The great majority of Mexicans, of course, speak Spanish. Of those included in the language enumeration in 1914, 88 per cent used Spanish as the usual means of communication. The rest were divided among 48 enumerated tongues. The Nahuatl or Mexicano was still used by over half a million, the Maya by 227,883, the Zapoteco by 224,863, and the Otomi by 209,640. None of the others were spoken by as many as one hundred thousand and some were evidently disappearing remnants.[1] Nevertheless that the Spanish tongue has not been adopted by so large a proportion of Mexicans in the four hundred years since dominion was established is an indication that the church, the school, and the government have all failed to bring a large number of Mexicans into touch with European standards of civilization.
One of the least satisfactory of the schedules of any census is that dealing with religion, because the declaration of membership in a church made to the enumerator may mean merely an occasional attendance or an almost inherited membership. The religious census of Mexico is not an exception. The conversion of the country to Christianity after the conquest was accomplished under circumstances similar to all those of the time. It was a surface conversion and often hardly that. Even up to the present time though 99 per cent of the population are listed as Catholics, the depth of the belief of a large part of the ignorant lower classes is obviously not great.
- ↑ Boletín de la dirección general de estadística, 5, México, 1914, p. 159.
