General languages from South America (Quechua, Guarani) XVI and XIX centuries – LANGAS

Three steps: philology, semantic history and historical anthropology. A first step is primary philology: palaeography, attribution of the text, historical and dialectical identification, comparison with the rest of the corpus, transliteration in modern graphics, analysis of the conditions of production and diffusion. The secondary philology interprets those documents as testimonies of cultural periods.
In the perspective of Semantic history applied to political vocabulary in Quechua, Guarani and Tupi, we’ll identify key words and its uses in a vast corpus, with specific computer’s tools: the website and a browser able to do research in different graphics have already been built. We expect entirely new results about the indigenous colonial experiences. Therefore our research participates to historical anthropology interested in indigenous social, political and religious organisations. We’ll lay out our result in semantic maps, dictionaries and specific text analysis.

The creation of the Langa’s website, incorporating corpus in Quechua, Guarani and Tupi (in Amerindian and Spanish palaeographic and modern versions.
An international symposium in Paris (22 and 23 of October 2012) in order to study the origin and history of the colonial notion “lenguas generales” and other linked notions; the political vocabulary of manifests, decrees and proclamations written in those languages during the independence period. A collective paper in English is on preparation, and a collective publication in a Spanish review is programed.
An international symposium in Lima in 2014 will contribute to the social history of “lenguas generales” and will promote a new South American philology. A collective book will be elaborated.

Amongst languages in danger, UNESCO identify five from the Tupi linguistic family, seven from the Guarani family and fifteen from the Quechua family. At the same time, some Amerindian languages have been recognised by many Latin American states which tend to define themselves as multicultural and plurilinguistic states. Their policies promote linguistic diversity and the right to express oneself in his native language. Furthermore, Amerindian political philosophy, specially in Quechua fosters international political thought (Buen Vivir or Sumaq Kawsay).
By the way, we seem to discover again and again the importance of those languages, as if they were always ignored and marginalized. Nonetheless, their long history is much more complex, even if constantly subaltern: they had got a political importance for Spanish and Portuguese colonial agents: A common political and religious vocabulary in some Amerindian languages had been settled and expanded between indigenous and colonial authorities. Because of their previous importance and general use amongst numerous and diverse groups in pre-colonial time, some Amerindian languages were chosen to be written, standardized, gramatized and christianized : by colonial times, they were called « general languages » ).
Therefore, the time is right to address these issues from historical and anthropological perspectives. The vast historical corpus of written documents in Quechua, Guarani, Tupi (and others) needs to be visible and accessible for most people. The social history of those languages has to be promoted, the semantic history of their political vocabulary has to be begun and the global history of the region needs to be re-written, by taking all those documents in indigenous languages into account. The project LANGAS contributes to a French tradition of study of Amerindian languages.

Informatic programs which allow a research in corpus written with different graphics could be protected.

Between the XVIth and XIXth centuries, a few variants of Quechua, Aymara, Tupi and Guarani stood out as a conveying language in territories of South America under Spanish and Portuguese domination. These languages known as "general" served as means of communication between the native populations and the colonizers. For the needs of the evangelization, they became written languages. The rich and varied literary production that followed consisted of linguistic tools (grammars and dictionaries), textbooks of catechises but also profane documents (personal letters, wills, petitions,...), erudite poems and dramas. This project contributes to the anthropological and historical research in Andean and tupi-guarani areas through the study and the comparison of these texts. Little exploited until now, they however constitute a source of irreplaceable information for our knowledge and comprehension of the colonized native societies and their cultural and epistemic universes. We'll focus on two key periods: the first one from mid XVI to mid XVII century is characterized by the standardization of the languages and the second one, at the beginning of the XIX century, when latin american nations take their independence, see the decline and ethnicisation of the same. For those periods we'll develop two approaches : a social and political history of language and the ethnohistory of the political organizations of the population through the analysis of the vocabulary.