Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance: A Southern Peruvian Quechua Case

Abstract

Reviewed by NANCY C. DORIAN, Bryn Mawr College This is an unusually valuable study. Hornberger worked at solid ethnographic depth in two different communities within a Peruvian Andean setting that she was already widely familiar with. She was fully proficient in both Quechua and Spanish at the outset of the study. Though well read in the literature of language shift and language maintenance, she seems to have avoided partisan adherence to any school of thought and to have waited with patience for local patterns to reveal their fit with existing theories, or their lack of fit. The result is a wellobserved, thoughtful, and revealing study which discourages any notion of a simple direct connection between the existence of a bilingual education program and the maintenance of a minority language. H's research on Quechua bilingual education is carefully located in the context of education policy in Peru and in the Department of Puno over the course of the 20th century and especially in recent decades. The Puno Experimental Bilingual Education Project began operation in 1980, with Quechua and Aymara programs undertaken in the appropriate districts respectively. H's two-year period of residence and observation in two Quechua-speaking communities came in 1982 and 1983. She lived and worked in Kinsachata, which in 1981 and 1982 had a Quechua bilingual education program, and in Visallani, which had not had such a program at all. The two communities were chosen to be much alike except for the presence of the bilingual school program in the one and the traditional monolingual Spanish-language school program in the other. Before giving any account of what she observed in the Kinsachata and Visallani schools, H discusses language attitudes and language use in the two communities, basing her analysis on informal conversations, observations of language interactions, and a formal (and tape-recorded) Language Use/Language History questionnaire which she had prepared as part of her research methodology. She offers not her own, but rather the community members' opinions and points of view, as they expressed them and demonstrated them. She is resolute at this point, as she is throughout her study, in trying to refrain from applying her own values and opinions to observed behavior or expressed opinions, though she conscientiously notes some matters in connection with which she found such restraint difficult (5). Within the Quechua-speaking communities H identifies two long-established domains of language use, the ayllu and the non-ayllu domains. The ayllu domain (from a Quechua word referring to community and family) encompasses social interactions between community members within traditional community life, while the non-ayllu domain refers to social interactions between community members and outsiders in which the larger Peruvian society intrudes on local life, such as interactions at the school or at the district seat. Beyond these two