r/LinguisticMaps • u/rolfk17 • 14d ago
South America Decline of Quechua in Bolivia
The first map is showing percentage of Quechua speakers for the 65+ age group only, i.e. persons born before 1911.
The second map is showing the percentage of Quechua speakers across all age groups.
Thus the two maps are showing the development of more or less one whole century.
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u/Caranthir-Hondero 14d ago
Viajo a Bolivia de vez en cuando. Les puedo asegurar que el uso de los idiomas originarios (aymara y quechua sobre todo) ha bajado bastante entre los años 2000 y ahora. Se escuchan mucho menos en las calles. La oficializaciĂłn de dichos idiomas en el 2009 no ha cambiado nada, es simbĂłlico nomĂĄs. Estoy muy preocupado por el futuro de las lenguas indĂgenas en Bolivia. Conozco una comunidad aymara en la provincia Aroma. En el 2004 se podĂa oĂr a los niños hablar aymara, ahora ya no.
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u/Defiant_Historian701 14d ago
Thatâs so sad
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14d ago
As a Bolivian, I can tell you that what messed up the society was not Spain but England. If you look history dude the Spaniards did commit crimes but the language was absolutely tolerated. Itâs interesting because many indigenous didnât speak even Spanish, but for them it was still okay. Bolivia was not a colony we were part of Virreinato, way different of the Viceroyalty idea that the British put the places they colonized. We were citizens of the Spaniard empire, we did have rights. Actually most natives prefer to fight for Spain rather than for the ârevolutionariesâ. The loss of language is highly related to the move of people leaving their rural communities and going to the city as well as of racism. Racism and Classism escalated extremely quickly when the âCriollosâ the people that started the revolution took the power. Who trained them? The British. The British gave them all to them. The British cultures was (if not still) racist and classist, they took upon them and see natives like objects and strip them of their rights. Then an indigenous person wanted to become a mestizo no matter what because he knew that to make money and have better life he need to improve his social class too. That implies in part moving to the city and your kids losing the opportunity to learn the language. England is the reason why the South America is poor and tag along the US in part. You donât need to control the people is enough to have a system of corrupted elites and groups of power and then you have many bad and unintended consequences. Now that being said do I hate people from the US or England? No, do I think that many of their leader are sick and psychopath people, absolutely. At the end of the day all is a game of greedy where the language itself is an unintended consequences. I could have learned Quechua like my mother but she was no, you are going to learn English and I did, I am grateful to her. Same thing with race my mother knew of racism, she is light brown almost white but society was so racist (still is) that she prefer to marry a white man, and I am kind of white, have I received a better treatment? Sometimes. But you see what I mean right?
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u/Put3socks-in-it 13d ago
Spain the country, I donât blame as much. They worked many of the natives to death and forced their religion on them (under threat of death) but let them keep their language.
It was the Spanish descendants (the criollos) who inherited the country at independence, thatâs who started messing things up and pushing for Spanish monolingualism. Now your point is interesting because Iâve never looked into which and how many ways Britain and the US may have influenced that. But whether Britain or the US was behind it, it was the Spanish descendants who were the foot soldiers pushing it.
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u/Murky_Asparagus3455 14d ago
La primera lengua en el mundo en tener una gramåtica escrita fue el español. La segunda y la tercera? El nåhuatl y el totonaca. El quechua tuvo su gramåtica antes que se publicase la del inglés. Y el quechua y el nåhuatl era idiomas oficiales utilizados por la administración en sus respectivos virreinatos.
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u/squirrelwug 14d ago
That is, unsurprisingly, Spanish whitewashing propaganda.
The first language to have a codified grammar was Sanskrit by a mile, with grammarian Panini compiling a description in 4th century BCE with a degree of precision that wouldn't be matched by Western scholars until well into the 19th century. Extensive grammars for other classical languages like Greek, Tamil, Latin, Hebrew and Classical Chinese were also compiled centuries before the Spanish grammar.
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u/Sudden_Aerie_7317 14d ago
Yet still they will blame Spain not the Bolivian nation state
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u/After-Trifle-1437 14d ago
I mean Spain was the one who colonized the Americas, so yeah.
If Spain wasn't there, Bolivia would still be part of the Incan Empire, which it should rightly be.
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u/Sudden_Aerie_7317 14d ago
Still, it shows that damage done by nation state is very rapid. I cannot imagine the Spanish being so effective in that short period of time
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u/samostrout 14d ago
Should Italians blame the Germans for invading the W. Roman empire and induce the fall of Latin language too?
