Media Lengua

Media Lengua, also known as Chaupi-shimi Chaupi-lengua, Chaupi-Quichua, Quichuañol, Chapu-shimi or llanga-shimi, (roughly translated to "half language" or "in-between language") is a mixed language with Spanish vocabulary and Kichwa grammar, most conspicuously in its morphology. In terms of vocabulary, almost all lexemes (89%), including core vocabulary, are of Spanish origin and appear to conform to Kichwa phonotactics. Media Lengua is one of the few widely acknowledged examples of a "bilingual mixed language" in both the conventional and narrow linguistic sense because of its split between roots and suffixes. Such extreme and systematic borrowing is only rarely attested, and Media Lengua is not typically described as a variety of either Kichwa or Spanish. Arends et al., list two languages subsumed under the name Media Lengua: Salcedo Media Lengua and Media Lengua of Saraguro. The northern variety of Media Lengua, found in the province of Imbabura, is commonly referred to as Imbabura Media Lengua and more specifically, the dialect varieties within the province are known as Pijal Media Lengua and Angla Media Lengua.
Media Lengua was first documented in Salcedo, Cotopaxi about 100 km south of Quito, Ecuador, by Dutch linguist Pieter Muysken during fieldwork on Ecuadorian Kichwa. During Muysken's surveys of the language, he also described other highly relexified varieties of Kichwa, including Amazonian Pidgin, Kichwa-Spanish interlanguage, Saraguro Media Lengua, and Catalangu. A 2011 investigation of Salcedo Media Lengua, however, suggests that the language is no longer spoken by the locals in and around Salcedo Canton. Little is known about the current status of the other relexified varieties of Kichwa described by Muysken. Several investigations from 2005, 2008, and 2011, however, show that a variety of Media Lengua is currently being spoken in the northern province of Imbabura. The investigations estimate that Imbabura Media Lengua is spoken by 2,600 people, 600 in the community of Pijal aged 35 and roughly 2,000 in and around the community of Angla, typically 25–45 years of age, making Media Lengua an endangered language and moribund in Pijal. The variety of Media Lengua that is spoken in Pijal appears to have emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and had its first generation of native speakers in the 1910s. Pijal Media Lengua then spread to the nearby community of Angla in the 1950s and the 1960s through intercommunity marriages and commerce. The current status of Media Lengua in Angla appears to be slightly healthier than in Pijal with the Angla variety having been passed on, to an extent, to the 2008 generation of schoolaged children.
The development trajectory of Media Lengua is unclear. Several theories exist concerning the origins of Media Lengua. According to Muysken, Salcedo Media Lengua emerged through ethnic self-identification for indigenous populations, who no longer identified with either the rural Kichwa or the urban Spanish cultures. Lipski also claims that ethnic factors contributed to the origins of Salcedo Media Lengua but argues that the same can not be said for Imbabura Media Lengua. Instead, some speakers of Imbabura Media Lengua continue to self-identify as Kayambis, a pre-Inca ethnic group.
Gómez-Rendón claims Angla Media Lengua arose through prolonged contact between the Kichwa-speaking indigenous populations with the Mestizo Spanish speaking populations. Gómez-Rendón suggests that when Angla men returned form working outside of their community, there was a shift to Kichwa-Spanish bilingualism in households, leading to the development of Angla Media Lengua.
Dikker believes Media Lengua was created by men who left their native communities to work in urban Spanish-speaking areas. When the men returned to the communities, they had acquired a fluent level of Spanish and had been using Kichwa infrequently. Media Lengua then served as a link between the older monolingual Kichwa-speaking generation and younger monolingual Spanish-speaking generations.
Finally, Jesse Stewart claims that Media Lengua was either brought to Pijal from Salcedo or vice versa. He bases these claims on the "striking resemblance" between the Pijal and Salcedo varieties at both the phonological and the morphological level. The claim also includes testimonies of a large migration from Cotopaxi to Pijal at the beginning of the 20th century, which can be seen in the many Cotopaxi surnames in community.
Most researchers agree, however, that Media Lengua developed linguistically through various processes of lexification (relexification, adlexification and translexification) in a relatively short period of time.
In 2018, Lipski visited the communities where Media Lengua was first documented. He reports that Media Lengua is no longer spoken by the community members. Since the language was first documented in the 1970's, there has been a shift to Spanish as the dominant language of the community. In the Province of Imbabura, reports reflect that Media Lengua is still spoken in the communities of Pijal, Angla, and Casco Valenzuela. However, the sociolinguistic aspects of Media Lengua differ between these communities. In Pijal, speakers of Media Lengua are typically aged 35 and above, those aged 20–35 typically have a passive knowledge of the language, and speakers aged 20 and younger are often monolingual in Spanish. In the more urban communities of Angla and Casco-Valenzuela, this is not the case. Media Lengua is preferred and spoken on a daily basis among a wider age range of individuals. There are also cases of children acquiring Media Lengua from their parents and grandparents, which is not the case in Pijal. Lipski reports that Media Lengua is even being used by school aged children who attend a Kichwa-Spanish bilingual school in Topo. Estimates of the number of speakers vary widely. In Pijal, there is an estimated of around 600 speakers while in the communities of Angla, Uscha, Casco-Valenzuela, and El Topo, there may be as many 2000+ speakers.
Words of Spanish origin often appear to conform to Kichwa phonotactics. However, voiced obstruents, which exist phonologically only as stops in a post-sonorant environment in Kichwa, appear phonemically as minimal pairs or near minimal pairs in Media Lengua through Spanish borrowings:
Another phonological difference between Media Lengua and Kichwa is that Media Lengua often does not take into account the voicing rule.
