Communicative strategies across Quechua languages (original) (raw)
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Bringing the language forward: engagements with Quechua language planning and policy
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2023
The 2004 issue followed Hornberger's (1989) IJSL special issue on Bilingual Education and Language Planning in Indigenous Latin America by about 15 years; the current issue offers a similar revisiting of the field. 2 As long explored in linguistic scholarship, Quechua is best understood as a language family made up of different grouped varieties (see Hornberger and Coronel-Molina 2004 for more detail on the linguistic classification of Quechua). Throughout this special issue, the terms Quechua, Kichwa and Runasimi are used by different authors. In this introduction, we use the term Quechua to refer to all Quechua varieties. Additionally, we use the terms Kichwa to refer to the varieties spoken in Ecuador and by Ecuadorian migrant diaspora in the United States and Runasimi to refer to the Quechua
Learning Quechua in a Social and Cultural Community: a Global Experience
Research, Teaching and Actions in Higher Education on the un Sustainable Development Goals, 2021
Is not possible to educate while overlooking society or without a cultural context; the educational process always includes people using different cognitive tools. Therefore, a global awareness that aims to approach humanity to the Sustainable Development Goals should incorporate all voices, and among them the ones that have been more historically silenced, such as Indigenous voices, which cultural heritage is a key component for a balanced society. The most refined legacy of this Indigenous background is probably their language, which should have a real presence in the elaboration and discussion of local and global development policies. Among those voices, Quechua can be found: one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in the Americas, a living language practised by more than 10 million people both in the Andes and in other countries due to migration. This work seeks to make a reading of language learning and teaching as a process of social and cultural acquisition, as well as highlighting the design of the Quechua language program at the University of Pennsylvania and other similar initiatives in the United States interconnected for this purpose. The purpose of this educational initiative is that the Quechua culture, and its society, can have a presence in world conversations about the design of the present and future. UN's Sustainable
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2023
Over the last two decades, the United States has increasingly become a site of Quechua language use and reclamation. Reclamation programs have emerged, both promoting the language and fostering community empowerment, particularly among Latinx youth. In this essay, we draw on our experiences as U.S.-based Quechua-language educators and organizers to explore the participation of diasporic Quechua reclamation movements in the global advance of the language. We frame these U.S.-based projects not as discrete entities, but as initiatives in constant connection with their counterparts in the Andes. This reflection piece provides a timeline of academic and community organizations in New York City, a global urban center with one of the largest bilingual Quechua-Spanish communities outside of the Andes. We conclude that these diasporic bottom-up language policy and planning (LPP) efforts are natural agents of dialogue on Quechua-language education and an integral part of the international Quechua reclamation movement. ----- Durante las últimas dos décadas, en Estados Unidos, se han generado más espacios para el uso y reclamación cultural de las lenguas quechuas. Han surgido programas tanto para promover el idioma como para fomentar el empoderamiento comunitario mediante la lengua, particularmente entre jóvenes estadounidenses de herencia latinoamericana. Desde nuestras experiencias como educadores y gestores culturales, buscamos analizar la participación de diferentes movimientos diaspóricos de revitalización de lenguas indígenas en el avance global del quechua. Enmarcamos estos proyectos en los EE.UU. no como entidades aisladas, sino como dinámicas en constante conexión con los Andes. Este texto y reflexión proporcionan una cronología y recuento de organizaciones académicas y comunitarias en la ciudad de Nueva York, un centro urbano global con una de las comunidades bilingües quechua-español más grandes fuera de los Andes. Concluimos que estos esfuerzos de política y planificación lingüísticas desde la diáspora andina merecen ser también considerados como puntos de diálogo sobre la educación en lengua quechua y como parte integral de un movimiento internacional de reclamación cultural de esta lengua indígena.
Quechua language shift, maintenance, and revitalization in the Andes: the case for language planning
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2004
Although Quechua is spoken by eight to twelve million people across six South American countries, by most measures, Quechua is an endangered language. This article provides an overview of the current situation of Quechua language shift, maintenance, and revitalization, and makes a case for the importance of language planning for the survival and development of the language. We use Fishman's notion of physical/ demographic, social, and cultural dislocations as an organizing rubric for discussing Quechua's current situation (Fishman 1991: 55-65), and the typology of status, corpus, and acquisition planning to discuss the role of language planning in Quechua's position, both current and future. We take into account the role of linguistic ideologies and language attitudes in language shift, maintenance, and revitalization and in the language-planning process, working from the assumption that language is a critical element of ethnic identity for many Quechua speakers in the Andes.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2004
Current language policies in Bolivia are based on ideological assumptions that reflect the language practice of Spanish speakers, rather than sociolinguistic evidence. These assumptions include: that standardization is key to Quechua language revitalization and political empowerment; that etymological criteria are the best guide for elaborating a standard; and that literacy-and school-based functions are the most crucial to Quechua's future. Inasmuch as these assumptions conflict with the language ideologies of Quechua communities, policies' chances for success are diminished. Rather than focusing exclusively on domains where Spanish is dominant, language planners should address language shift in those domains that constitute Quechua's stronghold: the home and the community.
