Letras sobre voces : Multilinguismo a traves de la historia (review)

Letras sobre voces: Multilingüismo a través de la historia. By Bárbara Cifuentes, in collaboration with Lucina García. (Mexico City: CIESAS and ini, 1998. 340 pp., preface, introduction, maps, illustrations, appendixes, bibliography. 13.00 pesos).

Letras sobre voces, a title that neatly summarizes the theme of this insightful book, is part of the valuable and rapidly growing series, Historia de los pueblos indígenas de México, edited by Teresa Roja Rabiela and Mario Humberto Ruz and published by the CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social) in collaboration with the INI (Instituto Nacional Indigenista). While pointing to the richness, diversity, and persistence of indigenous languages throughout Mexico, the author stresses the impact of alphabetic writing on New Spain’s and later Mexico’s native languages. Cifuentes provides readers with a deeply researched historical narrative of language politics in Mexico from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century.

The author begins by outlining some of the important questions a general history of indigenous languages must consider: how many languages existed at the moment of initial contact, and why did some survive and others die out? A second set of questions has to do with what the nature of the interaction between these languages and Spanish was like, and the third set involves language policies and how such policies differed between the colonial and national periods. In her first chapter Cifuentes provides a panoramic overview of language patterns across (and beyond) Mexico and argues that more than two hundred languages likely existed at contact (32). She also provides a brief but thorough geographic survey of these languages, along with a review of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature that seeks to describe and classify them. This chapter alone, filled with useful tables and maps, is worth the price of the book.

The second chapter examines the interactions between Spanish and the diverse Amerindian languages described in the preceding chapter. It offers both an overview of linguistic change as well as a narrative of an evolving colonial linguistic politics in which both church and state accepted, albeit somewhat grudgingly, that some diversity of languages would survive and that Spanish governance in all its manifestations would have to adjust to such diversity. Certain languages that were spoken across large areas, especially Nahuatl, received special attention, however, and began to take on a greater importance in the colonial world for communication, economic interchange, even intellectual and literary expressions. Thus church and legal policy helped to facilitate the spread of certain languages at the expense of many others.

But as Nahuatl was spreading as a spoken language, it was being written down in alphabetic form, although some languages had been written using pictographic or hieroglyphic writing systems—a feature of some languages, like Nahuatl, Mixtec, and the Mayan family, which the author deemphasizes. Chapter 3 takes up the history of this transition to alphabetic writing. Friars played a major role here, and by the end of the eighteenth century Cifuentes estimates that 158 native languages had some text dedicated to preserving their vocabularies and/or grammatical structures (125). But the missionaries were less interested in preservation than in using these languages to promote cultural change, particularly in the area of religious belief. Missions became closely tied to schooling, as each order established schools aimed either at training young indigenous men in religious belief and ritual as well as in alphabetic writing or at teaching new missionaries the languages they would need to carry out their work. While colonial written texts incorporated indigenous forms of expression, in Cifuentes’s view alphabetic writing introduced a rigidity into indigenous forms of discourse, narrowing and fixing their capacity for expression. Other types of texts reinforced this transition from a flexible and open orality to a fixed emphasis on the written, especially legal texts. In this manner the introduction of alphabetic writing at once helped to preserve indigenous cultural patrimony even...