The Changing Kichwa Language Map in Ecuador (original) (raw)
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Being & Speaking Kichwa in Otavalo, Ecuador: Language Ideologies & Language Vitality
This research argues that political and institutional efforts promoting a standardize Kichwa code or vernacular to unify numerous Kichwa linguistic groups are experienced as ‘limited’ to rural Kichwa indigenous populations, despite being seen as successful by particular populations. Secondary to Spanish, Kichwa, an official Ecuadorian language for “intercultural relations”, has been recently standardized and is now being taught in schools across the Ecuadorian Highlands. While the usage of Kichwa for in the Highlands grows, rural and agrarian people experience these efforts differently. I lived with and researched Runakuna or the indigenous Kichwa people in villages such as Agato, Quinchuqui, Peguche, Arias Uko, Pakta Llakta as well as the cities of Otavalo and Quito. Generally, urban Runakuna take pride in learning standardize Kichwa, while the rural Runakuna feel a sense a loss towards their heritage language. National development strategies, such as “Live Well” or “Buen Vivir” promulgate Ecuador’s western bilingual education models. The outcomes of these bilingual language policies affecting Kichwa are evaluated through the lens of prescriptive and denotative language ideologies and the corresponding “goals” they inform—yet, these outcomes are not representative of local Runakuna villages. Rural Kichwa Otavaleños perceive traditional bilingual education as incongruent with their local ways of life. The official bilingual education system in Otavalo falls short from being “Pluricultural” because it lacks the sensibilities and understandings that emanate from a local Kichwa cosmology. My research concludes that rural Runakuna are willing to linguistically adopt standardized Kichwa as long as local community values are not destabilized. These models take the form of “a balanced bilingualism”.
An indigenous language with more than one million speakers in Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, Kichwa is one of the most spoken indigenous languages in South America and an official language in Ecuador. Unfortunately, Kichwa is experiencing a rapid loss among young generations, which is leading to growing discontent about the education system, community and self-identity crises, among other issues. Furthermore, the situation of Kichwa is one example of a widespread indigenous language loss taking place worldwide, and it exemplifies the disappearance of indigenous cultures. It has been predicted that, by the end of the XXI century, approximately half of 7000 World languages will be extinct (Austin and Sallabank 2014, 2). Some more pessimistic sources provide an extinction rate by the end of the century up to 90%. However, there are efforts being done to revitalize endangered indigenous languages globally and, although many programs are struggling in their efforts, there are successful ex...
Linguistic Landscape. An international journal, 2018
This study considers the parallel expression of language policy toward Kichwa in the linguistic landscape of Yachay, two administratively independent government-funded institutions in Ecuador. Although the institutions share a geographic location, name, and goal of becoming a sciences and technology hub for Latin America, they maintain distinct identities through their official signage, providing opportunity for consideration of how recent political and cultural ideologies toward Ecuador’s language policy have been realized in the linguistic landscape of parallel institutions. Kichwa, a constitutionally-recognized minority language of the region, is largely absent from the landscape, providing little more than a shared institutional nomenclature. Instead, the language and culture are used as a commodity for promoting pan-Ecuadorian interculturality and indigenous values, even if these values are not otherwise overtly supported. Kichwa thus represents the ‘traditional’ Ecuador, while...
Kichwa Language and Culture Revitalization in Ecuador as Thinking-Feeling and Performance
2017
It has been predicted that, by the end of the XXI century, approximately half of 7000 World languages will be extinct (Austin and Sallabank 2014, 2). Some more pessimistic sources provide an extinction rate by the end of the century up to 90%. However, there are efforts being done to revitalize endangered indigenous languages globally and, although many programs are struggling in their efforts, there are successful examples of revitalization through these programs. The best studied examples include languages like Maori, Hawaiian, and Basque. The purpose of this project is to understand Kichwa language revitalization in comparative perspective with other language programs. Within this goal, this thesis addresses four main issues: The first will be to look at the growth and challenges faced by Kichwa revitalization movement. Then, the reasons and arguments that Kichwa revitalization activists provide for the undertaking of such task will be presented. This will be done with the purpose of drawing initial lessons from past and present failing projects attempting Kichwa revival. Lastly, the signs of hope for future and current revitalization projects from each interlocutor in my project will be presented and analyzed. With these goals in mind, I will present how Kichwa revitalization movements are operating in Ecuador and how these efforts influence the younger generation of speakers.
