Resumen de Language, nationalism, and ethnicity in the Americas

Yolanda Russinovich Solé

• From the mid sixties through the mid seventies, and again in the late eighties, we witnessed a widespread revival of ethnicity and language nationalism wherever ethnolinguistic minorities hadbeen suppressed. The ethnicity boom brought the language issue to the foreground. In spite of seeming de-ethnicization in most modern settings, mother-tongue language loyalty emerged äs a constant. My purpose is to examine language nationalism, language maintenance and language shift processes in four contrasting language contact situations in the Americas which differ in pre-contact factors, host-factors and product factors: Spanish in the United States versus English in Argentina; Guarani-Spanish in Paraguay versus Quechua-Spanish in Peru.