Bilingual Culture In Nasa Yuwe

Bilingual Culture; The Role of a Second and a Foreign Language

Children learn their native language “Nasa-yuwe” at home and it is spoken among members of

their own community, but at the time of interacting outside their native communities, they must

switch to Spanish. Likewise it happens when they have access to the external world like in the case

of radio and the internet; what at times suggests that interaction in the outer language (Spanish) has

more relevance than interaction in the innermost “Nasa-yuwe” language.

One of the main aspects of Own Education for Nasas lies on the fact that students interact in the

native language with teachers and other members of the community, and it is precisely in that

interactional dynamic
Ong (1967) asserts that human beings communicate thru countless ways making use of all their

senses: touch, smell, taste and specially sight. The author highlights that some non – oral

communication is exceedingly rich such in the case of gestures. Indigenous communication has

mainly been oral; written language, as the transcription of oral discourse rather than graphical

interpretation of natural phenomena as in the case of carved rocks or sculptures, is a relative new

concept.

Originally Language was oral and, according to Saussure (1959) nestled in sound. Former

scholar Henry Sweet (1896) stated that words are made up not of letters but functional sounds.

Historically among indigenous communities in America, orality has been the way knowledge passes

from one to another generation. But the spoken word needs to be herd in the world of sounds, which

is made up of human and nature sounds as understood by indigenous. According to Misael,
By valorization they mean the attribution of certain

positive values to language as a functional tool; that is, as an instrument which facilitates the

fulfilment of communicative and cognitive functioning at all societal and individual levels. For

instance, the linguistic and nonlinguistic discourse of an elder or “Shaman” take form and is valued

by the community as a healing ceremony.

But the concept of valorization gains important value at the time of analyzing the way two

languages come into usage; because usually and depending on the situation one is highly valued,

while the other is diminished. Nasa culture, however has kept an equilibrium among languages in

order to avoid the lost of their own ancestral cultural legacy. The extreme importance of Nasa-yuwe

language valorization is evidenced at all community and individual levels. They understood that if

native language is not valorized and used as a tool for communication during day to day activities

such as the “minga”, education activities at home and school, ceremonies and other societal

activities, language attrition and language shift are likely to occur; and along with language the end

of all the community ́s anthropological value attached