Proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2022
DOI:
[Fulltext]
Alphabetic System to Write in Quechua and Aimara
Domingo Alberto Ruelas Calloapaza
ABSTRACT:
Quechua and Aymara are the two main native languages of South America and in some of its countries they are official languages; however, UNESCO considers them as vulnerable and, in some areas, in the process of extinction. One of the greatest difficulties that these languages have been facing for their validity, in addition to the economic, political and cultural marginalization of their speakers, is the lack of their own alphabetic system for their development and presence as cultural elements. During the last centuries, strenuous efforts have been made to produce some written texts in these two languages using the Spanish alphabet, but until now the intellectual production written in these native languages is very limited and the reason for this situation is that the application of the indicated alphabet to write Quechua and Aymara voices, weighs a series of limitations and some erosive effects. The objective of this work was to develop an alphabetic system to write in Quechua and Aymara. As materials, all the phonemes of these two languages were used, some nouns and adjectives common to both languages, the table of articulatory features of the consonant sounds of the Quechua and Aymara languages and the symbology of the phonemes of the International Phonetic Alphabet that fit the phonemes of these languages. The methods consisted of the following: a) to design the spellings, objects whose name is common to both languages were selected b) the spellings were designed based on the outline of the silhouette of the selected object, c) the name of each vowel was determined based on the first phoneme of the selected Quechua-Aymara noun and d) the name of each of the consonants was determined based on the first syllable of the selected Quechua-Aymara noun. The result of the work is an alphabetic system based on Andean cultural elements, unprecedented and practical for writing in the Quechua and Aymara languages and, implicitly, useful for revitalizing these languages.
keywords: alphabet, Andean culture, native language, revitalization, linguistic syncretism.