Languages and history of indigenous societies in South America - (16th-19th centuries)

In the South American field, little research had been done on the social history of indigenous languages, and even less on ancient documents written in these languages, which are the only way to understand Indian societies in their own terms.

Since 2011, the Langas project (Langues générales de l'Amérique du Sud, XVIe - XIXe siècles) has brought together historians, linguists and anthropologists working mainly on Brazil, Paraguay and the Andean countries, around two questions: the diffusion and transformations of the major vehicular languages of the colonial era (then called "general languages": Tupi, Guarani, Quechua and Aymara) and the comparative study of indigenous political languages during the same period.

Extrait d'un manuscrit quechuadu début du XIXe siècle. DR © DR‎

From 2012 to 2015, Langas was funded by the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR) and led by Capucine Boidin, senior lecturer at the Institut des hautes études de l'Amérique latine (IHEAL) and lecturer in Guarani at Inalco. This project involves teachers and students from Inalco and the University of Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle, in close collaboration with researchers from other European countries (notably the Spanish team iberconceptos) and South America (especially Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Peru). Langas has organized several international colloquia and study days at Inalco (2012), the French Institute of Andean Studies (Lima, August 2014), the Alliance française d'Asunciόn (February 2016) and the université de Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle / IHEAL (2016).

So far, Langas' work focuses mainly on the Guarani (around Capucine Boidin) and Quechua (around César Itier, professor at Inalco) domains. Our research in archives -in Europe and South America- has enabled us to discover documents in Quechua and Guarani hitherto unknown to the scientific community. We have created an online textual database (http://www.langas.cnrs.fr/#/) which already contains thousands of pages of printed and manuscript transcriptions in Quechua or Guarani, and, to a lesser extent, in Tupi. It includes a polygraphic lexical search engine. Given the diversity of spellings used from one document to another for the same language, this engine enables vocabulary searches based on any existing spelling of a word. Other features, which will enable more complex searches, are currently being developed by Johanna Cordoba - a Quechua language and TAL (Automatic Language Processing) master's student at Inalco-, Damien Nouvel -lecturer at Inalco (TAL)- and Marie-Anne Moreau -lecturer at Inalco (TAL).

Our research has benefited enormously from this database and engine, which currently appears to be one of the most powerful for any historical linguistic corpus. This tool has helped draw the attention of fellow historians, anthropologists and South American linguists to these neglected documents. We also hope that the Langas site can serve as a resource for the development of these languages, at a time when several South American states are striving to promote them by extending their uses and functions. The database and engine interface is presented in four languages: French, Spanish, Quechua and Guarani.

Much of our research to date has focused on indigenous political vocabulary and concepts between the late colonial and early republican periods, a period marked by major Indian mobilizations, as well as the emergence of various forms of political modernity in South America. In the Guarani and Quechua cases, we believe we have identified the main concepts that crystallized indigenous ideas of government and society at that time, enabling us to approach the meaning the Indians gave to their participation in a key stage of South American political history. Our publications on this theme coincide with the bicentenary celebrations of South American independence.

We are now broadening our research chronologically, both upstream (the 16th and 17th centuries) and downstream (the 20th century and today). By devoting ourselves to the study of hitherto little-exploited documents - the historical corpora of indigenous languages - our aim is to contribute to forging new tools for historical understanding of South American Indian societies.

Our collaboration also covers the external history of "general languages", whose expansion and social and symbolic functions we are studying. In the South American field, this type of research is currently enjoying renewed interest at an international level. From a historical and linguistic point of view, César Itier is working on the expansion and dialectal diversification of Quechua in the Inca and colonial periods, in collaboration with Juan Carlos Estenssoro, lecturer in history at Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle, who examines the geo-linguistic dynamics at work in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas.

Scientific contact: César Itier, professor at Inalco (cesar.itier @ inalco.fr), member of the Cerlom (Centre d'étude et de recherche sur les littératures et les oralités du monde)

Languages: Aymara, guarani, quechua, tupi

Some publications from the project

Boidin, Capucine, Joëlle Chassin & César Itier (éds.), dossier " La propaganda política en lenguas indígenas en la época de las guerras de independencia sudamericanas", special supplement to Ariadna histórica, Lenguajes, conceptos, metáforas (Universidad del País Vasco, Bilbao), 2016.

Boidin, Capucine & Eduardo Santos Neumann, "A escrita política e o pensamento dos Guarani em tempos de autogoverno (c.1753)", Revista Brasileira de História, 37, 2017: 97 - 118.

Boidin, Capucine, Johanna Cordoba, César Itier, Marie-Anne Moreaux & Damien Nouvel, "Processing Quechua and Guarani Historical. Texts Query expansion at character and word level for Information Retrieval", Springer Communications in Computer and Information Science Series, 2019 (in press).

Estenssoro, Juan Carlos & César Itier (eds.), "Indian languages and empire in colonial South America: nomenclatures, usages and classifications", dossier des Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, n° 45 (1), 2015.

Itier, César, "Las independencias vistas desde las fuentes en lenguas indígenas", in: Juan Carlos Estenssoro and Cecilia Méndez, Las independencias antes de la independencia. Una mirada desde los pueblos, Lima, Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos - Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2019 (in press).

Itier, César, "The Expansion of Quechua Language in Inca and Colonial Times", in: Salikoko S. Mufwene and Anna María Escobar (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, Cambridge, 2019 (in press).

Itier, César, "Awqa "tirano", "opresor": un concepto básico de las proclamas en quechua y aimara de las guerras de independencia", Ariadna histórica, Lenguajes, conceptos, metáforas, 2016: 53-71.