Language Revitalization Processes and Prospects: Quichua in the Ecuadorian Andes (Bilingual Education & Bilingualism) - Softcover

King, Kendall A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853594946 ISBN 13: 9781853594946

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2001

Synopsis

This work explores educational and community efforts to revitalize the Quichua language in two indigenous Andean communities of southern Ecuador. Analyzing the linguistic, social, and cultural processes of positive language shift, this book contributes to our understanding of formal and informal educational efforts to revitalize threatened languages.

About this title

About the Author

Kendall A. King is Professor of Multilingual Education and Associate Dean for Graduate Education and Faculty Development at the University of Minnesota, USA. She received the AAAL Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award for her work, which focuses on the educational and familial practices impacting language use, language learning and equity.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Language Revitalization Processes and Prospects

Quichua in the Ecuadorian Andes

By Kendall A. King

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2001 Kendall A. King
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85359-494-6

Contents

Foreword by Nancy Hornberger, vii, 
Acknowledgements, ix, 
Preface, xi, 
1 Language Revitalization, 1, 
2 Setting the Scene, 33, 
3 Language Use and Ethnic Identity in Lagunas, 70, 
4 Language Use and Ethnic Identity in Tambopamba, 108, 
5 Quichua Instruction and the Community Schools, 139, 
6 Prospects and Processes Revisited, 185, 
Conclusion, 229, 
Appendices, 232, 
Appendix 1: Monthly schedule of research activities, 232, 
Appendix 2: Log of audio-taped interviews, 233, 
Appendix 3: Interview guides, 235, 
References, 240, 
Indices, 254, 

CHAPTER 1

Language Revitalization

The town meeting hall in the southern Ecuadorian highlands was filled beyond capacity. Women sat with their children on rows of small wooden benches; most of the men and the older boys stood to the sides and at the back, clustered near the entrance. After several delays, numerous speeches, and lengthy rounds of applause for the organizers of the event, the selection of the Sara Ñuesta (/Q/ 'Corn Queen') of Saraguro began. Each of the six teenage contestants, carefully clothed in her best and most traditional attire, was escorted to the stage by a teenage boy, also in traditional costume. While much of their clothing was just a finer, newer version of their everyday attire, all of the teenagers had exchanged their usual soft, felt hats for large, heavy ones made of pressed wool, typically worn only by the eldest Saraguros. And instead of their everyday sandals and athletic shoes, all were barefoot.

Upon reaching the stage, contestants were asked the same five basic questions about themselves and their communities in Quichua, a language which was not their mother tongue. The questions had been given to the Spanish-dominant contestants in advance so that they would have several days to prepare and practice their answers. Yet their responses clearly revealed their unfamiliarity with what has become, for most Saraguros, a second or foreign language. Some contestants stumbled through their answers, pausing after each Quichua word; others, unable to respond at all to the simplest questions about their name and age, awkwardly remained silent.

Between presentations of the contestants, the event's principal organizers (in fluent Spanish and halting Quichua) explained the benefits of knowing Quichua. Reasons ranged from the cultural importance of Quichua for Saraguros to the 'proven superiority' of Quichua as a computer programming language. While Quichua was clearly not the primary language of the contestants, the pronunciation and word choice of the event organizers indicated that they too spoke Quichua as a second language. Furthermore, the commotion and conversation during the Quichua monologues suggested that Quichua was also not a primary, nor even a fully comprehensible language for most of the audience.

The selection of the 1994 Saraguro 'Corn Queen' depended, to a large extent, on speaking a language no longer regularly used by most Saraguros. The annual contest is not a harvest ritual inherited by Saraguros from their Andean ancestors, but rather one of many events organized in recent years by Saraguros to display and promote what is perceived to be traditional Saraguro culture. These events, which might be described as exhibitions of 'metaculture' (Urban, 1993), focus on emblematic components of Saraguro ethnic identity. It is not surprising that language, as one of the more tangible aspects of identity, is frequently a central focus of public attention. This focus on language is particularly interesting given the position of the Saraguros.

As the Saraguros have shifted from speaking primarily Quichua to speaking mostly Spanish, they have nonetheless retained their Saraguro ethnic identity, that is, they define themselves as indigenous and carefully mark themselves as such with locally and nationally recognized indigenous Saraguro apparel and hair styles. While clearly identifiable as Saraguros, this group is also part of the Quichua nation. The Quichua, with over two million members, are by far the most numerous of the ten indigenous nationalities in Ecuador.

Yet the Saraguros are also one of a growing number of indigenous groups who face the possibility of losing their ancestral language as an oral channel of communication. In recent years, as it has become clear that most Saraguro communities are quickly approaching Spanish monolingualism, the decline in both Quichua competence and usage has increasingly become a source of concern and even embarrassment for many Saraguros. Concomitantly, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, in recent decades Saraguros have gained greater authority over their own schools and communities. Largely as a result of these two developments, many Saraguros, both individually and collectively, are attempting to use Quichua in new ways and to revitalize the language within their communities.

