Local schools motivate their students to learn the Baure language
Over the past few years, the Baure people have clearly shown a growing interest in the language. The negative connotations associated with the language seem to diminish and the people realize that a central element of their cultural heritage is about to be lost forever. As a result, in both elementary schools in Baures several language revival projects have been initiated. The teachers, even though they do not speak the language themselves, stimulate the children to learn some basic vocabulary and give them assignments for which they need to elicit language data from the elderly that do speak the language. At the end of the school year, both schools presented the children’s work at the school fair.
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On the 20th of November, the Rodolfo Durán Sosa school organized a fair where parents and other people interested were invited to have a look at the end-products of the children in the different courses. The members of the Baure Documentation Project were asked to contribute with a presentation on the language. |
We provided a sheet with the Baure alphabet and a short overview of the personal pronouns. Many of the classrooms were decorated with vocabulary in the Baure language. The children made drawings and put up the names of the painted objects in both Spanish and Baure. The vocabulary consisted mostly of names for animals, objects familiar to the classrooms and short phrases used in class.
At the Carmelo Lopez school, the school fair was held on the 23th of November. The younger children also decorated their classrooms with writings in the Baure language. Furthermore, the older children were given the assignment to make a glossary of as many Baure words as they could find. In order to do that, they had to go to the elderly speakers of the language and elicit the information that they needed. The wordlists thus created, were decorated with drawings and cuttings from magazines. It resulted in really nice and some fairly extensive glossaries from which the students learned their first words in the Baure language. |
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