From the Yucatán Peninsula , the cradle of Mayan culture in southeastern Mexico , Santos Toz uses TikTok to teach young people the language his ancestors have spoken for centuries.

The 21-year-old from the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán discovered his calling to keep his ancestral vocabulary alive during the COVID-19 lockdowns three years ago.

His TikTok account (@tuzsantos322) has more than 343 thousand followers and 3.1 million likes.

In one of his videos, Santos Toze asks his followers, "Something green on the outside and yellow on the inside, what is it?"

"We're talking about the avocado, which in the Mayan language is called +en," answers Tuz, wearing an embroidered shirt and white hat, traditional Yucatan clothing.

Like many of their peers, his teenage sisters have a very limited knowledge of the language, Tuz told AFP.

"I realized that many young people have stopped speaking Maya. However, they speak it in their homes. Why? Because they are afraid. It's not that they are ashamed. They are afraid of being discriminated against," he says.

The Mayan language is spoken by 860,000 people, the majority of whom are in the Yucatan Peninsula, making it the second most widely spoken indigenous language after Nahuatl, according to official figures.

About 7.3 million Mexicans, or 6.1 percent of the population, speak an indigenous language.

Toz reveals that when he was a child, schools prohibited admission of students who only spoke the Mayan language.

Although public education is officially bilingual in Yucatán, teaching of the indigenous language is just beginning.

"Parents have started to stop teaching their children the Mayan language for fear of rejection," added Tuz, who shares linguistic knowledge with his students on his own initiative.

Introducing the language through social media was also not easy at first.
Tuz faced ridicule and criticism, but he also received letters from people who were happy to follow him, including old people who regretted not speaking the language of their ancestors.

And Tuz has followers in regions far from his home state, such as the United States, Canada and Australia.
Tuz records his videos with a cell phone, camera and tripod given to him as a gift by a DCN creator from the United States.

His videos are short and colourful, and he sometimes shoots them in the countryside, at his home, visiting a historical site or tasting a typical indigenous dish.

Coming from a low-income family, Tuz has just started earning money from his videos.

Although he often receives requests from followers to take selfies, he does not consider himself a full-time influencer.