Media Lengua
Media Lengua (ML) is a mixed language spoken by around 1000 people in Salcedo, a canton in the central Ecuadorian province of Cotopaxi . It was discovered by chance by the Dutch linguist Pieter Muysken while doing field research on Ecuadorian Quechua in the 1970s. Media Lengua contains the grammar of Quechua and the entire nominal and verbal vocabulary of Spanish .
History of language contact between Spanish and Quechua
Quechua was the lingua franca of the Incas and was originally spoken in Peru , but spread to Bolivia , Chile and northern Argentina . Quechua came to Ecuador through the Inca at the end of the 15th century.
Under the rule of the Spaniards, which lasted from the early 16th century to 1830 in Ecuador , the country of origin of the Media Lengua, the use of Quechua was initially promoted to promote the proselytizing of the Indian population. During the colonial period, Quechua became the mother tongue of a large part of the Indian population. In the 17th and 18th centuries, however, there was a change in Spanish language policy . The Indian languages were suppressed and subordinated to Spanish.
Even after Ecuador gained independence in 1830, Quechua was excluded from public life.
When, at the beginning of the 20th century, Indian craftsmen and farmers in search of work moved from their villages, where Quechua often remained their mother tongue, to the capital Quito, where they were confronted with the Spanish language, the proportion of people who were bilingual increased Population. Quechua increasingly lost its prestige and was soon associated with backwardness and ignorance. Today, Spanish is the language spoken by most of the people of Ecuador.
The Quechua today has approximately 12.5 million speakers, of which 4.4 million in Peru , 2.2 million in Ecuador , 1.5 million in Bolivia and 120,000 in Argentina , 4400 in Colombia and, about 1000 in Chile and Brazil . (Cerrón-Palomino quoted from Shappeck)
Dissemination of Media Lengua
Muysken assumes that the Media Lengua originated between 1920 and 1940, because in the 1970s, when he was doing his field studies in Salcedo, most of the residents who were over 50 spoke exclusively Quechua and only the middle-aged people in the Media Lengua communicated.
Media Lengua is both the mother tongue and the second language of the Indian farmers and craftsmen who “ came to Quito from the highlands to build railways (...) from the highlands” from the beginning of the 20th century , as well as the mother tongue of the people who live in the villages who are located between the “white” world of the Spanish-speaking people in the valleys and the habitat of the only Quechua-speaking native population in the higher mountain regions. Muysken calls this Media Lengua speaking population group "Obreros".
However, the demographic and linguistic situation around Salcedo has changed significantly since the 1970s. Improved infrastructure makes it easier for residents of the higher areas to travel to the cities. Although great efforts have been made to preserve Quechua in this region and to promote Spanish-Quechua bilingualism , more and more people in and around Salcedo only speak Spanish.
Structure of Media Lengua taking into account the typological characteristics of Spanish and Quechua
Differentiation between Spanish and Quechua
Sentence structure
Standard Spanish has an SVO clause , so the verb comes before the object. In Quechua, on the other hand, the object precedes the verb, the sentences have an SOV structure.
morphology
Quechua is a synthetic agglutinating language , which means that each affix carries exactly one piece of grammatical information and has a certain position in the morphological structure of the lexeme . Spanish is a synthetically fusing language . An affix carries several grammatical functions.
The suffix imos in the Spanish verb comimos ("we ate") expresses that it is the 1st person plural present active indicative of the verb comer . The same information is expressed by different suffixes in Quechua. This should be illustrated by the following example:
Quechua: miku - ra - u - chu ("we ate")
The affix miku stands for the verb “essen”, ra for the simple past, u for the first person and chu for the plural.
Phonology
The Quechua phonemic system has three phonemic vowels : / i / (front, closed), / u / (back, closed) and / a / (front, open). (Cerrón-Palomino quoted from Shappeck) In Peruvian and Bolivian Quechua, the semi-closed vowels [e] and [o] often appear as allophones of the two closed vowels / i / and / u / when / i / or / u / border on a uvular consonant . However, this rule does not apply to Ecuadorian Quechua.
Spanish, on the other hand, has five phonemic vowels: / i /, / e /, / o /, / a /, and / u /. (Cerrón-Palomino quoted from Shappeck)
Morphological Characteristics of the Media Lengua
A special feature of Media Lengua is that a large majority - around 90% - of the word stems of Quechua have been replaced by Spanish forms without significantly changing the morphology , syntax and semantics of Quechua. Muysken calls this process relexification .
The fact that so many Spanish words were taken over into Quechua and relexification could take place to this extent can be explained by the agglutinating structure of Quechua and the fact that the grammatical information in Quechua is contained in the suffixes and not in the word stems . The extraction of word stems from Spanish did not have a major impact on grammatical processes.
According to Muysken, “word stems and affixes (...) are clearly different from each other.” In Quechua, the word stems always precede the affixes, prefixes and infixes do not exist. The word stems usually consist of two syllables , the affixes only one. Furthermore, the affixes have a much more abstract meaning. Muysken describes the affixes as "separate units", which could also be subjected to a process of relexification. There are also individual cases in the Media Lengua in which Spanish suffixes are used, such as the affixes -ndu ( gerund ) or -du ( resultative ). For the most part, however, the relexification only refers to the tribes, as most of the affixes were taken from Quechua.
Due to the agglutinating structure of Quechua, Spanish verbs can easily be converted into Quechua verbs , for example trabajar ("work") becomes trabaxana and entender ("understand") becomes intindi . Irregular Spanish verbs are treated like regular verbs in Media Lengua.
