Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

CULTURE-VENEZUELA: Mapoyo Language Nearing Extinction

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Oct 21 2003 (IPS) - Only a handful of elderly men still speak Mapoyo, the language of an ethnic group with just 200 surviving members that has lived along the Orinoco river in Venezuela for centuries.

The last female Mapoyo-speaker, Petra Reyes, died on Aug. 31 in the village of La Urbana, 400 kms south of Caracas. Her two surviving brothers and two or three other men are the only ones who still actually use their native language. The rest of the community has switched over to the dominant language, Spanish.

Mapoyo ”is one of the endangered indigenous languages that could soon disappear in Venezuela,” anthropologist María Eugenia Villalón at the Central University in Caracas, one of Venezuela’s leading researchers of disappearing languages, told IPS.

In Venezuela, a country of 24 million, just over 500,000 people describe themselves as belonging to one of the 32 ethnic groups that live mainly in the border areas in the southern, eastern and northwestern parts of the country.

At least seven languages native to Venezuela are on the verge of extinction: Napoyo, Añú, Baré, Sáliva, Yabarana, Uruak and Sape, according to a report presented by Villalón at the Fourth International Conference on Endangered Languages, held in November 2002 in Kyoto, Japan.

In fact, the last known Sape-speaker died in 2001.

Several languages are vanishing due to the tiny number of surviving members of the ethnic groups that speak those tongues. In the case of the Añú, who live in houses on stilts in the Sinamaica lagoon in the extreme northwestern portion of Venezuela, the nearly 3,000 members of that ethnic group are also losing their habitat due to the environmental deterioration of the lake.

A language, said Villalón, ”is not threatened and does not vanish merely because it is spoken by a small number of people, but because it ceases to be used and to be passed down from parents to children. The level of danger faced by a language can be measured by the number of children who speak it.”

For example, the Mapoyo people are not only a tiny ethnic group, spread out in villages along the Orinoco river, Venezuela’s biggest river, but only a handful of elderly men still speak the language.

”It is a language that is remembered, rather than spoken, by people who have become rusty Mapoyo-speakers, and who have gradually lost the syntax and only speak it with a style based on simple formulas, and simple sentence structures, like ‘I’m hungry’, ‘give me something to eat’, or ‘we have pineapples’,” said Villalón.

The Mapoyo were described by Jesuit chroniclers who ventured into Guayana in the early 18th century. Like other Carib peoples, they have a mythical hero, Marewaka or Marahuaca (taken from the name of a mountain in southern Venezuela) and share a cosmovision that is disappearing along with the ethnic group and its language.

”Every language is a unique system of cognition” and knowledge, a unique way of seeing the world, said Villalón. ”When it is lost, a human creation that took centuries to emerge disappears, and in this case, a piece of humanity’s – and specifically Venezuela’s – heritage.”

Linguists predict that at least 3,000 of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today will disappear this century, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

In Venezuela, the only truly vital indigenous languages are Yanomami and its subgroup Sanima, of the same linguistic family. The Yanomami community resides in the extreme southern part of Venezuela and northern Brazil, in relative isolation, with little contact with the rest of society.

The remaining indigenous languages face varying degrees of danger of becoming extinct, either because the ethnic communities that speak them are very small, or due to heavy interaction with people who speak other indigenous tongues or Spanish.

Silvia Gómez, a researcher at the governmental Cultural Heritage Institute, said that in the latter cases, it is a question of ”the different levels of ‘prestige’ assigned to each language, with Spanish seen as more prestigious, and thus embraced by the young, who distance themselves that way from their parents’ language.”

Along the middle of the spectrum, ”threatened and nearly endangered,” is the language of the Wayúu, an ethnic group in the Guajira region, which straddles the border between Colombia and Venezuela. There are around 200,000 Wayuú Indians in Venezuela, ”among whom the percentage of monolingual Spanish-speakers is growing,” said Gómez.

”This is not exclusively a Venezuelan phenomenon: in Peru, there are various forms of Quechua that are spoken by hundreds of thousands of people, which are threatened nonetheless,” said Villalón.

Three decades ago, Venezuela launched bilingual education programmes among the Wayúu, which were later extended to other areas. But Villalón and Gómez said the bilingual programmes virtually never go beyond the third or fourth grade.

Another step forward was taken by Venezuela’s new constitution, which was rewritten in 1999 in a process promoted by left-leaning President Hugo Chávez, and recognises the rights of indigenous peoples, including the right to declare their tongues the official languages in their ancestral territories.

But anthropologist Esteban Mosonyi said it takes at least eight to 10 years for bilingual education programmes to show results, in terms of rescuing disappearing languages.

”There is political will at the highest levels of government, but that does not translate into concrete programmes or government policy,” complained Villalón, who added that ”The universities also play a role in this: We have only one school of anthropology, and the number of people studying this subject can be counted on one hand.”