These efforts and the communities in which they are embedded are the starting points for this study. More precisely, this book seeks to contribute to our understanding of language revitalization through analysis of language use and ethnic identity in two Saraguro communities. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the region and detailed descriptions of school and community patterns of language use, language attitudes, and conceptions of ethnic identity, the book analyzes the socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural processes that correspond with 'positive,' societal-level language shift.

Basic Terms and Definitions

Language revitalization is best conceptualized as one of several types of societal-level language shift. Perhaps the most well-known instance of language revitalization to date is the case of Hebrew, which in the period of 1880–1921 was transformed from a literary, scholarly, and liturgical language to a regularly spoken vernacular (Spolsky, 1995). Before delving into the discussion of language revitalization in detail, it is helpful to consider briefly three closely related terms: (1) language maintenance, (2) language loss or obsolescence, and (3) language death. Only in the context of these sister terms can the concept of language revitalization be fully understood.

Language maintenance, quite simply, is the continued use of a language by a particular group. For more powerful, majority-language groups, this continuation of use is often a non-issue, and something of which most speakers are not conscious. Spanish speakers in Mexico or Spain, for example, might worry about speaking 'good' Spanish; they are not, however, concerned with the possible death or disappearance of the Spanish language. For less powerful, minority-language speakers in contrast, language maintenance tends to entail conscious effort and is often a collective goal in the face of adverse circumstances.

Most definitions of language maintenance implicitly adopt the perspective of speakers of minority languages. Nahir (1984: 315), for example, defines language maintenance as

the preservation of the use of a group's native language, as a first or even as a second language, where political, social, economic, educational, or other pressures threaten or cause (or are perceived to threaten or cause) a decline in the status of the language as a means of communication, a cultural medium, or a symbol of group or national identity.

Similarly, Marshall's (1994: 24) definition also implies planned efforts in the face of adverse conditions, and emphasizes that language maintenance consists of efforts 'to counteract slippage in number of speakers'.

Hyltenstam and Stroud (1996: 568) argue that for the concepts of language maintenance or language shift even to be relevant in a particular context, two conditions must be met. First, there must exist a 'contact situation between speech communities of two (or more) languages/varieties'. Second, there must be a 'factual and/or perceived power differential or state of inequitable access to important resources (be they political, legislative, economic, educational, or cultural) between groups'. For Hyltenstam and Stroud, in other words, language maintenance is a salient term only when a group has both the opportunity and the incentive to collectively shift from one language to another. Thus, while language maintenance simply can refer to the continued use of a particular language by a specific group, the term also tends to imply that the group intentionally does so under socially, economically, or otherwise adverse conditions.

Language loss, in contrast, means that a particular group ceases to maintain its language and that the 'community gives up a language completely in favor of another one' (Fasold, 1992: 213). As Dorian (1982: 46) has noted, this 'gradual displacement of one language by another in the lives of the community members' – often through the contraction in the number of speakers and domains of use – typically occurs 'where there is a sharp difference in prestige and in the level of official support for the two (or more) languages concerned'. This process of language loss, which is often referred to by linguists as language obsolescence, 'may result in the emergence of historically inappropriate morphology and/or phonological forms together with extensive borrowing' (Brenzinger & Dimmendaal, 1992: 3).

The end-point of language loss or obsolescence is language death (Jones, 1998a). Language death can be conceptualized in two ways. First, a language is said to have died when there are no longer any living speakers of that language. For example, the Yana language, indigenous to North America, is reported to have died with the death of its last and famous speaker, Ishi (Kroeber, 1961; Grinevald Craig, 1997). This is the most common way in which the term is used. However, the concept of language death can also be applied in a second manner: to describe the end result of language loss within a particular community. Fasold (1992: 213), for example, seems to adopt this second stance, defining language death as that which 'occurs when a community shifts to a new language totally so that the old language is no longer used'. Applying the term in this second manner, many Saraguro communities can be said to be close to experiencing the death of Quichua. Despite the fact that Quichua (or related varieties of the language) is spoken by roughly ten million indigenous persons in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, Quichua might well die out within the next two or three decades in the Saraguro region.

Faced with the imminent possibility of language death, Saraguros have initiated efforts which seek to revitalize Quichua within their communities. Language revitalization can be defined as the attempt to add new forms or new functions to a language which is threatened with language loss or death, with the aim of increasing its uses and users. This definition will be discussed in greater detail later. For now, it is important to note that as it is defined here, language revitalization encompasses efforts not only to expand the linguistic system of an embattled minority language, but also to bring the language into new domains for new uses among new types of speakers.

