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Whose Language Is It Anyway? Historical Fetishism and the Construction of Expertise in Bolivian Language Planning

In recent years, increased scholarly attention has focused on language ideologies, examining the connections between language use and broader political questions of diversity, governability, and socialization/acculturation (Gonzalez & Melis, 2000; Jaffe, 1999; Schieffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity, 1998, among others). This theoretically oriented, critical scholarship contrasts with more pragmatic, policy-oriented research[1], which is typically based on Likert-scale assessments of the target population's "attitudes" about the use of particular languages in different social contexts, or the association of particular speech varieties with qualities such as refinement or backwardness. While the latter type of research is often used to gauge the feasibility of proposed language policies (e.g., Zuniga, Sanchez, & Zacharias, 2000), critical analyses of language ideologies are less easily translated into concrete policy recommendations, since they often have social implications that go beyond language planning per se. Furthermore, policy-oriented research rarely examines the language ideologies of planners and policymakers themselves, perhaps because such analysis would call into question governmental actors' underlying agendas with regard to minority populations. Nevertheless, sociolinguists and language planners alike are increasingly aware of the importance of language ideologies to the success or failure of language planning initiatives. It is in this context that I wish to examine some of the ideologies driving recent language policies in the Andes, with an eye to those policies' likelihood of success, and to what sort of future sociolinguistic scenario such success would imply. In response to popular demands from ethnic minorities and a growing global awareness of language loss, numerous nations are currently supporting efforts to strengthen and preserve minority languages. In South America, these efforts have focused mainly on developing writing systems for indigenous languages and promoting their use within formal education. In Bolivia, where more than half the population speaks an indigenous language, bilingual education and the associated standardization of indigenous languages are among the most visible and controversial elements of the recent nationwide educational reform. Corpus planning[2] for Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani, Bolivia's most widely-spoken indigenous languages, has provoked considerable debate among indigenous speakers, even as state agencies strive to bring debate to a close and move ahead with the promotion of the newly standardized varieties, via the incorporation and training of key educational actors.[3] Language ideology plays an important role in shaping language policy, and policy in turn shapes the social and institutional conditions that encourage certain kinds of language use and discourage others. The nearly exclusive focus on school-based literacy as the site of language planning suggests that the underlying, perhaps unconscious aim is to expand Bolivia's indigenous languages into the standard set of western academic genres, rather than to encourage the persistence and development of culturally distinct,