The keynote speaker was linguist Gustavo Solis, a lecturer from the University of San Marcos who arrived from Peru to deliver a talk on Quechua and the Peruvian Languages: A Historical Perspective and translate tagalog to english.
The professor said that the Quechua language cannot be considered dead and is not on the verge of extinction, because it is spoken by ten to twelve million people living in the Andes region, especially in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.
“It is important that people know that Peru is home to the largest number of Quechua speakers and that this is a source of pride for all Peruvians,” Solis said.
Our compatriot Miriam Yatako, professor at the Department of Linguistics at New York University, also proudly confirms that in the 21st century, interest in learning Aboriginal languages in higher educational institutions around the world is not fading away.
“In the United States alone, there are about 25 programs for teaching the Quechua language at the most prestigious universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, California, Arizona, Kansas, New York, Indiana, Texas, Chicago, Pittsburgh. This can be called an academic triumph, “- says Yatako.
She said that the Quechua language course at New York University was introduced in 2008, 17 students enrolled in it, and a year later their number exceeded fifty people.
“This fact is very interesting, not only because the demand for teachers specializing in this language may increase in the coming years,
but also because a significant part of such students are children of migrants from the Andes, the second generation, which grows far from the homeland of their ancestors, but strives to learn their language, ”she notes.
According to Yatako, one should pay tribute to the work of various academicians, linguists and teachers, such as Felix Julia Guerrero, Clodoaldo Soto Ruiz, Nina Quinti-Moss, Jaime Dasa, Seraphin Coronel-Molina, well known in American academic circles.
“Their work made it possible to computerize and digitize the process of teaching the Quechua and Aymara languages. At the moment, an unparalleled pedagogical and linguistic corpus of teaching Quechua as a foreign language is being created, which, as we can see, is already influencing the revival of the study of this language, ”sums up Yatako.
REFERENCE
Peruvian origin
The Quechua language originated from the language spoken by the inhabitants of Central and Western Peru. Subsequently, it spread throughout the Andes.