Quechua Spanish Research Articles

Migrant bilingual youth, family, and school language policy: ethnographic insights for urban Quechua education

Abstract In this paper, I draw on the ethnography of language planning and policy to consider how urban Indigenous language education might benefit from understanding the meanings and processes behind other language planning and policy activities migrant youth participate in, specifically, family language policymaking activities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in the region of Cusco, Perú I examine the experiences of two youth from rural hometowns and of their families. My analysis discusses how family language policies influenced youth’s shifting repertoires towards and away from Quechua, how youth drew on their Quechua–Spanish bilingualism to act as family language policy agents guided by local crianza and raciolinguistic ideologies, and how youth experienced Quechua language education in urban high schools. I argue that urban Quechua education efforts need to consider how migrant youth experience and shape their bilingualism and that of their families across rural-urban continua in order to craft safe and meaningful spaces where youth can participate in the strengthening of their Quechua language practices and identities.

The Role of Prosody and Morphology in the Mapping of Information Structure onto Syntax

The mapping of information structure onto morphology or intonation varies greatly crosslinguistically. Agglutinative languages, like Inuktitut or Quechua, have a rich morphological layer onto which discourse-level features are mapped but a limited use of intonation. Instead, English or Spanish lack grammaticalized morphemes that convey discourse-level information but use intonation to a relatively large extent. We propose that the difference found in these two pairs of languages follows from a division of labor across language modules, such that two extreme values of the continuum of possible interactions across modules are available as well as combinations of morphological and intonational markers. At one extreme, in languages such as Inuktitut and Quechua, a rich set of morphemes with scope over constituents convey sentence-level and discourse-level distinctions, making the alignment of intonational patterns and information structure apparently redundant. At the other extreme, as in English and to some extent Spanish, a series of consistent alignments of PF and syntactic structure are required to distinguish sentence types and to determine the information value of a constituent. This results in a complementary distribution of morphology and intonation in these languages. In contact situations, overlap between patterns of module interaction are attested. Evidence from Quechua–Spanish and Inuktitut–English bilinguals supports a bidirectionality of crosslinguistic influence; intonational patterns emerge in non-intonational languages to distinguish sentence types, whereas morphemes or discourse particles emerge in intonational languages to mark discourse-level features.

Efficient Estimation of Children's Language Exposure in Two Bilingual Communities.

Purpose The language that children hear early in life is associated with their speech-language outcomes. This line of research relies on naturalistic observations of children's language input, often captured with daylong audio recordings. However, the large quantity of data that daylong recordings generate requires novel analytical tools to feasibly parse thousands of hours of naturalistic speech. This study outlines a new approach to efficiently process and sample from daylong audio recordings made in two bilingual communities, Spanish-English in the United States and Quechua-Spanish in Bolivia, to derive estimates of children's language exposure. Method We employed a general sampling with replacement technique to efficiently estimate two key elements of children's early language environments: (a) proportion of child-directed speech (CDS) and (b) dual language exposure. Proportions estimated from random sampling of 30-s segments were compared to those from annotations over the entire daylong recording (every other segment), as well as parental report of dual language exposure. Results Results showed that approximately 49 min from each recording or just 7% of the overall recording was required to reach a stable proportion of CDS and bilingual exposure. In both speech communities, strong correlations were found between bilingual language estimates made using random sampling and all-day annotation techniques. A strong association was additionally found for CDS estimates in the United States, but this was weaker at the Bolivian site, where CDS was less frequent. Dual language estimates from the audio recordings did not correspond well to estimates derived from parental report collected months apart. Conclusions Daylong recordings offer tremendous insight into children's daily language experiences, but they will not become widely used in developmental research until data processing and annotation time substantially decrease. We show that annotation based on random sampling is a promising approach to efficiently estimate ambient characteristics from daylong recordings that cannot currently be estimated via automated methods.

Neural machine translation with a polysynthetic low resource language

Low-resource languages (LRL) with complex morphology are known to be more difficult to translate in an automatic way. Some LRLs are particularly more difficult to translate than others due to the lack of research interest or collaboration. In this article, we experiment with a specific LRL, Quechua, that is spoken by millions of people in South America yet has not undertaken a neural approach for translation until now. We improve the latest published results with baseline BLEU scores using the state-of-the-art recurrent neural network approaches for translation. Additionally, we experiment with several morphological segmentation techniques and introduce a new one in order to decompose the language’s suffix-based morphemes. We extend our work to other high-resource languages (HRL) like Finnish and Spanish to show that Quechua, for qualitative purposes, can be considered compatible with and translatable into other major European languages with measurements comparable to the state-of-the-art HRLs at this time. We finalize our work by making our best two Quechua–Spanish translation engines available on-line.

