Indigenous Language Loss in Mexico: The Process of Language Displacement in Verbal Interaction

Will Mexico’s 56 indigenous peoples survive as ethnic groups that differ from mainstream mestizo society or will their languages and ethnic identities die out in the course of the 21st century? This question is central to the national debate on the nature of the Mexican nation state - pluricultural or homogeneous -, a debate that recovered strength with the 1992 amendment to the Constitution that recognizes the existence of indigenous peoples for the first time in Mexican history and grants them certain cultural and linguistic rights.