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Martha Tsutsui Billins (host): Hello and welcome to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. I’m Martha Tsutsui Billins, and today’s episode is with Karolina Grzech. Karolina is a documentary and descriptive linguist, working mostly on the Quechuan languages and natural language use. Her main topics of research are evidentiality (encoding how we know things) and epistemic modality (encoding different aspects of knowledge). She is particularly interested in how these categories play out in natural discourse. She also researches pragmatics in general, and language endangerment and methodology of linguistic fieldwork, with special reference to the Indigenous languages of South America. Karolina is also interested in the socioeconomic issues which affect minority and endangered languages and the communities which use them.
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Okay, so the first thing I’d like to ask you is, how did you become a linguist? How did you first become interested in linguistics?
Karolina Grzech: Well, I was always interested in languages, sort of, like in learning them, but I didn’t really realize this is a thing you can do until I was already at uni studying something else. I was doing political science. And then I went to Barcelona, I think it was, over the holidays, and I stumbled across this exhibition on endangered languages. And then I was totally hooked. I was like, “What is this? Where can I learn more about this?” And then I realized that there was an MA at SOAS doing exactly that, I think it’s the same one that you’ve done.
MTB: Language documentation, yes.
Karolina Grzech: And so basically, when I finished my political studies degree, I went straight to SOAS to do that. And then it was like a whole year of talking about how to do fieldwork, but without any actual fieldwork, so I kind of felt, “Okay, now I have to do a PhD to do fieldwork and really find out what this is about.”
MTB: Yeah, and I think we overlapped a little bit at SOAS, right? What years were you there?
Karolina Grzech: I did the MA starting in 2010, and then my PhD took quite a while, so I finished that in 2017, but I wasn’t really kind of on-site in London for that whole time. But when did you start at SOAS?
MTB: I started the MA in 2015, so I was there at the tail end then of your PhD. I think I attended a talk that you did or something like that. I feel like we were in the same sphere, but we didn’t know each other.
Karolina Grzech: I think we met like a couple of times, but in a room full of people; we haven’t actually spoken until now.
MTB: Yeah.
Karolina Grzech: [laughs]
MTB: Yeah, that’s so funny. Well, I’m glad we can talk now. That’s so funny. Okay, so I’d love to hear more about your fieldwork biography. So where have you done fieldwork? With who? What has that been like?
Karolina Grzech: All my fieldwork so far has been in Ecuador, so South America. I’ve been working on Quechuan languages kind of properly since 2013, but my first field trip was Christmas 2011. So I submitted a failed ELDP application right after my MA to start doing fieldwork, but then the criticism was, I didn’t really have contact with the community. So Mandana from ELDP put me in touch with Connie Dickinson, a linguist who’s by then been in Ecuador for about 20-odd years, and she’s still there actually working. So Connie took me in so that I could establish contacts with the community. And it was actually quite funny because of this failed application that I put in, which was about kind of sociolinguistics and stuff, because I was new to linguistics and I didn’t feel like I could do language documentation proper, let’s say. And she said, “Oh, yeah, this is about a language on the border of Colombia and Ecuador.” This was for completely different reasons. And she thought, “Yeah, you want to work on agglutinative languages.” So… Apparently. So, I mean, I haven’t actually talked with her about this. So I don’t know, but that’s what I’ve heard later on. She’s like, “Yeah, you have to work on Quechua. There is this Quechuan language here that still needs documenting,” and she set me up with the community. So I went there 2011, then I got the grant to go there for an ELDP-funded fieldwork, spent about a year in the village in the Napo Province in Ecuador between 2013, when my first field trip was, and then 2014 again. And I kept coming back for smaller field trips, either to give back the results of the work, like we produced a DVD about medicinal plants and all the data, the corpus and stuff, and to collect some more data as well in 2017 or ’18, or actually both these years. And then most recently, I’ve had an ELDP-funded postdoc where I worked more on Upper Napo Kichwa, which is this first language that I did my PhD on, in the Amazon. But I also started working on another Quechuan variety called Chibuleo Kichwa, which is actually in the mountains near Ambato in the Tungurahua Province. So those are two languages from the same language family, I think mutually intelligible to an extent, but the speakers are culturally very different. So it’s an interesting experience to kind of branch out of the Amazon, where the climate and everything is different, and now be working also in the Andes at like 3,000, 4,000 meters of altitude. It’s not very far, but in terms of ecosystems and customs and everything, it really is quite different. So it’s very interesting.
