Language endangerment and linguistic suicide
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The Language: Upper Necaxa Totonac
photo by S. Gross
- spoken in the villages of Chicontla, Patla, San Pedro, and Cacahuatlán
- 3,400 speakers out of a population of around 7,000 in the valley
- only a few monolinguals
- in Chicontla, most fluent speakers are in their forties or older
- Patla has younger speakers, but only a handful of families have Totonac-dominant children
- although many fluent speakers are (or were recently) of child-rearing age, many of them deliberately choose not to speak to their children in Totonac
“I spoke to all of [my
children] in Spanish from the time they were
born because, well, I thought it would be better if they weren’t like
me, I learned when I was older, I don’t want them to be like that, my
children, I want them to speak Spanish … [but the first and] the
second were the same, he started to speak Totonac. … I said to them,
why don’t you answer me the way I talk to you? And they answered in
Totonac. … At times I would scold them … They understood what I was
saying to them, but they would just answer me that way. Until the third
child came along, this one, the youngest, and the first words he said
were in Spanish. Now I was happy because my child now, my baby, now he
was starting to speak in Spanish.”
—Gualdalupe Mendoza Muñoz
If this practice continues, the language will die with the current generation,
deliberately killed off by its speakers
Why would this happen?