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Language Ideology, Policy and Planning in Peru

Multilingual Matters

Why Study a Language Academy?

The first answer to the question posed in this chapter's title is a personal one. Being a native Quechua speaker born in Huancayo, Peru, which is located in the central Andes, I have always felt a deep attachment to the language and a continuing identification with the people. For most of my adult life I have been interested in the efforts to maintain and revitalize Quechua, and involved in fieldwork to study the language. In fact, I have traveled widely throughout the Andes – including several visits to Cuzco while doing fieldwork for one of my jobs before I began my graduate studies–interviewing native speakers, not only on their attitudes towards the language, but also collecting narratives of their life experiences. This work also provided the sociolinguistic data to help construct dictionaries and perform linguistic and dialectological studies. I have also visited many bilingual schools throughout the Andes, when I was working at the Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Educación (INIDE), to evaluate the use to which the schools were putting the bilingual materials the Ministry of Education had provided them. I consider myself an activist for Amerindian languages, especially for the Quechua language, and an Indigenous scholar (an 'organic intellectual', as Antonio Gramsci [1971] would say). Thus, I have long been interested in the work of any agency that was involved in maintenance and revitalization efforts for Quechua and other Indigenous languages of the Americas. I have been collecting archival data about, and following the multiple activities of, the High Academy of the Quechua Language in Cuzco, Peru (HAQL) since 1998. This book is the direct result of that long interest.

Apart from my personal reasons, worldwide, the number of languages being spoken is gradually diminishing: many vernacular languages with only a minimal number of speakers are dying out to cede their places to more dominant languages, such as English, Spanish, French and other major languages of the developed world (Crystal, 2000). Such a phenomenon is not going unnoticed, nor is it being allowed to happen in many areas without a struggle. Governmental and non-governmental organizations, Indigenous/ grassroots organizations, academic institutions, linguists, language planners, concerned officials and even many of the speakers of these languages in many countries are trying to find ways to maintain, preserve or expand the domains of use of these slowly dying languages.

Given this situation, case studies of what certain groups or countries have done can be beneficial, since often such experiences can be extrapolated to other places, or object lessons learned from their successes and failures. This is the context in which the present study was conducted. As a case study of the efforts of the Qheswa Simi Hamut'ana Kuraq Suntur, or HAQL, located in Cuzco, Peru, the present work offers insights into practices and ideologies that have occasionally served the Academy in meeting its goals, but often have hindered their efforts as well.

Quechua is an Indigenous language spoken by an estimated six to twelve million people throughout the Andean region of South America (Albó, 1999: 20; Cerrón-Palomino, 1987: 76; Grinevald, 1998: 128; Hornberger & Coronel-Molina, 2004: 19–20). With such a large community of speakers, it would hardly seem to warrant categorization as an endangered language, and yet that is exactly the situation in which many linguists and language planners classify it. For instance, Mannheim (1991: 27) calls it an '"oppressed language" in that its functional development has, since the European invasion, been the political, economic, and ideological prerogative of non-Quechua speakers'.

As Hornberger and King (2001: 166) note, there are a host of unfavorable political, social and ideological circumstances that contribute to its endangered condition. Given this fact, and the strong desire that many people have to preserve and/or revitalize it, the attention given in recent decades to ways of preserving it becomes understandable. The goal of the present investigation is to contribute to the body of knowledge surrounding the use and conservation of an endangered language from a very specific point of view: the contribution to Quechua language planning, maintenance and revitalization made by the HAQL. My hope is that highlighting one institution's efforts, actions and motivations can give other professionals and organizations ideas for strategies to try or pitfalls to avoid in their own areas.

