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In Cuzco Quechua (CQ), a periphrastic construction optionally marked for the past tense is said to serve as past habitual. The study focuses on the evolution of this construction in CQ. Its development replicates the cline suggested by Bybee et al. in 1994 and supports their findings but not in full: Although the habitual marker in CQ is restricted temporally to the past, it bears no past tense marking. The article sketches the different stages and concludes that the construction in question had further grammaticalized to a past imperfective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. It is concluded that by virtually any standard Quechua shows clear evidence for a distinct class of attributive noun modifiers, and that in the future Quechua should not be considered a 'flexible' noun/adjective language for the purposes of crosslinguistic comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use and status of the Quechua language in central highland Peru, where varieties of the "Quechua I " subgroup are spoken. The discussion centers on a case study of Tantamayo Quechua, spoken in the province of Huamali'es, department of Hua'nuco. After a brief overview of formal features of the language, the paper complements Hornberger and Coronel-Molina's article by exploring issues of language attitudes, language shift and language-status planning with reference to a specific geographic case study. It furthermore seeks to identify some of the sociopsychological factors that contribute to language endangerment in the context of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary aims to reinforce and to some degree clarify Hornberger and Coronel-Molina's discussion of Quechua by providing further data regarding Ecuadorian Quichua today. Based on personal fieldwork and on-going discussions with Quichua and non-Quichua speakers about the status of Quichua in Ecuador, this paper presents up-to-date data which highlights the controversial status of Ecuadorian Quichua. Despite the large number of Quichua speakers in Ecuador, the Andes, and abroad, Quichua falls into the category of an endangered language in need of immediate attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the status of a lesser-known Argentinian dialect of Quechua: Santiago del Estero,and highlights the sociocultural context of the language. Specifically, the authors discuss the potential maintenance, revitalization, and loss of the language in light of Fishman's "dislocations" (1991)and Crawford's hypotheses of language loss (2000). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Quechua is spoken by eight to twelve million people across six South American countries, by most measures,Quechua is an endangered language. This article provides an overview of the current situation of Quechua language shift, maintenance, and revitalization, and makes a case for the importance of language planning for the survival and development of the language. We use Fishman's notion of physical/demographic, social,and cultural dislocations as an organizing rubric for discussing Quechua's current situation (Fishman 1991:55--65),and the typology of status, corpus, and acquisition planning to discuss the role of language planning in Quechua's position, both current and future. We take into account the role of linguistic ideologies and language attitudes in language shift, maintenance, and revitalization and in the language-planning process, working from the assumption that language is a critical element of ethnic identity for many Quechua speakers in the Andes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of the nature of the Quechua language. As there are currently thousands of endangered languages in the world, many of which lie close to extinction, one might reasonably ask why Quechua merits special attention, and in particular, why an entire issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Quechua has been characterized as a group of varieties within a language family, but lacking the superstructure of parents and grandparents. Linguistic classification of Quechua is complicated by the fact that it is spoken in a half dozen Andean nations, each of which have treated the language somewhat differently. Quechua is also characterized by great geographic diversity. Quechua reside in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, with smaller numbers in Argentina, Colombia, and Chile. While the rural Andean highlands have been the traditional stronghold of the language, there are substantial numbers of Quechua speakers, and indeed, whole communities, who reside in a variety of different nonhighland, nonrural settings. Massive migration since the 1950s has transformed all Andean countries, to a greater or lesser extent, from largely rural nations to primarily urban ones. The geographic diversity of Quechua speakers and communities results in great variation in the amount, duration, and intensity of contact with speakers of indigenous languages such as Aymara and Guarani, as well as speakers of European languages such as Spanish and English.

This paper presents and discusses empirical findings about new literacy practices in indigenous languages, observed and analyzed in Bolivia in the framework of the research project "Literacy practices in a cross-cultural perspective: a comparison between Bolivia and Uganda,"funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft at the Collaborative Research Center on Multilingualism at Hamburg University. Such knowledge and analysis of new situated community literacy practices using a systematic methodology (von Gleich et al.2002)might help to design more user-adequate programs for schoolchildren and adults, especially in multilingual literacy planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current language policies in Bolivia are based on ideological assumptions that reflect the language practice of Spanish speakers, rather than socio-linguistic evidence. These assumptions include: that standardization is key to Quechua language revitalization and political empowerment; that etymological criteria are the best guide for elaborating a standard; and that literacy- and school-based functions are the most crucial to Quechua's future. Inasmuch as these assumptions conflict with the language ideologies of Quechua communities, policies chances for success are diminished. Rather than focusing exclusively on domains where Spanish is dominant, language planners should address language shift in those domains that constitute Quechua's stronghold: the home and the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a specifically Bolivian perspective on several themes from the Hornberger and Coronel-Molina review. On the shifting boundaries of Quechua language use, the commentary takes an ecological view, locating Quechua in relation to Aymara and Spanish and drawing special attention to politico-military, economic, and religious factors in the shifting boundaries, both historical and recent. The author goes on to caution against the comparison of cross-national statistical data, pinpointing the weaknesses of census data on languages and highlighting the ways in which Bolivia's projected 2001 census improves on the census questions relating to language. After commenting briefly on Quechua speakers 'glottocentric attitudes and ideologies of ethnic loyalty, the article concludes with a call for more uses of Quechua in written and mass-media domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it is beyond question that lexical borrowing from Quechua into Spanish occurred during the colonial period, determining when structural interference of Queehua on Peruvian Spanish can be said to have begun is a more difficult matter. It is here proposed that the development of contact features is dependent on a series of sociolinguistic conditions that trigger the development or a contact variety. The development of contact features, then, is understood not as a second-language phenomenon, but as a social phenomenon. A review of the social, demographic, and linguistic characteristics of Peruvian society from the early colonial period onward indicates that the necessary sociolinguistic conditions were not present in the colonial period in Peru. Only after a transition period (from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century) were the social conditions in place for a contact variety to develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the properties of Lowland Ecuadorian Quechua, a possibly pidginized variety from this Andean indigenous language family, are evaluated in the light of the semantic-transparency hypothesis. It is argued that the typological perspective created by looking at a wider range of languages brings some of the basic ideas developed for creole languages into focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is manifold. The first section contains a discussion of the concept of language spread policy with respect to a language that for historical and social reasons has deteriorated from a lingua franca and official administrative language in precolonial times to an endangered minority language after decolonization in the context of modern national societies. For this paper, language spread policy is defined as a policy by a state or government that aims at fostering the spread of a specific language within and/or outside its boundaries. The second section explains specific features of the Quechua language and gives the numerical and regional distribution of Quechua speakers. Section three reviews language policy with respect to the spread of Quechua from precolonial times up to the twentieth century. Section four sketches the major incentives and support given by international organizations in favor of Latin American indigenous languages. Section five analyzes the present situation in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Information about the current legal and functional status of Quechua in contact with Spanish is necessary to understand the task of language spread policy. The focus of this section, however, lies in the identification of domains of spread, mechanisms, strategies, and promoting institutions in the respective countries.