Abstract
The Bora language is spoken by nearly 2000 people, members of an indigenous group that was persecuted and exploited during the Amazon rubber boom. They began learning Spanish early in the twentieth century, while leaving Bora behind. During 2015, after the formalization of the Bora alphabet, the Bora communities that live by the Ampiyacu, Yaguasyacu, and Amazon rivers started to teach their language again. This has resulted into a new pride among the Bora speakers leading them to the production of new texts in their native language and the construction of their indigenous identity. At the same time, as they discuss what graphemes should be used in their alphabet, they reveal ideologies about how their language should be written and what is actually a language for them. On the one hand, they respect the Spanish tradition for some consonants, like <c>; but, on the other hand, they prefer new graphemes that reveal their indigenous status, like the <ɨ> vowel.
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This work was funded by the Dirección de Gestión de la Investigación at the PUCP through grant 2015-1-0070.
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Napurí, A. (2018). Revitalization of the Bora Language. In: Trifonas, P., Aravossitas, T. (eds) Handbook of Research and Practice in Heritage Language Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44694-3_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44694-3_24
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