Thursday 24 August 2017

Peru’s indigenous-language push

All of us are newshounds

THE son of European refugees, Peru’s president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, is fluent in Spanish, English, German and French. He does not speak any of the country’s 47 indigenous languages. Yet his government is doing more to encourage the use of those tongues than did those of his predecessors, some of whom have indigenous roots.

In December TV Perú, the state-run television network, began broadcasting the first national daily news programme in Quechua. In April this year it started one in Aymara. On August 10th the government launched its “policy for native languages”, part of its preparations for the 200th anniversary of independence in 2021. It would require government agencies to offer services in those languages in areas where they are dominant.

Some 4m of Peru’s 31m people speak one of the country’s native languages as their mother tongue. Three-quarters of those speak Quechua, the idiom of the Inca....Continue reading

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