Introduction: Texts in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas: Narratives in Indigenous Peruvian Languages

Peru is a particularly interesting geographic area on which to focus as the wealth of languages spoken there spread over and between lowlands, foothills and highland communities. Geographically, Peru can be divided into the Amazon Basin, the Andes, and the coast. The overwhelming majority of the territory is composed of the Amazon Basin, which hosts the highest degree of linguistic diversity in the country. Official estimates suggest that the Andes has four languages and the basin hosts a total of 43, belonging to some 19 distinct families, many of which are either isolates, and/or have fewer than five members. Peruvian multilingualism is thus particularly attractive to scholars working on language ecology. Even the better-known families, Quechua and Aymara, are saliently diverse and exhibit traces of long-disappeared regional languages. As for the coast, the last indigenous language, Mochica, ceased to be spoken around 1950. This volume is organized around the theme of narratives in indigenous Peruvian languages. Each text comes from a different representative of a Peruvian language family. The following chapters feature 12 languages (13 including Urarina, which is accessible online), each from a different language family. The languages are organized into two categories:(i) languages from the Amazonian lowlands, including the eastern foothills, and (ii) those from the Andean highlands. We aim to provide insights not just into linguistic structures, but also beliefs, mythologies and cosmovisions associated with Peruvian peoples. All contributions result from extensive fieldwork in Peruvian communities.

International Journal of American Linguistics