Events

Dr. Karl Swinehart, Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Louisville, will give a talk on November 7th at 4:30pm in PAIS 290 on "A Difficult Language:  Aymara Media, Linguistic Labor, and Urban Indigeneity in Bolivia."

Aymara is a difficult language in more ways than one. The language’s difficulty is sometimes embraced by Aymaras themselves. Its cultivation affords forms of expertise and authority for language professionals and diverse Aymara cultural interventions foreground its difference from Spanish and other European languages. Bolivian Aymaras’ insistence on keeping the language in the public sphere poses difficulties to a colonial status-quo and to those who would rather not accommodate, much less learn, this or any other Indigenous language. Drawing on analyses of Bolivian media and research among Bolivian Aymara-language educators and media professionals, this talk examines these dynamics and their impact, both on the Aymara language itself and on the unequal terrain of Bolivia’s plurinational, multilingual society.