# Information on Merida, Yucatan



## banat4 (Sep 16, 2015)

Hello,

Are there any expats on here that currently live there or plan on? I'd love to get in touch.
I have some questions: Is the Maya language the primary there? Any Spanish classes available to take? Are most people there indigenous? Any information would be appreciated.

Thank you all.


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## citlali (Mar 4, 2013)

The primary language is Spanish. The Maya speak a Yucateco Maya. In Villages there are many people speaking Spanish and Maya and there are many mestizos- In Mexico to be considered indeginous you have to speak an indigenous language so many people who have indigenous parents and grand-parents but do not speak anything but Spanish are not considerd indigenous.
I live in Chiapas were many people speak various Maya languages. chol and Lacandon are the closest to the Yucateo Maya but if Yucatan is like Chiapas there are many variance and each area has a lot of vocabulary that is specific to the area and a different accent or way of speaking although understandable to another area most of the time but not always. I do not know if in the Yucatan the language is more uniform than in CHiapas where every town has a didderent way of speaking even within the same form of the language.


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## mattoleriver (Oct 21, 2011)

citlali,
you may find this interesting. Duolingo y Wikipedia, al rescate de las lenguas indígenas | El Economista Unfortunately there is no indication of which dialect(s) will be translated. Luis von Ahn, co-founder and director of Duolingo, is Guatemalan.


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## banat4 (Sep 16, 2015)

Thank you for you reply. What about the other questions I had?

Thanks.


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

banat4 said:


> Thank you for you reply. What about the other questions I had?
> 
> Thanks.



Is your post directed to citlali? Since she doesn't live in Merida, it's unlikely she'll have information about the best places there to study Spanish. What was your other question?


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## TundraGreen (Jul 15, 2010)

banat4 said:


> Thank you for you reply. What about the other questions I had?
> 
> Thanks.


Most of the people on the street in Mérida are not indigenous. I can't help you with Spanish classes, but most language schools, and there are many, offer classes in English. There are also private teachers in major cities like Mérida.


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## citlali (Mar 4, 2013)

Thanks Mattoleriver, this should be interesting since thre is no such a thing as a Maya language, but there are quite a few Mayalanguages and they can be very differnt one from the others. Last week.end I was with a goup of people mostly Maya and a man from MOnterrey had the idea of having everyone in the group say the same thing in their own language. The tsotsil and tseltal were close enough you could figure it out but the tojolabal was so different that you could not get anything out of it and you could say the same thing about the Chol or Yucateco Maya or the various languages speken in Guatemala, WHen speaking of the Maya languages one refers to them as variations not dialect. Dislect is not PC as it assume thre is one correct language but the Maya had city States and not a central empire or kingdom so there was no King´s Maya, all Maya languages are on the same lever there is no Maya language and dialect.}
By the way within the same language you have lots of variations just within 10km of San Cristobal the Chamulans say alak for chicken when 10 km down the road the people from Zinacantan will say kaxlan and 30 km south of there Amatenango which is tseltal will call it mut so you have to learn a whole bunch of vocabulary to communicate at the most elementary level.
..I jusr do not see how duolingo can handle it. Also the man from Guatemala being excited to have it in Maya may be surprised if he does not understand a word of what is being said if they use yucateco Maya...life is not that easy..


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

Here's an extensive article about the Mayan language family, including a chart showing how all of the various languages are related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_languages


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## citlali (Mar 4, 2013)

so good luck to duolingo
...


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

citlali said:


> so good luck to duolingo
> ...


Indeed!


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## mattoleriver (Oct 21, 2011)

Ah, ladies, the joke is on you! If you have ever encountered a reCaptcha while entering a website you have already helped to translate the web using the technology developed, in large part, by Luis von Ahn. Multiply that tiny assist by several million times per day and it starts to add up. Duolingo does essentially the same thing but in much larger portions and costs the language students nothing but their time. It would be a pity if von Ahn took on only simple and/or profitable tasks. I would not bet against him.


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

mattoleriver said:


> Ah, ladies, the joke is on you! If you have ever encountered a reCaptcha while entering a website you have already helped to translate the web using the technology developed, in large part, by Luis von Ahn. Multiply that tiny assist by several million times per day and it starts to add up. Duolingo does essentially the same thing but in much larger portions and costs the language students nothing but their time. It would be a pity if von Ahn took on only simple and/or profitable tasks. I would not bet against him.


Which ladies are you referring to? 

What is a reCaptcha? Actually, I don't understand your post at all since I know nothing about Duolingo or Mr. von Ahn. Please explain!


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## mattoleriver (Oct 21, 2011)

Isla Verde said:


> Which ladies are you referring to?
> 
> What is a reCaptcha? Actually, I don't understand your post at all since I know nothing about Duolingo or Mr. von Ahn. Please explain!


The ladies would be you and citlali and the rest can best be answered by this Ted Talk. Unfortunately the Ted Talk is a few years old but probably still the best explanation. https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration?language=en#t-95390
None of this is meant to imply that I think that languages, nor any other art, skill, etc., can be adequately conveyed by any single source or tool.


