Metadiscursive regime and register formation on Aymara radio

This paper examines the links between language use, speakers and institutional authority at the oldest Aymara-language radio station in Bolivia. The station’s Aymara language department develops and approves scripts and monitors programming, identifying Spanish loan words – “aberrations” – and replacing them with Aymara neologisms. In the context of indigenous political resurgence in Bolivia, language has become a metonym for the indigenous nation, another terrain for decolonization and personal transformation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis of a broadcast of the program Aymara Language, I argue that the metadiscursive regime operating at the station plays a role in consolidating a distinct register of Aymara and its elusive model speaker.

► An Aymara radio station in Bolivia maintains a language policy of broadcasting “pure Aymara” free of Spanish loan words. ► The radio’s Aymara Language Department draws on academic, religious, and familial authority. ► Language endangerment and nationalist discourses inform metadiscursive practices surrounding this register of Aymara. ► Pure Aymara is diffused by the radio as a complex icon of Aymara personhood.