MTB: That’s really interesting. Geographically, how close together are the communities? So you said it’s not that far, but they’re quite different.
Karolina Grzech: Yeah. I mean, Ecuador is relatively small. When I went there last time in October last year, I think the whole trip from one field site to the other would take me something like six, seven hours, but it’s about 250 kilometers, maybe? I can’t give you the exact figure, but it takes quite a while just because you have to get out of the jungle and go up the mountains and all, and there is not really a direct route, but it’s not very far. And the first community I’ve been working with, it feels quite remote, but it’s also about 200 kilometers from the capital, Quito. So it’s not great distances, but because of the terrain and everything and the ecosystems you go through, it does feel quite far.
MTB: How do you get from place to place? Like can you… Are there roads? Can you just take a van or do you have to hike? Like, how do you get to the field site?
Karolina Grzech: So the first field site where I did my field work, it’s Nuevo Paraíso. That’s kind of the most remote location that I’ve been to, but it’s also not so remote, so you can get easily from Quito to Tena either by bus, or you can hire a private taxi like if you’re going with equipment and things like that if you’d rather have that in a secure place, and that takes about three hours, and bus is three, four hours. And then from there, it’s two hours on a public bus. I’ve never actually taken a cab. Like, I mean, with other people, maybe I’ve hitched a ride, but not to move myself. So then it’s further two hours by bus. You could also take a canoe, but then it would take you like six, seven hours. That used to be the only way until, I think, mid-’90s to get to that part of the province, but there is also oil exploitation going on in the area. So actually the roads are kind of decent. Getting into the community where I was working, it’s kind of paved road half the way from Tena, from the provincial capital, and then it’s kind of a dirt road, so if it rains a lot, it gets harder, but I never really had any trouble. It would usually take you like two, two and a half hours to get there from Tena.
MTB: That’s not bad.
Karolina Grzech: Yeah, it’s quite convenient. I was able to go to town for supplies or for internet connection when I was doing fieldwork to talk to family and just kind of feel less isolated. So it’s not like this field site story where you have to take a canoe and then hike, etc., etc. It’s actually quite accessible.
MTB: Yeah, I just did an interview with Kate Lindsay, and she does have to take a canoe to her field site, so she has like the classic experience where it’s like a plane and then a smaller plane and then a smaller plane, and then finally you get to your canoe and then you have to do the canoe and then you have to hike.
Karolina Grzech: Oh, wow.
MTB: Yeah, she’s tough.
Karolina Grzech: Right, yeah. I mean, there is places like that in Ecuador as well. And when I first started fieldwork, I was kind of jealous of the people who had to do that. But I have to say that it’s very convenient to be able to just kind of jet out on the bus when you feel like you absolutely need to talk to your partner or your family, or otherwise you’re just not going to be doing so well. So that was very convenient kind of for my well-being. Because when I first went, I felt like, “Yeah, it’s not a problem. It’s going to be fine,” but then you find yourself doing this work that you’re new to on the other side of the world, and sometimes it is needed to kind of reconnect with people you know.
MTB: Oh, definitely. Yeah. That’s something I really struggled with a lot when I’ve been in the field, is, even though you’re around people all the time, you can feel quite lonely. And both times, I went without my family or without my partner, so after all day speaking Amami or speaking Japanese, you just want to think in your native language, you know, and you haven’t had a chance to. And somebody has been touching you all day long, like some child, or you’ve been around other people all day. But I don’t know. It’s just a very strange feeling to be lonely, but also surrounded by so many people.
Karolina Grzech: And I think we don’t really get to talk about that enough. I mean, now for me it’s different (right?) because I go there and it’s very, very strange. So I arrive in this remote village. It’s dead of the night. The dogs are barking. And I’m like, “I’m home again, sort of.” I mean, I know it’s not my home, but it does really feel like that. And because I’ve been kind of back and forth so many times, it’s really good to see people, and it feels very different. But yeah, the first field trip, especially, I think I just really wasn’t prepared for how complex this is going to be. I don’t want to say “tough” because it was a great thing to do, and I’m very happy that I got to do it. I’m very happy that the people, my host family and the people in the village put up with me and we were able to establish a really nice relationship, and it’s also kind of easier getting into new communities, I think, once you know what you’re doing. But first you go there, you’re kind of clueless, you don’t speak the language, and you kind of expect people are going to be very patient with you. That might not always be the case. You might not always be very patient. So I was very happy that I had this kind of possibility to vent at not such a big distance.
