10 ː Language on the Ground, ep. I

Blake, my fellow intern, and I first met Pablo at dusk in the middle of Salasaka, outside his shop, where tourists on their way to the nearby hot springs would stop by for a poncho, panpipe, or a blanket of alpaca wool to bring home. Pablo and Simon, our coordinating American linguist, embraced, and together we walked up the gradually inclined main street past store faces, cell phone repair kiosks, and food stands serving encebollado, ceviche, and French fries; past thorny agave plants, stray dogs, and women with gray and black streaked hair spinning sheep's wool into yarn by hand. I fixated on the hexagonal concrete tiles illuminated by the streetlights above the sidewalk while reviewing Quichua verb forms under my breath. Pablo was taking us to the home of Jimena, his sister-in-law, and Jimena's husband Enrique, who happened to be Pablo's cousin. My mind perplexed by both the levels of relation in the family and the half-filled verb chart in my head, we arrived. Pablo and Simon, after introducing Blake and me to our host family, left for the night.

Jimena invited us to join her at the dining room table for a merienda, which was a small, late-night meal of bread, rice, and coffee, and not the word for "snack" that I had learned in my Spanish classes. After using some of the stalk Quichua greetings Blake and I had learned in our 20 hours of language lessons, we chatted in Spanish with Jimena, Enrique, and Guillermo, a neighbor who was joining us for merienda.

"How much Quichua have you learned?" someone asked.

I had been dreading this question as the acidic coffee tightened the knot in my stomach. Blake, the more astute linguist between the two of us, quickly rattled off the present tense forms of mikuna, the verb meaning "to eat." I hesitantly contributed some stilted sentences. My name is… What is your name? They applauded us, both impressed and amused at our attempts in using the language of their ancestors, of their heart and home.

"Diosolopay," I responded. Thank you.

"Yupaychani," Guillermo interjected. Blake and I exchanged confused looks, and Guillermo continued. "Diosolopay is a Spanish loan phrase. The correct way to thank someone in Quichua is yupaychani."

I had learned that diosolopay came from Spanish Dios le pague, meaning may God repay you. I knew Quichua had borrowed from Spanish over the years because of the centuries of contact between the two languages. I hadn't considered, however, that there might be a surviving form of the phrase that was purely Quichua. I had assumed that the Spanish borrowing had replaced whatever phrase had been used in the past.

"Guillermo is very well-educated," explained Enrique. "He went to the university in Ambato. He knows Quichua words for all sorts of things."

Guillermo went on to share all sorts of words in Quichua that had apparently fallen out of use in Salasaka. As he continued talking, mentioning names for days of the week and months of the year, among other topics, I could sense Enrique and Jimena growing silent, gazes glued to their mugs of instant coffee, now lukewarm. Guillermo grew more passionate, critiquing the generation of his parents and their borrowing from the language of the colonizers to fill in the gaps of their Quichua. It became obvious that in this space, Guillermo held authority on all things Quichua.

Satellite photo of Ecuador.

(NASA, Wikimedia Commons)

Ecuador is a small country in the northwestern corner of South America, but what it lacks in size (many claim that Peru robbed them of much of their territory in the 1940’s, which is still a sore subject), it makes up for in diversity of language and culture. There are three distinct geographic regions of Ecuador: the coastal lowlands to the west, the Andes running along the center, and the Amazon to the east. These regions have historically marked borders between cultural and ethnic groups.

Before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, the Inca Empire dominated the Andes Mountains and imposed their language, Quechua, as a lingua franca with the groups they ruled. There was much variety in the languages spoken by other groups in the coastal lowlands and in the Amazon as well, beyond the reach of Incan rule. Once the Spanish arrived, Francisco Pizarro's armies overthrew the Incan Empire. Throughout the centuries of colonial rule, the languages of the coastal region waned and eventually died out, one by one. Quechua and Aymara, on the other hand, remained in use by millions in the Andes, and many Amazonian languages persisted, although all faced enormous pressures in the face of Spanish domination.

The European colonizers sought to establish Spanish as the sole language of the land and systematically eliminate Indigenous languages. Many Spaniards learned Quechua in order to properly administer their territory and evangelize the Indigenous peoples. They saw Quechua as a practical means to an exacting end; they would use it for the time being, with the expectation that eventually all those in Ecuador would come to use Spanish exclusively.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Ecuador is an independent nation that, like so many nation-states in the Americas, bears deep scars of these colonial dynamics, especially in terms of language. Census reports often inaccurate or inconsistent in Ecuador, but the general estimate is that there are between 1 and 3 million speakers of Quichua in Ecuador today, compared to about 8 million speakers of Quechua in South America, making it the largest Indigenous language in the Americas in terms of number of speakers.[1] The vast majority of Quichua speakers are bilingual in their local variety of Quichua and Spanish. In many parts of Ecuador, it is common to find a tri-generational divide: elderly Quichuans are more comfortable in Quichua than Spanish; middle-aged Quichuans are equally comfortable in Quichua and Spanish; and the Quichuan youth are more comfortable in Spanish than Quichua.