However, in certain instances, especially regarding verbal inflections, the Kichwa voicing rule is preserved.
A number of lexical items in both the Salcedo and Imbabura varieties maintain Spanish preservations from the Colonial period; most notably word-initial /x/.
(*)=reconstruction
IPA Chart (Imbabura Media Lengua) Common allophones are marked in brackets([]) and affricates are presented under the place of final articulation.
There are several competing views regarding the number and types of vowels in Media Lengua. One theory suggests Salcedo Media Lengua, like Kichwa, maintains three vowels [i], [u] and [a], with the occasional Spanish preservation of [e] and [o] in names, interjections and in stressed positions. Under that theory, all other Spanish borrowings assimilate to the Kichwa system. Another theory suggests that Imbabura Media Lengua passes through a three-step process of assimilation and words can maintain Spanish phonotactics [kabeza] cabeza 'head', undergo partial assimilation [kabisa] cabeza or (3) undergo complete assimilation [kabiza] cabeza. This theory also suggests that high-frequency words also tend to undergo complete assimilation, but low-frequency do not. Finally, acoustic evidence supports the claim that Media Lengua could be dealing with as many as eight vowels: Spanish-derived [i, a, u], which exist as extreme mergers with Kichwa-derived [i, a, u], and Spanish-derived [e] and [o], which exist as partial mergers with Kichwa [i] and [u], respectively.
Spanish diphthongs also exist with various degrees of assimilation in both Media Lengua dialects. The diphthong /ue/ is sometimes pronounced as /u/, /wi/ or /i/; Spanish /ui/ is pronounced /u/; Spanish /ie/ is pronounced as /i/; and Spanish /ai/, is maintained from Kichwa.
There is also evidence of sonorant devoicing between voiceless obstruents, which affects the realization of pitch accents that fall on devoiced syllables (see the following section).
[+sonorant]→[-voice]/[-sonorant] ___ [-sonorant] [-voice] [-voice]
(1) Vosteka tuyu casapika. [bos.te.ka tu.ju ka.za.pika]→[bos.te̥.ka tu.ju ka.za.pi̥ka] "[What do] you [have planted] at your house?"
According to Muysken (1997), like Kichwa, stress is penultimate in Media Lengua. Stewart (2015), referring to stress as pitch accent (PA), provides a similar analysis pointing towards the realization of a low-high pitch accent (L+H*) taking place at the prosodic word level on, leading up to, or just after the penultimate syllable of a word. In the majority of a cases, an L+H* pitch accent on the penultimate syllable describes word level prosody (see example 1).
(1) L+H* L+H* L+H* L% Papasuka wawakunawanmi colerahurka. "Father was angry with the children."
In certain cases, however, a simple high (H*) may appear when the PA follows the penultimate syllable of a disyllabic word or when a voiceless onset appears in the penultimate syllable (see example 2). In both cases, Stewart (2015) suggests that is caused since there is no material to bear the preaccental rise, which would otherwise be realized as a typical L+H* PA.
(2)H* L+H* L% Bela quemajun. "The candle is burning."
Media Lengua also appears to mark emphasis at the prosodic word level with a substantial increase in pitch frequency on one or more words in an utterance (L+^H*) (see example 3). Pitch accents may also appear in a stair step-like pattern in utterances containing reduplication where the low (L) on the second instance of the reduplicated pair is often undershot. In the first instance of the reduplicated pair, a standard L+H* appears while in the second instances an emphatic L+^H% PA takes place where the L may be undershot (see example 4).
(3) L+H* L+^H* L+H* L+^H* L+H* L+H* L+^H* L% Y alotro diaka vuelta otro bastanteta llevashpa, escondidito mio mamamanta llevashpa inkarkachi. "And on the following day, we would go bringing another bunch [of beans] hidden from my mom."
(4) L+H* L+H* L+^H* L+H* L- H* H* H% Diaymanta wachu wachu buscashka dezin uno cañata. "So, they say she looked all over the plot of land, for a stick that is."
Stewart (2015) also describes instances of intermediate boundaries appearing as a single low tone (L-). These are often observed in standard content questions (wh-questions) following the utterance-initial question constituent or in some cases after words containing an emphatic PA (see example 5). There is also evidence of intermediate boundary tones in the form of pitch restart which take place in listing intonation just before the listing of items begins.
(5) L+H* L- L% Quienpatak ese pelota? "Whose ball is that?"
The intonational phrase in Media Lengua (the highest level unit within the autosegmental-metrical framework ) is marked by a low boundary tone (L%) at the end of nearly every utterance (see examples 1, 2, 3, and 5). An exception to the configuration can be found in what Stewart (2015) refers to as clarifying utterances, which are marked with a high boundary tone (H%) (see example 4). Clarifying utterances in Media Lengua are used in three typical scenarios: (1) to clarify that a topic within a conversation is shared by those speaking, (2) to provide information which was accidentally left out of the main clause, and (3) provide the listener with additional information.
Media Lengua, like Kichwa, is a highly agglutinative language. Its normal sentence order is SOV (subject–object–verb). There are a large number of suffix changes both in the overall significance of words and their meanings. Of the 63 particles in Kichwa, Imbabura Media Lengua makes use of 49; an estimated 80% of the original Kichwa morphemes. The derivation and infectional particles appear to be in complete functioning order in the same way they are found in Ecuadorian Kichwa.
Jilana in Media Lengua, Spanish, and English: