What We Overlook Talking About Smaller Languages

When I was younger I was really fascinated to learn that Quechua was still spoken today. You might know Quechua as the language of the Incan Empire, or the French sporting goods company. It’s a fascinating language with evidentiality markers, bipersonal verb conjugations and lots of other features that are catnip for a grammar nerd like me. I could go on for days, but that would be missing the point I want to make here, which is that

Quechua isn’t a language.

Well that's a bit misleading. I should say that Quechua isn't a single language. In reality, Quechua is a term that people often use to refer to a whole group of related languages spoken throughout the Andes region of South America, many varieties of which are not mutually intelligible with each other.

A rough sketch of where 'Quechua' is spoken

A linguist much more informed than I am once explained it to me that using the term Quechua the way we do was like calling all the West Slavic languages (think Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Kashubian, etc) one thing. And while the arguments and analyses about the number of 'Quechuas' are intimidating and fascinating, this is a blog about language politics.

So politically speaking, where does Quechua stand?

For one, Bolivia and Peru both name 'Quechua' as official languages while Ecuador refers to 'Kichwa' as one. So is there a difference? It's not such an important question if you're talking about the weather or shopping at the market, but what about rights? If I speak one of the Peruvian varieties of "Quechua" in Ecuador would I have rights?

And what about writing? Recently a Peruvian doctoral student wrote her thesis in Quechua. So the question comes up - which Quechua did she use?

The are at least four distinct groupings of 'Quechua' 

 In addition to being several languages, Quechua has several competing orthographies - One based on Spanish spelling, another preferred by a Quechua language academy and another used by the Peruvian government. And all of these brings me to my point.

Minority Languages Often Don't Have a Unified Standard

Just to be clear I'm not saying that languages should or need to be unified by any means, but understanding this makes it easier to understand the scope and the complications of language preservation and linguistic rights for smaller languages.

Most of the world’s minority languages don’t have one spoken standard. And those that have written forms often don't have standards or are based on the dominant language of the region. And both of theses factors raise difficult questions.

Which form a language do you use for education? Or for legal procedures? If you want to write a contract, which spelling system should you use? If it's the 'wrong' one, will it still hold legal standing?

When you think about it, this lack of standard makes a lot of sense. A standard form of a language is an entirely artificial thing that came about with the rise of the nation-state. Which dialect or variety of a language becomes or has become the exemplar of "good language use" is a matter of chance and which group of speakers have the most power.

Larger languages like French, Japanese, Mandarin, and German have institutions and grammar books and usage guides that tell speakers what is ‘proper’ and what isn’t. There are hundreds of guides of good writing and established norms for them.

You can expect all these books to have matching spelling

Because, minority languages often don't have standards, those teaching or disseminating them have to make a lot of choices. This goes deeper than word choice, but includes phonology and basic grammar structures.

This is a difficulty that becomes apparent with minority languages that are well supported. Welsh for example has a huge amount of variation in vocabulary, accent, phonology and grammar from region to region. Several linguists and casual observers have suggested that the language is currently going through its own standardisation process as Welsh continues to be promoted. In Welsh, there are at least four separate words for butterfly (glöyn byw, blyfyn bach yr haf, iâr fach yr haf, pilipala), but these days the use of glöyn byw and pilipala is becoming increasingly widespread with pilipala looking to be the frontrunner.

The various Welsh words for 'butterfly' is a fairly benign example, but it does illustrate a point. In communities that speak minority languages, finding multiple words, pronunciations and grammar is the norm. And if we want to work on their preservation, we have to take it into account.