Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Inhabiting Language

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Image courtesy of CCCB

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, linguist and activist for the rights of the Mixe people of Mexico, speaks about the challenge of imagining linguistically diverse communities.

The UN estimates that 40% of the world’s 6,700 languages are in danger of disappearing, which means a loss not only of linguistic diversity but also of social, political and cultural diversity. In her book Ää: Manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística (Ää: Manifestos on Linguistic Diversity, Almadía, 2023), the Mixe linguist and activist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil draws attention to the paradoxical nature of the fact that, as the number of languages at risk keeps growing, diversity is taking center stage in contemporary political discourse. The threat of disappearance is glaringly looming over what, in the West, have been called “Indigenous languages,” a category which, as a product of colonialism, has contributed towards the minoritisation and folklorisation of languages that are spoken by more than seven thousand of the world’s non-state nations.

In this session, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil will talk about the political and cultural situation of Mexico’s First Peoples and will invite her audience to imagine forms of coexistence that set aside monolingualism and open up to diversity. Where is a culture left when it can no longer be spoken in its own language? How to build communities where linguistic polyphony is an echo of mutual recognition and harmony in cohabitation?

Event will be held in Spanish and Catalan.

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