11 ː Language on the Ground, ep. II

"Oh, yes, the children know Quichua, of course," Jimena said proudly, not prompted by any question from me or Blake. "My sister Milena and I were raised in Galápagos, where we lost much of our Quichua. But we regained it once we came back to Salasaka. My children, may they rest in peace, spoke Quichua, and we all speak Quichua with Milena and Pablo's children, my nieces and nephew." She continued to peel potatoes for the soup we were preparing for that evening.

I had little doubt that the children could understand Quichua. Normally, the parents and their generation would address the children in Quichua, who would respond in Spanish. Perhaps this was exacerbated by my and Blake's being there. Perhaps they spoke Spanish for our sake. Perhaps they felt that, on a global scale, Quichua ultimately didn't matter, but to young people from the U.S., Spanish would appear more acceptable and worldly.

Meanwhile, Efren and María, Jimena’s nephew and niece, had brought a live chicken into the kitchen, which was a small brick building adjacent to the house with a large woodfire stove. “Después de ser degollada, la gallina sabe moverse mucho,” María explained. After you cut the hen’s throat, it moves quite a bit. Interesting, I thought. She was using the Spanish verb saber (to know) to describe what a chicken usually does. This is probably a habitual aspect, perhaps influence from Quichua, I wondered. I must’ve been too focused on the grammar of her sentence than what she was actually saying, because it didn’t register to me what she was doing until the knife was already to the hen’s throat.

I’ll spare you the rest of the details. The soup was delicious.

The sun sets on Tungurauha, a volcano overlooking Salasaka.

With a new, standardized form of Quichua on the books, bilingual schools across Ecuador adopted it and began to train their teachers in it. Perhaps now Quichua could gain equal footing with Spanish. Perhaps this generation could reclaim the ground that was lost to colonialism. Perhaps…well, perhaps it was more complicated than that.

Bilingual schools have a complex legacy in Ecuador. Their primary purpose is often to get young Quichua speakers gradually introduced to Spanish in elementary school and not-so-gradually cut out instruction in Quichua. The schools, most of them state schools, do not serve to preserve Quichua, only to produce viable Spanish speakers, using Quichua as a means to a monolingual end.[1]

With the introduction of UQ (Unified Quichua), schools and universities flexed their authority on the linguistic lives of their students, who were learning a Quichua markedly different from that of their grandparents, as we’ll see later. Families, not wanting their children to learn “corrupted” Quichua, entrusted their children’s linguistic futures to the schools, who were sure to teach them the official form of the language. Thus, the home—the dinner table, the potato field, the weaving room—lost its place in raising Quichua speakers.

This harmful attitude is just one of many that have taken root in Quichua communities over recent generations. The broader Hispanic culture has convinced many of the worthlessness of their language. Many parents have stopped speaking Quichua to their children for fear that it might handicap them. Even if a parent understands the benefits of bilingualism, they might still prefer that their children learn Spanish and English rather than Spanish and Quichua.

Shouldn’t a standardized language reflect the “standards” of what is already spoken? Why would the UQ taught in school differ from what the children heard at home? These questions are at the heart of the matter, and their answers may lie in the values which informed those who were involved in the standardization of UQ: universalism, and linguistic purity.

Universalism

The Center for Investigation of Indigenous Education at the Pontifical Catholic University in Ecuador was the body responsible for developing UQ. In 1981, they invited speakers and educators to represent the various dialects of Quichua spoken in Ecuador.[2] They dreamed of a future in which every Quichua child would learn to speak the same form of Quichua in school, regardless of their family’s linguistic background. UQ wasn’t designed to erase the differences across dialects, but to provide a formal, literary, and prestigious alternative to the rural diversity in dialect. As we’ll soon see, this local/universal divide didn’t play out as expected.

First, universalizing the language meant deciding upon a standard alphabet. There are many ways to represent sounds, up to this point, each dialect had its own preferences about how to write their language. Quichua wasn’t written down before the arrival of the Spanish, and since education in Quichua hadn’t been formalized for very long, the sets of letters became different from community to community. Quichua, however, has sounds that aren’t represented in the Spanish alphabet, and vice versa. Groups throughout history—missionaries, linguists, schools—have proposed solutions to this, by repurposing certain letters in Spanish to fit Quichua. The creators of UQ decided on 20 consonants and 3 vowels which would be used in perpetuity. Their decision to include some letters and not others was guided by the notion that only the sounds common to all varieties of Quichua should be represented.

