Bringing the language forward: engagements with Quechua language planning and policy

1 Quechua LPP in changing times

Nearly two decades ago, Kendall King and Nancy Hornberger edited a special issue on the current status and future prospects of Quechua language planning and policy (LPP) for this journal (King and Hornberger 2004).^[1] They contended that there was no “single, monolithic ‘Quechua situation’” (10) but instead a mosaic of sociolinguistic contexts that characterize the sociolinguistic scenario of this Indigenous language, the most widely spoken in the Americas.^[2] In light of the shifting mosaics of the last few decades, this special issue spotlights research on contemporary advances and future outlooks of Quechua LPP, addressing conceptual, methodological, socio-political and demographic changes that contribute toward bringing the language forward.^[3] Harking back to Fishman’s (1971) original sociology of language question: “who speaks (or writes) what language (or what language variety) to whom and when and to what end?” (219), our reflections here focus in essence on who engages in Quechua LPP (research) for whom and when and to what end?

In the intervening twenty years since 2004, we have witnessed growing scholarship documenting, analyzing and impacting the mosaics of shifting Quechua ecologies and LPP activities. Official and bottom-up language education policies, mostly regarding intercultural bilingual education (IBE), have expanded Quechua language education beyond its traditional domains, and research now also encompasses preschools, urban and secondary schools (Aviles Cadima 2017; Kvietok 2021; Kvietok Dueñas 2021; Sichra 2006; Zavala 2018). Educational research has grown to consider LPP processes taking place in higher education and teacher education institutions (Delany-Barmann 2010; Hornberger 2014; Luykx et al. 2016) as well as in ministries of education (Limerick forthcoming). In the Ecuadorian context, Limerick (2022) illuminates the double binds of Kichwa language reclamation when taken up by the state. Scholars continue to consider the different forms and meanings of Quechua textual production, an ongoing topic of interest specially in relation to educational practices (Limerick 2018; Limerick and Hornberger 2019). The growth of higher education IBE programs across the Andes has resulted in an increasing number of Quechua researchers. As part of the growing scholarship in Quechua and by Quechua researchers, we see innovations in research methodologies (Kenfield 2021) and research genres inclusive of policy and practice implications (Catalán Colque 2006; Cazón Nolasco 2006; Hancco Mamani 2007; Mamani Vilca 2006), as well as academic publications in Quechua (Coronel-Molina 1999; Quispe-Collantes 2019).

Policy changes, global phenomena, language ideologies, and bottom-up efforts also shape how diverse actors engage in Quechua LPP in governmental, legal and media domains (Andrade et al. 2018; Howard 2007; Zavala et al. 2014), language academies (Coronel-Molina 2015) and digital spaces (Limachi 2019; Zavala 2019). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Quechua activists have seized digital platforms to join prevention efforts alongside often limited governmental Indigenous language campaigns (López 2021).^[4] The roles and Quechua planning activities of youth (Hornberger and Swinehart 2012; Sumida Huaman 2014) and families (King and Haboud 2011; Sichra 2016) are increasingly being highlighted. The impact of mobility of Quechua actors and the geographical expansion of LPP activities beyond rural domains and outside Andean nation states are also taken up in recent work (Firestone 2017; Manley 2008; Mendoza-Mori 2017).

This issue originated to celebrate Nancy Hornberger’s longstanding contributions to Quechua language planning and policy, which began with her multi-year dissertation work in Puno, Perú in the 1980s (Hornberger 1988) and have continued to expand from her roles as ethnographer, consultant, professor, and mentor. The authors herein – colleagues and some, former students of Nancy – engage with her prolific scholarship, observing continuities in LPP trends she has identified across the Andes and using her conceptual and methodological innovations to provide new insights on shifting LPP dynamics. The combined genres of academic articles and reflection essays from practice spotlight a range of Quechua LPP researchers and practitioners and their many engagements. The multilingual contributions – in English, Spanish and/or Quechua, Kichwa and Runasimi^[5] – attempt to create greater dialog between LPP actors, decentering English as the main language of academic production and contributing to growing efforts in academic Quechua text production. We hope this special issue is of interest to scholars and practitioners of LPP activities regarding Quechua and beyond to other Indigenous languages around the globe, given our engagement with ongoing conceptual and methodological shifts in the LPP field, as well as policy, social and demographic changes impacting Indigenous language user communities everywhere.

Two long-term Andean scholar-practitioners, Luis Enrique López and Nicholas Limerick, offer opening and closing commentaries on the politics and future of Quechua, reflecting on the work herein. In what follows, we take up the six contributions organized around three thematic strands in dialog with Nancy’s scholarship.

2 Filling new spaces with Quechua voices

The first two contributions describe new spaces being filled with Quechua voices – academic and urban youth spaces. In the first essay, Roxana Quispe-Collantes reflects, in Runasimi, on her dream made reality in 2019 with the historic completion and defense of her doctoral dissertation, the first ever in Quechua, at San Marcos University in Lima, the oldest university in the Americas. Her trajectory from a rural community in Acomayo province took her to academic studies at Cusco’s National University of San Antonio Abad and her eventual discovery of the one book in Quechua in its library, a book of poems titled Yawar Para. This book ultimately became the topic of her dissertation, fulfilling her dream of bringing Quechua voices and Runasimi language into academia. Recounting many doubts and challenges along the way, in an engaging narrative voice, she never loses sight of the ancestral dreams, desires, and wisdom which spurred her on and also give her hope for a respectful future for her Quechua language and identity – and all Indigenous languages and identities – in a new post-pandemic world.

Virginia Zavala takes up a new urban space for Quechua language classes in Lima – Quechua Para Todos (QPT), promoted by young Quechua activists, mostly university graduates who migrated from Ayacucho as children. Analyzing this radical departure from Peru’s half-century of IBE policies targeted at first language rural Quechua speakers, in this article she frames the popularity of QPT through language commodification and neoliberalism, showing how historic racialization of Quechua speakers as ignorant and backward is transformed by a view of Quechua knowledge as added bonus for university-educated multicultural citizens with some knowledge of English. The teachers and students style themselves as professionals and Quechua as economic asset for their future work and international marker of their national pride. It remains to be seen, she muses, whether these new spaces will indeed overcome centuries of marginalization and racialization, in order to benefit all Quechua speakers.

Quechua voice – and Quechua voices – are a central theme of Nancy Hornberger’s work across the decades, as she repeatedly calls for “autonomy of the speech community in deciding about use of languages in their schools and a societal context in which primary incentives exist for the use of one, two, or multiple languages in that and every other domain” (1988: 237), the rights of minoritized language speakers to “participate in the global community on, and IN, their own terms” (1998: 455), and Indigenous voices as a powerful force for enhancing children’s learning and promoting maintenance and revitalization of their languages (2006: 290). The Quechua voices resonating in the academic and urban spaces highlighted in these two contributions offer evidence and hope for the future of Quechua language and identity in our ever-changing world.

3 Methodological innovations

The next set of contributions offer a window into Quechua LPP participatory research and methodological innovations. In their reflection essay, Luis Andrade Ciudad and Rosaleen Howard share methodological considerations from a participatory research project that sought to recognize the roles of Peruvian women leaders as Quechua- and Aimara-Spanish interpreters and translators for their communities. The project, designed by women leaders, academic researchers and an NGO, used innovative methods like a trilingual play and audiovisual exhibit to visibilise the voices and experiences of women interpreters to a range of LPP actors, including state policymakers. This piece highlights the potential of participatory LPP research to have an impact on macro and official LPP activities, and the necessity for researchers to engage in ongoing reflexivity during this process.

With the backdrop of Kichwa language policies and shift in Ecuador in the last two decades, Marleen Haboud Bumachar reports on the activities of Oralidad Modernidad, an inter- and multidisciplinary group of Kichwa speakers and non-speakers that supports active Kichwa documentation and revitalization. At the core of the group’s efforts is the recognition that Kichwa documentation-revitalization is not just about research results and products, but most importantly, about long-term accomplishments with, from and for Kichwa speakers. In this article, Haboud Bumachar describes a set of guiding principles that run across different projects undertaken in the last years, even during the pandemic, activities which have contributed to participants’ self-empowerment, Kichwa use, and the revalorization of Kichwa values and knowledges.

The contributions connect to Nancy’s ongoing reflections on who, how and why we conduct language planning and policy research, most lately addressed in her discussion of methodological rich points, where she affirms the fundamental role of the ethnography of language policy as “transforming lives through language practices” (Hornberger 2013: 118). Andrade Ciudad, Howard and Haboud Bumachar provide telling examples of moments when “researchers learn that their assumptions about the way research works and the conceptual tools they have for doing research are inadequate to understand the worlds they are researching” (Hornberger 2013: 102) and they offer the tools of critical reflexivity and documentación-revitalización (documentation-revitalization) as ways to engage with these methodological rich points. Across these authors’ engagements, the possibility of LPP research to transform social realities and inequalities stands as the biggest promise of engaged LPP methodological reflection and action.

4 Ideological and implementational spaces in Quechua LPP

The final contributions reflect on educational LPP developments, offering cases from the United States and Peru. There is an emergence of Quechua language and culture reclamation in educational programs of diasporic communities in the United States. Tracing the diaspora’s demographics to rural–urban and Andean–U.S. migration in the 1970s and 80s, in the last reflection essay, Américo Mendoza-Mori and Rachel Sprouse highlight the example of New York University’s Quechua program in existence since 2008 as an incubator for reclamation initiatives by Quechua language and culture actors. These include the Quechua Collective of New York founded by a Quechua elder to run Quechua language programs and classes, the Kichwa language radio program Kichwa Hatari, and the May Sumak Qichwa Film Showcase. Notably, the authors highlight these initiatives’ pan-Andean perspective celebrating all varieties of the language family rather than foregrounding one best or purest form; and their ongoing strengthening exchange with counterparts in the Andes.

