LANGAS

Between the XVIth and XIXth centuries, a few variants of Quechua, Aymara, Tupi and Guarani stood out as a conveying language in territories of South America under Spanish and Portuguese domination. These languages known as "general" served as means of communication between the native populations and the colonizers. For the needs of the evangelization, they became written languages. The rich and varied literary production that followed consisted of linguistic tools (grammars and dictionaries), textbooks of catechises but also profane documents (personal letters, wills, petitions,...), erudite poems and dramas. This project contributes to the anthropological and historical research in Andean and tupi-guarani areas through the study and the comparison of these texts. Little exploited until now, they however constitute a source of irreplaceable information for our knowledge and comprehension of the colonized native societies and their cultural and epistemic universes. We'll focus on two key periods: the first one from mid XVI to mid XVII century is characterized by the standardization of the languages and the second one, at the beginning of the XIX century, when latin american nations take their independence, see the decline and ethnicisation of the same. For those periods we'll develop two approaches : a social and political history of language and the ethnohistory of the political organizations of the population through the analysis of the vocabulary.