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Abstract
Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) programmes in Latin America pose interesting questions for sociolinguistics, since their implementation interrogates the link between language and the nation resulting from the emergence of nation-states, but also from processes of decolonization. In the case of Argentina, a new legal framework and the recent implementation of new public policies at national and provincial levels have caused key social and linguistic transformations in educational institutions in indigenous contexts. This paper aims to show some current transformations in multilingual management in Chaco's educational institutions. To do this, I consider the case of public schools, traditionally monolingual in Spanish, to which new actors are incorporated, i.e. Wichi bilingual teachers. Their presence at school and their linguistic practices illustrate the tensions between different language ideologies that coexist today in the Argentinean educational system. As I try to show, bilingualism – as an ideological sign and as symbolic capital – and bilingual practices constitute a contested terrain that can be explored through a sociolinguistic ethnography.
Acknowledgements
I thank Luci Nussbaum (UAB) for her discussion of the draft of this paper. Many thanks to Juan Bonnin (CONICET) for his comments and to Camilo Ballena (CIFMA) for his support during field research, transcription and writing processes. I also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their helpful and detailed suggestions. But especially my thanks are due to the Wichi teachers and families for sharing with me hours of discussion about how to construct a happier education.
Funding
This work was supported by the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and carried out in the framework of the PIP-2011-2013 research project.
Notes
1. As I mentioned in Section 2.1., ‘blanco’ (white) is a native category used by Wichi people to refer to non-indigenous who arrived from other regions and inhabit the area.
2. The participant structures and the interactional practices described here are very similar to those identified in classroom research elsewhere, where bilingual assistants are appointed to work alongside a monolingual class teacher, for example, in the study by Martin-Jones and Saxena (Citation2001) on bilingual classrooms in the UK.
3. The name of the colour blue has many translations in Wichi because it is not part of Wichi everyday vocabulary. In this case, Laura chooses LATS'AJH, which may also be translated as grey. A similar case is the colour orange. In line 29, Hinu uses ATSETAJ as a translation for ‘naranja’. This word refers to the fruit. Laura accepts this suggestion and in the following lines she uses this word.
4. As I mentioned in Section 2, in the region two native categories can be found to refer to the non-indigenous populations, i.e. ‘criollo’ (creole) and ‘blanco’ (white). However, the Wichis use their own word, ‘suwele’, to refer to any person who is not Wichi. This term is also used to refer to Spanish (the language of others). In this classroom extract, it is interesting that Jony asks to participate in ‘criollo’, projecting a social category onto a linguistic one.