MTB: Yeah, definitely. Why did you choose Ecuador? Had you already, like, was it just someplace you were interested in? Had you already been there before?
Karolina Grzech: So I hadn’t been to Ecuador actually prior to this field trip, like this pre-field trip in 2011, but I lived in South America, in Argentina for about a year before, and I was interested in the region. My MA in International Relations was on South America, and I spoke Spanish, and I kind of thought it would make sense, you know, since I was new to linguistics, very, really very new when I started applying for grants to do my PhD, that it would make my chances of getting funding bigger if I went to a region that I already had some sort of relationship with. I mean, of course, I could have done work in Europe as well, right? But at that point, I was like, “Yeah, I want to do something far away from home,” and this was, seemed like the most feasible option where I had something additional to offer. And as I told you, my first ELDP application was totally failed. It was also a really bad application because I did political science before. I thought, “Yeah, I’m going to look at, like, the influence of conflict on language endangerment,” which I still think would be a very interesting thing to do, but super complex, which I didn’t realize at the time. And so I wanted to go and work on the border of Ecuador and Colombia, but in Ecuador because this was kind of immediately out of the conflict zone. And then, as I told you already, when Mandana realized that I could need some, I would need some extra help with getting in touch with people, she put me in touch with Connie. And then she’s like, “Oh, yeah, you want to work in Ecuador and on an agglutinative language. Here is Kichwa.” So that’s kind of how it all happened. It’s a little bit of a string of coincidences.
MTB: Yeah, yeah. Maybe we should explain what agglutinative languages are, just in case not everyone knows or maybe they’ve forgotten since undergrad morphology class.
Karolina Grzech: Yeah, of course. So basically, I think in lay terms, it’s kind of languages which stack a lot of morphemes together into one word, not like those languages which have one word as one big sentence, so those are fusional, but those, kind of in simple terms, with really long words where each morpheme has a very specific meaning and you just tend to put them together. So Quechua language family is kind of typical. And yeah, I mean, in Peru, there is more agglutination, I think, than in Ecuador. It’s kind of slightly more isolating in Ecuador. But yeah, the irony is, I never really wanted to work on morphology. My interests are semantics and pragmatics, but it’s just, you know, it was, I think Connie wasn’t aware of the extent to which, you know, this was kind of a weird choice of project on my part. And then I found out later that, you know, the reason why she recommended Kichwa is because it was agglutinative. But I think a lot of people arrived at their field sites through coincidences of that sort.
MTB: Oh, yes.
Karolina Grzech: When you ask people about that, you always think that they had it crystal clear, you know, from when they started being interested in linguistics, “I want to work on this.” And then I remembered in my MA, like everybody that we asked as students were like, “Oh, yeah, it just kind of so happened,” or, you know, somebody reached out or…
MTB: Yeah, definitely. Like you just kind of fell in, and look at you now. [laughs]
Karolina Grzech: [laughs] Yeah. Well, then it turned out that Kichwa has a really fascinating system of discourse markers, which mark the things that I’m really interested in, like evidentiality and epistemicity.
MTB: Yeah, maybe we can talk about evidentiality now. So, again, like, can you explain what these concepts mean and why you are interested in them?
Karolina Grzech: Right. So, evidentiality is, at least traditionally understood, is a linguistic marking of the source of information. What that means is basically morphemes that code how you know about something. We don’t really have kind of a straight equivalent in, say, familiar, the most familiar or widely known languages. But you could say in English, an evidential would be something like “reportedly.” So, if you say, I don’t know, “Reportedly, Tom is going to come to the party,” that’s probably, I mean, it’s a different register, right? So, a little bit. So, maybe that’s not the best example. But that means that it’s not firsthand information; you don’t know that from Tom. You wouldn’t say that if Tom himself told you. Or you could say, “I hear Tom is going to come to the party.” So, in English, we have that. But it also kind of transmits that you don’t fully trust that information. And in languages with grammatical evidentiality, the source of information is separated from how much you trust it or not. So, source of information, evidentiality, and how much we trust that something is true or that it might happen is something called epistemic modality. But actually, the reality is much more complex than that. So, we thought when we started studying this seriously in the 1980s that this was a category that really rigidly marked sources of information, like whether you’ve heard something from somebody else, whether you infer it from evidence, so, like you see, I don’t know, ashes on the ground, and you say, “Oh, there was a fire here,” and you mark it with a specific evidential morpheme, or you experience something firsthand and then you mark it differently. But in most languages, really, and also in Kichwa, what happens is that that kind of gets mixed up with something called epistemic stance. So, it’s more about how you want to present yourself and present this information.
