Background

Bolivia, a country with more than 11 million inhabitants, has no less than thirty-six languages. A large number of these languages are only spoken by small ethnic groups and are becoming less and less used. Before the small Bolivian languages become extinct, it is important they are documented in reference books and recordings. For the Bolivians this is of cultural historical and cultural political importance, while for the international linguistics community such a description is important because it gives insight into issues such as language development and what happens when languages are in contact with each other.

Bolivia is not only one of the poorest countries of Latin America, it is also a country with a huge cultural and linguistic diversity. In addition to Spanish, the thirty-six indigenous languages are or were recently spoken, with speaker numbers ranging from several million to less than five (Crevels and Muysken 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015). There are not only many languages, but these languages also belong to many different, genetically completely unrelated families. So far, geographical obstacles, the lack of roads, and the isolation of large parts of Bolivia have led to the preservation of parts of the cultural and linguistic heritage. Nonetheless, the majority of the languages of Bolivia are critically endangered. It is expected that only 10‒20% will survive in the next century, and in fact all indigenous languages are under pressure or severe threat in the country (Crevels 2012).

Despite the great cultural and linguistic wealth, the knowledge of Bolivian languages and cultures was very limited until recently. There is no national tradition of linguistic research, there are hardly any trained Bolivian linguists, and native speakers of indigenous languages with training and interest in their own language belong mostly to the two largest groups, the Quechua and the Aymara. Most of the research was and is done by foreigners, and the results, in so far as they have been published, are hardly available in Bolivia itself, since they are mostly written in English. They contain, moreover, a lot of technical linguistic terminology. Unfortunately, while Western scholars often achieve excellent research results with data acquired in the Third World, the local population, and particularly the people who collaborated in the projects, seldom get to see any results.