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108 Some time ago, the feasibility and convenience of purifying and standardizing the ways that we speak and write the Spanish language were discussed at great length. The attempt was laudable in that it embodied a cultural goal but was illogical and impossible. Here, we will not occupy ourselves with the numerous indigenous languages and dialects that are spoken in Mexico. Rather, we will contend with the diversity of our Spanishes. Our Spanish is the Spanish of Yucatán, which is a Maya-Spanish; the Spanish of the high plateaus, which is influenced by Aztec and Otomí; that of Sonora, which is mixed with the speech of the Yaquis; that of Oaxaca, which is mixed with Zapotec; and so on and so on. We must account for the fact that our Spanish is also the Anglicized Spanish of the border region, with its particular sounds, and the Spanish of Veracruz with its own sounds, and so forth. All of these modalities of Castilian differ from one another in terms of analogy, syntax, phonetics, and the ideology that they encapsulate. Expressions and sounds used in different regions differ insofar as Mexicans have not yet melded into a physically and intellectually homogeneous race. For this fusion to occur, it is important for a race to live in a region where physical and biological conditions are equal for all of the individuals that constitute it. The form and structure of the human body and the characteristics of its intellect—art, language, and so forth—result directly from the influences of the food, climate , flora, fauna, and geology of the land that it inhabits. The distinct regions that constitute our country vary climatologically, botanically, zoologically, and geologically. Because of this, the same Spanish will never be spoken in all of 23 Language and Our Country 109 L a n g u a g e a n d O u r C o u n t r y Mexico, but we will speak the varieties that develop and flower naturally in each region. Four hundred years of experience are more conclusive than the ideas of all the literatos and grammarians regarding the attempted unification of the Spanish language. For example, let us consider the experience of the population of white race in Yucatán, direct descendants of the Spaniards who spoke Castilian Spanish when they emigrated there in the sixteenth century. These people have a series of physiological and anatomical characteristics that were imprinted upon them by the environment. Especially notable are the pale complexion caused by tropical anemia and the form of the cranium. It would not be difficult to prove scientifically that these transformations are products of the environment, just as Dr. Boas demonstrated very perceptible cranial differences in the first generation of Hebrew immigrants to New York. Regarding the Spanish that the Yucatecos speak, it is easily demonstrated that it differs by various degrees from that spoken in other regions of Mexico, and even more from that of the Iberian Peninsula. Their phoneticism includes obscurevowels,consonantsproducedbythesoftpalate,consonantsinterrupted by the closing of the glottis, and other sounds that do not exist in the Spanish that we speak in Mexico City or that is spoken by the people of Madrid. The usual vocabulary contains numerous “Mayismos.” The syntax of the sentence is often altered by indigenous word concepts. Something similar happens in other regions of the country. And if this occurs in the population of Spanish descent, it is even more accentuated in the mixed and aboriginal population that has had more time living in the locality. That literature is written among us in the Spanish of Castile, and that its authors read it with impeccable prosody for academic ears, is both possible and praiseworthy. But we should also insist that no barriers be placed on regional literature or on the cultivation of Spanish as it is naturally spoken and written in each region of the country. There is more beauty, more realism, and greater expressive power in that picturesque variety of “Spanishes” in Mexico than in any grotesque imitation of the Spanish of Castile into which they could be forcibly melded. ...

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