Concordance Between Mother Tongue, Linguistic Repertoire, and Ethnocultural Identity Among Quechua and Aymara Speakers in Peru

Language simultaneously constitutes a social practice, a communicative resource, and a marker of belonging, but the language learned in childhood, the languages a person reports speaking, and ethnocultural self-identification do not necessarily coincide. This study analyzed the concordance among these three dimensions among Peruvian adults with Quechua or Aymara as their mother tongue, paying particular attention to social, educational, territorial, and generational differences. A secondary cross-sectional analysis of the 2022 National Reading Survey was conducted. After applying quality restrictions, the general analytical dataset included 43,104 individuals aged 18 to 64 years; 7688 reported Quechua or Aymara as their mother tongue, and 7365 had complete information to construct the concordance profile. Full concordance coincidence between mother tongue, self-reported speaking of the same language, and ethnocultural identity was 80.08% among individuals with Quechua as their mother tongue and 86.83% among those with Aymara as their mother tongue. In the adjusted model, Aymara as a mother tongue was associated with higher odds of full concordance than Quechua (OR = 2.57; 95% CI: 2.04–3.23). Secondary education (OR = 0.64; 95% CI: 0.54–0.75) and higher education (OR = 0.48; 95% CI: 0.40–0.59) were associated with lower concordance compared with basic education. Residence in the Highlands was associated with higher concordance than Metropolitan Lima (OR = 3.90; 95% CI: 3.19–4.78), while the Coast and Jungle showed no statistically significant differences. The interaction between mother tongue and age was significant (p = 0.0078), indicating that there is no single generational pattern. A careful sensitivity analysis using the eight original territorial domains produced concordant results. These findings suggest that mother tongue, self-reported linguistic repertoire, and ethnocultural identity are closely related but not interchangeable dimensions, whose alignment depends, to a large extent, on the social, educational, and territorial context.