UniLang

Five years late but:

Daionii wrote:Does anyone know of any English resources for Mapuche/Mapudungun?

Yep.

I don't suppose you/anybody knows what indigenous languages are spoken in Chubut?

Chubut Province? Mapudungun.

I read about Tehuelche but it seems to only have a handful of speakers left.

It's been dead for about half a century.

I was wondering if there is one single particular Token Value Central/South American Lingua Franca.

For the purpose of explaining what I mean by "token (symbolical) value", I'd like to provide an Africa-related example.

Maybe a certain person would like to be able to speak at least one ethnic African language, even if it is very clear to him/her that there also are many Africans who don't understand this one particular single language. This very language could be Swahili, for example. So even if/she meets Africans who speak another one, there still can be a token/symbolic value be involved when he/she tells them that it would be possible to use this one too, instead of English or another one.

Is there also a one particular Central/South American language that can serve the same token/symbolic purpose?

Swahili is only a lingua franca in some parts of East Africa. Guarani is a lingua franca in and around Paraguay from what I understand (particularly on the border with Brazil), and e.g. Tukano is the lingua franca of the Vaupes R9ver Basin.

vijayjohn wrote:Swahili is only a lingua franca in some parts of East Africa. Guarani is a lingua franca in and around Paraguay from what I understand (particularly on the border with Brazil), and e.g. Tukano is the lingua franca of the Vaupes R9ver Basin.

Quechua was once the lingua franca in parts of the Andes. The issue is that the indigenous languages have been replaced by Spanish as the lingua franca (and by Portuguese in Brazil). This makes it a rather different situation from Africa, where languages like Swahili are national languages. In South America I think only Guaraní comes close, but as Vijay mentioned, only in Paraguay. In Bolivia and Peru, Quechua and Aymara have official status, but so do several other indigenous languages, so they aren't necessarily used as lingua francas anymore, just spoken by their own populations.

The Spanish used Quechua as a lingua franca in order to transition towards making Spanish the lingua franca, just as they did with Nahuatl in Mexico. IIRC, the Inca elite spoke Puquina but used Quechua as its official language and eventually shifted towards Quechua. Some villages in the Amazon to this day use Quechua as a lingua franca, at least in Peru. Guarani is also used as a lingua franca on the borders of Paraguay.

vijayjohn wrote:The Spanish used Quechua as a lingua franca in order to transition towards making Spanish the lingua franca, just as they did with Nahuatl in Mexico. IIRC, the Inca elite spoke Puquina but used Quechua as its official language and eventually shifted towards Quechua. Some villages in the Amazon to this day use Quechua as a lingua franca, at least in Peru. Guarani is also used as a lingua franca on the borders of Paraguay.

Quechua and Náhuatl were already used as lingua francas in their respective regions before the arrival of Spanish-speakers, though. Quechua still is to some extent, but Náhuatl at this point is not.