Language academies in general have a long history of setting the linguistic standards for, or prescribing the parameters of, the languages they support. They serve as arbiters of standard orthography, lexicon and usage for their languages, ultimately providing a unifying foundation, at least for the written language, for all the speakers of all varieties of a given language. In theory, their goal is to linguistically unite a broad speech community, to offer its members a common linguistic bond and to encourage maintenance and even spread of their language. However, there are those who would argue that language academies' main goal is not, in fact, to serve such a unifying purpose. Rather, as the argument goes, they seek to promote the linguistic, political and sociocultural ideologies of the upper classes that have traditionally formed them and carried out their work. Some of these critics argue that the HAQL has a similar hidden agenda. Far from contributing to a unifying goal, the Academy ultimately fractionates the Quechua-speaking community through elitist ideologies and policies that are not always based on solid linguistic theory and practice (Cerrón-Palomino, 1997b: 63; Cooper, 1989: 8–14; El-Khafaifi, 1985; García, 2005: 21; Heggarty, 2000; Itier, 1992; Marr, 1998: 221–225, 1999; Nahir, 1974; Niño-Murcia, 1997). I undertook the study of the HAQL, the original Quechua language academy, to establish just what its positions, ideologies and practices consist of, and whether these do indeed benefit or hinder the progress and development of the language. Specifically, I examined how this academy functions in the maintenance and/or revitalization of Quechua in the Andean regions where it exercises its influence.

To understand why it is important to study a language planning agency in Peru, it is helpful to understand something of the linguistic background of the region. Peru is a multilingual and pluricultural country in which the dominant language is Spanish, and the status of the numerous Indigenous languages, including the many varieties of Quechua, has fluctuated greatly depending on what political group is in power. Quechua is slowly dying out in some areas, as many of its speakers come to believe that the only way they can better their lives is to turn their backs on their mother tongue and learn to speak the Spanish of the dominant class:

Although Quechua grammar and vocabulary have not atrophied, today, at the end of the twentieth century, monolingual Quechua speakers lead an atrophied existence, cut off from political, economic, social, and cultural arenas that affect their everyday lives. For this reason, many Southern Peruvian Quechua speakers have found knowledge of Spanish — even very limited knowledge — to be an indispensable resource. So Quechua speakers have a complex and often ambiguous set of responses to domination by Spanish Peru, including varying degrees of Quechua language maintenance and second-language survival skills in Spanish. (Mannheim, 1991: 27)

There are many individuals and groups who strongly believe that to lose Quechua in this region would be a great cultural and linguistic loss. One proposed approach to attempt to prevent further loss, and perhaps even to revitalize Quechua in areas where it has declined dangerously, is to standardize the written language and improve the status of the language in general. Language academies in many parts of the world have played, and continue to play, a fundamental role in such language planning processes, and so it would be logical to suppose that the HAQL might serve the same role. Given the precarious state of Quechua in the Andean region, and some of the criticism that has been leveled at the HAQL and its potential to impact maintenance and/or revitalization, it is reasonable and even necessary to study the role it currently plays in language planning processes for Quechua in Peru.

Why Use an Ethnographic Approach?

Given the amount of material that seems to be available on language academies worldwide, one might wonder about the relevance of an ethnographic study to investigate the efforts and achievements of one. I believe that such an ethnographic study is very important for the simple reason that archives and propaganda can never tell the whole story. As Ferguson (1996: 277) so aptly notes, 'All language planning activities take place in particular sociolinguistic settings, and the nature and scope of the planning can only be fully understood in relation to the settings'. Thus, without understanding the sociolinguistic setting within which the language academy functions, one cannot fully appreciate the work it may accomplish, the members' ideologies and attitudes, nor how these influence their work and their achievement of conservation goals.

There have been no ethnographic studies done of the HAQL that I have been able to discover. If the Quechua Academy itself has any kind of historical or promotional literature, it is currently not readily available internationally. Thus, my research fills a significant void in the literature on language policy and planning (LPP) in general, and the Quechua language academy in particular.

At the local level, the results of this study can provide information for policy makers and educators in Peru and other Andean countries, enabling them to decide on the value of such institutions for language planning, and to what degree they might be helpful in policy areas, such as status, corpus and acquisition planning, educational policy, etc. This study could inform policy, thus benefiting the HAQL, governments and educational systems. From the available literature, it appears that no one has ever doubted the role that language academies have in LPP, maintenance or revitalization; but neither has anyone actually gone to the field to observe and record directly the kinds of work that the academies do. All of the available information to date is historical, apparently based on archival records and self-reports. Ethnography is the most effective way to determine whether these records and histories reflect reality. In addition, the kinds of details revealed are much more useful than a simple recounting of projects carried out and their results. They can provide concrete evidence to language planners and researchers in other areas of the world of what does or does not work in a specific type of situation under certain sociopolitical conditions.

