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In Mexico, 64 Dialects At Risk Of Extinction

EL UNIVERSAL (Mexico)

Worldcrunch

MEXICO CITY - Linguistic experts have identified as many as 364 different dialects in modern Mexico, with at least 100 people speaking each linguistic variation. But this wealth of language diversity risks disappearing.

Javier López Sánchez, director of the National Indigenous Languages Institute in Mexico (INALI), says that currently 64 dialects face serious risk of disappearing forever.

During a recent visit to Boca del Río in the state of Veracruz, to celebrate the “National Day of the Mother Tongue”, López recognized that one of the main problems that they face in the efforts to try to preserve these dialects is the discrimination towards the populations that communicate in languages other than Spanish.

For example, the Kiliwa dialect from the state of Baja California is one of the dialects that risks extinction since there are only 10 speakers still alive, who may not transfer the language to their descendants.

Other examples are the Diapaneca dialect from the state of Tabasco with only 21 speakers, as well as some variants of the Zapoteca dialect from the State of Oaxaca such as the Chocholteco and the Nahual from the state of Veracruz

López Sánchez explained that according to data gathered by the National Statistics and Geography Institute in Mexico (INEGI), in the last census, 16 million people in Mexico are considered indigenous, but only 7 million of them speak a prehispanic dialect.

The Mexican Government has set up a program to help the speakers of these “almost forgotten” tongues transcribe the Mexican Constitution and their documents into their dialects.

Here's a video report about dying dialects in Mexico:

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Geopolitics

Journalist Spy, Subversive 13-Year-Old: Law And Order In Totalitarian Russia

Even beyond the bloodshed of its war in Ukraine, lesser acts of aggression by the state are a clear expression of the intentions of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Photo of an anti-war drawing by a 13-year-old girl

Incriminated drawing by Maria, 13

Pierre Haski

-Analysis-

They are "minor” incidents compared to the bloody frontline near Bakhmut, or the missiles raining down on Ukrainian cities. But these same incidents say a lot about what is going on in Russian society, behind the relatively normal facade that has been preserved for a year.

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Two arrests occurred Thursday, one of a Russian citizen whose story is one of aberrant cruelty; the other of an American journalist turned hostage in the proxy confrontation between Moscow and Washington.

Aleksei Moskalyov is a single father of a 13-year-old girl, Maria, a status which is in itself considered abnormal in Russian society. But above all, Maria was taken away from her father and placed in an orphanage for having drawn an anti-war picture at school. Her own teacher reported her to the authorities.

The father was sentenced to two years in prison for having criticized the Russian army. He fled, but was arrested in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, probably betrayed by the activation of his cell phone. He risks an even harsher sentence, and likely will not see his daughter again for years.

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