Howard, Rosaleen

    University of Newcastle  Reino Unido

     

    Emeritus Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Newcastle. She works on the sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology of the Andean region. Among her books are “Multilingualism in the Andes. Policies, Politics, Power” published by Routledge (2023), “Kawsay Vida. A Multimedia Quechua Course for Beginners and Beyond” published by the University of Texas Press (2013), and “Por los linderos de la lengua. Ideologías lingüísticas en los Andes” published in Lima by IEP (2007).

     

    Lecture

    Language policies, territorialization and linguistic rights in the Andean region

     

    In relation to the legislation that has been enacted in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, in this presentation I offer a comparative reflection on language policy in three Andean-Amazonian countries. I will briefly review how the relationship between language, territory, and linguistic rights is expressed in the constitutional texts, laws, and linguistic policies of each country. Then I will focus on the case of Ecuador: questioning to what extent the communities of speakers of native languages respond to official language policies, particularly to the issue of territorialization. I present some ethnographic data collected during my stay in Ecuador in 2019, in relation to three scenarios: (i) the ‘Millennium Schools’, which have produced the displacement of students to urban centers and their consequent accelerated Hispanization and abandonment of their languages of first socialization; (ii) the case of the Kichwa speakers from the highlands who have migrated to Guayaquil, and who have been forming a Kichwa-coastal identity for political and educational purposes; (iii) the case of coastal students who come to the highlands to train as educators in the EIB (Intercultural Bilingual Education) system, and who, according to testimonies I have collected, dedicate themselves to learning Kichwa with less shame than their indigenous highland peers.