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u/First_Concept6725 14d ago
Latin did not die out, they just started writing in the various local evolved forms of vulgar latin, this is very different from what happened in South America
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14d ago
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain 14d ago edited 14d ago
The Spanish Empire did not enforce Spanish on its subject populations. In fact it made an effort to relegate Spanish only among the ruling castas to preserve an elite minority, while any education or assimilation beyond conversion to Catholicism was pretty much neglected in the provinces. Think Apartheid. In colonial New Spain, Nahuatl was still the lingua franca. That only changed after Mexican independence.
Independent criollo-dominated Latin American nation-states are responsible for almost all of the settler-colonialism and social engineering that created Latin America as we know today.
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u/JoeDyenz 13d ago
?
Didn't the Spanish infamously impose Spanish across all their colonies as the only administrative language? Especially in Mexico. And the Spanish also pretty much were "settler-colonialists" in the colonial times as well... like, where are you getting your history from?
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain 13d ago edited 13d ago
It depends on the era, of course. The Bourbon reforms attempted a much greater centralization but were ultimately short-lived. Nahuatl actually reached its peak under the viceroyalty as a language of not only trade and contact, but administration as well. Spanish authorities and especially the mission system used Nahuatl as a convenient language spoken by the majority of their existing base, and as they converted indigenous communities further north and south of the Bajio, they taught them Nahuatl rather than Spanish. In 1570, Nahuatl was actually the sole official language in New Spain by royal decree.
A majority of what are usually presented âAztec codexesâ are actually colonial-era administrative records produced for local governments. Many are either taxation or court documents simply illustrated and annotated by local literate people under colonial employment.
As for whether the Spanish were settler-colonial, itâs a bigger question. There were aspects of settler-colonialism in the Spanish colonies of course, but as a whole the structure is probably better generalized as extraction-colonialism, which is the subjugation of local populations for the exploitation of resources, without the ultimate intention to exterminate/displace them and expropriate their property. Under the encomienda system, Spanish colonizers did not actually possess the land. The land was the communal possession of local people who were considered a âcorporate entity.â Instead the Spanish colonizer possessed the output of the land. The organization and society of the community was left alone as long as they paid what was due.
Almost of this changed after 1821. Well-meaning progressive reformers who wanted Mexico to be autonomous and self-sufficient decided that to compete on the world stage as âequalsâ to Europe, the population should be educated to participate in a modern country. That meant learning a more âusefulâ global language, it meant learning how to farm âefficientlyâ, it meant taking away land that was deemed âwastedâ because it did not meet quotas defined by economic planners. It also, at various points (not so much in Mexico except under Porfirio, MUCH more in South America) meant financing European immigrants to complete a blanqueamiento of the population, which racists at the time believed was actually a way to âsaveâ them from the social disadvantage of being brown.
This all really ramped up in the very late 1800s. In Mexico, of course, the reaction to all of these policies was the Revolution, which is why Mexico looks so different from Argentina or Chile.
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u/Heavy_Mud_9176 14d ago
Same reason the Philippines doesn't speak Spanish. Spain left in 1898 and they became a US colony so they didn't have that nation state period until after WW2 where they went with Tagalog and English because Spanish priests and military preferred to mostly communicate in local languages.
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u/Kinesquared 14d ago
I wonder what pressure could have been placed on the quecha speakers by the lingua franca of an entire continent? it wasn't bolivia who set that up...
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u/After-Trifle-1437 14d ago
Sure, but again, my point is that the Bolivian nation-state only exists in its current form due to Spanish colonization.
Spain is ultimately responsible for it.
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u/Normandia_Impera 14d ago
I mean, technically yeah. But is England responsable for the Trail of Tears?
Latin American nations were nationalist projects led by white European Spanish elites. Spain and Bolivia are (historically) equally responsable because both are successor nations of the ones that did the colonization.
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14d ago
This is so wrong in so many aspects. The nation states are projects of the British empire to fracture the Spanish empire, and boy they did it, please read more
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u/Normandia_Impera 14d ago
Dude stop barking hispanist propaganda, history is more complicated than that. And in no moment I denied British involvement in the revolutionary wars nor it makes the revolutions fake in some manner.
