Runasimita rimanquichu? — Do you speak Quechua? (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Saturday,  April 28,  2007
PERU

Runasimita rimanquichu? — Do you speak Quechua?
Various Quechua dialects make teaching the language difficult

Hildegard Willer.  Apr 25, 2007
http://www.latinamericapress.org/article.asp?lanCode=1&artCode=5122

Quechua continues to lose ground to Spanish.

In August 2006 it appeared as though the Quechua was about to flourish again
in Lima. Here, on Peru’s central coast, many linguists believe the Quechua
language was born at least 2,000 years ago. Congresswomen Hilaria Supa and
María Sumire, both from the highland Cuzco department, where Quechua is the
dominant tongue, took their oath of office in their native Quechua, and
vowed to speak in the indigenous language on the floor of Congress.

But lawmaker and linguist Martha Hildebrandt did not accept their oath and
tried to force them to speak in Spanish, causing an uproar. Most sided with
the two Quechua-speaking congresswomen.

Will Quechua, which for centuries, especially in the capital, has been
considered an inferior and shameful language to speak, be given more public
use?

According to recent studies, Quechua, or “runasimi,” was born in central
Peru and was later adopted by the Inca Empire. Quechua is spoken throughout
the Andes, from Ecuador to Chile and Argentina.

But it is not a uniform language. Instead it is composed of various regional
dialects and the Quechua most widely spoken is that of southern Peru,
particularly the Ayacucho and Cuzco regions.

Invisible language
Some 3 million Peruvians, about 16 percent of the population, speaks
Quechua, according to the 1993 census (the 2005 census did not survey
languages). But this linguistic minority remains unnoticed as many Quechua
speakers live in very remote villages, are indigenous and most are women.

Even though Quechua is an official language in Peru, it is easy to live a
lifetime in the country without even hearing it spoken, and that goes not
only for the capital, Lima, but in the southern Quechua-speaking highlands.

There are very few places with bilingual street signs. There are neither any
Quechua-language newspapers or television stations.

Natividad Mamani and her daughter Sonia Luque live in the southern Andean
city of Juliaca, near Lake Titicaca. Their story is common: the younger the
person and the more urban their surroundings, the less likely they are to
speak the language.

“I was born in the countryside and I only learned Spanish at 8 years of
age,” said Mamani, 44. “Now I live in Juliaca, and I speak the two
languages. I speak Quechua with my husband and Quechua and Spanish with my
children.”

Luque is a 21-year-old teacher. She said: “I understand Quechua perfectly,
but I don’t speak it well.”

“Sometimes I speak it with my close friends, but in my current job as a
private school teacher in Juliaca, I don’t need it,” she said. “The kids
prefer to study English.”

Luque’s case shows that the better grasp native Quechua speakers have on
Spanish, the less they speak Quechua.

The 60 students enrolled in Quechua courses at the San Antonio Abad
University in Cuzco are an exception.