7. ‘Why do they steal our phonemes?’ Inventing the Survival of the Cañari Language (Ecuador)

Resumen

What may be deemed the #034;survival#034; or #034;death#034; of a language depends not only on formal criteria but also on ideological concerns. This chapter presents some empirical evidence for the #034;survival#034; of an ostensibly extinct pre-Incan language of the southern Ecuadorian Andes, Canari. On the one hand, many items of Canari lexicon survive in both the Quichua and the colloquial Spanish of the Canar region today. On the other hand, these lexical features and their associated phonemes have garnered ideological importance for indigenous speakers of Quichua at the forefront of politicized language revitalization policy in Ecuador since the late 1980s. The author asks whether there may be cultural continuity in language of a kind that the historian working from the Spanish colonial archive may not uncover, and propose that this continuity lies in the way Quichua, and to some extent Spanish, are spoken in the Canar-Azuay region. Keywords:Canari language; Ecuador; ideological; lexicon; phonemes; Quichua; Spanish