Documenting an indigenous language in the rainforests of Ecuador

Education at Brigham Young University (BYU) places an emphasis on experiential learning opportunities, allowing undergraduate students to apply their fields of study to real-life experiences around the world. From programs in Fiji, Ghana, Japan, the UK, and dozens of countries in between, thousands of students participate each year in one of the largest university study-abroad programs in the United States. One such international study takes place in the rainforests of Ecuador, where BYU linguistics professor Janis Nuckolls has spent 30 years learning, examining, documenting, and preserving the evolving Quichua language. She and her teams of students explore and record the overlooked yet insightful nuances of the indigenous culture.

Surrounded by nature, the BYU students study Quichua linguistics and anthropology and interact regularly with locals and native speakers. “It’s a lot different from learning in a classroom,” says Emily Peterson, one of the linguistics students who made the trip, “because sometimes in a normal classroom you feel disconnected from the material. But here, when you get to see the lives of the people who speak the language that you’re studying, you get to look through a different lens and experience their culture in a more authentic way.”

The student team recently began researching how speakers of Quichua describe colors. Rather than use a single word for each color, they reference something else that has the same pigment. For example, they might say something is blue by describing it as the color of a toucan’s tail feather. Nuckolls had always wondered why Quichua has so few color terms and why the ones they do have are mostly borrowed from Spanish. This new insight has fostered greater appreciation for the Quichua people and their connection to nature.

There’s something special about immersing yourself in a field of study, a language, and a people while having a wide and deep engagement with the world around you. “Learning about the culture and lives of [speakers of Quichua] has been very exciting, humbling, and thought-provoking,” Nuckolls says. “At first I was baffled by their culture. Then I was intrigued. Now I admire them a lot.”