Peru’s Queen of Quechua Rap Wants to Rescue Indigenous Culture With Her Music

Renata Flores is part of a new generation of artists producing contemporary music in Quechua, the language of her ancestors.Credit…Celia D. Luna

The music video begins with the sweeping views of the snow-capped Andes Mountains and the whistle of the region’s traditional wind instruments.

Then you see Renata Flores. Standing defiantly in the baggy pants, slick ponytail and hoop earrings that have become the uniform of hip-hop artists around the world, she begins to rap — in Quechua, the language of the Incas, whose empire was rooted in these heights.

This blend of traditional and transgressive, rural and urban, local and global, has thrust Ms. Flores, 19, and her music into an intensifying debate over identity in the region, and made her a leader among a new generation of artists producing contemporary music in Quechua, which remains the most widely spoken Indigenous language in Latin America… NYTIMES

New effort aims to provide Covid-19 resources to non-English speakers in U.S.

Pooja Chandrashekar, a first-year medical student at Harvard Medical School who founded the Covid-19 Health Literacy Project.

By Shafaq Zia

Covid-19 is impacting lives across the U.S., and health officials are racing to provide communities with important information about the illness. But language divides are likely to put non-English speakers at greater risk. While some health information is being translated into commonly spoken languages including Spanish and Chinese, the U.S. is home to non-English speakers who speak any of more than 350 other languages.

A new initiative from medical students and physicians at Harvard Medical School aims to help members of these communities by translating fact-based Covid-19 information. The initiative, known as the Covid-19 Health Literacy Project, has already translated essential Covid-19 information about prevention and possible treatment options, among other issues, in over 35 languages, including Navajo, Oromo (spoken by an ethnic group in Ethiopia), and Swahili. STATNEWS

The Race to Save the World’s Disappearing Languages

Photograph by Jonas Bendiksen, National Geographic

Every two weeks a language dies. Wikitongues wants to save them.

Many of the world’s most remote languages are in danger of disappearing. Here, neighbors in the Altai mountains in China craft a new pair of skis. The range connects Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, making the threatened Altai language an unusual blend of dialects… NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC