Like many minority languages, Yuracaré – spoken in a remote region of Bolivia – is considered endangered. But new initiatives are offering hope.
Many of the Indigenous languages of Bolivia are no longer spoken. Yuracaré is one of the survivors, largely because its speakers lived in a remote area and refused to integrate with the colonial system. But inevitably, over the years, more and more Yuracaré people adopted Spanish as their primary language.
Today, the first ever definitive dictionary of Yuracaré has been published as the result of a collaboration of the remaining speakers, Gerónimo Ballivián Asencio Chávez, Alina Flores and Rufino Yabeta, with French anthropologist Vincent Hintzel and Dutch ethnolinguist Rik van Gijn. As well as capturing its linguistic richness of the language, the dictionary provides information about the traditional knowledge base of the people.
The Yuracaré culture is based in an area of extraordinary ecological diversity, and the language reflects this. Adult Yuracaré speakers typically know the names of 260 distinct bird species, for example, while the language also contains many explicit and implicit references to their shamanic belief system, which is deeply embedded in the local environment.
When a language is lost, a lot of cultural knowledge is lost too. The publication of the new Yuracaré dictionary offers hope for a brighter future.
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