Several years ago, a researcher from New Zealand who lived in Samoa arrived in Sitka, Alaska with an encyclopedia of Tlingit, an indigenous language spoken today in Alaska. The encyclopedia, which reached beyond language to discuss aspects of Tlingit culture and society, was written over several years as a labor of love, based on written sources that the researcher had found, some in libraries, some on the Internet. The sources dated from the 19th century up to the present day, including the very ethnographic work of John Swanton, which was written before the time of the founder of American anthropology, Franz Boas. The work, written entirely in Tlingit was presented to Tlingit elders in Sitka. No one could understand even the smallest bit of the encyclopedia. What happened? There are several obvious answers. Tlingit is what anthropologist Xavier Albó called an “oppressed language,” not only because the speakers could exercise free use of their language only in limited domains—mainly the home, but because even in those limited domains, there has been the specter of another language—most recently English—hovering just beyond, giving Tlingit speakers a “double consciousness” (to use the famous phrase by W.E.B. DuBois) even when speaking their own. For the aficionado from New Zealand by way of Samoa, as for those of us reading this chapter, knowledge of Tlingit is mediated entirely through the dominant language, English, the meanings of words made to fit the meanings of counterparts in English, the grammatical morphology reshaped to fit English grammar, the syntax and the mundane pragmatic calculations that Tlingit speakers use day in and day out to fit English. Even the best intentioned materials developed for promoting the revival of Tlingit carry traces of the presence of English as the “matrix language”. In brief, the answer is painfully obvious. Although the English-language forms—the words and affixes--of English sentences, written following practices of English style, and English pragmatics were replaced with their Tlingit counterparts, using dictionaries, they remained English sentences, no more Tlingit for the Tlingit words. And so to interpret the Encyclopedia, a Tlingit speaker would have had to treat it as a word puzzle, to take every single word and try to find it in a bilingual dictionary (using the English to Tlingit part of course) and then guess at the English concept intended by the writer of the encyclopedia.
I walk you through this anecdote because it speaks to the status of Quechua today in the Andean republics, which like Tlingit is an “oppressed language,” albeit a language family with 10 to 12 million speakers, many—perhaps most—for all intents and purposes monolingual. (By “Quechua speaker,” I mean someone whose default mode o interaction in mundane circumstances is Quechua, regardless of what other languages they my speak; practice not knowledge is critical here.) Here, Spanish is the matrix language, and though official statistics in Peru and Bolivia show a massive erosion since the 1960s in the population that speaks it in everyday contexts, my limited ethnographic experience is that it is being reproduced and transmitted normally—that is, with all children in rural communities learning Quechua at home and being exposed to Spanish only in school. Nonetheless, when one leaves rural heartlands, and when one leaves the contexts of home and agropastoralism, it is eminently clear that Spanish is the language of public discourse. Moreover, Spanish is the matrix language in the same sense as English in Alaska. All public knowledge of Quechua linguistic structure, all grammatical analysis, all documentation of lexical meaning is mediated through Spanish (although it is sometimes retranslated into a third language, such as French or English). Such mundane routines as greeting a fellow traveler on a foot path, giving directions to the nearest town, entering a house, or asking for a drink of water are reformulated into Spanish-language interactional routines, although these are as opaque to Quechua speakers as the Tlingit encyclopedia was to Tlingit elders. Quechua culture is described in the matrix language and Quechua culture, history, and archaeology returned to Quechua-speaking children using Quechua word forms to label Spanish meanings, again as opaque to its audience as in the Tlingit case.
Why would this be so? After all, the Spaniards arrived as settler-conquerors. In policy matters, religious and secular alike, they debated how they were to approach the linguistic differences with their new subjects; there were those who proposed that Spanish be imposed on the new subject population with the same vigor as toward Arabic speakers on the Spanish peninsula, and those who advocated missionizing their new subjects in their own languages, with a pendulum swing between these two approaches, neither of which quite fit the facts-on the-ground. Language policy in itself, whether we are talking about royal decrees, recommendations to the Council of the Indies, or recommendations to missionary priests, is a poor indication of practices on the ground, particularly under as polycephalous an administrative tangle as the Spanish Hapsburgs, whose multiple jurisdictions could adopt and implement policy in very different ways. Moreover, the division of labor between state administrative structures and Church structures looked very different in the Hapsburg dominions than they look today in its successor republics. Language policy was discussed in both Church and state venues; linguistic and cultural practices, in contrast, were implemented by the Church and varied from one diocesanal jurisdiction to another.
(excerpted from chapter 7)
