The University of Arizona Press
November 20, 2025
The Peruvian altiplano, a high plateau around Lake Titicaca, is known for its breathtaking landscapes and the cultivation of commodities like quinoa and alpaca wool. The region also stands out for its history of inter-Indigenous language contact and multilingualism between Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities. This linguistic ecology predates the Spanish conquest and persists today, making the altiplano, with its capital, Puno, a unique space where Indigenous multiplicity is recognized and celebrated. Yet this celebration is accompanied by additional ideological challenges around defining Quechua and Aymara as distinct Indigenous languages and ethnic groups.
Anthropologist Sandhya Krittika Narayanan begins with these challenges, and asks: What does it mean to be a Quechua or Aymara speaker in Puno today? What does it mean to be an Indigenous ethnic Quechua or Aymara individual? Mother Tongues of the High Andes opens with these questions, exploring what Quechua and Aymara languages and identities mean for Indigenous puneños as they navigate their past and present. Read an excerpt from the book below.
“Qué quieres saber de mi lengua materna?” From the day I first arrived in Puno till my last, I was frequently asked versions of this question, asking me, the researcher, what I wanted to know about the Indigenous languages of Puno. Over time I slowly understood that this rejoinder to my requests to interview Indigenous puneños about their linguistic background was made in reference to the two Indigenous languages of the Peruvian altiplano: Quechua and Aymara. Even as I would grow accustomed to other aspects of living and being in Puno, the phrasing of this invitation to discuss, explore, and compare different communicative social worlds would still catch me off guard. After all, I had come to Puno to see how Indigenous puneños spoke Quechua and Aymara—Indigenous languages that were widely regarded as “languages” in the formal grammatical and sociopolitical sense by academics and the general public. But the Indigenous Quechua-and Aymara-speaking puneños I spoke with rarely would refer to Quechua or Aymara as an idioma, the most direct Spanish translation for a named, grammatically distinct “language.” Instead, my interlocutors more frequently would describe their native linguistic backgrounds through the phrase lengua materna—“ mother tongue.”
This book has been shaped and framed around what it means to be recognized as a speaker of an Indigenous language in multilingual Puno. But this book is also about the personal affective connections that speakers have with the ways that they communicate and interact with each other across social and linguistic differences. In this way, calling one’s native language a lengua materna draws our focus away from thinking about these modes of communication as strictly defined by socially recognized named languages like Quechua or Aymara. Instead, thinking about talk in this region as shaped by different lenguas maternas emphasizes ways of speaking, and the role that they play in building social worlds and nurturing bonds and connections within and across different Indigenous communities in Puno and the Peruvian altiplano. The gendering of the phrase aligns these ways of speaking with mothers and motherhood. It evokes these connections by emplacing these ways of talking within spaces we might typically associate with mothers, such as the home and hearth, which foster talk and other social activities central to creating social relations and bonds. But these activities can also occur outside of the home, transporting these practices to create new connections with people and communities. In these situations, using one’s lengua materna also becomes a vehicle to form new bonds that bridge social differences and relationships between individuals across different communities.
In many ways, the frequent use of lengua materna by puneños to describe their communicative practices felt similar to my own experiences with minoritized languages and multilingualism. I was born in Toronto, a first-generation South Asian immigrant living in Canada as part of the large wave of immigration that came to the nation in the late ’70s through the ’80s. At that time, Toronto and its surrounding neighborhoods transformed to a multilingual hub, with enclaves and boroughs slowly coalescing around distinct diasporic nations and ethnic identities. My early childhood memories include playing primarily with other children of South Indian and Sri Lankan Tamil descent; having to answer to various aunties and uncles when we got caught causing some kind of mischief; and being surrounded by the love that came from these other adults and families in our community, some of whom were connected by blood and others through a shared sense of being foreigners and minorities in Canada. But this sense of community was also made through the commonalities in how the adults in our lives spoke to us in a mixture of their respective mother tongues and English. As a child, I knew that there were differences in how many of those families spoke, and especially the ones who would label what they spoke as “Tamil.” My brother and I would pick up these differences and novelties and sometimes reproduce them at home, only to be corrected by our mother or grandmother as not being how “we spoke.” “Well don’t we speak Tamil too?” I would ask, not always knowing what these terms meant. “Yes, and no,” my mother would respond, and she would end the discussion decisively by saying, “That is not how we speak in our home.” The significance of what my mother and grandmother told me did not make sense till I got older, when I slowly came to learn about the history of my mother’s and grandmother’s mother tongue—a product of contact and multilingualism from the highlands of Kerala. Did that mean that we still spoke Tamil? Or did we speak Malayalam? To this day, I still do not have any straight answers to those questions from my mother, grandmother, or maternal kin. Instead, our mother tongue, a mixed variety that is a testament to both our Tamil and Malayalam linguistic heritages, is used proudly in extended family WhatsApp group chats. Jokingly named “the clan,” the group of extended family members are spread across three continents and frequently post in our mother tongue, discussing family recipes such as the correct way to make aviyyal and puliakuthi (traditional South Indian vegetable dishes) and sharing pictures of all the “clan” women donning their best traditional kasava or mundu saree for festivals like Onam and Trissur Pooram.
Sandhya Krittika Narayanan is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she also directs the Linguistic Anthropology Research Lab (LARL). Her research focuses on Quechua–Aymara language contact and multilingualism in the Peruvian altiplano. Her work has been published in Language and Communication, Signs and Society, and Gender and Language.
