator of the Mayan Language department at the Institutional Language Center (CIL) explained that a child begins to speak Mayan at one and a half years of age.
This process is called acquisition, it is unique and unrepeatable, it ends at age 12 and it develops because the child’s parents, family, and friends speak to him/her in Mayan at home or in the community. However, there is no formal training in grammar, syntax, oral structure, etc.
“The acquisition occurs because one or both of their parents speak Mayan. It has even been proven that a child whose parents are not Mayan speakers will speak Mayan if the children he/she goes out to play with or other people in her community speak to him/her in this language,” Can Canul continued.
“The modern process of learning a second language is totally different and much more complex. Students learn in a school, with books or audiovisual materials, with specific guidelines and rules”, he underlined.
Finally Cesar Can Canul stated that if the decline in the number of Mayan speakers continues and a project to counteract it efficiently is not implemented, the language will be extinct in less than 20 years.
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