Colla Vs, Cambas (and Even a little Cunumi)

This is a topic that I want to possibly cover in my project three. It explores how language is a huge force field that often acts as a separation between the Collas and Cambas.

Cunumis are the minority but I still believe they are relevant enough to mention. In Bolivia, La Paz and Santa Cruz are the two biggest cities that make up the country. But although that share that similarity the culture is very different from one another. The hostility that people from these two cities share are rooted from racism and segregation. The way this anger against each other is often portrayed is by words of Colla and Camba (and sometimes cunumi). Paceños, people born in La Paz, are referred to as collas and Cruzeños people born in Santa Cruz are called Cambas. The word colla is used as a derogatory phrase and it offends Paceños. These two words have defined a fine line of racism and the segregation of different groups and how they are treated.

On the other hand, a cunumi isn't an ethnicity or race. It is the racism that falls when people aren't Spanish white but instead they're a brown shade of latino. They are seem as lesser than Camba.

language Accents

The Spanish language has so many different accents it's unbelievable! I am Bolivian and we share the border with Argentina. When I was really little I would claim that I would marry an Argentinian guy. They were so dreamy when I watched my telenovelas.  And their accent was so amazing! I always thought it was fascinating how I lived fairly close to the borders of Argentina, give or take a twelve hour trip by car, but their accent varied greatly from a next door camba.

Usually your accent depicts where you from and the assumption people make about you. If you have a southern accent then you might get stereotyped as a hillbilly. The same goes for Spanish speakers. Usually the more southern the country is the better they are regarded throughout the Spanish community. So a Salvadorian is regarded less than an Uruguayan.

The southern countries take pride in not having the same accents as central Americans. I read this article on the four different sectors of countries that can carry different accents:
       "Andean or Serrano Spanish (southern Colombia, part of Ecuador and Peru, part of Bolivia, northern Chile and northwestern Argentina), Caribbean Spanish (the Antilles, Central America, Venezuela and Colombia), Rio de la Plata Spanish (Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay) and Mexican Spanish."

While reading this article it made a lot of sense the way the countries are separated and I fall under the sector of Serrano Spanish. A little bit of the accents of the sector Rio de la Plata Spanish can also be attributed to the way we and my family speak because of where we use to live and how it was closer to those borders.


https://www.latinoschools.com/blog/spanish-language-accents/

Langauges in Bolivia

This post is about the different languages that Bolivia has. When I went back to Bolivia to study abroad for a year, I remember my teachers trying to show us a language. I couldn't quite remember it so I googled all the languages spoken in Bolivia to help refresh my memory.

There are 26 languages spoken in Bolivia!!

Now this are probably languages that are spoken between small villages and Spanish or Castellano is the language that dominates most of Bolivia. But the language I was looking for is called Quechua.

The language of Quechua is what makes up most of the indigenous people in Bolivia. Most textbooks only reference make up people with cultural background of Quechua and Aymara.  These people live in Bolivia's highland, but recently they moved to low lines due to the reduced prices in Agriculture prices. The culture and languages of Quechua are slowly dying out. What my school was trying to do was preserve an indigenous language. They aren't doing the best but that is because of the school system itself and not because of their attempt. The point of this is because all over minority languages are being lost to the world more dominant languages. This can be good and bad. If the more dominant languages stay then the universe will eventually have language where everyone can understand one another. In the other sense, smaller cultures will have the lost their way in time because their language would have died out.

Anime And other Thoughts

This week I have really been concentrating on how to do my essay, all the different ways I can perceive the information and how I can come up with new ways to think about my argument. Through one ways that I was able to come up with an idea is how people watch Anime.
I have never been a fan of Anime so this was a way for me to research some of the cultural background behind by some people like Anime.
I have a couple of friends who are big anime fans and they often will watch anime through using sub tiles. One of the sources I got for my essay was the usage of anime as one of the shows to learn the foreign language. Although, I'm not specifically looking into foreign language I do think that it is relevant to mention anime because of the huge fan base it has.
Anyways, what I learned was that Anime is very motivated to keep the roots of their culture which is why a lot of anime isn't available with spoken over English. This allows them for the person who is watching to have to listen to Japanese. I talked this over with one of my friends who likes anime. They said that even when there is anime who has English spoken over in anime it isn't the same and not as many episodes are offered with the English spoken over version. I think this is really interested because they had a strong purpose to maintain their culture and they have maintained as their fan base grows. It's a very respectful things to do and it also encourages people to learn the language.