Vowel categories and allophonic lowering among Bolivian Quechua–Spanish bilinguals

This paper is an acoustic study describing the vowel spaces of bilingual Quechua–Spanish speakers in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with a particular focus on the height of mid and high vowels, in order to explore longstanding questions about the nature of Quechua vowel categories. South Bolivian Quechua is generally described as phonemically trivocalic with high-vowel lowering in presence of uvular consonants, but there has been little acoustic study of vowel formant characteristics (Cerrón-Palomino 1987, Laime Ajacopa, Cazazola & Pairumani 2007). The current study quantifies previous impressionistic observations of the vowel system and describes the acoustic properties of the Quechua vowels. Eleven bilingual speakers of South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish were recorded in a Quechua translation task and a Spanish list-reading task. Results of Bayesian models indicate that Quechua high vowels do appear to undergo systematic lowering following uvular consonants, supporting earlier descriptions. The results also demonstrate that lowering is consistent throughout the duration of the vowels, challenging a purely coarticulatory motivation for the observed lowering pattern. The allophonic mid-vowels of Quechua and the phonemic high and mid vowels of Spanish also have formant characteristics that may differ from one another, providing evidence for the hypothesis that these bilingual speakers could potentially command two separate vowel systems with different bases of articulation. These findings are also relevant for questions related to the nature of three-vowel systems, and whether or not they may contain true mid-vowel allophones.

Spanish as a second language when L1 is Quechua: Endangered languages and the SLA researcher

Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Quechua is the largest indigenous language family to constitute the first language (L1) of second language (L2) Spanish speakers. Despite sheer number of speakers and typologically interesting contrasts, Quechua–Spanish second language acquisition is a nearly untapped research area, due to the marginalization of Quechua-speaking people. This review considers contributions to the field of second language acquisition gleaned from studying the grammars of Quechua speakers who learn Spanish as well as monolingual Quechua and Spanish speakers in the contact area. Contribution to the documentation and revitalization of the Quechua languages is discussed as an ethical and scientific imperative.

Inga Language and Culture Revitalization in Putumayo, Colombia

Increasing levels of Quechua–Spanish bilingualism and increased use of Spanish within indigenous communities and classrooms have given rise to concern about Quechua language maintenance (Hornberger, 1988, 1998, 1999; Hornberger & CoronelMolina, 2004). The present investigation is preliminary and explores the possibility of bilingual intercultural education to promote Quechua (Inga) language revitalization in the Putumayo region of Colombia. Because of the large role that schooling has played in the language shift process, Inga language revitalization efforts have focused on implementing use of the Inga language in schools. This paper offers suggestions based on research in second language acquisition (SLA), language revitalization, and bilingual intercultural education to improve recent efforts and overcome the many overt and covert challenges that exist to bilingual education implementation in Putumayo, Colombia. This article attempts to bring such forms of resistance to the surface and provide suggestions for overcoming them, in hopes of facilitating the grassroots-initiated language planning goals of culture revitalization and reversing language shift that are already in place.

Convergence in syntax/morphology mapping strategies: Evidence from Quechua–Spanish code mixing

Convergence in case mapping strategies in the oral speech of Quechua–Spanish bilinguals is examined. In principle, Quechua case suffixes could be analyzed as postpositions or as case markers. The data show that in code mixing utterances, Spanish prepositions and Quechua case suffixes co-occur and that mapping strategies converge. The fact that, in Quechua–Spanish code switching, Spanish prepositions are combined with Quechua case suffixes is taken as evidence that the latter are case markers, not postpositions. Further support for this view is the fact that no obvious differences were found in the data between non-oblique and oblique case markers. This distribution is consistent with an analysis of Quechua case suffixes as the spell out of an agree relationship between a null prepositional head and a DP. Cases of case suffix dropping in differential object marking expressions are analyzed as a possible source of instability in case marking in code mixing utterances.

