De-Westernizing grammar in the Quechua language classroom

Despite the wide range of studies seeking to understand the Grammar (i.e., linguistic systems) of speakers involved in situations of long-term language contact between Indigenous and colonial languages, few discuss how grammars (i.e., prescriptive and pedagogical materials) are subject to analogous social, cultural, and institutional pressures, often resulting in the wholesale adoption of Westernized, or more appropriately Latinized , grammatical explanations. This paper seeks to fill an important gap in our understanding of the continuing impact of European colonization in Latin America, particularly with respect to descriptive practices that subjugate, in subtle but ultimately important ways, the linguistic diversity that characterizes autochthonous languages, and specifically Quechua, the most widely spoken of the Indigenous languages of the Americas. We argue for a concept of nativized grammatical descriptions that are founded in careful linguistic observation and not dependent on the categories and assumptions of Western grammatical traditions. This chapter offers a critical commentary on how to create a native frame for instruction that avoids both the bias of traditional approaches and the “hyperbolic valorization” often observed with Indigenous practices ( Hill 2002 ).