Fighting the odds to keep Indian tongues alive

In his first year at San Marcos University, Hermenegildo Espejo barely spoke, and certainly not in class.

His Spanish was rudimentary, his accent an embarrassment. Classmates in Lima, a two-day trip from his Amazon home town, laughed at his grammatical stumbles, his odd pronunciation.

"I didn't understand anything. I couldn't pronounce words well," the 22-year-old Peruvian Indian recalls, wincing as he gazes out a taxi window on a rutted jungle road near his home.

Six years later, Espejo is a thesis away from an undergraduate degree in linguistics at Peru's top public university. And while his Spanish is now excellent, it is not his …