PRODUCING AND CIRCULATING KICHWA COMMUNITY IN INTERCULTURAL ECUADOR
Economic globalization combined with increased rights for Indigenous peoples has resulted in new ways of imagining and enacting community. Neoliberal economic reforms have substantially weakened subsistence agriculture, while Ecuador’s Indigenous movement has successfully increased educational and political opportunities. While both factors weaken their collective base, rather than simply disappearing or being assimilated into dominant, mestizo society, many Indigenous communities are reconstructing themselves to reflect this new reality. This essay examines four ways through which new forms of community are articulated—political, economic, educational and communicational. Kichwa politicians have won political office in Otavalo and Cotacachi. Kichwa NGOs articulate development policies that recognize their ethnically mixed populations. The Kayambi confederation builds community through its free school in an attempt to fortify local identities, while preparing young people to participate in the wider world. Finally, OtavalosOnLine.com seeks to create a virtual community to connect its widespread following to home. This intercultural approach to community building allows them to borrow from and contribute to national and global processes without sacrificing their own identities.
Signs and Society, 2020
Can Indigenous language use transform state politics? In Ecuador, speakers of Kichwa (Ecuadorian Quechua) head a national, intercultural bilingual school system that promotes and teaches Indigenous languages. In their professional roles, they give speeches during which they speak as national state agents. Most commonly, they begin such events by using standardized Kichwa to greet and welcome attendees and then switch to Spanish. Although brief, such greetings serve to mark the state as intercultural. However, they also make Kichwa commensurate with Spanish. Speakers encounter a conundrum in how more extensive or illegible Kichwa speech may not demonstrate a modernist, commensurate form of Kichwa for non-Indigenous-identifying addressees and may even trigger anxiety or censure from Ministry of Education higher-ups. Yet, Kichwa state agents simultaneously risk angering Kichwa-speaking addressees with intralinguistic shift and restricting a movement to reclaim a language to curtailed speech acts within extensive non-Kichwa (Spanish) speech, further prioritizing that language and addressees who speak it. Their dilemmas indicate the challenges of language standardization in recognition politics and illustrate how semiotic processes of entextualization and enregisterment are integral to commensuration.
History and Language in the Andes
2011
"The modern world began with the clash of civilisations between Spaniards and native Americans. Their interplay and struggles ever since are mirrored in the fates of the very languages they spoke. The conquistadors wrought theirs into a new 'world language'; yet the Andes still host the New World's greatest linguistic survivor, Quechua. Historians and linguists see this through different - but complementary - perspectives. This book is a meeting of minds, long overdue, to weave them together. It ranges from Inca collapse to the impacts of colonial rule, reform, independence, and the modern-day trends that so threaten native language here with its ultimate demise. CONTENTS 0. Introduction: History, Linguistics, and the Andean Past: A Much-Needed Conversation - Adrian J. Pearce and Paul Heggarty Part I: The Colonial Era 1. Language and Society in Early Colonial Peru - Gabriela Ramos 2. A Visit to the Children of Chaupi Ñamca: From Myth to Andean History via Onomastics and Demography - Frank Salomon and Sue Grosboll 3. What Was the 'Lengua General' of Colonial Peru? - César Itier 4. 'Mining the Data' on the Huancayo-Huancavelica Quechua Frontier - Adrian J. Pearce and Paul Heggarty Part II: Reform, Independence, & The Early Republic 5. The Bourbon Reforms, Independence, and the Spread of Quechua and Aymara - Kenneth J. Andrien 6. Reindigenisation and Native Languages in Peru's Long Nineteenth Century (1795-1940) - Adrian J. Pearce 7, Quechua Political Literature in Early Republican Peru (1810-1876) - Alan Durston Part III: Towards Present and Future 8. The Quechua Language in the Andes Today: Between Statistics, the State, and Daily Life - Rosaleen Howard 9. 'Ya no podemos regresar al quechua': Modernity, Identity, and Language Choice among Migrants in Urban Peru - Tim Marr""
In the twenty-first century books such as Michael Uzendoski’s The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador (2005), Norman Whitten and Dorothea Scott Whitten’s Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia (2003), Uzendoski and Edith Calapucha-Tapuy’s The Ecology of the Spoken Word: Amazonian Storytelling and Shamanism among the Napo Runa (2012), Janis Nuckolls’ Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective (2010), and Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013), it is made clear that Amazonian Quichua-Quechua-speaking people manifest central paradigms of power and dynamic cultural systems that serve both as axes of interculturality and templates for cultural continuity and transformation. To establish the contextual basis for this special topic, we turn now to a brief introduction to, and overview of, Amazonian Quichua-speaking people of Ecuador. This section is taken from a piece co-written by Uzendoski and Whitten, upon which we elaborate in the ensuing section.