Glottopolitics and Intercultural Education in Argentina: The Teaching of Indigenous Languages in Contemporary Educational Policies

Abstract

In this article, we examine the contextualization of linguistic rights in recent educational policies from a critical glottopolitical and sociolinguistic perspective. Through an analysis of the 1993 Federal Education Law, the 1994 Constitutional Reform, and the 2006 National Education Law, we investigate the language ideologies underlying the teaching of indigenous languages and the consolidation of Intercultural Bilingual Education. The study reveals how legal discourses, while promoting the recognition of  diversity and linguistic variation, reproduce intercultural and intralinguistic regimes that naturalize Spanish as the language of citizenship and relegate indigenous languages to the realm of heritage. From a Latin American reading of motivations and implications, we interpret these laws as historical technologies of sociolinguistic regulation that reproduce differential effects of inclusion, exclusion, and subalternation through the recognition, management and conceptualization of diverse languages. Consequently, we argue that the contemporary Argentine policies analyzed here, even when they broaden the scope of educational rights, continue to be crossed by the tension between processes characteristic of neoliberal capitalism and globalization: the universalization of Spanish, the fragmentation of multilingualism, and the commodification of indigenous languages. Finally, we propose the need for an intercultural language policy and a decolonial approach to linguistic education that, in the case of Argentina, embraces linguistic diversity as a constitutive principle of the State and promotes a more equitable linguistic citizenship in access to human rights.