Bruce Mannheim

Una nación acorralada : Southern Peruvian Quechua language planning and politics in historical perspective

This paper sketches Spanish colonial policies toward Southern Peruvian Quechua in order to identify long-term trends and constants. I emphasize the following conjunctures in the debate on the status of the indigenous languages: (1) the simultaneous efforts to restrict the inroads of bilingualism in the legal and political domain and to encourage bilingualism among local headmen so as to facilitate indirect rule in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; (2) the debate as to the role of the vernacular in religious education and missionary work in the same period, a debate in which the position favoring use of the vernacular held out for a time against calls for forced liquidation of the indigenous languages; (3) the ascendancy of the position calling for liquidation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and (4) the role of Southern Peruvian Quechua as a nationalist emblem during the eighteenth century. These conjunctures have considerable relevance today. Differences in vocabulary and ideological justification have obscured the continuity between colonial and modern language policy. The issues debated, the limits of the alternatives proposed as solutions, and even the practical efforts carried out on behalf of alternative policies, have been surprisingly perdurable. For four and a half centuries the “Andean language debate,” the issues and terms of language policy, have continued to have at their center the question of whether or not the Quechua have a right to exist as a separate community. (Language policy, colonialism, South America, Quechua)

A developmental analysis of generic nouns in Southern Peruvian Quechua.

Generic noun phrases (e.g., “Cats like to drink milk”) are a primary means by which adults express generalizations to children, yet they pose a challenging induction puzzle for learners. Although prior research has established that English speakers understand and produce generic noun phrases by preschool age, little is known regarding the cross-cultural generality of generic acquisition. Southern Peruvian Quechua provides a valuable comparison because, unlike English, it is a highly inflected language in which generics are marked by the absence rather than the presence of any linguistic markers. Moreover, Quechua is spoken in a cultural context that differs markedly from the highly educated, middle-class contexts within which earlier research on generics was conducted. We presented participants from five age groups (3–6, 7–9, 10–12, 14–35, and 36–90 years of age) with two tasks that examined the ability to distinguish generic from nongeneric utterances. In Study 1, even the youngest children understood generics as applying broadly to a category (like “all”) and distinct from indefinite reference (“some”). However, there was a developmental lag before children understood that generics, unlike “all,” can include exceptions. Study 2 revealed that generic interpretations are more frequent for utterances that (a) lack specifying markers and (b) are animate. Altogether, generic interpretations are found among the youngest participants, and may be a default mode of quantification. These data demonstrate the cross-cultural importance of generic information in linguistic expression.

Teleological talk in parent–child conversations in Quechua

Southern Peruvian Quechua is an indigenous language spoken primarily in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. The language includes a syntactic construction, ‘-paq’, that expresses purpose or function, thus providing an opportunity to trace how parents and children with little formal education express teleological concepts. The authors recorded parent–child dyads (N = 36; children aged 3–5 years) talking about items in a picture book, and coded uses of -paq (e.g., ‘What is that little [toy] bear for?’ [‘Chay usuchari imapaqtaq?’]. For younger children (3–4 years) and their parents, -paq was infrequent and equivalent across domains. For older children (5-year-olds) and their parents, -paq increased dramatically and differentially by domain (most commonly produced for artifacts, food, and animals). These results provide new evidence that speaks to existing developmental accounts regarding the domain-specificity vs. domain-generality of teleological concepts in development.