Why Millions of Mexicans Don’t Speak Spanish - General Knowledge Reaction

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Welcome back everyone. We have why millions of Mexicans do not speak Spanish.

[00:00:07]This is a curiosity one. This is general knowledge. We're going to have some interesting times here. Let's jump right in.

[00:00:18]And you guys can't hear anything. I am such an amateur. Two seconds. Two seconds. Two seconds.

[00:00:25]Boom.

[00:00:26]>> The new black. The other day I was watching an episode of Orange is the New Black and one of the detainees on the show had a problem. Nobody at the prison spoke her language. They go through a whole process of being confused because she was from Mexico but didn't speak the language that everyone associates with that country. So this is either going to be a very interesting dialect similar to how we see in other countries or could this speak an old tribal language >> Spanish. Instead she spoke nawat. This led me to go down a whole rabbit hole of Mexican languages and to find out what is maybe obvious to anyone from the country, but maybe not so much so for somebody outside of it like myself.

[00:01:13]Mexico speaks a lot of languages that wa >> are not dang Yucatan Maya is huge. Now these are languages not dialects. I'm imagining noatal >> Spanish and are actually nothing close to Spanish at all. Now >> so they are languages.

[00:01:37]>> Don't get me wrong, Spanish is the de facto national language. It's spoken by 90% of the population, but Mexico has such a big population totaling at over 130 million people. A lot of people forget that a ton of people Mexico has more people in his country than most of European countries that even minority languages end up having up to several thousands of speakers, even several hundreds of thousands in some cases. And in fact, there are a lot of other languages. Most of them are indigenous descendants of what was spoken throughout Mexico's regions before the country existed.

[00:02:22]>> So, like the Aztecs >> and before the Spanish arrived and colonized it. Today, there are 68 different official indigenous languages in the country.

[00:02:34]>> Wow. Okay. Okay.

[00:02:37]>> The biggest is Nawat. That's the one spoken by the women in that series with 1.6 million speakers. Yukatkaya has 775,000 speakers. Zel has 589,000 and Zotiel has another 550 with Mixtec having 526,000.

[00:02:59]>> So we got like 4 million speakers right there of those five languages. Learn something new every day.

[00:03:06]>> Speakers. But while those are the only five with over half a million speakers and Nawati is the only one with over 1.5 million, the following ones as you go down the chart aren't at all irrelevant.

[00:03:20]There's Zapotech at 490,000 and 10 others with between 100 and 300,000 speakers each. Of course, >> that's a ton.

[00:03:30]>> These people speak Spanish.

[00:03:31]>> Now, yeah, that was about I was about to ask that question. Is is this the Spanish still the lingua frana >> too? The case shown in the series would be a rare exception of someone who is only fluent in the indigenous language.

[00:03:44]About 10% of the people of the country are like that. On the opposite end you also have the least spoken indigenous languages like Ikil spoken by 117 people or kikapu spoken by 62 or even auate with only a mere.

[00:04:00]>> So these are the dying languages is what we would call them. 20 alive speakers today. So, this got me thinking, how did so many of these languages survive the Hispanicization of Mexico? And why did some of them retain so many speakers while others are spoken by only a handful?

[00:04:20]>> Interesting conversation really. I would say >> I think to understand this fully we need to understand not just the languages but who speaks them and where they come from. The existence of so many indigenous languages in Mexico has of course to do with the history of the people that live there before the Spanish and other Europeans arrived. So to understand them we need to understand first the history of Mexico as a whole.

[00:04:51]Mexico's pre-Colombian period is very very interesting. Mostly because the concept of a unified Mexico didn't really exist at all. What you had was a patchwork or a collection of ancient and small independent kingdoms. Some more powerful than others, some in alliances, some in wars, and each of them speaking their own languages. The most famous of these languages is nawat which >> natal >> was the language of the Mexican people who built the famous and most powerful of all these cultures the Aztec Empire.

