Ivá (Taushiro)

It is an application for cell phones and tablets (Android Operating System) for children from 3 to 5 years old to learn through images and sounds the basic contents about the alphabet, numbers, family, colors, parts of the human body, animals, fruits and basic expressions in the Taushiro language.

This app is aimed at serving as instruments to strengthen and promote linguistic revitalization processes that arise with the new generations.

The taushiro were known as pinches or pinchis. Catholic missionaries first made contact with them in 1684, and fourteen years later they relocated most of them to two missions. At that time the number of speakers reached 2,500. The next known information was that the town of San José de los Pichis on the banks of the Pastaza River disappeared. In 1737 only one hundred and thirty-six people lived in the mission, and as many lived between the Chambira and Pastaza rivers. By 1841, that number had dropped to 100, and by 1960 to 70. The epidemics exterminated many people, so that by 1975 their number had been reduced to eighteen people. By the 1990s the number had dropped to seven.

The older Taushiro say that soldiers long ago took their ancestors prisoners, probably believing them to be hostile. When they realized that the taushiro were peaceful, they stopped chasing them. Meanwhile the Taushiro had contracted diseases such as dengue, whooping cough, measles, and smallpox. Many died during those epidemics. The mestizos carried other diseases that particularly attacked women. The few that remained settled near the mouth of the Ahuaruna River, working for a patron for several years. Another small group moved to the Legía ravine, near Intuto. They married quechuas from the jungle and mestizos, they lost their identity and decided to assimilate into the mestizo culture and speak Spanish.

Source: ILV (SIL Peru).