Imbuing words with power: Linguistic diversity and identity politics among the Murui-Muina of the Colombian Amazon

Abstract Indigenous identity politics in South America increasingly mobilize language as a resource for political visibility, cultural continuity, and resistance to homogenizing state agendas. While many Indigenous movements pursue linguistic standardization, the Murui-Muina people of the Colombian Amazon advance an inverse project: they emphasize internal differentiation, maintaining four ethnolinguistic groups (Murui, Mɨka, Mɨnɨka, Nɨpode). Drawing on long-term ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork, this article examines how Murui-Muina speakers construct and sustain these distinctions through ideologically charged lexical contrasts (‘flag words’) that function as shibboleths of subgroup identity. Situated within histories of violence, Indigenous language politics, and Northwest Amazonian multilingual ecologies, the analysis shows how minimal linguistic differences become imbued with cosmological significance, social meaning, and political value. The Murui-Muina case challenges structuralist definitions of ‘language’, demonstrating that what ultimately counts as a language depends on local approaches to language itself, offering a broader insight into how linguistic diversity is lived, valued, and reproduced. (Indigenous identity, linguistic diversity, language standardization, Murui-Muina, Northwest Amazonia, Colombia)