[00:05:26]It was centered in the valley of Mexico at Tenotitlan. The Mexican used natal as a language but also as a tool of imperial administration. So this noatal is the actual surviving language probably not exactly the same like old English and English is very different but the surviving language of the Aztecs is what we're saying because they were so powerful they conquered or exacted the tribute from so many of the other surrounding groups and so Nawat spread far beyond its original borders and its original group of speakers reaching very deep into the south and even down to Central America in some cases. But the Aztecs didn't replace everybody else's language when they arrived. They sort of sat on top of a pile of diverse cultures. There was no need for them to get >> a beautiful place by the way on these lakes.

[00:06:26]Beautiful >> rid of the other languages. And so they kind of existed side by side. This helped all the other mined languages survive too. For instance, to their west was the Puripetcha Empire, also known as the Taraskan state. The Puripeta spoke a language that is what linguists call an isolate, meaning that it has no known relationship to any other language in the world.

[00:06:50]>> We see that a lot, more often than you think. Of course, we if you watch all of our videos, you know that. But you already know that. Also, if you knew that isolate languages are not so rare, they're so interesting, right? Where did they come from? Did they just create it? Did they just, you know, are they Most likely there's like a long lost brother or sister language that's long lost? They're gone and you just don't know.

[00:07:22]>> They were kind of the strongest rivals of the Aztecs. They successfully defended their borders. They actually used a type of advanced metallurgy. It's pretty fascinating and it was kind of rare throughout the Americas. But anyway, this ensured that their language remained dominant in the region that is now Mijuakan. And I think it's interesting that we go a little bit throughout the country of Mexico today and understand where each old or ancient culture existed and what languages they used because those are the languages that in many cases survive today.

[00:07:56]Further south and east, the landscape was dominated by the various Mayan languages which >> of course is the Yucatan Maya now >> which were tied to the remnants of the great classic Maya city states which we often call the Mayan Empire. They weren't really an empire but whatever that's not what this >> wasn't it more like a confederation >> video is about. They spoke this set of languages in the Yucatan Peninsula. The Yucatakaya language was the standard spoken across a series of petty kingdoms or Kucha Cababalob like Kabalob >> and Sauta. These were independent provinces that shared a common culture and language but were often at war with one another too. Meanwhile, in the highlands of what is now Chiapas and Guatemala, groups like the Kish and the Kachikel. By the way, I'm probably mispronouncing all of these.

[00:08:48]>> I would do no better. They maintained their own kingdoms with distinct but related mind languages. Their languages served as sort of the primary vehicle for their sophisticated astronomical, scientical and historical records such as the poor vu which is a sort of mythological but also historical record of their existence as a people >> but written in Spanish. Then in the rugged terrain of Aaka, the Zapotech and the mixed tech cultures created a very dense competing network of citystates.

[00:09:20]The Zapotech centered around Monte Alban and later Mitla used various Zapotcan languages that are part of the Otto Mangian family. And speaking of that family, it's important to note that these 68 languages are grouped into less families. There's essentially 11 of them. The Mayan city states are a good example of that. You know, they have one family of their own. This means that many of these multiple languages are somewhat mutually >> Walmart >> understandable or at least share a common identifiable heritage. This map shows us where they are. Just near to Zapotech, the mixtex that I mentioned were famous for their new they're essentially petty kingdoms.

[00:10:07]>> Mist famous for their new such as Tilongo Dutipek and each mixtec king or I think they called them Ia ruled a small territory and they had a version of a language of their own or even their specific language entirely.

[00:10:24]Those languages were used in their famous cotices. These sort of screenfold books that used pictographic writing to record the genealogies and the conquests of their rulers.

[00:10:35]>> Those are always the coolest to look at.

[00:10:38]But because the geography of Aaka is so mountainous, these small kingdoms often stayed relatively isolated, which is why there are so many different mutually unintelligible varieties of Zapotech and Mixtec spoken in those same mountains today. It's similar to why Papu Guinea also has so many unique languages. We covered it in a previous video. The communities are so isolated by mountains, forts and rivers that so many different >> geography basically >> languages develop in the Gulf Coast. The Toonak and Uastic peoples held their own territories too. The Toonak were centered around cities like Elaheen and later Simpoa and they spoke their own languages. They were among the first to encounter the Spanish and were quick to ally with them to escape the heavy tribute demands that they exerted on the Aztecs, for instance. But they suffered with colonization nonetheless >> and probably had a 90% uh mortality rate uh as most people did.

