Preservation and revival trends in the Southern Americas
Today I came across two rather interesting stories form the Southern Americas, or technically, the Central and Southern Americas…namely from Mexico and Venezuela.
The first piece of news from Mexico, relates to a new initiative originating from the office of the Mayor of Mexico City. The Mayor, Marcelo Ebrard wants all city employees to learn the Aztec language Nahuatl in an attempt to halt its national decline and, in fact, to reverse this growing trend…this new initiative will be applicable to every stratum of City employee from the very top reaches of the council right down to bus drivers.
The attempt at institutionalising the use of Nahuatl will be progressed in the first instance by the provision of language classes to all city and Government employees (including the Mayor and his Cabinet) and the distribution of booklets about indigenous culture to over 300,000 city employees.
Nahuatl is still spoken by about 1% of the national population but its use has been declining steadily due to the migratory trends of native speakers; these native speakers’ heartlands are within the largely poor rural areas of Mexico and as they move to the larger (Spanish speaking) conurbations, their use of Nahuatl becomes largely redundant.
My second piece of news is almost the converse of the story above inasmuch as it attempts to deal with the preservation of Spanish!
The Venezuelan national telephone company, Anonima Nacional de Telefonos de Venezuela, in an attempt to excise a creeping Anglicisation within the work environment, has decreed that only Spanish words should be used within their offices as part of a “say it in Spanish, say it with pride” campaign.
Apparently, Managers at the company noticed an ever increasing use of English for industry terms that actually had direct Spanish equivalents, such as “pop up” and “marketing”. Thus, now a PC mouse should be referred to as a ‘raton’…the Spanish equivalent, and a computer becomes an ‘organador’.