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## citlali (Mar 4, 2013)

mattoleriver which Maya language are they going to teach and which version of each language are they going to teach? I can pick up languages pretty quickly and frankly when you know how many of these languages there are and the number of variations you can encounter and how many people will be interested in learning them it seems to me that the efforst will have a very poor return. So the joke is on them. 
You learn these languages in the villages not on the internet and unless you already speak one of them learning them is difficult to say the least as the concepts and way of expressing yourself are very different, as I said good luck to them..You do get the idea that here is no such a thing as A Maya language , do you mattoleriver? Learning Maya is somilar to learning European, the idea needs some refinement and breaking down into English German Franch Spansh and many others...these languages all come from Indo European but that does not help to say that or know that when you have to oder a kilo of tomatoes..


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## RVGRINGO (May 16, 2007)

The Duolingo answer lies in the reason for it being offered free of charge, which provides recognition and input which can be sifted down to a comonality; not too likely in the Mayan family/assortment of languages, but maybe not impossible. It is a fascinating and effective learning tool, which I recommend.


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

RVGRINGO said:


> The Duolingo answer lies in the reason for it being offered free of charge, which provides recognition and input which can be sifted down to a comonality;


My brain must be out to lunch today, but I really don't understand your description of how Duolingo operates.

Just googled Duolingo to get a general sense of how it works. As a professional language teacher for most of my life (both English and Spanish), the fact that the Duolingo system uses translation so much is not ideal. Learning to use a language is one skill, translation is quite another and can get in the way of mastering the former. And the fact that Duolingo sells translations done by its participants really rubs me the wrong way. Who would buy translations done by amateurs?


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## RVGRINGO (May 16, 2007)

OK: Are you familiar with those squiggly letters and numbers that you must interpret to prove that you are a human on many websites? They are not only for security, but also provide the owners of Duolingo with information on the interpretation, by the human brain after lunch, of distorted or incomplete text elements, as well as combinations. That information is used to teach their computers how to better read old text that may be incomplete or distorted due to age or damage. The use of translation input from students, from many cultural/linguistic bacgrounds, also teaches their computers to better translate text with missing parts, idioms and also regional & cultural variations. All of this is in a concerted effort to digitize the printed and written knowledge and literature of the world before it turns to dust, or is otherwise forgotten. All will be placed on digital media for future generations to decifer; as soon as they can get the equivalent of an 8-track machine or floppy disk to work again. We old teachers of whatever will be, by then, extinct of course.
Since there is money in digitizing for posterity, Duolingo collects the money and we give them the input in exchange for our lessons. So; Duolingo continues to be “a free service“.


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## citlali (Mar 4, 2013)

translating Maya is a lot of fun..as there can be lots of differnt translations fro the same sentence..People who are fluent in both have a tough time with it so I can imagine translation by amateurs..I think they have a long road in front of them.


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## xolo (May 25, 2014)

The descriptions by citlali are good descriptions of organic, native languages. Of the remaining 70 indigenous languages in Mexico, many have variations over small geographic distances, same as the regional languages of Spain like Galician, or most any area of native, organic languages. 

_Dialect _is not only _not _PC, it is a colonial term that is used to indicate a second class status and this term is widely used in Mexican Spanish even today. In other words, the meaning of it is the language is not a _real _language because it does not have a traditional written form. 

To get back to the OP question, Mérida is predominantly mestizo and Spanish is the widely spoken common language. The revolutionary governments of the 1920s and 1930s really sealed that deal.

And yes, this is my area of academic study. Sorry if I'm a bit pedantic!


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

más chueco que la fayuca said:


> _Dialect _is not only _not _PC, it is a colonial term that is used to indicate a second class status and this term is widely used in Mexican Spanish even today. In other words, the meaning of it is the language is not a _real _language because it does not have a traditional written form.


As I understand it, a dialect is merely a variant form of a language - dialects of a particular language are generally mutually intelligible. Unfortunately, it is still quite common today in Mexico to call any of the many indigenous languages "dialects", and it is indeed a kind of not so subtle put-down.


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## citlali (Mar 4, 2013)

My grand-árents were Basques and spoke Basque which is a non-indo- European language and I never learned it but I used to understand the dialect spoken in the Arcachon area south of Bordeaux. I did not speak it but understood it and there is no way French speaking people could understand that dialect , it was a mixture of French and Spanish sprinkled with local words which made that dialect only understantable by people of the area, my Spanish friends did not understand it either. .I would think the dialects were variances of French but since only the French spoken at court was recognized as correct French everything else was a dialect from either the north or the south which used to be two different languages as well. 

Some of the scholars have studied the Zinacantan version of Tsotsil and Rober Laughlin has written a Zinacantan dictionary but I have yet to find a decent method to learn any of the indigenous languages in Chiapas. You can find a grammar in the internet for Tsotsil but no good teaching method. CELALI was giving classes at a time but most of the students already spoke one indigenous language or had been raised hearing it , as an outsider it is very tough to keep up as your native language has no commun roots . I guess I never learned Basque for the same reasons.


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