Use
The viability of Zapotec languages also varies tremendously. Loxicha Zapotec, for example, has over 70,000 speakers. San Felipe Tejalapan Zapotec might have ten, all elderly. San Agustin Mixtepec Zapotec reportedly has just one remaining speaker. Historically, government teachers discouraged the use of the language, which has contributed to its diminution in many places. In La Ventosa, Oaxaca, a Zapotec mother of three claims that her children are punished in class if they speak Zapotec. Other areas however, such as the Isthmus, proudly maintain their mother tongue.
Zapotec-language programming is available on a number of radio stations: The CDI's radio stations XEGLO, based in Guelatao de Juárez, Oaxaca and XEQIN-AM, based in San Quintín, Baja California carry Zapotec-language programming along with other indigenous languages; in the Isthmus there is one privately-owned commercial station, Radio TEKA (1030 AM), and several community-based radio stations, most notably the community-based Radio Totopo (102.5 FM) in Juchitán, Oaxaca, and Radio Atempa in San Blas Atempa.
As of 2012, the Natividad Medical Center of Salinas, California was training medical interpreters bilingual in one of the Oaxacan languages (including Zapotec, Triqui, Mixteco) as well as in Spanish.
Read more about this topic: Zapotec Languages
Famous quotes containing the word use:
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)