Extraordinary change is under way in the Alto Urubamba Valley, a vital and turbulent corner of the Andean-Amazonian borderland of southern Peru. Here, tens of thousands of Quechua-speaking farmers from the rural Andes have migrated to the territory of the Indigenous Amazonian Matsigenka people in search of land for coffee cultivation. This migration has created a new multilingual, multiethnic agrarian society. The rich-tasting Peruvian coffee in your cup is the distillate of an intensely dynamic Amazonian frontier, where native Matsigenkas, state agents, and migrants from the rural highlands are carving the forest into farms. Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier shows how people of different backgrounds married together and blended the Quechua, Matsigenka, and Spanish languages in their day-to-day lives. This frontier relationship took place against a backdrop of deforestation, cocaine trafficking, and destructive natural gas extraction. Nicholas Q. Emlen’s rich account—which takes us to remote Amazonian villages, dusty frontier towns, roadside bargaining sessions, and coffee traders’ homes—offers a new view of settlement frontiers as they are negotiated in linguistic interactions and social relationships. This interethnic encounter was not a clash between distinct groups but rather an integrated network of people who adopted various stances toward each other as they spoke. The book brings together a fine-grained analysis of multilingualism with urgent issues in Latin America today, including land rights, poverty, drug trafficking, and the devastation of the world’s largest forest. It offers a timely on-the-ground perspective on the agricultural colonization of the Amazon, which has triggered an environmental emergency threatening the future of the planet.

This illuminating book critically examines multicultural language politics and policymaking in the Andean-Amazonian countries of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, demonstrating how issues of language and power throw light on the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state. Based on the author’s research in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia over several decades, Howard draws comparisons over time and space. With due attention to history, the book’s focus is situated in the years following the turn of the millennium, a period in which ideological shifts have affected continuity in official policy delivery even as processes of language shift from Indigenous languages such as Aymara and Quechua, to Spanish, have accelerated. The book combines in-depth description and analysis of state-level activity with ethnographic description of responses to policy on the ground. The author works with concepts of technologies of power and language regimentation to draw out the hegemonic workings of power as exercised through language policy creation at multiple scales. This book will be key reading for students and scholars of critical sociolinguistic ethnography, the history, society and politics of the Andean region, and linguistic anthropology, language policy and planning, and Latin American studies more broadly.

Through the presentation of visual and textual insights, this book chronicles the experiences of Quechuan bilingual college students, who strive to maintain their ethnolinguistic identity while succeeding in Spanish-centric curricula. The book merges decolonial theory and participatory action research in pursuit of mobilizing Indigenous languages such as Quechua and depicts the ways in which these Andean college students deal with limited opportunities for Quechua-Spanish bilingual practices. It provides an overview of their collective efforts to mobilize Quechua in higher education, efforts which will help all who read it understand the maintenance of the Quechua language beginning at the grassroots level. The author advocates for engaging language researchers in critical collective forces at the core of conditions which promote Quechua in higher education, a collective effort which must reflect decolonial, non-Eurocentric, non-fundamentalist Indigenous concepts in combination with action-oriented cultural wealth for the benefit of minoritized languages and peoples.

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.

This book presents a vision of bilingual education in six South American nations: three Andean countries, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, and three 'Southern Cone' countries, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. It provides an integrated perspective, including work carried out in majority as well as minority language contexts, referring to developments in the fields of indigeneous, Deaf, and international bilingual and multilingual provision.

This groundbreaking volume describes unprecedented changes in education across Latin America, resulting from the endorsement of Indigenous peoples' rights through the development of intercultural bilingual education. The chapters evaluate the ways in which cultural and language differences are being used to create national policies that affirm the presence of Indigenous peoples and their cultures within Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala. Describing the collaboration between grassroots movements and transnational networks, the authors analyze how social change is taking place at the local and regional levels, and they present case studies that illuminate the expansion of intercultural bilingual education. This book is both a call to action for researchers, teachers, policy-makers and Indigenous leaders, and a primer for practitioners seeking to provide better learning opportunities for a diverse student body.

This volume makes a vital and original contribution to a topic that lies at the intersection of the fields of history, anthropology, and linguistics. The book is the first to consider indigenous languages as vehicles of political orders in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present, across regional and national contexts, including Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and Paraguay. The chapters focus on languages that have been prominent in multiethnic colonial and national societies and are well represented in the written record: Guarani, Quechua, some of the Mayan languages, Nahuatl, and other Mesoamerican languages. The contributors put into dialogue the questions and methodologies that have animated anthropological and historical approaches to the topic, including ethnohistory, philology, language politics and ideologies, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and metapragmatics. Some of the historical chapters deal with how political concepts and discourses were expressed in indigenous languages, while others focus on multilingualism and language hierarchies, where some indigenous languages, or language varieties, acquired a special status as mediums of written communication and as elite languages. The ethnographic chapters show how the deployment of distinct linguistic varieties in social interaction lays bare the workings of social differentiation and social hierarchy. Contributors: Alan Durston, Bruce Mannheim, Sabine MacCormack, Bas van Doesburg, Camilla Townsend, Capucine Boidin, Angélica Otazú Melgarejo, Judith M. Maxwell, Margarita Huayhua.

This book presents a synchronic grammar of the southern dialects of Yauyos, an extremely endangered Quechuan language spoken in the Peruvian Andes. As the language is highly synthetic, the grammar focuses principally on morphology; a longer section is dedicated to the language's unusual evidential system. The grammar's 1400 examples are drawn from a 24-hour corpus of transcribed recordings collected in the course of the documentation of the language.

In South America indigenous languages are extremely diverse. There are over one hundred language families in this region alone. Contributors from around the world explore the history and structure of these languages, combining insights from archaeology and genetics with innovative linguistic analysis. The book aims to uncover regional patterns and potential deeper genealogical relations between the languages. Based on a large-scale database of features from sixty languages, the book analyses major language families such as Tupian and Arawakan, as well as the Quechua/Aymara complex in the Andes, the Isthmo-Colombian region and the Andean foothills. It explores the effects of historical change in different grammatical systems and fills gaps in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) database, where South American languages are underrepresented. An important resource for students and researchers interested in linguistics, anthropology and language evolution.

The Andean and Pacific regions of South America are home to a remarkable variety of languages and language families, with a range of typological differences. This linguistic diversity results from a complex historical background, comprising periods of greater communication between different peoples and languages, and periods of fragmentation and individual development. The Languages of the Andes documents in a single volume the indigenous languages spoken and formerly spoken in this linguistically rich region, as well as in adjacent areas. Grouping the languages into different cultural spheres, it describes their characteristics in terms of language typology, language contact, and the social perspectives of present-day languages. The authors provide both historical and contemporary information, and illustrate the languages with detailed grammatical sketches. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will be a valuable source for students and scholars of linguistics and anthropology alike.