Las Comunidades Virtuales del Quichua Ecuatoriano: Revalorizando La Lengua en un Espacio Apropiado

The indigenous languages of America have a long history of subalternization that continues nowadays. For this reason, the United Nations stated the 2019 as the International Year of the Indigenous Languages, as an effort to reverse the lossing of the linguistic diversity on the planet. The Ecuadorian quichua has presence in many countries of the region. . In Ecuador is the indigenous language with the biggest number of speakers. However, there are evidences that this language is suffering a dramatic situation of decline at intergenerational transmission. In the actual context, the young quichua speakers take over technological resources in order of building virtual communities with the purpose of defense and diffusion the language and culture quichua. This paper shows an exploratory investigation of two virtual communities on Facebook: Kichwa Mashikuna and Kichwa Hatari NY. With this approach, is revelated the need to think about linguistic survival in front of the possibility of adaptation to the urban and technological context. In relation with this, the young Quichuas bet on “going through modernity” , instead of get around or deny it.