MTB: Like present your confidence in that information?
Karolina Grzech: Kind of, yeah, if you want to come across as expert. So, it’s not really one to one about whether you’ve seen something or you’ve heard it or you inferred it. And also, as interlocutors, we don’t care about that as much. Right? So, now when I’m talking to you and saying all these things, you’re not going to ask me like, “Okay, but have you actually gotten on the bus and have you been on it for two hours so that now you can tell me that this is how long the ride takes?” It’s more important for you to know that I have been there and I have done this fieldwork and you kind of trust me because of that.
If you look at evidentiality the way that fieldwork was done before, so you had a set of isolated sentences and you presented them to speakers for translation and there were different sources of evidence — so like you see it with your own eyes or you hear the rain tapping on the roof or somebody told you it was raining — then you get a neat paradigm. But the moment you start working on natural discourse, which is what I do, then it gets really messy and really fascinating.
And then the epistemicity comes in, so it’s a broader concept, which basically means all the different things related to knowledge and language. It’s not very specific, but it’s also a field in development that a lot of people are working on right now from different angles and there are different subcategories of it right now. It’s very messy to work with, but I find it fascinating, really. I can’t tell you why. It’s just one of these things you stumble upon, you’re like, “Yeah, this is what I’m going to do.”
MTB: Yeah, that’s really interesting. What is a general day like for you when you’re collecting data? Do you have a routine?
Karolina Grzech: So, that’s a tricky one mostly because the first project that I’ve done for my PhD, it was a very different setup to this postdoc that I also mentioned, which was the most recent thing. So, when I was doing PhD fieldwork, I think the common denominator of all my work is that I’ve always tried to work collaboratively with people. So, it wouldn’t just be me working, but there was a team of native speakers working with me. So, they would show up at my house early in the morning and either we would go to an interview that has been set up previously to record and that could have been all day depending on how far that was and how we needed to get there. Or we were lucky enough that the local school let us use their space. So, then we would just sit there and transcribe or we would do elicitation sessions, which are also needed sometimes (right?) for negative data or conversational elicitation with some stimuli and things. So, it was kind of computer-heavy on the days that we didn’t have interviews because we did a lot of transcription work and actually it was mostly the native speakers transcribing. So, I would do the segmentation sometimes just in the interest of time. And then once they transcribe something, I would go through things and ask, you know, “What about this? What about that?” So, that took a lot of time. That was throughout my PhD. And then for this last project, because it was scheduled to start in 2019 and then it didn’t start until 2020 with COVID and everything, we did it remotely mostly. So, first I was working with a speaker of Chibuleo Kichwa, Selena, my co-investigator, and kind of trying to find out more about the language for research purposes. And then once we managed to get equipment to her, which was not an easy thing with COVID and all the restraints of, you know, buying things and sending them to Ecuador, then she started doing interviews herself with her cousin Inti, who was the other project team member. So, they would go record people that they knew had something interesting to say, and then more or less it would be that they would be transcribing… Well, I would segment, they would transcribe, then we would talk about things together. And when I went there last fall, so October, November, I was there last year, we did a couple of those interviews as well together. And for this postdoc part of the Upper Napo Kichwa work, which was with a slightly different community, it was yet another setup, basically kind of flash field trips where our main consultant Darwin Grefa would assemble people who we wanted to interview, and we would prepare some food or something, you know, so we would just spend the whole day recording different interviews. And then transcription and translation was the same idea.
MTB: Yeah. Did you have to decide on a… Like, how were you going to transcribe the recordings? Or is there already a writing system that you could use? How did you navigate that?
Karolina Grzech: So, there is a writing system called Kichwa Unificado, which was changed quite a few times since its inception in, I think, in the 1980s. But we tried not to use it, really. So, I followed Simeon Floyd’s advice. Simeon is another linguist working in Ecuador, a colleague. And he always said he lets people write however they want, and I pretty much followed the same advice because people don’t feel very represented by this unified orthography. It doesn’t reflect some voicing contrasts, for example, which are present in the varieties that I’ve been working on. So, there is only voiceless stops that you can use, but actually in those languages there is a voicing contrast. What I ask people to do is to stick to representing kind of the same sound with the same letter. But, for example, when we were all together working in Napo during my PhD, that was easier because I was just there the whole time so we could discuss things. And then with this remote project, it’s like, you know, if you want to represent the [i] sound with an <e> or with an <i>, that’s kind of up to you, but just be consistent with that. And then I’ll, I still have to do that, but yeah, I’ll include that in the deposit guides for the archive data so that it’s kind of clear.
