The Inheritance of Indigenous Languages: Documentation of Kichwa– Spanish bilingualism in Ecuador

This project investigates how Kichwa, an indigenous language of Ecuador, is maintained or lost amid increasing Spanish dominance. It asks how Kichwa is transmitted across generations and how linguistic, social, and institutional factors shape language use within communities. Integrating language documentation and bilingual acquisition research, the study situates children’s bilingual development within broader issues of democracy, education, and human rights. Fieldwork in Kichwa-speaking regions will involve recording and analyzing child–caregiver interactions and bilingual speech tasks, supplemented by ethnographic interviews with families and educators. The resulting corpus will reveal patterns of grammatical features, code-switching, and language attitudes. Through this mixed-method approach, the project aims to demonstrate how indigenous language vitality intersects with political and social inequality. Ultimately, it contributes to understanding bilingualism in endangered-language contexts and to promoting linguistic equity, cultural rights, and inclusive human development in Latin America.