Attaining Multicultural Citizenship through Indigenous‐Language Instruction: Successful Kichwa Misfires and the Modeling of Modernist Language Ideologies in Ecuador

Abstract

In recent years, state policymakers have responded to the demands of Indigenous peoples with cultural and linguistic recognition, and such recognition has influenced how traditionally marginalized peoples self‐identify. This article examines how teachers in an intercultural bilingual school in Quito, Ecuador, coach students to speak successively in Spanish and Kichwa in greetings and songs as they model languages as discrete, commensurate, and orderly. Through semiotic processes of diagrammaticity, multilingual ways of speaking align with nonlinguistic markers, such as regional forms of dress, to illustrate a sanctioned form of Indigeneity as the identities of the students. Drawing on the concept of “misfire,” the article shows how, in the process, the students speak “incorrectly” in Kichwa but successfully illustrate their citizenship identities for non‐Kichwa‐speakers. Such actions foreground sanctioned traits, helping students to pass through public spaces and gain funding for intercultural bilingual education. State recognition thus paradoxically orients use of Indigenous languages towards those who do not understand them.