Language Revitalization as a Field of Study

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in societal-level language shift in general and language revitalization in particular. When I first began to investigate language revitalization efforts in the early 1990s, there were few published works on the topic. Several excellent, in-depth studies of language loss and language death had been published, most notably those of Gal (1979), Dorian (1981), and Hill and Hill (1986). However, there were only two works dedicated to the topic of language revitalization at that time. The first among these was Ellis and mac a'Ghobhainn's The Problem of Language Revival, an early, inspirational, and insightful attempt to present a general introduction to 'the task of cultural and linguistic revival,' as well as to encourage speakers of Celtic languages to continue their struggles towards that end (Ellis & mac a'Ghobhainn, 1971: 9). A second important work appearing two decades later was Fishman's Reversing Language Shift (1991), which provided policy-level overviews of 13 cases of language revitalization from around the globe.

In addition to Ellis, mac a'Ghobhainn, and Fishman, a small number of other scholars had begun to direct their attention to issues related to language revitalization. As early as 1971, for example, John Macnamara assessed the successes and failures of the Irish restoration movement. Benton (1986) provided an early analysis of the roles of schools in language revival in Ireland and New Zealand; and Brandt and Ayoungman (1989) published a practical guide to language renewal and maintenance. While the 1970s and 1980s saw a handful of articles on language revitalization such as these (additional examples include Brandt, 1988; Dressler & Wodak-Leodolter, 1977), as both the severity and awareness of the problem of language loss and death intensified, interest in how 'to do' language revitalization correspondingly increased. This trend holds true among community-level activists, as well as academics.

At the community level, it has often been the case that only as the last remaining native speakers of an ancestral language reach their final years, do members become sufficiently alarmed and motivated to begin arduous and intensive efforts to either archive or teach their native language (Huss, 1999). Drawing from her study of Karelian, a threatened language of northwest Russia, Pyöli (1998: 129) notes that 'paradoxically, some kind of ethnic awakening does not seem to arise among the minorities until the terminal stage of a language, when statistics already reflect the decline of minority-language speakers' (emphasis hers).

Leanne Hinton (1994) documents how language revitalization efforts have developed in recent years among dozens of Native Californian groups, most of which have less than a dozen living speakers. For example, Wintu, an indigenous Californian language, has only six fluent speakers. For Wintu and other California Indian languages, the main hope for 'rebuilding the fire' rests with the Master–Apprentice Language Learning Program, which pairs older, fluent speakers of the threatened languages with young learners. These language learning 'teams' attempt to create an immersion experience in which the language is acquired through regular, intensive, and naturalistic sessions where the younger member of the pair informally converses with and elicits language from the elder native speaker (Hinton, 1994). As part of this program, for example, Florence Jones, a Wintu Indian doctor, works four times a week with her granddaughter and apprentice, Caleen Sisk-Franco, to pass on the Wintu language.

The program seems to be successful not just in transmitting the language to new speakers, but also in enriching the lives and relationships of both the masters and the apprentices. For some members of the roughly 20 tribes which have participated in the program, the teams' efforts have also renewed pride in their heritage and hope for the future (Hinton, 1998a). Yet, at the same time, in assessing the prospects for the survival of these languages, many of which have only a handful of speakers, it is hard not to wonder if this effort might be a case of 'too little, too late'. And given the fact that none of California's 50 indigenous languages is currently being learned in the home by children as a primary language (Hinton, 1998a), the prospects for the continued survival of these languages seem less than certain.

At the academic level, only after multiple 'doomsday' predictions of the imminent loss of most of the world's languages – at times followed by debate concerning whether the topic merited the attention of linguists at all (e.g. Dorian, 1993; Ladefoged, 1992) – did language revitalization begin to receive serious attention from the academic community and beyond. For those not directly witnessing language loss or language death in their own language communities, the dramatic quantitative picture of the future world linguistic landscape has perhaps been the most convincing 'call to arms.'

It is generally agreed that of the estimated 6000 languages on the planet, roughly half are either currently endangered or near extinction (Krauss, 1992a; Wurm, 1998). Within the United States and Canada, for instance, of the 210 indigenous languages still extant, about 86% are moribund, that is, no longer spoken by children (Krauss, 1998b). Furthermore, predictive calculations based on the number of 'safe' languages – those which enjoy official state support and relatively large numbers of speakers – suggest that by the year 2100, as many as 90% of the world's languages could be either extinct or moribund (Krauss, 1992a). This estimate is further supported by recent data from the Summer Institute of Linguistics which indicate that there are 51 languages with only one remaining speaker and almost 500 languages with fewer than 100 speakers (Crystal, 1999). Indeed, given the fact that 96% of the world's languages are spoken by only 4% of its people, it is hardly surprising that we are currently losing roughly one language every two weeks (Crystal, 1999; Geary, 1997).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1853594946
• ISBN 13: 9781853594946
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272