[00:11:40]>> For the north, the Wastex represented a pretty interesting linguistic mystery in the middle of all of this. They spoke a Mayan language despite being geographically separated from the rest of the Mayan world by hundreds of kilometers. The reason why seems to be that they just came from the same place a long time ago and their geographical isolation allowed them to keep those linguistic features from where they came from. Even though >> like a colony, it's how I view it.

[00:12:07]>> They were surrounded by other cultures.

[00:12:09]In the northern reaches, the territory was less about those massive stone seas that we associate with the Aztecs and more about the Chicha nations, a term that the Aztecs used for a group of pneumatic or semi-nomatic peoples. This included the Ottomi who lived on the fringes of the central empires. They spoke an Ottomanian language. The Otomi were often utilized as a kind of mercenary warrior company type of thing both by the Aztecs and later the Spanish. And interestingly, this helped their language persist in the central highlands because since they fought on both sides, they were usually seen as useful by both sides too and weren't really conquered and replaced culturally and linguistically. And just to wrap it up, further north were the Kamuri or >> Haramui >> or Taraumara. Many of these have different names in the canyons of Chihuahua and the Yaki along the rivers of Sonora. These groups didn't really have kingdoms in the European sense, but they were organized into, you know, kind of autonomous communities. Their languages belong to the Utu Aken family, making them kind of distant relatives of the Nawat speakers to the south. All of this is really interesting. But of course that when the Spanish arrived and started conquering these territories, they brought Spanish along with them. It became the new administration language.

[00:13:31]>> They brought Spanish along with them.

[00:13:33]They brought Christianity along with them. They brought they brought smallpox and other uh stuff. They didn't intend to do that, by the way. That was just, you know, unfortunate. Uh so 90% of these people get wiped out. their language is I mean think about the resistance now because you have only 10 to 15% of your population left your language resistance your religion resistance it goes down too because you don't have enough momentum anymore the tax language the military language as well as the language of education moving forward at the same time thousands if not millions of speakers of the native languages died out due to war or disease.

[00:14:22]The number of those native speakers, but still not enough death or Spanishization took place for >> Oh my god, bro. Look at that.

[00:14:32]Eight million deaths.

[00:14:42]15 20. Jeez. Just in a sense of like What's what's that? Like a fever of some sort? I don't know. I don't know. But you're talking about like 25 million deaths in just 50 years >> for them to disappear entirely. And so we can understand why so many exist up.

[00:15:11]It's like a world war death. It's because of the fact that Mexico wasn't unified and its many communities were geographically isolated. But the survival is what is most fascinating to me. When European diseases like smallpox and tyas decimated the main settlements, the survivors often retreated further into what was called the Diaka Caliente or the deep mountains where the Spanish found it too difficult or too expensive to follow. And in these remote refues, the native languages survived, too.

[00:15:42]Furthermore, many indigenous groups were kind of masters of what you could call a selective adaptation. They would adopt Spanish names, convert to Catholicism to satisfy the colonial authorities. We just talked about this. If you guys haven't seen it, we just did the uh the last pagans of Europe by religion for breakfast and we talked about the Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, the people in the Baltics, people in the far northeast of Europe undergoing a similar colonization of some sort you could call it, where they're having they obviously have their own paganistic animistic religion. Paganistic is just a umbrella term in this case. They have their own animistic religion and well Christianity is coming and they're mostly doing force conversions.

[00:16:41]Well, they do, you know, they do something called creization where they have to, you know, you know, mix the two, mix the deities, mix the cultural uh appropriation of of of that.

[00:17:00]They have to, you know, change everything.

[00:17:04]And this is selective adaptation is nothing, you know, unique here. There's that. There's, you know, we we saw that in the first nations in Canada.

[00:17:15]Obviously, the Native Americans or the Indians in the United States, uh, American Indians in the United States, you had to go through the same thing with, you know, selective schools. Uh, you had to change your name, you had to change your how you looked. It's it's it's it's appropriate yourself.

[00:17:36]I think it's all derived from religion at at its base. But yeah, >> but they continue to conduct their internal community business, their traditional agricultural rituals and their family lives in >> but he's saying is utilizing the selective adaptation helped them survive by masking the change >> entirely in their mother native tongues.

