This introduction consists of a brief overview of the people, cultures, and history of Mesoamerica, to give readers context and background for understanding precolonial Mesoamerican thought. It provides accounts of the languages, myths, and intellectual culture of the ancient Olmecs, one of the foundational early cultures of Mesoamerica, as well as of still extant groups such as the Maya, Aztecs, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs.

Nation-states are key players in the design and implementation of language policy. Language communities can rarely fully decide the future of their language, but they often have their own strategies to revive and strengthen their language. This chapter defines top-down and bottom up language policies, exemplifying how they may be implemented in different types of language planning (corpus, status, prestige and acquisition planning). It identifies issues that may arise in dealing with policy makers. Language rights are supported by various international legal instruments (such as the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages and the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights) and activists may refer to these for support, although appeals to such charters have rarely been successful in law. The capsule presents the Mexican Indigenous Language Promotion and Advocacy project (MILPA), a model of community-based language maintenance and advocacy work creating programs that foster language maintenance, multi-literacy, social justice, and Indígena pride.

This chapter looks at various kinds of language revitalization communities, and explores issues affecting different community types and subgroups of speakers within communities. Types include ‘original’ or ancestral communities; exiled, forcibly dispersed or resettled communities; diaspora and migrant communities; and communities of practice and learning. The latter are groups which deliberately develop social revitalization networks focusing on efforts to reverse shift, enhance mutual learning and communication, and mobilize available resources. An example of such a project in Nahuatl, Mexico, is described. Various types of speakers of heritage languages are also described, although we emphasize that categorizing individual speakers and their language competence can be counterproductive for people struggling to speak or learn their heritage language. The case studies describe the younger generation’s interest in developing new Wymysiöeryś identities in the twenty-first century; the diverse language practices of diaspora Mixtec communities; and the creation of a community of practice for the revitalization of Greko, Italy.

A stated goal of language documentation is to make language resources available for use in language revitalization. This chapter identifies some limitations and challenges of working with language documentation materials, particularly legacy (historical) documents and resources in digital language archives. It then suggests ways that language documenters can make their work more useful for revitalization purposes. It identifies often-ignored areas that documentation should target, such as family language, everyday usage and young people’s speech, and suggests further contextual information and metadata that should be included. Language revitalizers can also adopt the methods, practices and tools of language documenters and should be encouraged to document the processes, decision-making, events, successes and failures of their work so that they and others can learn from them. The capsules present technical advice on making audio and video language documentation recordings; a community-based research model for field methods courses on revitalization; and outcomes of a pilot study on Alznerish conducted during a field school in Poland, with methodological proposals for short-term studies.