Most non-Indigenous individuals of Ecuador are Spanish-monolingual mestizos, descendants of Europeans who intermarried with Indigenous peoples. Because of this fact, there is a general sense that "everyone is Indigenous" in Ecuador, and that there is no need to recognize modern Indigenous groups who retain their distinct linguistic and cultural heritage.[2] Quichua, which is the name for all dialects of Quechua in Ecuador, and other Indigenous languages, are treated with disdain by the majority population. A popular language myth goes that the Quichua language came from people imitating birds and other wild animals of the forest, and thus is not a real, sophisticated human language like Spanish.[3]

It wasn't until 2008 that Ecuador's constitution recognized Quichua as an "official language for intercultural relations" at a regional level. (Note, it is still not an official language on a national level.)[4] This along with other achievements toward the recognition of Indigenous languages are thanks to the impressive level of organization between Indigenous groups in Ecuador. In the face of oil drilling in the Amazon and other blatant overreaches by the Ecuadorian government, many groups unified under CONAIE (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador — Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) in 1986 to have a vocal representation at the public and national level.

Another huge achievement was the formation of DINEIB (Dirección Nacional de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe — National Directorate of Intercultural Bilingual Education), which the government established in 1989 as an independent, Indigenous-led branch of the national education system overseeing education in Indigenous regions.

As different Quichua groups began to organize and plan for the future of their language, they saw education as the key. But in order to accomplish this, it was decided that a standardized form of Quichua, one that would be taught in all bilingual schools across Ecuador and used in all written forms of Quichua, should be agreed upon. After all, languages with status and prestige like Spanish and English had standardized forms in different countries. Spanish has the Real Academia Española, which has the final linguistic say in the Spanish-speaking world. If Quichua was to be on par with other languages, it must be standardized. Or so it was assumed.

In the years that followed, people from Indigenous coalitions, educators, and linguists rallied together to form such a standard:

• It must be understandable by speakers of all 8 dialects of Quichua.

• They agreed that it should be used universally in writing across Ecuador, and that it should use an alphabet that represents only the sounds found in all 8 dialects.

• And finally, it should represent a "pure" Quichua, one that is rid of Spanish loan words, free from the contamination of the language of the colonizers. A purified Quichua would reflect what their ancestors spoke in the glory days of the Inca Empire.

What resulted was what is known as Unified Quichua. It was optimistically implemented in bilingual schools across the nation. This pure and unified and hopeful form of Quichua, as we’ll see in Episode 2, would come to have consequences on the ground, unforeseen by its creators.

The 8 varieties of Quichua in Ecuador. The small yellow bubble in the middle represents Salasaka Quichua.[5]

The next morning Blake and I accompanied Enrique as he brought breakfast to his mother in her cinder block and thatched-roof house, sliced agave leaves for the pig, and cut alfalfa for the rabbits—a routine we would repeat for the next several weeks. Along the way, Enrique taught us words for animals, tools, places, and directions. His demeanor was markedly different from last night. His head nodded with pride each time he taught us a new word and we would repeat it. He was eager to share the wealth of medicinal and spiritual knowledge that had been passed down from generations of Quichua speakers, and we were honored to benefit from his generosity. His enthusiasm was contagious, whereas last night, the topic of language seemed to bring embarrassment for him. Quichua was his mother tongue—that is, the Quichua of his parents, of Salasaka, of the elders. Like most dialects of Quichua, Salasaka Quichua had indeed taken many a Spanish word and tweaked it so that it would feel more natural on their tongues and in their sentences.

Blake shared with Enrique that it was normal for languages to borrow words from other languages. Like English, which has borrowed tens of thousands (up to half of our modern vocabulary) from French and Latin. This didn’t make English any less English. Enrique ahh-ed in seeming interest before finding another plant to show us.

[1] Limerick, N. (2018). Kichwa or quichua? Competing alphabets, political histories, and complicated reading in indigenous languages. Comparative Education Review, 62(1), 103-124. https://doi.org/10.1086/695487 [2] King, K. A., & Haboud, M. (2007). Language planning and policy in Ecuador. In R. B. Baldauf Jr & R. B. Kaplan (Eds.), Language planning and policy in Latin America: Vol. 1. Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay (pp. 39-104). Multilingual Matters. [3] King & Haboud (2007). [4] Grzech, K., Schwarz, A., Ennis, G. (2019). Divided we stand, unified we fall? The impact of standardisation on oral language varieties: a case study of Amazonian Kichwa. Revista de Llengua i Dret, Journal of Language and Law, (71), 123-145. [5] Aschmann, Richard P. (2007). Quichua.net. Retrieved from http://quichua.net/Q/Ec/espanol.html (13 November 2022).