What's Media Lengua?

Media Lengua (ML) is a mixed language spoken in the Ecuadorian highlands.  What makes Media Lengua, (and other mixed languages) so unique is its genesis.  ML has a split ancestry wherein almost all content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) from Spanish have replaced their Quichua counterparts while maintaining functional morphemes from Quichua with no grammatical simplification.  Due to the rarity of mixed languages, very little acoustic or psycholinguistic work has been conducted. However, mixed languages hold a wealth of information which could be used to better understand the psychological and neurological factors of language that allow humans to take two typologically unrelated, fully functional languages, split them apart and create a new, fully functional language based on different linguistic components with little blending from each source language.

My Media Lengua research

In November of 2010, I recorded an undocumented variety of Media Lengua, also known as Chaupishimi (lit. half-language) or Llangashimi (lit. nothing language¹) in the community of Pijal Bajo in Ecuador. This dialect was thought to have been lost to Spanish (Gomez-Rendon 2007:46), however, my recent findings show that it still spoken by the people of Pijal along with Quichua and Spanish.  Unfortunately, this moribund variety is spoken by less than 300 people aged 35 and above.

For my Master’s thesis, I produced a brief descriptive grammar of Pijal Media Lengua and an acoustic vowel space analysis of Quichua and Pijal Media Lengua vowel inventories. The descriptive grammar provided a comparative analysis of the Pijal variety with the first documented variety in the province of Cotopaxi (Muysken 1980). My work in acoustics along with the application of statistical tests had never been undertaken with mixed language data. The results not only challenge traditional linguistic views of phonology but have also produced unprecedented insights into the inter-workings of co-existing vowel systems. This is only the beginning of potential discoveries which could add to and/or modifying current linguistic theories based on empirical evidence from mixed languages.  

            My doctoral research will be aimed at documenting Media Lengua in its entirety.  The scope of this project includes in-depth documentation of the phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax of the language while using the latest techniques from the areas of psycholinguistics and computational linguistics to better understand how our brains deal with language contact, language compatibility and language genesis. On a social level, my research has already begun to produce the first ever written form of Media Lengua. A story book entitled Stories and Traditions from Pijal is currently being put together containing cultural traditions, stories, customs and herbal remedies from the community of Pijal. This book will be reproduced and made available through their community tourism project Sumak Pacha and other sources where proceeds will go towards to social projects in the community.

Burma (Myanmar) - 2009

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¹ Llangashimi is typically a derogatory term used by speakers of Quichua to describe their language.  It is believed that the term was introduced by Mestizo school teachers to further discredit the indigenous populations.