Newscaster broadcasting in Quechua. Photo: screen grab, TeleSur The American continent is something of a linguistic outlier. Throughout its massive expanse, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, almost no one speaks any of the thousands of native languages developed on the continent itself. Instead, most people speak just a handful of European languages, mostly English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
But one TV channel in South America is trying to help America - as in the continent, not the country - hold on to its linguistic roots by broadcasting news in one of the most widely spoken native languages in the Americas: Quechua. At the end of 2014, TeleSur, a channel supported by several South American countries that wears its left-wing populism on its sleeve, began producing occasional news segments in Quechua. Though this move is not without a bit of an ideological bent - the struggle for indigenous rights has been part of the platform that TeleSur promotes - it's also a practical move, given that there are nearly 10 million Quechua speakers in South America. Quechua actually originated before the rise of the Incan Empire, but was employed by the Incas to communicate across the lands they conquered. After the Spanish conquest of Peru and much of the rest of South America, many Spanish missionaries learned Quechua to be able to evangelize more effectively to local populations. Today, it is an official language in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Though some are reluctant to speak it, seeing it as something to be ashamed of in a context that all too often prioritizes Europeanized quasi-Spanish culture over native traditions, others are proud of the language. There is even a Peruvian woman who has become famous by singing covers of Michael Jackson songs translated into Quechua. But the Quecha newscast in particular also points to an interesting fact about broadcast speech styles in general: the way on-air speakers speak in pretty much every language is quite different from ordinary speech in that language. When we listen to a newscast given in our own native language, the difference between that speech style and normal speech is subtle, often going unnoticed (though not always - think of Ron Burgundy in Anchorman). But pay close attention and you'll hear it. But when listening to foreign languages, the difference becomes much more apparent. When I learned a foreign language, I found listening to regular conversations to be quite difficult at first. And when I listened to the news, the difference became clear right away: newscasters usually made a clear effort to annunciate every word, making sure the articulation was clear and straight forward. For me, this was a relief after trying so hard to decipher informal speech. But to native speakers, the intended effect was not just to be easy to understand, but to establish a tone of formality and seriousness, and therefore credibility. When comparing clips of newscasters in Quechua with others of everyday, colloquial speech in the language, it's clear even to non-speakers (like me) that there is a difference in the way words are enunciated. It also made it easier to hear some of the words that Quechua has borrowed from Spanish; at one point the anchor mentions "energia aeolica", Spanish for "wind energy", a term that understandably doesn't have its own version in Quechua. This is clearly something new in the language, but it may be a welcome change - there are many divergent dialects of it that make it difficult for speakers of one form to understand the other, and this move might help to standardize the language. Though we're still far from a Quechua version of Ron Burgundy, it will be interesting to see how Quechua newscasts evolve in the future. I've been an occasional reader of This Is Africa, a news site with stories covering everything from Cairo to Cape Town, for a number of months. But, after clicking on one of their stories, I was surprised to find that a good chunk of the links on their sidebar are in French. Of course, this isn't too much of a surprise. After English, French is the most prevalent European language on the continent. Other European languages, left over from the troubled history of colonialism on the continent, have left their mark, such as Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch (there's also Afrikaans, a language with strong ties to Dutch spoken mainly in South Africa). In the northern part of the continent, Arabic is prevalent - another colonial language, though not a European one. And let's not forget about the rich linguistic diversity of Africa's home grown languages. A Wikipedia article asserts that there are anywhere from 1,250 to 2,100 languages spoken on the continent. Though some of those are the European ones listed above, most aren't. The site lists a number of other languages, such as Somali, Berber, Amharic, Oromo, Swahili, Hausa, Igbo, Fulani and Yoruba, as all having over 10 million speakers in Africa. Given this wide array of languages spoken, it's no surprise that a website aspiring to cover the entire continent would need to use more than one. But this presents a dilemma: what about the readers that don't speak French? Multilingual websites are a challenge, especially for news websites which are constantly updated. Many major news sites opt to center on a single language, with specific stories translated, especially if they are related to certain geographical regions in particular. For instance, a New York Times Magazine story about internet trolls in Russia was translated into Russian, even though most of the site's content is not. In the case of This is Africa perhaps posting articles in parallel languages isn't such a bad idea. And who knows? Maybe it will help some of its readers to brush up on their French skills. |
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