A Linguistic Injustice

You are standing in the Cordillera of the Andes. Southern Perú. It's hard to breathe this high up. The sky is a clear, fresh, intense blue, stretching upwards into the deep realms of the heavens. You see rocky slopes sprawling before you, and some grassy fields splayed about. A river splices the horizon in two, snaking its way between the peaks. You note a small village beside a road. The inhabitants of the village have a skin tone unchanged from that of their ancestors: the mighty Inkas. They have a dark, awful secret, however. They speak the Inkan language, Quechua.

So? What's so bad about that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But the Quechuas feel that it is an awful thing to speak their native language. A Cuzcan tour guide named Ernesto once told me, "These people don't like to speak their native language [around others]. They have vergüenza - shame - to speak it. They feel it is a lower, dirtier language compared to Spanish." How can this be? Well, through centuries of cultural, legal and economic oppresion by the Spanish conquistadores, the Quechuas have been made to be ashamed of their culture, society, heritage and their language. Through this process, the ability to read quipus - the Inka way of writing by making knots - has been lost (although we have determined some numerical properities through analysis). Also, a third of all the words in Quechua have been lost. Most, if not all, speak Spanish, the official language of Peru. Any who hope to move to a big city and work, moving up the social ladder, must know how to speak this key language.

This is not a peculiarity limited to Quechua. The same has occurred with Aymara, another native language, along with many others throughout the world. I experienced this myself countless hundreds of times. People who communicate better in Quechua or Aymara, in front of other people, will speak only in Spanish. Even in  the vast mazes in Peruvian markets, buried beneath tarps in dark alleyways, the Quechua or Aymara will, amongst themselves, oft not speak their most natural tongue, one they can both understand.