Furthermore, in the Media Lengua there is a combination of different Spanish words in a single Media Lengua word. This process is called freezing. The Spanish a mí (“me”), for example, becomes “ami” in Media Lengua.
Another process that can take place when adapting Spanish vocabulary in Media Lengua is reduplication . Individual words in Media Lengua are doubled, as in the sentence Yo-ga bin-bin tixi-y-da pudi-ni . In Spanish, “good” only occurs once: Yo puedo tejer muy bien . ("I am good at knitting.")
Phonological Features of the Media Lengua
A large part of the Spanish vocabulary is taken over into the Media Lengua and phonologically adapted to the Quechua. The semi-closed vowels [e] and [o], which do not exist as phonemic vowels in Ecuadorian Quechua, are often replaced in Media Lengua by the closed vowels [i] and [u], but retained in names or interjections . The verbs dizi - "say", azi - "make", bini - "come" and pudi - "can" often appear in Media Lengua are always pronounced with closed vowels, the pronouns yo "I", bos "you" and el "he / she" only in rare cases.
Syntactic Features of Media Lengua
Sentence structure
In Media Lengua there is mainly a SOV clause structure like in Quechua. Although around a fifth of the sentences examined by Muysken whose verb phrases contain a verb and an object or an adverbial definition have an SVO sentence structure similar to Spanish, this is also the case with other varieties of Quechua.
The comparative
In Quechua, the comparative is formed with the non- inflectable verb yalli (“to surpass”) and the object with which something is compared is given the accusative ending -da . In Media Lengua, yalli is replaced by the form gana- (from Spanish ganar , "to win"), which must always be inflected.
| Quechua | Media Lengua |
|---|---|
| Kan Huzi-da yalli puri-ngi . ("You go faster than John.") | Xwan-mi Pedro-da gana-sha grande ga-n . ("Juan is bigger than Pedro.") |
Reasons for the creation of the Media Lengua
Muysken is of the opinion that the Media Lengua gives the people in the Salcedo region the opportunity to express their cultural identity , which does not fit into the pattern Quechua = Indian and Spanish = white. He describes this as the “sense of cultural indeterminacy.” The Media Lengua speakers try “to use the language to create their own identity that is neither congruent with Spanish nor with traditional Quechua”.
Criticism of Muysken (after Dikker)
Muysken's presentation of the structure of Media Lengua implies that this process of relexification differs greatly from other “normal” cases in which language change occurs due to language contact (“contact induced language change”).
Dikker, however, takes a different view and believes that the Media Lengua does not deviate from standards or restrictions that apply to other situations of language contact.
In her remarks, she introduces Sarah G. Thomason's borrowing scale and places the Media Lengua on the third level of this scale, into which mixed languages can be classified. She justifies her decision with the fact that the speakers of the Media Lengua have close contact with Spanish and that the youngest generation mainly speaks Spanish, the oldest generation mainly Quechua.
A characteristic of the first stage of the borrowing scale is that only insignificant vocabulary is borrowed from the source language (the language from which words were adopted) into the recipient language (the language into which new words are introduced). In the second stage, in addition to insignificant vocabulary, phonological features or prepositions and conjunctions are also adopted. In the third level - according to Dikker, the Media Lengua is located here - almost all features of a language can be borrowed. Finally, on the fourth level, complete bilingualism is achieved. Either the source language dominates , or both languages are equally important.
Dikker is of the opinion that the characteristics of the Media Lengua can be explained using the Thomasons borrowing scale . Basic vocabulary and the affixes -ndu , -itu / -ita and -do have been adopted from Spanish in the Media Lengua. She does not share Muysken's view that Media Lengua differs significantly from other mixed languages.
Muysken, on the other hand, claims that the fact that more than 90% of Spanish vocabulary has been borrowed into the Media Lengua - more than twice as many words as in other cases of Spanish vocabulary borrowing into Quechua - is evidence that the Media Lengua can not only have been a normal case of “regular borrowing”, but relexification must have taken place. Dikker, however, sees the particular social circumstances under which the Media Lengua was created as the reason for the large number of loans. The language did not develop because of people's communicative needs, but because of the desire for their own identity.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ethnologue report for language . Lewis, M. Paul, ed. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition . Dallas, Tex .: SIL International, 2009. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/ .
- ↑ a b c Bossong, Georg. Challenges for genealogical language classification . Munich, 2004. Web http://www.rose.uzh.ch/seminar/lösungen/bossong/boss_gsatz_01.pdf
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Muysken, Pieter. "Media Lengua." Contact Languages: A wider perspective . Ed. Sarah G. Thomason. Amstersdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company, 1997. 365-427. Print.
- ↑ Gómez-Rendón, Jorge. "Grammatical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua." Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective. Ed. Yaron Matras and Jeanette Sakel. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007. 481-523. Print.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Shappeck, Marco. Quichua-Spanish Language Contact in Salcedo, Ecuador: revisiting Media Lengua syncretic language practices . Urbana: University of Illinois, 2011. Web. http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/24334/Shappeck_Marco.pdf?sequence=1
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Dikker, Susanne. "Spanish Prepositions in Media Lengua: Redefining Relexification." Hispanization: The Impact of Spanish on the Lexicon and Grammar of the indigenous languages of Austronesia and the Americas. Ed. Thomas Stolz, Dik Bakker and Rosa Salas Palomo. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008.121-149. Print.
- ↑ a b c d e Muysken, Pieter. "Root / Affix asymmetries in contact and transfer: Case studies from the Andes." International Journal of Bilingualism 16 (2012): 22-36. Web. Archived copy ( Memento of the original from May 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