[00:17:58]It's interesting because similar things happened in Europe.

[00:18:02]>> Oh my god, bro.

[00:18:05]I just said that >> even in Spain specifically when the crown expelled all the Jews or forced Muslims to convert to Christianity pers >> yeah forced >> them with the Inquisition many of them did in public convert to Christianity but continued to practice their original religions in secret or at least in private >> good for them.

[00:18:26]>> This was a similar case with language because the Spanish were often satisfied with that outward display of loyalty and the payment of tribute. They didn't really police what was being said in the private homes of the pueblo. And this allowed the languages to stay alive in the domestic sphere, passed down from mother to child as a sort of inheritance that the Spanish swords and the European plagues couldn't touch. Even as the population crashed, the density of speakers in places like the Yucatan or the Oaxak valleys remained high enough that the linguistic landscape never fully turned entirely Spanish. It created a cultural resilience that allowed the languages to bounce back as the populations eventually recovered.

[00:19:10]So, okay, we understand why there are so many of them, the fact that Mexico wasn't unified, and the geographical isolation of those previous ancient kingdoms. And we understand how they survived because well the Spanish didn't really care enough to erase them or they weren't able to. But what do they actually sound like today? Comparing these languages to Spanish kind of highlights how deeply different they are and how they are tied to these specific pre-Colombian social structures. Spanish vocabulary is of course heavily influenced by the European and Mediterranean world.

[00:19:43]>> It's a romance language, right? with words like cababayo or trigo that were brought over by the colonizers. In contrast, the indigenous languages have highly specialized vocabularies for the American landscape. For example, while the Spanish have a word seo for a hill or mountain, Zabotek uses different terms based on the mountain's relationship with the community and its sacred status. In Awat, the word for ruler is platani, which literally translates to the one who speaks, emphasizing that the power of their kings was rooted in the authority of their oratory skills. In terms of specific word comparisons, the way these languages handle identity is pretty unique, too. In Spanish, the word for person is persona, but in many lying languages, the word is unique. But it often carries a connotation of being part of a larger community or what you could translate as a true human who follows the traditions of the ancestors.

[00:20:42]The word for earth in Spanish is focusing on the soil. In mixt the word for land or earth is nu which is often the same root used for village and people showing >> it's very interesting here >> that for the mixc kingdoms there was no separation between the soil the town and the people who live there and >> uh just more collective >> and when you compare the languages with each other you also understand they differ a lot too even between these indigenous ones while they share a common geographic space they are mostly not actually related to one another an Awat speaker and a Maya speaker belong to linguistic worlds that are as different as English and Chinese. They might share a common heritage at some point in the past of where their ancestors came from, but their usage by communities that were so unique in other aspects of their existence and so isolated geographically and politically contributed to their evolution in completely different ways. And all of those linguistic features show that the languages didn't just survive by accident. They were the essential operating systems for these petty kingdoms and empires designed to describe a world of sacred mountains, communal land, and royal lineages that existed long before a single word of Spanish was ever spoken in Mexico or all of the Americas for that matter. And while Spanish is the most spoken language there today, many of these languages remain as proof of the region's pre-colonial history.

[00:22:12]>> We got to do more ancient Americas. So, if you guys know any new ancient Americas videos that we should do, please put that down in the recommendations. Uh this this is just proof that such a you know, the surface, you know, when we look at me Mexico and the map, we don't see this uh this way. maps are very telling, not just, you know, geographic, but demographic, uh, and and so forth.

[00:22:41]Really interesting. You know, it's, you know, I would love to see also like a sidebyside of how many. One thing we didn't see, we we kind of guessed maybe like the top five or six. I think it just to be like four to five million. I wonder like all of them collectively what it would be. Um, but I'm sure there's probably a similar a similar look and feel to how this map looks to like all their other Central American and South American countries. Probably the same for the Caribbean. Uh, it's probably the same for the United States uh, and Canada. Uh, this is just, you know, the old world. The old world, basically.

[00:23:23]Thank you guys for being here. Let me know if you have any other context to add. I hope you have a good one. Peace out.