Professor Emerita Nancy Hornberger has for decades worked extensively on bilingualism and biliteracy, ethnography and language policy, and Indigenous language revitalization, first and foremost in various Latin American countries, but in recent years also in Sápmi. In this talk she will share her insights and thoughs on language policy and planning from the perspective of Indigenous communities in the Global South.
Ideological and implementational spaces in language policy and planning: Perspectives from Indigenous communities in the Global South
Using the lens of layered, scaled and interacting implementational and ideological spaces and focusing on cases of Indigenous education in the Andes and Mexico, I explore how ethnographic studies uncover intertwining language policy and planning (LPP) dynamics that might be leveraged to promote social change in educational contexts of inequality. For example, potential equality and actual inequality of languages intertwine in Mexican education policy and practice to interrupt spaces for Maya language in a Yucatec Mayan Indigenous preschool. Intertwining monoglossic and heteroglossic language ideologies in the discourse of Indigenous leaders of Ecuador’s bilingual intercultural education reveal tensions negotiated in the politics of Kichwa identity and language across spaces like ministry offices, bilingual classrooms or official translation workshops. Top-down and bottom-up LPP activities intertwining in Peruvian bilingual education are leveraged locally to create transformational spaces for Quechua youth to acquire and use their heritage language in multimodal ways. Critical and transformative LPP research paradigms intertwine in an ethnographic project examining how higher education administrators, teachers and students collaborate to create new spaces for Indigenous language learning in Diidxazá/Isthmus Zapotec classes in Oaxaca, Mexico. These dynamic LPP ideological and implementational spaces are being leveraged to confront the inequities in Indigenous educational access and ways of speaking and being.