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Notes for LG102, Intro Sociolinguistics

University of Essex, Prof. Peter L. Patrick

Week 8, Autumn term

Case Study: PERU

© by Dr. Virginia Zavala

1. Peru is a linguistically and culturally diverse country. 18 language families are spoken there, with their own dialects. The most important ones are Spanish, Quechua and Aimara. There has been a big decrease in the use of indigenous languages since the 1940s, mainly because of migration. Many people from the mountains have come to Lima - out of the country's 24 million population, almost 8 million live in the capital - and subsequently shifted to Spanish.

2. Before the Spanish conquerors came, it was already multilingual/multicultural. The Inca empire began to grow in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, and the Incas started to conquer lots of territories. They promoted Quechua in these different places. However, even though they made the people from the elite and local governments learn Quechua, they respected and tolerated other native languages. Therefore these languages were maintained.

3. Spanish replaced Quechua as the official language with the advent of the Spanish colonial power in the 16^th century. The Spanish conquerors forbade the use of the indigenous languages, saying that the indigenous people used them to preserve their religious and moral practices, which went against Catholicism. Since the beginning of colonization, the Spanish devalued Quechua as a 'simple' language. They thought it did not have the vocabulary to cover the topics of Catholicism; they held against it the lack of a written system, and said its use went against the unity of the Spanish empire. Since the Spanish settled on the coast, the presence of the Spanish language was stronger there than in the mountains. The indigenous people were concentrated in the mountains, due to the hard work they were forced to do in mining and in agriculture; they also fled from the coast to escape epidemics and civil wars.

4. The acquisition of Spanish by the indigenous people from the mountains was never a deliberate process. They had no schools, and the population of Spanish-speaking people for them to have contact with was small. Due to this slow, spontaneous and informal process of learning, Andean Spanish, a different variety, was formed. Andean Spanish is a variety that emerged in the context of a permanent situation of language contact (500 years) with indigenous languages. Now it is considered a variety that is neither homogenous nor discrete: it can be represented as a continuum that goes from varieties that are greatly influenced by Quechua structure (mostly in rural areas) to others that are closer to Standard Spanish. Both monolingual and bilingual speakers of Andean Spanish exist, and can be placed on this continuum. Whether Andean Spanish is an accent, a dialect or a different language is at issue. Even though it is used by bilinguals who know Spanish as a second language (and Spanish monolinguals as well), it seems to be a variety used by people who share linguistic and cultural features. Because it has particular phonological and grammatical characteristics, it might be called a dialect. 

5. Andean Spanish has been stigmatized from the beginning of its formation. There was a belief that this variety was not ‘pure’, that it was ‘deformed’ and reflected the incapacity and the dumbness of the Indians when they spoke it. Hence, for the speakers of this variety, speaking Andean Spanish has always been shameful. Nowadays, it is still stigmatized; its phonological features have become stereotypes that identify the socio-cultural group that speaks it, e.g.:

• the assibilation of [r] (i.e. its sibilant, or 'S-like' quality)
• and the alternation of vowels (mixing up of mid and high vowels - Quechua has no mid vowels)

However, some grammatical features that are not so salient, and are not popularly identified as Andean Spanish, are beginning to influence the speech of non-Andean people in Lima. This phenomenon dates to migration from the mountains to Lima around 1960. This can be considered a case in which the dialect of non-prestigious social groups is influencing the speech of the mainstream population. Why? There is no clear answer yet. It is interesting that even though Quechua is losing strength, this variety with some of its features is gaining force in the larger Peruvian society.

6. After independence from Spain in 1821, Spanish continued unquestioned as the national language, and the other indigenous languages were completely displaced, both for national-ist and for nation-ist purposes (see Fasold reading). For a brief period in the 1970s, Quechua held co-equal status with Spanish as an official language. However, the 1979 constitution of Peru designated only Spanish as the official language of the country, whereas Quechua and Aimara are “in official use in the zones and form that the law establishes”. Even though this means that in certain areas the problems of governing could be solved using Quechua and Aimara, this does not always happen either. According to the constitution, the other indigenous languages are the “cultural patrimony of the nation” (Article 83). Although there are some bilingual education programs going on in some areas, which try to use Quechua and Spanish in schools, the population is educated in Spanish all over the country. Quechua does not serve national-ist functions: to be Peruvian (the authenticity function), you have to speak Spanish, Quechua is not enough. All of these policies have made Quechua an oppressed language whose speakers are - sometimes - not proud of speaking it. However, attitude studies need to be done to understand more about this.

(From this information, you should be able to make a comparison with the Paraguayan case study drawn from Fasold 1984, Chap. 1. For more detail, see also Nancy Hornberger 1988, Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance: A Southern Peruvian Quechua Case, Dordrecht/Foris.)

[This lecture by Dr Zavala has been edited by PL Patrick for classroom use.]

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Last updated 23 November 2004