Discrimination against indigenous communities, and especially against Mayan speakers, appears to be the main factor that has influenced the reduction of this sector of the population, to the detriment of the native language of the southeastern region of the country, according to Abigail Uc Canché, promoter of Mayan culture in Yucatán.
From the Municipal Institute for the Strengthening of Maya Culture, she acknowledged that in recent years there has been a decrease in the number of people who admit to speaking Maya, because they fear that by expressing it they will be victims of some kind of backwardness, violence or discrimination.
In this sense, she recalled that according to the 2020 Population Census of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), currently in Yucatan there are 525,92 people who agreed to speak Mayan, when in 2010 there were 544,927.
This suggests that only 23.7 percent of the 2,320,898 inhabitants of Yucatan speak Mayan, when a little more than a decade ago this group represented 30 percent of all Yucatecans.
Ms. Uc Canché indicated that within the communities, it is the children and young people who do not want to speak this language, or worse, they speak it but do not like to admit it to people who do not speak it.
For this reason, she suggested that intensive campaigns should be carried out so that Mayan-speaking families encourage the use of the Mayan language as a language that should be preserved, so that it can be passed on from generation to generation.
“One of the factors that go against the Mayan language is discrimination, I will tell you in the flesh, when you go down from the village to the city, the first thing is that they look at you up and down, sometimes also because of the color of your skin, how you dress, so I think that has made other generations no longer want to speak it,” she said.
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