Indigenous languages in Latin America For any community, the language allows communication with its environment and serves to express its own understanding of the world. One of the objectives of the Declaration over the Right of Indigenous People, approved by the United Nations in 2007, was the need to know and respect the culture of these communities. One of these projects is the Sociolinguistic Atlas of the indigenous people in Latin America. This document revealed that Latin America is the region of the world with the greatest number of linguistic families in the world. It includes 99 (families) versus other regions such as Africa, Southern Asia and Nueva Guinea which present between 10 and 27. The most extended Latino-American family is the Arawak with 40 languages spread out from Central America to the Amazonia. Regarding the most extended languages, Quechua stands out, being spoken in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru. Also, one of the most known and studied is Nahuatl, the aztecs’ language. A large number of words in Spanish come from this language: "tomate" from "tomatl" (tomato), "aguacate" from "ahuacatl" (avocado), "chicle" from "tzictli" (chewing gum) o "petaca" from "petlacalli" (smoking pipe). However, the only case of bilingualism is Paraguay, where Spanish and Guarani are both official since the passing of the Constitution of 1992. The data reveal that nearly a fifth of the Latin American people have stopped speaking their own indigenous language. The studies explain this fact on account of a reduction in the number of indigenous communities as well as a need to adapt to government institutions and to economic development using its language less. This problem takes place in different regions of the world so the United Nations decided to designate 2019 as the International Year of the Indigenous Languages in order to raise the awareness of the need for preservation.
By Mrs Hernandez-Moral
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