MTB: Okay. And then, so then, you know, like, “Okay, this transcriptionist, they use the <i> symbol, this transcriptionist likes to use the <e> symbol,” and you make those notes.
Karolina Grzech: Yeah, so for the… Actually, that’s, it’s more kind of difference on the language base because, so Selena was the first transcriber for our data for Chibuleo Kichwa, and then her cousin also joined in, so he basically just adopted her convention. And then for upper Napo Kichwa or the Kichwa spoken in the Amazon, I was lucky enough that everybody kind of mostly agreed on how they want to represent things. And I also… We used ELAN for transcription, so I made notes as well sometimes when something wasn’t transparent, and because we revised these transcriptions a lot, you know, there was an opportunity to kind of put in special notes when something wasn’t clear.
MTB: Were you impact… It sounds like you were impacted by COVID because you had to postpone your project and you had to do it remotely, but what about the participants in Ecuador? Did they have to do lockdowns or anything like that?
Karolina Grzech: Not really. I mean, Selena Tisalema, whom I mentioned, who was kind of my main co-worker on the Chibuleo project, she was studying in Quito, and then because of COVID, she actually stayed with her parents in her community, but they were moving relatively freely within the community. They were kind of cut off from the external world, but mostly she interviewed her family that she would visit anyway. And we’ve managed to get enough equipment so that we could set up kind of social distance if necessary. And the Napo part of the project, that got a little bit more affected because the idea was that the data recording would be coordinated by an anthropologist friend of mine, Saul Uribe, and he would have to get there from Quito, and that wasn’t always possible. So he was kind of keeping the equipment, and that’s also why we decided to do these kind of condensed interview sessions. So he would go there for three or four days and record people. We did a lot of training online, actually, so that was kind of nice, because we reached to quite many people from… He works at the University in Ecuador and also collaborates with Colombia. So we were able to organize training sessions for people who then didn’t even end up working on the project, but were generally interested in endangered languages or documentation.
MTB: That’s neat. Do you want to say anything more about natural discourse, how you use natural discourse in your work?
Karolina Grzech: Yeah, maybe I should, actually. So basically, that’s kind of another spin-off. So using natural discourse, which I mentioned before, basically the only reason I can do this is because I’m lucky enough to work with native speakers, and the way we set up interviews is that it’s never really me talking to the person that we want to interview — I mean, unless there is like, you know, we are eating a meal and I’m also involved, or I just kind of chip in to ask some sort of short question. But normally, it would just be two native speakers talking, and I’m mostly recording or, you know, behind the scenes if there is another person who is able to record. Or sometimes I wasn’t even there. Because for me, what’s really interesting is how people really use language, so… Especially because these markers that I set out to analyze, supposedly we already knew what they meant from research on other varieties of Quechua. And then it turned out that actually in this language, they were used completely differently. But you wouldn’t pick up on that in settings that were not natural language, because they tend to get used in what is called high-st… Well, I mean, I call it that, high-stake interactions — so basically, a conversation that has some real purpose, right? If you are just asking people to describe pictures, and it’s really all the same to them, you know, if this woman is wearing a blue skirt or a red skirt, or if whoever the dog is standing behind or in front of the tree, they won’t be using these epistemic markers or evidential markers, but when it’s a conversation negotiating, you know, like, “Oh, you know, you remember this guy who passed away,” or “He moved away,” or, you know, “No, this story didn’t go like that,” then you have to negotiate knowledge in a more real sense, and then you actually see them all the time.
MTB: That’s interesting. That’s what I was going to ask you if you could explain more about high stakes, but I think you did it. Can we talk about the language context of Quechua? So for speakers who aren’t familiar, like, you know, you’ve already said where the language is spoken, it’s spoken in Ecuador. But, like, is there any idea about like numbers of speakers? Do young people still speak the language? What are the contexts?
Karolina Grzech: Right. So I said before that I was working on Quechua specific, and then I started talking about Kichwa, right? So that could have been confusing.
MTB: Yeah, maybe we can explain.
