Mother Tongue, Father Tongue, Place Tongue: Twenty-First-Century Language Transmission and Language Survival in the Andes and Western Amazonia

Abstract

Language transmission, and language survivance, are bound up with social organization, territoriality, and the movement of people through social space, through marriage, fosterage, or productive economy. Critical among these are the relationships that speakers have to their lands, which vary considerably across regions. Contact among Indigenous languages in the Central Andes and the Western Amazon is often invisible to linguists and anthropologists but it is a living reality, one which will shape the future of the languages, and with it the future of Indigenous South Americans.