Some dialects, however, sound much different than others. For example, in some dialects, the swapping out t for d, k for g, or p for b can change the meaning of the word. For others, those sound pairs are the roughly the same, changing only depending on its position in a word. The dialects who don’t make this distinction were favored: d, g, and b were excluded from the alphabet.[3]

As it happens, the highland dialects (map below), including Salasaka, had more representation at the UQ convention than the Amazon dialects. UQ, unsurprisingly, resembles the highland varieties, especially when it comes to the alphabet. For Quichua speakers in the Amazon, and any community that had grown accustomed to an older alphabet, this Pan-Quichua alphabet has been met with much resistance. For many, learning to read was a traumatic journey, one fraught with humiliation and discrimination. Having to relearn a new alphabet meant revisiting a demon from their past: feelings of worthlessness due to illiteracy.[4] For these communities, UQ isn’t just artificial—it’s foreign.[5]

The 8 varieties of Quichua in Ecuador. The small yellow bubble in the middle represents Salasaka Quichua.[6]

Linguistic purity

Five centuries’ worth of domination by Spanish-speakers means that Spanish words crept their way into Quichua. Prior to UQ, Quichua had remained flexible to Spanish borrowings. It adapted Spanish words to fit their sound systems, grammatic structures, and practical needs. For the UQ innovators, these borrowings represented the lingering effects of colonialism. Contamination. Compromise. For them, the only way to reclaim Quichua meant a total Iberian detox. The UQ dictionary began to list newly born words, words that would replace a Castilian borrowing. Compound words, resurrected words, invented words. The dictionary was now riddled with them. And so were the radio broadcasts, school curricula, and government notices.

These words did not originate naturally. For English speakers, it is a normal experience to hear an unfamiliar word and use a dictionary to learn its meaning. For Quichua speakers, hearing a new word could strike them as foreign, pretentious, or artificial.

The unique voices and needs of each community were not represented in UQ. Despite hopes for unity, UQ has, ironically, created deep division. Grandparent and grandchild, rural and urban, undereducated and overeducated. The proposed universal/local divide—the idea that each community would maintain its diversity while appropriating UQ to official and educational uses—instead manifested in estrangement and discord.

The elderly, rural, and undereducated resist UQ out of fear of change and a sense that their authority has been coopted by powers far above them. The young, urban, and educated reject the outdated vernaculars of their villages, which they fear would prevent them from advancing in life.

UQ is now understood in juxtaposition with AQ, Authentic Quichua, which includes non-standardized dialects preferred by the elderly, rural, and undereducated. Grandchildren grow up despising or pitying their grandparents’ backwards, backwater ways of talking. Grandparents refuse to listen to their grandchildren’s new high-and-mighty jargon.

Thus, a language that has threats of extinction for centuries is plagued by internal dissensions. The health of a language is ultimately dependent on its being passed down from parent to child. At best, UQ has created a generational gap, and future generations of Quichuans will simply acquiesce to the new standard. At worst, large swaths of Quichuans without a familial connection to the language will opt to use Spanish outside of the UQ classroom.

What are people to do in the face of such a lose-lose scenario? Are they damned if they do, damned if they don’t? The future of Quichua (better yet, Quichuas) is far from secure, but it’s important to recognize the monumental feat that UQ is. Developing a national standard for hundreds of thousands of Quichua speakers, though imperfect, constitutes a Herculean level of organization and cooperation. It seems that even within groups that are eager to see Quichuas thrive, counter-productive myths—such as language purism and the prioritization of a national Quichua identity over communal identities[7]—are ever-present. But language planners and educators must not despair when met with road bumps like the fallout from UQ.

What can be done for the future of Quichuas? Stay tuned for Episode 3!

…

“Achcu!” squealed Selena, the youngest of Pablo and Milena’s children. Dog! Handsome, the family’s Daschund puppy that had fallen asleep in my lap, suddenly woke up and began barking. Selena was quizzing Blake and me on Quichua animal names as we sat around a large wooden table for merienda in their dirt-floor dining room, which was connected to Pablo’s store. Selena was currently at a “bilingual” elementary school, which seemed to teach Quichua as a second language rather than teach children subject material in Quichua. When Blake and I were present, Pablo and Milena would address her in Quichua. ¿Mande? ¡En español por favor! she would whine. Apparently, she knew even less Quichua than her siblings, who were about 5 and 7 years older than her.

[1] 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. [2] King & Haboud (2007). [3] King & Haboud (2007). [4] 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 [5] 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. [6] Aschmann, Richard P. (2007). Quichua.net. Retrieved from http://quichua.net/Q/Ec/espanol.html (13 November 2022). [7] Hornberger, N. H., & King, K. A. (1999). Authenticity and unification in Quechua language planning. In S. May (Ed.), Indigenous community-based education (pp. 160-180). Multilingual Matters.