Karolina Grzech: Yeah, let’s do that. So Quechua or Quechuan is the language family. It’s the biggest Indigenous language family of South America. And even though it’s probably also the most well-studied one, we don’t really have much of a clue how many speakers are there. There is some stats are saying it’s 8 million and some are saying it’s 12. So you can see it’s quite a big discrepancy. It’s spoken on the west side of South America, kind of along the Andes or in the Andes from north of Argentina to the south of Colombia, in Bolivia and Peru and Ecuador, as well. And in Ecuador, Quechuan languages are called Kichwa. And officially, you know, I told you already there was this unified Kichwa orthography. So officially, the government is going for the stance that there is really one Kichwa in all of Ecuador.
MTB: And one Kichwa, does that include the two varieties that you work with?
Karolina Grzech: Yeah. Maybe they would, you know, admit that maybe, okay, maybe there is two, Highland Kichwa and Lowland Kichwa, because the cultures are so markedly different that you can’t really kind of lump them together culturally, also, because as far as we know, the language spread to the Amazon kind of replaced local languages several hundred years ago. So the people in the Amazon who are Kichwa speakers today, their culture is much more kind of Amazonic. It’s not like, you know, they kind of adapted the Andean culture to the Amazonian context. But really, we don’t know very much about the full extent of variation within Quechuan language family, just because it’s not really been well analyzed. Also, in linguistics, there was this idea that, you know, when you said “Quechua,” it was like, “Okay, but Quechua is already described, because we have described some varieties in Peru,” and meanwhile, you have, you know, in Bolivian Quechua, there is some descriptive work coming up now, but really, there wasn’t very much before. And in Ecuador, also, there are still varieties that we know very little of, and there is quite a lot of kind of cultural variation. So the people in Chibuleo, in the Andes, in the community where we, where I’ve been working, they see themselves as culturally different from, say, Salasaca Quichua people who live nearby. And the languages are maybe intelligible, but yeah, culturally it’s different.
And I’m… I know it’s a, you know, it’s kind of hard to decide what you want to go for, whether you should unify in the interest of having more speakers lumped together, but from my experience, keeping heritage languages alive, it’s more often about the identity and some sort of cultural continuity that you should feel, you know, with people who use this language in the past, and this is often the narrative, oh, you know, “It’s the language of our ancestors.” And the Unified Quechua is not a language of anybody’s ancestors. So there are kind of two schools in the region. Some people are very strongly in favor of Unified, and they, that’s what is actually getting taught in schools. So even native speakers who want to teach in this bilingual education in Ecuador, which is in place in areas where Indigenous people or speakers of a particular Indigenous language are a majority, in case of Quechua they have to pass a special exam in Unified Quechua, with a lot of… And it’s, lexically, you know, basically, it’s kind of pairs of Spanish influence. So you can get to situations which, in my opinion, are a little bit absurd, like when, you know, you would have to do your homework as a kid, and you go and ask your grandma how to say something, and then she says something like, say, “‘To go straight’ is dirichu purina, right, from derecho in Spanish, which kind of means “straight.” And then you can take that back to school, and basically, the teacher is going to tell you it’s all wrong. So what’s the thing… What’s going to happen the next time you have to ask your grandma something, you’re just going to ask her in Spanish. So from my perspective, and the people I’ve been working with, I think it kind of erodes transmission. And the situation is, in terms of vitality, it’s really hard to say how many speakers there are of the varieties that I’ve been working on, because the stats in Ecuador are done by language. But as I said, Quechua is not treated as so many languages, or, you know, not every variety gets treated distinctly. So the way to know the number of speakers is to kind of check how many people said that they speak Quechua and live in a given province, and that doesn’t really give you a very granular picture. That’s, at least that was the case for the last census data that I worked on for 2010. I think there was a new one more recently. But I would be surprised if they improved how they gather data on this, because… I think it might have been done last year. There was a different methodology for the census, and I don’t know how well it worked.
MTB: I was just going to ask, so is there official, like official recognition, government recognition that Quechua is not just one language, or is this not really the case that like, as linguists, we say like, “Okay, Quechua is a language family,” but there’s no recognition for the different varieties within, you know, the different languages within that family? Like how… Because it sounds like for Kichwa, they’re just making up some standard variety that no one speaks and saying like, “This is the standard.” Is that right?