From Marvelous Antidote to the Poison of Idolatry: The Transatlantic Role of Andean Bezoar Stones During the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract Introducing intertwined themes of profit, the hunt for treasure, and the excavation of camelid bodies; and drawing from the analysis of Renaissance medical books, bilingual Aymara–Spanish and Quechua–Spanish dictionaries, inquisition records, and inventories of curiosity cabinets, this essay considers how Peruvian bezoar stones acquired transatlantic importance following their discovery in 1568 by a Spanish soldier. In spite of its less-than-glamorous physiological genesis as a calcinated concretion formed in the digestive tract of ruminants, including the four species of Andean camelids, the bezoar stone played a significant yet academically overlooked role in the social and economic history of modern Europe and Spanish America for its use as an antidote to poisons, and the stones constituted one of the most sought-after objects for the fashionable cabinets of curiosities belonging to Europe’s powerful elites. However, for indigenous pastoral peoples, bezoars were central to the reproduction of native cultural practices and directly linked to the foundational myths of Andean cosmology. The stones were believed to protect the herds and the shepherds, for whom the camelids represented the primary source of wealth. Consequently, the bezoar stone takes on unforeseen significance as a neglected site where the colonial drama of competing epistemologies was enacted.

Indigenous worldviews in intercultural education: teachers’ construction of interculturalism in a bilingual Quechua–Spanish program

This paper examines teachers’ implementation of a bilingual intercultural education (BIE) program in Peru. This program is inspired by global policies that promote cultural pluralism and educational access to marginalized indigenous populations. Broadly addressed in policy in Andean countries, interculturalism in Peru has remained a core educational principle with a neglected pedagogy. The lack of preparation of BIE teachers in intercultural pedagogy has both forced and allowed them intuitively to make sense of interculturalism in practice. Based on an ethnographic study of BIE teachers, this paper discusses teachers’ interpretations of interculturalism and of indigenous culture. The study aims to inform educators and policy‐makers concerned with interculturalism about the challenges and possibilities of a pedagogy that affirms diversity and advocates quality education for all. Este artículo examina la implementación del programa de educación bilingüe intercultural (EBI) en el Perú. EBI se inspira en políticas globales que promueven el pluralismo cultural y el acceso educativo de las poblaciones indígenas marginadas. Siendo parte de la pólitica nacional de distintos países andinos, la interculturalidad en el Perú se ha mantenido como principio educativo con una pedagogía negada. La falta de preparación profesional de los maestros en pedagogía intercultural ha forzado y a la vez permitido una interpretación intuitiva de EBI en la práctica. Basado en un estudio etnográfico de maestros EBI, este artículo analiza las interpretaciones de los maestros sobre interculturalidad y la cultural indígena. Este estudio intenta informar a educadores y políticos interesados en la interculturalidad, sobre los retos y las posibilidades de una pedagogía que afirma la diversidad y que promueve una educación de calidad para todos.

Bilingualism/Second-Language Research and the Assessment of Oral Proficiency in Minority Bilingual Children

This article discusses some of the challenges that researchers working in the fields of bilingualism and second-language acquisition (SLA) and in the field of language testing face in developing comparable and culturally and cognitively appropriate data collection and language assessment tools for bilingual children from rural minority-language communities with low levels of literacy. These challenges include defining language proficiency in a bilingual continuum, avoiding cultural biases, and attaining cross-linguistic validity. Using evidence from oral proficiency and aural comprehension tasks developed for bilingualism and SLA research and for the assessment of language proficiency in Quechua–Spanish and Aymara–Spanish bilingual students in the public schools of Peru, I illustrate recent attempts to develop appropriate tests to probe into bilingual students' linguistic competence.

Functional convergence in the tense, evidentiality and aspectual systems of Quechua Spanish bilinguals

In this paper, I present an exploratory study on cross-linguistic interference among Quechua-Spanish bilingual children living in a language contact situation. The study focuses on convergence in the tense, aspectual and evidentiality systems of the two languages. While in Quechua past tense features are strongly linked to evidentiality in the matrix of features associated with the functional category Tense, in Spanish, past tense features are linked to aspectual features. The study presents evidence that supports the Functional Convergence Hypothesis according to which syntactic convergence among bilingual speakers is favored when the matrix of features associated with a functional category is partially divergent, as is the case for Tense in Spanish and Quechua. The Spanish results indicate that among bilinguals past tense is associated with evidentiality features and contrast sharply with the results of the monolingual comparison group. Bilingual Quechua results exhibit an incipient emergence of discourse-oriented background and foreground distinctions, similar to those found in Spanish in association with aspectual morphology.

Free traditions: Translations in Quechua Spanish and English

(1996). Free traditions: Translations in Quechua Spanish and English. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 3-10.