Talk on Quechua at Penn (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

The Educational Linguistics Forum (ELF)
Presents a Brownbag Discussion

Transcending or Strengthening Quechua's Emblematic Value:
Language Identity in Cochabamba

by

Inge Sichra, PhD
Universidad Mayor de San Simon
Cochabamba, BOLIVIA

When:   Friday, March 18, 2005 from 12-1:30pm
Where:  The Graduate School of Education, Rm. 400

Abstract: This work begins by presenting a sociolinguistic panorama of
Bolivia (Andean languages, especially Quechua) and of the city of
Cochabamba with data from the last censuses.  Besides reproducing the
widely-known characteristic of the country’s indigenous majority, the
city of Cochabamba bears the trait of being tenaciously and
persistently bilingual in spite of the constant displacement of
indigenous languages by Spanish: both in the city and in the country as
a whole.  The second part considers three life stories in order to
analyze different adaptation strategies of Quechua to an urban space:
both in terms of the functionality of the language, and of the identity
speakers assign
to it and to themselves as bilingual individuals in a milieu of
diglossia. The work questions linguistic and academic assumptions that
a native language needs to be modernized and to overcome diglossia in
order to have a future.  The talk concludes that the permanence of the
native language in the city of Cochabamba is not necessarily ensured by
modernizing it, for even people with a high level of linguistic
awareness and loyalty prioritize traditional cultural referents to
innovative, followed by ideological referents. The need to overcome
social spheres, historically established for indigenous languages in
the urban circle, is not clearly perceived.

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