Drunken speech and the construction of meaning: Bilingual competence in the Southern Peruvian Andes

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the language use of drunken speakers in a bilingual community of the Southern Peruvian Andes. When drunk, speakers are less constrained in their linguistic choices by considerations of individual linguistic competence and of differential status between speaker and addressees. Cultural norms of heightened potency and diminished responsibility allow drunken speakers to extend their linguistic repertoires and to challenge established social relations. Spanish and Quechua carry very complex and ambiguous meanings related to local conceptions of power and evaluations of an Hispanic and a pre-Hispanic past. Drunks exploit the ambiguities in implicit social meanings that normally function to maintain the status quo as they use their extended communicative competence to present alternative views on the nature of social relations. (Bilingualism, language and power, social anthropology, South America)