Occasionally when I walk to Portuguese class, a short little man walks by. He’s perhaps 5′ 3”, and he has that sturdy build that is so typical of tropical indigenous peoples of Central and South America. He smiles quickly and says hello to everyone. He wears jeans and a big bubble coat and carries a backpack, with a humility in his talk and walk and attire that would never tell you he’s a professor at a major university.
He teaches Quechua, a native language spoken in the Andes, a language that isn’t the offiical language of any country and therefore doesn’t get much attention. To its ten million speakers, though, it’s a part of who they are.
We live in an age of superlanguages, where they say perhaps 40% of the world speaks English, and a handful of languages dominate almost all the communication in the world: six European languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Russian), three Asian languages (Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Japanese), two Middle Eastern languages (Arabic, Farsi) and one African language (Swahili). The rest of the world’s six thousand languages are pretty much pushed to the side, and even yesterday another language died when its last speaker passed away.
With perhaps a handful of exceptions, anyone who speaks Quechua also speaks the Spanish language that dominates the Andean countries. It would be easy to say that there is no reason to keep Quechua alive. For what function does it have? What use is a language when all of its speakers also speak another more widely used language?
But it would be a tragedy to see another language die. So I’m glad every time I see the smiling little professor of Quechua walk by.
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here’s to you, osu quechua guy
Occasionally when I walk to Portuguese class, a short little man walks by. He’s perhaps 5′ 3”, and he has that sturdy build that is so typical of tropical indigenous peoples of Central and South America. He smiles quickly and says hello to everyone. He wears jeans and a big bubble coat and carries a backpack, with a humility in his talk and walk and attire that would never tell you he’s a professor at a major university.
He teaches Quechua, a native language spoken in the Andes, a language that isn’t the offiical language of any country and therefore doesn’t get much attention. To its ten million speakers, though, it’s a part of who they are.
We live in an age of superlanguages, where they say perhaps 40% of the world speaks English, and a handful of languages dominate almost all the communication in the world: six European languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Russian), three Asian languages (Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Japanese), two Middle Eastern languages (Arabic, Farsi) and one African language (Swahili). The rest of the world’s six thousand languages are pretty much pushed to the side, and even yesterday another language died when its last speaker passed away.
With perhaps a handful of exceptions, anyone who speaks Quechua also speaks the Spanish language that dominates the Andean countries. It would be easy to say that there is no reason to keep Quechua alive. For what function does it have? What use is a language when all of its speakers also speak another more widely used language?
But it would be a tragedy to see another language die. So I’m glad every time I see the smiling little professor of Quechua walk by.
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