READING WITH A 7 YEAR OLD

One of the assigned readings for Friday was the article called "Fighting For Our Lives" by Deborah Tannen. While I was reading my seven year-old sister came to spend time with me. So I decided to entertain her while I did my homework. I did this by making her read me the article. We were going to split the article because she would read one paragraph and then I would follow suit with the next. We eventually get the aggressive part of war and how Americans will turn a lot of metaphors to having a war theme.

When the example of "Blood lust" came into picture and she was pretty perplexed by this. It was hard for her to wrap her head around the idea of Blood lust and when I told her they wanted blood. She gave me this crazy look, as I knew she would. I explained to her the idea of a metaphor. I gave her the example of me saying "I could eat a whale right now" which is a metaphor for me being super hungry. I then went back to explain how blood lust is a representation of aggressive behavior.

Throughout this reading process her and I created, I began to wonder when students, even young ones, become aware of different sayings for different meanings. Metaphors like "take a shot at it" is not usually taken like a war reference unless you're super analyzing it. And with new generations different metaphors will arise because the way they speak are very different.

2ND LANGUAGE LEARNING AND OUT OF THE CLASSROOM EXPOSURE

The article I read was on how language learning can be different when it is coming from outside the classroom. This article is a strong supporter for people to receive outside the classroom exposure because often time the classroom method of learning a language can be insufficient. If language can be thought in a less formal setting then it helps the person tie learning the language into something that they see happening in an everyday surrounding. The article goes on to discuss how a native language speakers deal with learning new lemmas everyday and how it is impossible to teach over 42 thousand terminologies inside a formal classroom. That's a reason that the article advises people to scout outside the classroom for different opportunities where they can be exposed to the language they're trying to learn in an every day type of scenario.

The article also discussed how muti language speakers know a thousand of "extra" words which, if you're bilingual, you start to connect those words into your mind and bring up the different meanings behind them. An idea that raised was learning language through film watching. In the case of children, they are able to pick up multiple words from short subtitled films while adults will pick up words even without subtitles due to the context that lays within the screen. You can easily see this occur in countries like Belgium where they really don't have any TV shows that are in their native language.

De Wilde, V., Brysbaert, M., & Eyckmans, J. (2020). Learning English through out-of-school exposure. Which levels of language proficiency are attained and which types of input are important? Bilingualism: Language & Cognition, 23(1), 171–185. https://doi-org.proxyau.wrlc.org/10.1017/S1366728918001062

Code Switiching

The documentary that we watched in class on Tuesday made me question a lot of things. It is crazy that once you learn something new, like what the term of Code Switching, you then start to connect it to all the things that are related to that one specific thing. 

After the documentary, I wondered if Mainland China was just choosing to go after Hong Kong for Code Switching, because I lack knowledge on other aspects of their history. Then, that made me question why they would only go after code switching, since code switching happens in the slightest of manners, hundreds of times a day. 

The way that you change your words to classier ones when you speak to a professor or to an older adult. The way that even throughout different friend groups you will switch the way you speak and how it varies depending on the person to which you are speaking to. These are just examples of inner code switches that can occur within the same language.

Then there's code switches that can occur when you speak with foreign relative. My family is very guilty of this. If not all, most of my moms sentences contains both English and Spanish words mixed into her sentence to complete one fragment. We call it Spanglish because it has both Spanish and English mixed into the way that she speaks regularly. I think that it's very normal to be around this atmosphere because I've grown up with it. I don't think twice when I hear someone in their native language speak to someone else but then incorporate English within their conversation. I think its a natural process of integrating cultures and being an immigrant or descendant from an immigrant family.

Therefore, it's quite troubling to see a documentary when you hear someone call something "disgusting" in a documentary when commenting of Code Switches, because in a world where things are constantly evolving and should be innovating, you would think there would be bigger issues to worry about.