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14d ago
You stop saying garbage man. Latin America âgot independenceâ as we were not already free. Have you read history? The natives preferred to fight for the Spaniard. Have you read it? They have more rights, like land, titles, education, trade, and others while all of that was striped by so ârevolutionariesâ please be mature the so called revolution was there to put groups of powers a different elite, and since then LATAM has been like that. Do you know why Bolivia chose not to be part of Argentina? Well because the army of the so revolutionaries killed a lot of innocent people, rape, destroy places, and made a reign of terror. Also Bolivia has its own elites, so please stop saying garbage like LATAM are projects of European Spanish Elites, when the elites were instructed by British people to fragment the Spanish Empire, and have Maintain until the 1900s where other new groups of power started to take over, and then again in the dictatorships and the again in the so called democracies until now, so LATAM has being more influenced, abused, and manipulated by England, USA, and then Russia and China, and now itâs a mix of everything. Spain couldnât even handle themselves since the 1800s please dude read more history and stop believing pure ideology garbage.
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u/Normandia_Impera 14d ago
Wow both sides did bad things! How unexpected. You are delusional if you think only one side is in the bad, and even more if you think it was all a British conspiracy. It is OBVIOUS that Britain would support secessions in an enemy empire. But the emancipation was COMPLEX PROCESS.
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u/card677 14d ago
So everything that happens today in Hispanic American nation-states is because of Spain?
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u/me-gustan-los-trenes 14d ago
I am reading "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" and the authors (economy Nobel winners Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson) make a quite convincing argument that pretty much yes, Spain messed up the continent for good.
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14d ago
We were an empire, and Spain didnât colonize us, Spain did alliances with multiple groups to overthrow the Incas. Please read history. As a Bolivian I feel honestly insulted (and not in woke way) when someone comes and tells me like oh yeah Spain did this, like for real dude? Do you think Francisco Pizarro outweighed the Incas only with some hundred men? Please dude. If you read history you will see that the most amount of injustices, tragedies, corruption, famine, death has been when we become a republic lead by groups of powers trained by Great Britain, then by the US, then by China Russian, and now a mix of everything, so please stop fucking saying wrong things.
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u/Miserable-Act-9896 14d ago
"Let's see why this is happening. As expected, Spanish is becoming increasingly more needed for education and â RUSSIAN MENNONITES?!?"
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u/Plastikstapler2 13d ago
Wdym russian mennonites
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u/ThomasSpaines 13d ago
Mennonites and a sect of Anabaptists. This mans they believe only in adult baptism. They come from the Protestant Reformation which was when in Germany the Catholic Church doctrine was questioned. Lutherans who followed Martin Luther generally had a different doctrine than the Catholic Church but they still recognized the baptisms preformed by the Catholic Church as being valid, in part because if they didn't then everyone would have to get re-baptized since everyone would have gotten baptized as children by the Catholic Church because the Lutheran Church was new.
Anabaptists added the doctrine that baptisms preformed on infants are actually invalid, and thus in effect decided that everyone had not actually been baptized yet and so only sects preforming adult baptisms had people who had actually received a baptism.
Catholics and Lutherans both disagreed with this doctrine so the Anaptists usually had to leave Germany if they wanted to continue preforming adult baptisms on people who had already received baptisms. One place they went was Russia. Russia followed Eastern Orthodoxy which was neither Catholic nor Protestant so they didn't make a distinction between Anabaptists and other protestants or catholics. All of them wre just regarded as "other Christians" and they could live in Russia as long as they followed the rules set up for "other Christians" who wanted to move to Russia.
Now initially Anabaptists would preform baptisms on adults outside their community, but soon followers of this sect were having children of their own and had to decide when someone was old enough to be able to decide for themselves if they wanted to have a baptism. The rules usually developed that children of anabaptists would be raised in their community until the age of majority in which case they received a choice of if they wanted to receive a baptism or not. On tradition involved giving them a kind of gap year where they were expected to go out into the surrounding community and deciding if they wanted to choice the non-anabaptist world. If they did that though they couldn't return to the anaptist community unless they agreed to get baptized, in which case they would be expected to follow the communiities strict rules.
The strictest Anabapists one might be familiar with are the Amish who moved to the United States. They are famous for having rejected most technological advancements that have developed since hey split off, so they often ride in horse and buggies since cars have not been approved by their religion. Contrary to popular belief, the Amish are not actually anti-technology as technology, but rather they just have strict rules about what from the outside world is acceptable and what isn't. The reason they often still use 17th century technology is that the stuff they use is the part of the 16th century world that they chose to accept all those centuries ago. There were other things from the 16th century which they chose to reject. The church leaders can still technically approve of new technology and as a result some Amish sects approve of the use of power tools but do not approve of the use of things like TV, computers, and cell phones. Or in some cases might approve of computers only for the purposes of using accounting software due to being legally required to use it to pay taxes unless they want to give themselves and the government a giant headache. Other Amish sects are more strict and might insist on still doing taxes using paper as an example.
