LINGUISTIC PREJUDICES OF BILINGUAL PERUVIAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS TOWARDS QUECHUA

Abstract

Since the beginning of this century, social and political circumstances have changed favorably for Peruvian indigenous languages; therefore, it follows that these new trends would have had repercussions on the linguistic beliefs and assessments of their speakers. The research aimed to describe and analyze the various linguistic prejudices of bilingual Quechua-Spanish students of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the National University of the Altiplano of Puno, from the theoretical approaches of critical sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The study presents an explanatory descriptive qualitative methodology with a phenomenological design of semi-structured interviews proposed for discourse analysis. The results highlight the ideological association of Quechua as a language of the countryside, a difficult language, an ancient language, a language of the cultural past. In general, the students showed positive prejudices towards the indigenous language; however, these representations are counterproductive for the vitality of the language due to the irrational nature of prejudices.