Duck and Frog Stories in Chuquisaca Quechua (quh)

FAIN: FN-266278-19

Susan E. Kalt
Roxbury Community College (Roxbury, MA 02120-3423)

The analysis of recordings from Chuquisaca, a dialect of Southern Quechua, an indigenous language spoken in the Andean regions of Bolivia and Peru, as well as linguistic training of local collaborators involved in language revitalization.

The core activity of this project will be to document storytelling and conversations with speakers of Quechua (quh) in rural highlands Chuquisaca, Bolivia. We will create the first digital collection of such narratives from this relatively undocumented variety at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) consisting of 60 interviews of children and 25 of adults video-recorded, transcribed and translated to Spanish with the collaboration of Bolivian researchers in 2016 and 2018. During the fellowship term, we will analyze and publish findings based on these interviews to illuminate theories of how languages are acquired, lost and changed. Chuquisaca lies near the southern extreme of the linguistic area that produced Standard Colonial Quechua (quz/quh). Cuzco Quechua is the prestige variety which has been documented for over 500 years, whereas Bolivian varieties have rarely received attention (Durston 2007, Mannheim 1991). Quechua is now ‘definitely endangered’ in this region as intergenerational transmission is increasingly abandoned in favor of Spanish, even within this rural and relatively well-preserved variety. (Edited by staff)

Associated Products

Duck and Frog Stories in Chuquisaca Quechua (Acquisitions/Materials Collection)
Name: Duck and Frog Stories in Chuquisaca Quechua
Abstract: This collection documents storytelling and conversations with speakers of Quechua (quh) in rural highlands Chuquisaca, Bolivia in the communities surrounding Tarabuco town, home of the Yampara culture and celebrated as a World Heritage Site. A small degree of Quechua monolingualism is still preserved there. This collection began in 2016 with 25 interviews of adults and continued in 2018 with 58 interviews of children as well as the making of a short film in which children and community leaders presented theater, a game and songs. In 2019 we conducted two free-form narrative interviews of adults. All collection media were video-recorded, transcribed in Quechua and translated to Spanish by indigenous Bolivian researchers in collaboration with North American linguists. Chuquisaca lies near the southern extreme of the linguistic area that produced Standard Colonial Quechua (quz/quh). Movement of people between Cuzco and Chuquisaca accelerated in the 16th century due to silver mining in Potosí. Cuzco Quechua is the international prestige variety which has been documented for over 500 years, whereas Bolivian varieties have rarely received attention (Durston 2007, Mannheim 1991). Quechua is now ‘definitely endangered’ in the communities where we conducted this collection of interviews, as intergenerational transmission is increasingly abandoned in favor of Spanish. This collection is an extension of our team’s first efforts, found at AILLA in The Speech of Children from Cuzco and Chuquisaca. In that collection, interviews conducted in Chuquisaca were limited to sentence comprehension and picture description tasks. The elicitation instruments we used here include a series of drawings about a duck and an Andean goose developed by our team, as well as a book of drawings adapted from Mercer Mayer’s Frog Stories which have been used for studies of languages around the world. This project represents collaborative work between the communities of origin, Bolivian native linguists,
Director: Susan Smythe Kung, AILLA Manager, Univ. of Texas Libraries
Director: Susan E. Kalt
Year: 2016
Address: LLILAS BENSON LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES AND COLLECTIONS The University of Texas at Austin 2300 Red River St, Austin, TX 78712 Phone: (512) 495-4520
Primary URL: https://ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla%3A258876
Primary URL Description: A collection of video and text at AILLA. AILLA is a digital language archive of recordings, texts, and other multimedia materials in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America. AILLA's mission is to preserve these materials and make them available to Indigenous Peoples, researchers, and other friends of these languages now and for generations to come. The look and feel of this new site has been updated, and some user functionality has been added, including the ability to perform a keyword search across all collections, as well as the ability to stream and view some media files without having to download them first. Access to AILLA and its resources is always free of charge.

Acquisition, Loss and Innovation in Chuquisaca Quechua—What Happened to Evidential Marking? (Article)
Title: Acquisition, Loss and Innovation in Chuquisaca Quechua—What Happened to Evidential Marking?
Author: Susan E. Kalt
Abstract: Variation among closely related languages may reveal the inner workings of language acquisition, loss and innovation. This study of the existing literature and of selected interviews from recent narrative corpora compares the marking of evidentiality and epistemic modality in Chuquisaca, Bolivian Quechua with its closely related variety in Cuzco, Peru and investigates three hypotheses: that morpho-syntactic attrition proceeds in reverse order of child language acquisition, that convergence characterizes the emergence of grammatical forms different from L1 and L2 in contact situations, and that the Quechua languages are undergoing typological shift toward more isolating morphology. It appears that reportive -sis disappeared first in Bolivia, with eyewitness/validator -min retaining only the validator function. This finding seems to concord with reverse acquisition since it has previously been claimed that epistemic marking is acquired earlier than evidential marking in Cuzco. Meanwhile, Spanish and Quechua in nearby Cochabamba are claimed to mark reportive evidentiality via freestanding verbs of saying. I explore the reportive use of ñiy ‘to say’ in Chuquisaca as compared to Cochabamba and Cuzco and suggest the need for comparative statistical studies of evidential and epistemic marking in Southern Quechua.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6020076
Primary URL Description: Languages (ISSN 2226-471X) is an international, multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed open access journal on interdisciplinary studies of languages, and is published quarterly online by MDPI. The first issue has been released in 2016.
Secondary URL: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages/special_issues/indigenous-america
Secondary URL Description: (This article belongs to the Special Issue Indigenous Languages of the Americas) edited by Liliana Sanchez and Jose Camacho
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Languages
Publisher: mdpi.com

Typological Shift in Bilinguals’ L1: Word Order and Case Marking in Two Varieties of Child Quechua (Article)
Title: Typological Shift in Bilinguals’ L1: Word Order and Case Marking in Two Varieties of Child Quechua
Author: Jonathan A. Geary
Author: Susan E.Kalt
Abstract: We compare speech production and find morphosyntactic change among children and adolescents speaking two closely related varieties of Quechua in Cuzco, Peru, and Chuquisaca, Bolivia. Quechua languages traditionally employ Object-Verb (OV) word order in main clauses, but robust case marking permits other orders, especially to focalize new information through constituent fronting. In Chuquisaca, but not Cuzco, we find that schoolchildren often omit the accusative suffix -ta from direct objects while retaining a prosodic trace of -ta. In other varieties, loss of accusative marking is associated with a shift towards Verb-Object (VO) word order, as in Spanish. However, we find that Chuquisaqueños use more canonical OV and possessor-possessed order in declarative sentences than do Cuzqueños, who employ a wide range of word orders at the sentence level and deviate from the possessor-possessed norm for Quechua noun phrases. Our finding of more rigid word order in Chuquisaca highlights the complex factors contributing to typological shift in word order and morphology: Omission of case morphology places a greater burden on word order to identify grammatical roles. Further, we find that Chuquisaqueño schoolchildren alone have begun to use huk, “one,” to mark indefiniteness, perhaps to replace determiner-like functions ascribed to -ta and to obsolescent markers such as evidentials.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6010042
Primary URL Description: Languages (ISSN 2226-471X) is an international, multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed open access journal on interdisciplinary studies of languages, and is published quarterly online by MDPI. The first issue has been released in 2016.
Secondary URL: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages/special_issues/indigenous-america#published
Secondary URL Description: (This article belongs to the Special Issue Indigenous Languages of the Americas) edited by Liliana Sanchez and Jose Camacho.
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Languages
Publisher: mdpi.com

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