The Languages of the Andes
The Languages of the Andes

Author: Willem F. H. Adelaar

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-06-10

Total Pages: 746

ISBN-13: 113945112X

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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.

Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier
Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier

Author: Nicholas Q. Emlen

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0816541353

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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.

The Native Languages of South America
The Native Languages of South America

Author: Loretta O'Connor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-03-20

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1139867989

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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.

Rethinking the Andes–Amazonia Divide
Rethinking the Andes–Amazonia Divide

Author: Adrian J. Pearce

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2020-10-21

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 178735735X

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Nowhere on Earth is there an ecological transformation so swift and so extreme as between the snow-line of the high Andes and the tropical rainforest of Amazonia. The different disciplines that research the human past in South America have long tended to treat these two great subzones of the continent as self-contained enough to be taken independently of each other. Objections have repeatedly been raised, however, to warn against imagining too sharp a divide between the people and societies of the Andes and Amazonia, when there are also clear indications of significant connections and transitions between them. Rethinking the Andes–Amazonia Divide brings together archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians and historians to explore both correlations and contrasts in how the various disciplines see the relationship between the Andes and Amazonia, from deepest prehistory up to the European colonial period. The volume emerges from an innovative programme of conferences and symposia conceived explicitly to foster awareness, discussion and co-operation across the divides between disciplines. Underway since 2008, this programme has already yielded major publications on the Andean past, including History and Language in the Andes (2011) and Archaeology and Language in the Andes (2012).

A grammar of Yauyos Quechua
A grammar of Yauyos Quechua

Author: Aviva Shimelman

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2017-03-29

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 3946234216

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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.

Language Revitalization Processes and Prospects
Language Revitalization Processes and Prospects

Author: Kendall A. King

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9781853594946

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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.

The Indigenous Languages of South America
The Indigenous Languages of South America

Author: Lyle Campbell

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-01-27

Total Pages: 765

ISBN-13: 311025803X

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The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide is a thorough guide to the indigenous languages of this part of the world. With more than a third of the linguistic diversity of the world (in terms of language families and isolates), South American languages contribute new findings in most areas of linguistics. Though formerly one of the linguistically least known areas of the world, extensive descriptive and historical linguistic research in recent years has expanded knowledge greatly. These advances are represented in this volume in indepth treatments by the foremost scholars in the field, with chapters on the history of investigation, language classification, language endangerment, language contact, typology, phonology and phonetics, and on major language families and regions of South America.

Enacting and Envisioning Decolonial Forces while Sustaining Indigenous Language
Enacting and Envisioning Decolonial Forces while Sustaining Indigenous Language

Author: Yuliana Hevelyn Kenfield

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2021-10-26

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1788929721

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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.

Indigenous Languages, Politics, and Authority in Latin America
Indigenous Languages, Politics, and Authority in Latin America

Author: Alan Durston

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2018-05-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0268103720

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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.

Gods of the Andes
Gods of the Andes

Author: Blas Valera

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 0271048808

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"An English translation of a sixteenth-century Spanish manuscript, by an Inca Jesuit, about Inca religion and the spread of Christianity in colonial Peru. Includes an introductory essay"--Provided by publisher.