Doctoral Dissertation Research: Factors Contributing to Long-Term Stability in the Maintenance of Linguistic Boundaries

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This project, which trains a graduate student in the methods of conducting empirical, scientific fieldwork, explores the social and linguistic mechanisms that produce and maintain linguistic distinctiveness between languages that have a long history of contact. In a world that has become increasingly linguistically and culturally complex, it is critical to understand what happens when speakers of different languages or linguistic varieties come into contact; to see whether they influence each other or whether linguistic differences are used to maintain social boundaries. Most research on language contact emphasizes the "mutual influence" aspects of contact, where the linguistic varieties in contact converge and become more like each other. This study, in contrast, considers a case in which linguistic boundaries have been stable for at least half a millennium, and seeks to discover the linguistic and social reasons why such a boundary persists today. Sandhya Narayanan, under the supervision of Dr. Bruce Mannheim of the University of Michigan, will explore how linguistic and social boundaries are maintained between speakers of different indigenous languages, by tracking how speakers use these languages, how they are able to recognize and evaluate differences among themselves, and what structural mechanisms perpetuate the boundary between them. This research investigates the case of contact between Quechua and Aymara, two Native South American languages spoken predominantly in Peru and Bolivia. These languages have been in intimate contact since before the Spanish conquest, but have maintained their linguistic distinctiveness through today. The research tests the hypothesis that differences in the rhythmic timing structures of the languages both maintain the linguistic boundary and - linked to behavioral features - permit people to identify each other at a distance as speakers of one or the other language. The project employs a range of ethnographic and linguistic anthropological methods of data collection and analysis including social network analysis, participant observation, interviews, linguistic life history surveys, textual analysis, and morphosyntactic and interaction based analysis. Findings from this research will inform the types of linguistic and social processes that come out of situations of contact among indigenous South Americans, and advance our understanding of the relationship between language ideologies and language contact. In addition, there is a strong documentation component to this research, because although both languages are still widely spoken in the Andean region, they are in the midst of precipitous decline, and so are endangered.