Karolina Grzech: A lot of language activists actually do pick it up. So there is some people who think that Unified Kichwa is the way to go, because it gives you much more visibility, and, like, basically, there is a strength in numbers.
MTB: Okay.
Karolina Grzech: So that’s another, that’s also kind of a division line. People insist on using that official variety, and, you know, and they think that this way, they will get kind of a bigger arena for their language. But in the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008, Kichwa is actually mentioned as the official language of intercultural relations, if I’m not mistaken. So it’s kind of a co-official language, but it’s only recognized as one.
MTB: With Spanish.
Karolina Grzech: Yeah. So there is Spanish is the official language. And then you’ve got Kichwa and Shuar, I think, another Indigenous language, which are kind of official languages of intercultural relations, that’s how they call them. And then you have the other languages, which are not mentioned by name. And there’s, I think, 13 Indigenous languages in Ecuador. Well, 13 languages in Ecuador in total, if I’m not mistaken. And those are kind of supposedly co-official in the territories where the speakers are a majority, but it’s kind of, you know… It looks very nice when you look at this Fishman scale of, you know, how officially, how the language is officially recognized, but this official recognition doesn’t really trickle down to everyday use. So there is media, especially radio in Kichwa, also produced locally. And it really depends on the region, how much, you know, children learn it and how widely it’s spoken. In my experience, in the Amazon, the further you go from the main road, the more children are going to speak it. So it’s really a matter of how accessible the town is. And people, I mean, also people kind of profess this attachment to the Kichwa identity, but it’s not always necessarily connected to speaking the language. And also what kind of further complicates things is that in the Amazon, there is a recent process of nation formation. So some people who speak Amazonian Kichwa, as I said before, you know, they’ve adopted this language, and before, they spoke something else; we don’t really know exactly what that language was. But they don’t call themselves Kichwa, they call themselves Quijos, and then they call their variety that they speak Quijos-Quichua. So around the region of Tena in the Napa Province, you will get some villages which say, “Oh, we are a Kichwa community, and the others would say, we are a Quijos community.” And I’m not exactly sure what their legal status is, but they are in the process of being recognized. So it’s all very dynamic. And Darwin Grefa, one of my co-workers on the research project, he is a big activist for advocating the emergence of the Quijos nation, with a separate heritage and acknowledgment that Kichwa is something separate, and it’s, you know, that there used to be another language before. It’s really hard to do research on that as well, because there is not so many archaeological sources or, you know, written records. But yeah, he has been going through archives and, you know, working with people who remember past history. So there is a lot of work to be done there, and it’s very, very interesting.
MTB: Do you want to discuss your experience archiving your data? Like, how has that been? You have a deposit at EL… You have one deposit or two deposits at ELAR?
Karolina Grzech: I have three deposits at ELAR. [laughs]
MTB: Three deposits at ELAR. [laughs] Can you talk a bit about that?
Karolina Grzech: Yeah, sure. So one of them only is really kind of completed. It’s still missing a guide, I have to, I have to submit a guide. But basically, I decided the easiest way to do it is to create a deposit, separate deposit for each project, just because the setup was so different.
MTB: And there are different varieties, right? So makes sense.
Karolina Grzech: Exactly. And different people were involved in the creation, and circumstances were different as well. Because basically, most of my fieldwork experience is tied to ELDP grants, right, to the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme. I was obliged to deposit in ELAR. I’m very happy that I was obliged because I think that’s, you know, what people should do as well when you collect all this data. It’s good to put them somewhere where they can be accessed and they can be professionally curated. But it is hard work to put it in there in a form that can be useful to people. So I’m still in the process of curating the deposits from my recent project, which finished last December. And I’ve already submitted all the media, but I’m working on the transcriptions. So I have to kind of go through them and add English translations. My deposit from the PhD, it’s all translated into… Well, most of it is translated into Spanish, and some of it is glossed morpheme by morpheme, but there is no English translation, unfortunately, and I wanted to add that this time for the new deposits. So yeah, if you search ELAR, you’re going to find two Upper Napo Kichwa deposits, where I’m the depositor or co-depositor, and one for Chibuleo Kichwa.
MTB: Are they open?
