Linguistics and children in society. A South American Example

Your email reminded me of another linguistic anecdote that we have in South America. The word “orphan” did not properly exist in the Quechua language spoken by millions of people when the Spanish arrived, and still spoken widely today. According to one of my revered college teachers, William Hurtado de Mendoza, the concept of a category for children whose parents have died was just not relevant enough to merit its own word in Quechua. Children without parents were nurtured by family and society. Their status or expectations of success was not inferior to those children with parents.

The Spaniards’ arrival did create the need of both a translation for the word “orphan” in the sense that we are used to in the West, and a word for a new social phenomena of orphans in their society. The word “wakcha,” which can be translated as solitary, poor, mendicant, vagabond, far from home, etc.–and of which the word “gaucho” derives- was combined with the word for child “wawa,” to form wakcha-wawa.

In recent years the “wawa” part has been dropped and “wakcha” is now being used to mean orphan in addition to retaining its other meanings, which are often combined anyway. It is easy to guess why there is a need for words to get shorter: when they are used often people just tend to get tired of repeating long words. With the passage of time the need for other great words have arisen such as words for children of single mothers, children victims of violence and institutionalized.

I think we got a new word in “Albanian” which means “concerned hardworking parent of happy child/children” : Afooper. Let’s add more to the dictionary.