Trust Me, The World’s Not Ending…

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Trust Me, The World’s Not Ending…

ID # 3736

My name is John Elliott and I have lived in North Carolina my entire life, and the same can be said for the majority of my extended family.  I grew up in Winston-Salem and have been in Chapel Hill for the last three and a half years, and I’m proud to say I’m a North Carolinian.  I make this statement of state pride because one of the most valuable things I’ve gained from having experiences abroad and with other cultures is a greater appreciation and understanding of what defines my own cultural heritage.

As an undergrad at UNC, I double major in Linguistics and Global Studies.  Within Global Studies, I study nation-state politics with a focus on Western Europe, which I originally chose because I’m getting a minor in German and my only previous international experience was in Germany (a month-long exchange program to Rottenberg am Neckar when I was in high school).  While I still love Europe and am very interested in EU politics and European language and culture, my studies in Linguistics brought me to Mesoamerican languages, of which there are many still thriving and some are even on the verge of entering a real linguistic renaissance.

This past summer, I spent six weeks in the Mexican state of Yucatan in an intensive language program to learn Yucatec Maya, the most spoken of the living Mayan languages in Mexico with nearly a million native speakers.  Given the history of repression, many Mayans are somewhat reluctant to speak their native language in the Spanish-dominated public, so the shock on a lot of faces when a tall white guy asks them ‘Ka t’aanik wa Maaya?’ (do you speak Maya) was a constant source of entertainment.  It was a great to see modern Mayan culture beyond the tourist-covered Chichen Itza and the fake doomsday prophesies, being able instead to spend time in community museums, slash-and-burn milpa farms, and – most importantly – peoples homes.  Mexico, like Germany, like any country in the world, is a diverse place with more than just a single cultural framework, and I feel like I had a first time experience in a Latin American nation that most people do not get – the indigenous one – especially given that I don’t really speak Spanish.

Of course, when you go all over the Yucatan and it’s ruins and come back speaking Maya, you are inevitably bombarded with the question “So, is the world really gonna end in 2012?”.  Anytime the question was brought up to any of our Mayan hosts, they would either laugh or have no idea what we were talking about.  So, either these descendants of the great calendar makers were trying deceive us into a false sense of security, or we really have nothing to worry about.  I would imagine it’s the latter.