Why do millions of people grow up hearing Quechua but never fully learn to speak it? This four-episode podcast follows the life of Victor, a bilingual speaker from the valleys of Bolivia, and uses real research from SLA to answer that question.
Four lessons on what it takes to save a heritage language.
I was born in the Bolivian countryside. I grew up with chickens, helping my mom herd sheep. Later, I started teaching myself English with textbooks. It was frustrating at first. But I kept learning,
I built my own English program for students like me, won awards for community service, and earned a $430,000 scholarship to study in the U.S.
Today, I study political economy at Georgetown University, hoping to take what I've learned back to Bolivia.
Episode 1
Victor grew up hearing Quechua and Spanish from birth, but nobody planned his bilingualism. This episode explores what happens when a child acquires two languages without any strategy, and why hearing a language every day does not guarantee you will speak it.
Episode 2
When Carlos entered school, everything shifted to Spanish. This episode breaks down the four ingredients that make language learning work (input, output, interaction, and feedback) and shows which ones were missing from Carlos's experience entirely.
.png)
.png)
Episode 3
As a teenager, Victor felt embarrassed about Quechua. As an adult, he reclaimed it. This episode examines how emotions like shame and pride shape whether someone keeps or abandons a heritage language, and why identity matters as much as grammar.
Episode 4
Victor didn't know how to teach Quechua to his children. This final episode turns to policy: what does the research say about saving a language when school alone is not enough and the real loss happens at home?
.png)
I built this podcast as a final project for the class 'How Languages Are Learned', taught by Dr. Erin Fell at Georgetown University.
And the questions it asks are not academic to me. I grew up in Bolivia. So, I sat in the same classrooms this podcast mentions. And, I watched the same cycle play out in my own community.
This project is my attempt to connect what I learned in a linguistics course with my reality, and my hope is to share that connection with the people who need it most: the families, educators, and policymakers who will decide what happens to Quechua next.
If you want to talk about heritage language education, language policy in Bolivia, or anything this podcast made you think about, please reach out! I am always happy to continue the conversation.
- Serafin Burgulla Marca
