Page 430 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

408 Winfried Thielmann

of the new text types – need to remain close to the traditional registers.”
(Kummer 1985: 147).
At a first glance none of the linguistic expansion strategies discussed here is
in any way surprising. When European vernacular languages were expanded for
the purpose of doing science, all of these strategies were used in one way or an-
other (for German see Wolff [1733] 1973, [1713] 1978; Ricken 1995; Ehlich
1995; for Italian Thielmann 2003). But these expansions were not only a slow
process, they also occurred on the basis of concepts that were already known to
the scientific community by their Latin terms.
Yet the Shuar language was expanded within a few decades to accommodate
the complete cultural apparatus of postcolonial Ecuador as it is represented by
the National Curriculum. New concepts were rendered by new terms in a lan-
guage of instruction stretched to the limits. The language was made “do the
splits”. So were – presumably – the students when in this language they learned
about societal solutions to problems alien to their society. As for the linguistic
difficulties during the process of linguistic expansion, Kummer writes (1985,
141): “Within the analytical sections of the school book texts, the shift in the fre-
quencies of certain syntactic connection devices and their unusual combination
results in a syntax the average speaker of Shuar cannot decode. (…) Even teach-
ers who have to work with these texts can only reproduce the parts of a complex
sentence, but not the complex sentence as a whole. As a result, students taught by
these teachers do not understand these complex sentences either. It would require
a larger study to determine whether the new syntactic registers created in the
school book language are gradually going to be accepted by the ethnic commu-
nity, or whether education in their own language is going to fail for reasons such
as the large distance between traditional syntax and the new register.”
According to Almeira (2004) the experiment has worked and enjoys the
Shuar’s full support: “In the search for an alternative to modernization imposed
from above, the Shuar have managed to reduce semi-illiteracy to seven per cent
and total illiteracy to two per cent.” “Relying on their organizational strength,
they now have some very ambitious projects, including one for an educational
television station, for which they are seeking foreign technical assistance and
funding.”
The Shuar survived as a society because they codified, institutionalized and
expanded their language. Stretched to its very limits, this language at least par-
tially mediates and reconciles two extremely different cultural apparatus in a
way that gives the society a genuine opportunity to determine its own future
within postcolonial Ecuador.
Even in the light of this, it is still possible to argue that the linguistic expan-
sion of Shuara is equivalent to the Shuar’s final colonization and that the so-
ciety’s traditional ways will suffer. But such a view would presuppose authen-
ticity as desirable for indigenous societies in a postcolonial context. It would