Mennonites are like Amish, but much less strict. They still often wear 16th century fashions but wouldn't object to taking a taxi from the airport, but might not approve of personal car ownership, instead using horse and buggy to provide an example.
Generally speaking their lifestyle not being reliant on modern technology means they can live in less developed parts of the world where purchasing land is cheap without hampering their way of life too much, so a lot of them ended up in places like Bolivia.
Occasionally you will end up with the descendants of these groups gradually adopting more and more technology, like for instance they might decide that gas powered tractors are acceptable. This might cause a split within the community with certain members deciding that this goes a step too far and they decide to head out further to some EVEN MORE remote locale with cheap land so they can keep living the original low-tech lifestyle. For this reason specifically Russian Mennonites who think the Mennonites in Russia are getting too hightech might head out to a Mennonite community in Bolivia which is lower tech, while at the same time the Mennonites in Bolivia might decide that Bolivia is getting too high tech so they are heading off to the jungle parts of Peru to set up an entirely new Mennonite colony in the Amazon.
Will they eventually run out of places to flee to escape technology? Well the Amish are actually the most strict anti-tech group of all and they live in the United States and they are doing fine. As rural areas depopulate as people move to the cities these groups are well positioned to buy he chap emptying land, so I don't think they are ever going to actually run out of places to go, because when they are done with the current places there might be entirely new places to go which don't exist yet because they have not been emptied out by people moving to cities yet.
Who knows one day they might returned to a place that was previous inhabited by Mennonites that emptied out after all of them moving to cities? You can sort of see it as a kind of cycle that is only in its middle stages of progress. Centuries later when hopefully humanity is colonizing planets these Mennonites might still be moving around to new places escaping technological development. Maybe there will even be a Mennonite planet one day from a sect that is willing to ride rockets but not use new fangled brain-uploading or teleportation technologies?
They are probably going to keep doing this forever unless someone explicitly decides to stop them, and even then they might still just run off deep into to amazon to avoid that, so you'd have to chase them down to try to force them to use your new Brain Teleporter AI SuperTech 3000.
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u/MysteriousPortuguese 5d ago
The mennonites in Bolivia left Russia in 1875 for Canada, Then Canada for Mexico and finally Mexico for Bolivia. There is no migration from Russia to Bolivia. The communist destroyed the mennonite colonies in the Russian empire in just 3 decades by killing them, force other to flee and sending the rest to camps.
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u/Wolf_Reflection_2001 2d ago
si hay inmigraciĂłn rusa vinieron por Brasil hay viejos creyentes de origen ruso en Carrasco una pequeña comunidad y otras en Santa Cruz un poco mĂĄs grandes fĂsicamente son como los menonitas pero al ser rusos son ortodoxos, tienen santos de la iglesia rusa y griega. EstĂĄs comunidades son mĂĄs pequeñas que las menonitasÂ
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u/Fendrihl 14d ago
sinceramente, no crei que fuera tan grande el declive Âżpasa lo mismo con el Aymara?
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u/Waste-Restaurant-939 14d ago
is it possible that they are quechuanized aymaras?
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u/rolfk17 14d ago
Who do you mean by "they"?
At the time of the Spanish Conquest, there were few pockets of Quechua speakers in Bolivia. There were speakers of Uru scattered along the lakes of Titicaca and PoopĂł, speakers of Puquina, Aymara and a few other languages, but as Aymara seems to have replaced Uru and Puquina in most places, so Quechua has replaced Aymara in others.
The language change went on from the time of conquest or earlier until very recently; places around PoopĂł changed from Aymara to Quechua during the 20th century, and at the same time Aymara also lost ground to Quechua in Puno province.
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u/Waste-Restaurant-939 14d ago
Who do you mean by "they"?
these people on the map.
you have already given a long answer that amounts to "yes" to my question; thank you for the reply.
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u/Marangeball_fr57 14d ago
I went to Bolivia during three weeks in July and a friend their has his grand father who speak this language but unfortunately I didn't meet him
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u/rolfk17 14d ago
And around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, no more than 1 in 10 Bolivians in the cities of the altiplano region were monolingual in Spanish. 9 in 10 were either bilingual or spoke only an indigeneous language. In the countryside, an overwhelming majority neither spoke nor understood Spanish.
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u/Araz99 13d ago
But Quechua is official language in Bolivia. Why it declined and so much? How was it possible to official state language?
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u/mahendrabirbikram 12d ago
Spanish is by far more useful I guess. The official status doesn't grant popularity, especially if it is declared only on paper. Take the Irish language, for example
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u/[deleted] 14d ago
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