Ethnography is a particularly hands-on way to gather qualitative data on a given population, as well as enabling comparisons between what that population claims to do or believe, and what they really do or believe. One of the key elements of ethnography is its capacity to enable the researcher to really get inside the lives of the group from which s/he wants to learn, to gain their confidence and be accepted as one of them, so that they go about their daily lives without constraint (Spradley, 1980).

Although ethnographic observation was my primary means of collecting data, archival research was also useful in collecting non-observational types of data, such as decrees, bylaws, past meeting minutes, memoranda, official letters, books published by the HAQL, journals, newspaper articles, workshop/conference proceedings, agreements, radio programs, government policies, laws, lists of Academy members, a full set of the published issues of their official journal, Inka Rimay and even copies of students' class notes. Also, in more recent years, sources, such as the internet, blogs, Facebook and YouTube, have also been a rich source of information, although of course, such information must be weighed carefully for validity value.

Thus, I have read innumerable documents written by Academy members, and from these, I gained a very clear picture of the ideologies the HAQL holds and the portrait they attempt to present of themselves to the public. Nevertheless, I found that what they had published did not always correspond with what they did or how they acted. This revelation is perfectly in line with contemporary thinking regarding information validity. It has been shown time and again that in evaluating the credibility of information in a given document, the source of the information is at least as important as the information itself. Thus, by the same token, it would be helpful to have other sources of information outside the HAQL, since the members' own ideological, political or other leanings influence the picture they paint of the Academy.

What Do I Want to Know?

Language academies have a long history worldwide of seeking to standardize their respective languages, with various motives. In the case of many less commonly spoken languages, those motives include a desire to revitalize a dead or dying language. My research focuses on one such institution, the HAQL in Cuzco, Peru. My investigation was guided by four principal questions that pertain to the three subfields of language planning, and to the top-down/bottom-up nature of the Academy's language planning activities.

(1) Status planning: in what ways does the HAQL contribute to Quechua language maintenance and/or revitalization? How do its positions, ideologies and practices influence members' work in this area? How much do the HAQL members actually use the language on a daily basis, for what purposes, under what circumstances and in what forms (i.e. written or spoken)? What expectations does the public have of the HAQL, and how do these affect its activities in the three spheres of language planning?

(2) Corpus planning: what are the members' positions, ideologies and practices concerning lexical and orthographic standardization, and lexical modernization and purification of Quechua? What impact do these positions, ideologies and practices have on the Academy's ability to achieve its goals?

(3) Acquisition planning: in what specific activities is the HAQL involved, and at what level? How do the members' ideologies influence their activities? This question is also related by extension to language revitalization: what outreach efforts does the HAQL perform in neighboring rural or urban communities in the department of Cuzco, and how do these serve its language planning goals?

(4) What kinds of projects does the HAQL carry out and with whom does it collaborate to achieve them? In what ways, if any, does it work with other regional and international branches of the Academy, local schools and top-down institutions, such as government planning agencies and non-government organizations (NGO)? In what ways, if any, does it accept and encourage participation from the grassroots level in its activities?

These questions form a basic organizational framework for the present book, and their answers point to the ultimate utility of the HAQL. They also have implications for possible directions for improvement of the Academy and provide insights at a more general level into what does and does not work in terms of encouraging maintenance and/or revitalization of a language within circumstances similar to those pertaining to the HAQL.

The book is divided into five sections, each focused on a different aspect of the Academy and its efforts in language planning. Part 1 provides an overview of general background information, including a brief introduction to the dynamics of language change; an equally brief history of a selection of language academies; and an overview of language planning and policy in Peru from Incan times to the present. Part 2 highlights the history of the founding and the organizational structure of the HAQL, while Part 3 delves into its ideologies. Part 4 is where the Academy's language planning and policy efforts per se are discussed, focusing on status and corpus planning, and Part 5 deals with acquisition planning. Before we begin these discussions however, I would like to give some background on the methodologies I used to gather my data.

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Excerpted from Language Ideology, Policy and Planning in Peru by Serafin M. Coronel-Molina. Copyright © 2015 Serafín M. Coronel-Molina. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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