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Article published In:
What’s so standard about standards? Variationist principles and debates
Edited by Jonathan R. Kasstan
[Asia-Pacific Language Variation 8:2] 2022
► pp. 240–273

Authenticity in language ideology

Social variation in Chanka Quechua

| Indiana University Bloomington
| New York University

Like many marginalized languages, Chanka Quechua (Peru) lacks community-wide prestige norms associated with standard-language ideology. Formal situations require Spanish, and few speakers are literate in Quechua, so normative speech styles are absent. Speakers’ evaluative judgments do not reference notions of correctness; rather, they value puro ‘pure’ speech and authenticity.

This paper explores alternative approaches to accessing sociolinguistic judgments with a study of the variably present uvular phoneme in the past tense /–rqa/ morpheme, as exemplified in the following alternation:

(1)
ri-r q a-ni ~ ri-ra-ni
go-pst-1sg   go-pst-1sg
‘I went’   ‘I went’

To contrast speech from sociolinguistic interviews, careful, self-monitored speech is elicited through oral retelling of material presented aurally, rather than in writing. Of 38 participants, rural speakers tend to have higher rates of /q/ than urbanites and reflect idealized puro Quechua. We argue that authenticity guides variation, in place of standard language ideology.

Keywords: sociolinguistic authenticity, variation, Spanish, Quechua
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Uvular alternation in Chanka Quechua
    • 2.2Authenticity in discourse
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Data elicitation task
    • 3.3Interview speech
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Results from oral sentence correction task
    • 4.2Results in interview speech
    • 4.3Comparison with exhortative morpheme results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 December 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.22004.pov
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