Karolina Grzech: Yeah, well, some data are and some aren’t. So for the first one, for the one from 2013 and 2014, we had a very different arrangement with the community. So I had this kind of meeting where I explained what I was going to do, and they’ve kind of approved of, you know, letting me record there, and most of the data was open. And then we had some sessions, for example, where there was a midwife who came to try and turn somebody’s baby in their belly prior to when it was born. It’s, you know, it’s such private data that we decided, “Okay, this is going to be available upon request.” And for the new ones, because of different process that we have adopted with the ethical requirements, and also the remote factor and everything, and it was harder to do it on community basis. So we asked for consent individually from people, and they were able to choose who they want to make it open to. So in general, people had no problem. And most of the data in the Tungurahua deposit, the Chibuleo Kichwa one, they’re open to the public, but some sessions are, you know, only available upon request, or I think one or two are only open to like family. It’s also hard to kind of put across, you know, what a language archive is and how it’s going to be used, and, you know, and how it’s going to be accessed. So I want to keep working on those deposits to kind of be adding more information and, you know, making it more transparent. But in each case, everybody got a copy of their interview as well. And people seem to be kind of content with that, because for their purposes of passing it on to family or friends, or you know, having it as a keepsake, that’s kind of enough. And unfortunately, some of the oldest people I’ve managed to interview, they’ve passed away since. And actually, I think the kind of most touching thing that I’ve heard from a family of one of them is that always on the birthday of this lady who passed away, they watched the interview that we’ve recorded with her.
MTB: Oh, wow. That’s really nice.
Karolina Grzech: So, yeah, I hope that, you know, archives kind of stick around and make themselves more and more open, like maybe there was be, there’s going to be a Spanish interface one day to make it properly available, because I try to make it as transparent as possible, but as you know yourself, it’s the demands of the infrastructure of putting the data in a certain order, they may be, they’re not even transparent to linguists sometimes, so it’s hard to make them very accessible to the community. But the data is there.
MTB: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Yeah, there’s so many layers, like you have to have internet to start with, and then you have to have internet literacy, and then if the interface of ELAR is only in English, you have to have enough English to be able to navigate the archive to find your deposit. And, you know, like you say, like, now we have to find like which files are my grandfather that I want to listen to. It’s not as transparent, or it’s not as easy as you would think.
Karolina Grzech: Exactly. And then you also try to make it accessible to other researchers. But really, I mean, it takes a lot of time to just even, you know, transcribe and translate. And then if it’s like 20-odd hours of data, doing morpheme-morpheme glossing of all of that, that’s a completely different story. Like, I almost feel there should be a separate grant just for that, glossing all the data that you’ve recorded, because I can use it all right, and people can use it for maybe like anthropological research, or, you know, just if they’re generally interested in the culture, but using it for linguistic analysis, it’s a whole different story, unfortunately.
MTB: Yeah, that’s so true. Ugh, transcribing is, is, like, linguistic hell to me. It’s just, it takes so long, and it’s so painful, and you have to make so many decisions. I don’t think people realize like how many choices you have to make when you’re doing a transcription for a language that doesn’t have a standard writing system that everybody uses. Like, “Oh, should we do IPA? You know, what do people want? What can people read?” Oh, it’s too much.
Karolina Grzech: Exactly. And then you have to remember the choices that you’ve made as well.
MTB: Yes, yes, it’s true. Oh. Okay. Well, on that note, thank you, Karolina, so much for coming on to Field Notes. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about your work?
Karolina Grzech: I am on both Academia…
MTB: I will link your Academia profile.
Karolina Grzech: Thank you. And on ResearchGate as well. I think that’s the most kind of stable repository of the things that I have done, because I’ve been changing institutions quite a lot. When you asked me to come to Field Notes, I’ve also finally, after a few years of thinking, have been motivated to purchase my own domain, which is going to be karolinagrzech.info. So the domain is purchased, but there is nothing there yet, but I hope there will be shortly. And I am also on Twitter. And I’m trying to be more active there. But… Or should I say X, right? I’m on X.
MTB: Right. [laughs]
Karolina Grzech: [laughs] I’m not very active there yet, but I’m trying to be. And then, of course, there are deposits on ELAR as well.
MTB: Great. And I will link everything in the show notes so that people can find you.
Karolina Grzech: Perfect. Thank you.
You’ve been listening to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. This podcast is hosted and produced by Martha Tsutsui Billins with production help from Laura Tsutsui. Claire Gawne is our editor, and Luca Dinu is our transcriptionist. Our music is by Lobo Loco, and our logo is by E.Vill Designs. If you have fieldwork experience to share, email us at fieldnotespod@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram @lingfieldnotes. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Also, consider becoming our patron on Patreon to help keep our content ad-free. Thanks for listening!
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