Bringing together the study of family and educational LPP, in the final article, Frances Kvietok addresses how youth from rural hometowns and their families residing in a large town in the Peruvian Andes experience their bilingualism. Ethnographic findings highlight migrant youth’s evolving repertoires and negotiations of family language policies across rural-urban continua, their roles and responsibilities as language policy agents with siblings and parents, and their school language learning experiences as racialized speakers. Kvietok emphasizes how family language policy research can inform Quechua educational LPP and offers suggestions for urban schools to consider migrant learners’ and their families’ multilingual experiences and desires to support Quechua language practices and identities.

The two pieces address the multilayered nature of Quechua educational LPP and its potential to open ideological and implementational spaces for diverse Quechua linguistic practices and identities, enduring themes at the heart of Nancy’s scholarship on multilingual language policies (Hornberger 2002b) and the ethnography of language policy (Hornberger and Johnson 2011). This work, which combines insights from their roles as educators, organizers and ethnographers, attests to the perduring significance of Hornberger’s calls for research and practice to attend to how actors make sense of myriad LPP types and processes in situated contexts, to the interplay of layered LPP activities, and to hidden motivations, ideologies and unintended consequences in order to better understand how ideological and implementational spaces for language diversity in education can be opened up or closed down (Hornberger and Johnson 2011; Hornberger 2021). Mendoza-Mori, Sprouse and Kvietok show the importance of expanding Quechua educational LPP research and practice to include the experiences of a range of educational actors in a diversity of settings, in particular migrant and diasporic communities, to understand how co-existent possibilities and tensions in Quechua education continue to be experienced and their consequences for learners, speakers and communities.

5 Bringing the language forward: Quechua LPP and reclamation

Across decades and centuries, visions for the future of the Quechua language have evolved and changed along with a changing world and the changing mosaic of sociolinguistic contexts in which Quechua and its speakers live and move. Since Nancy’s work (1988) on Quechua language maintenance in Peru in the early 1980s, a microcosm of evolving conceptual frames can be seen in the sequence of her students’ scholarship, from Kendall King’s work (1999, 2001) on Quichua language revitalization in Ecuador a decade later, to Coronel-Molina’s (2008, 2015 on locally-based activism of Cusco’s historic High Academy of the Quechua Language, to Frances Kvietok Dueñas’ (2020, 2021; Kvietok 2021) on youth bilingualism and identity in urban Quechua language education, to Limerick’s (2020, 2022, forthcoming) on the double binds of Kichwa language reclamation from within Ecuadorian Indigenous Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) in ways that paradoxically distance IBE leaders from their own constituents who speak the language on a daily basis. If language revitalization goes beyond language maintenance, in that it is about “recuperating and reconstructing something that is at least partially lost, rather than maintaining and strengthening what already exists” (Hornberger 2002a: 366), language reclamation goes still further, undertaking “place-specific actions through which individuals or groups are countering forms of marginalization” (De Korne and Leonard 2017: 5), actions grounded on community needs, histories and worldviews.^[6]

One might see this progression in stance from Quechua language maintenance to revitalization to reclamation in a pessimistic light, marking a changed frame “at least partially attributable to the growing threat to even such a large Indigenous language as Quechua” (Hornberger 2002a: 367). Our view is more hopeful, as we take inspiration from the strength of Quechua voices carving a path for Quechua’s vitality, versatility and stability over time; we build on the words and writings of eloquent Quechua LPP activists such as ‘El Inka’ Faustino Espinoza Navarro (Espinoza Navarro 1963; Hornberger 1994), Puno PEEB’s prolific Quechua author Chuquimamani (1983, 1984; Hornberger 1994), and Quechua Indigenous PROEIB scholar activist Mamani Vilca (2006; Hornberger 2014). Like those earlier voices, the authors here represent an “outlook toward reclaiming an Indigenous identity and future in the Andes… [that] is not by any means a naïve or uncritical stance, nor does it represent a way of life frozen in time or place, but rather it is a set of professional and life commitments consistently practiced and generously offered to…our world” (Hornberger 2014: 297). This special issue highlights new Quechua scholarly voices, but also new spaces where Quechua voices, histories and knowledges are heard, new participatory methodologies more fully incorporating Quechua voices and values, and new multilayered Quechua educational policies opening ideological and implementational spaces for Quechua linguistic practices and identities. Our hope is that voices and spaces like these will inspire and inform Quechua LPP well into the future.