" It will emerge if they grow fond of it ": Translanguaging and power in Quechua teaching
This article addresses Quechua instruction to emergent bilinguals in urban schools, as part of the implementation of a language policy promoting Quechua in the Peruvian Andes. In the light of two other teachers who work in similar scenarios and the language ideologies of Quechua experts leading the language policy, this article analyzes a focal teacher who constructs alternative ideologies and subjectivities that contribute to transform the power relationships typically enacted in these racially segregated urban schools. Through translanguaging strategies for involving her diverse audience (Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García, 2009) and a critical language awareness approach to make the invisible visible and the inaudible audible (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004), this teacher constructs a community of legitimate Quechua speakers, which subverts the dominant representation of the bilingual speaker as the " perfectly " coordinated bilingual and the invisibilization of emergent bilin-guals in the official language policy. Like other studies that conceptualize teachers as policy makers (Menken & García, 2010), the present study shows that teachers negotiate with official language policies and can ultimately contest them in practice. However, in the case under study, this constitutes a process where the teacher initially reproduces ambiguous and contradictory discourses before reaching more critical positionings.
Language revitalisation in the Andes: Can the schools reverse language shift?
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural …, 1996
Quechua, often known as the language of the Incas, remains today a vital language with over 10 million speakers in several Andean republics. Nevertheless, census records and sociolinguistic studies document a continuous cross-generational shift from Quechua monolingualism to Spanish monolingualism in the latter half of the twentieth century, at both individual and community levels. An increasing awareness of the potential threat to the language has led to a variety of new initiatives for Quechua revitalization in the 1990s, initiatives which go beyond earlier experimental bilingual education projects designed primarily to provide mother tongue literacy instruction to indigenous children (in transitional or maintenance programs) to larger or more rooted efforts to extend indigenous language and literacy instruction to new speakers as well. Drawing on documents, interviews, and on-site participant observation, this paper will review and comment on two recent such initiatives: Bolivia's 1994 national educational reform incorporating the provision of bilingual intercultural education on a national scale; and a community-based effort to incorporate Quichua as a second language instruction in a school of the Ecuadorian highlands. G ra d uate S c hool of Edu c a tio n , U n iv e rsity of Pe n nsy lv a nia, 3 70 0 W aln ut S tre e t, P h ila d e lp h ia , PA 1 9 10 4 -6 2 16 , USA Quechua, often known as the language of the Incas, remains today a vital language with over 10 million speakers in several Andean republics. Nevertheless, census records and sociolinguistic studies document a continuous cross-generational shift from Quechua monolingualism to Spanish monolingualism in the latter half of the twentieth century, at both individual and community levels. An increasing awareness of the potential threat to the language has led to a variety of new initiatives for Quechua revitalisation in the 1990s, initiatives which go beyond earlier experimental bilingual education projects designed primarily to provide mother tongue literacy instruction to indigenous children (in transitional or maintenance programs) to larger or more rooted efforts to extend indigenous language and literacy instruction to new speakers as well. Drawing on documents, interviews, and on-site participant observation, this paper will review and comment on two recent such initiatives: Bolivia's 1994 national educational reform incorporating the provision of bilingual intercultural education on a national scale; and a community-based effort to incorporate Quichua as a second language instruction in a school of the Ecuadorian highlands.
Authenticity and unification in Quechua language planning
GSE Publications, 1998
With more than ten million speakers and numerous local and regional varieties, the unification and standardisation of Quechua/Quichua has been a complicated, politically charged, and lengthy process. In most Andean nations, great strides have been made towards unification of the language in recent decades. However, the process is far from complete, and multiple unresolved issues remain, at both national and local levels. A frequent sticking point in the process is the concern that the authenticity of the language will be lost in the move towards unification. This paper examines the potentially problematic tension between the goals of authenticity and unification. One case examines an orthographic debate which arose in the process of establishing an official orthography for Quechua at the national level in Peru. The second case study moves to the local level and concerns two indigenous communities in Saraguro in the southern Ecuadorian highlands where Spanish predominates but two Quichua varieties co-exist. The final section considers the implications of these debates and tensions for language planning and policy.