Yucatec Maya Language Revitalization Efforts Among Professional Educators in the State of Yucatán, México

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Yucatec Maya Language Revitalization Efforts Among Professional Educators in the State of Yucatán, México

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O knihe

Master's Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, North Carolina State University, language: English, abstract: Indigenous languages throughout the Americas are endangered. For instance, in Mexico 16% of the national population spoke an indigenous language in 1930; that is more than 14 million people at that time. In 2015, only 6.6% of the total population or 7'382.785 people currently speak an indigenous language in Mexico. Even for Yucatec Maya, the second most spoken indigenous language in Mexico with more than 795, 000 speakers, intergenerational transmission of the language to new generations is compromised.

In the summer of 2018, I completed my research in the state of Yucatan, with the purpose of gathering data on the efforts educators, social scientists, and other proactive participants engaged in to revitalize Yucatec Maya. A second purpose was to obtain the ideologies and experiences they bring to their profession in its revitalization. My field methods included observation, informant interviewing, and collecting of printed material in Yucatec Maya as well as digital collection of material by taking photos, and I collected my data in the urban centers of Merida and Valladolid.

Despite lukewarm efforts of financial support for Maya language revitalization from the government, my data shows that my participants unanimously agree that there is insufficient legislative enforcing action to secure the linguistic and cultural rights of Maya speakers in Yucatan as delineated in the Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas (General Law of Indigenous Peoples' Linguistic Rights) in Mexico.

Among the linguistic and cultural rights my participants identify as weak there is poor infrastructure and insufficient number of indigenous schools, lack of sufficient qualified educators to teach Maya, lack of meaningful Maya pedagogic material production and distribution, and an almost non-existent offering of public services for Maya-speakers in their language, such as medical and legal interpreting.