Bilingual Education in Paraguay Grondin Anne-Sophie

Paraguay appears as an island in the middle of the South American continent. Its population is estimated at 6.3 million in 2009 and about 40% of it currently speaks both Guarani and Spanish. Indeed, there are two official languages: Spanish and Guarani. Guarani, one of the eighteen indigenous languages of the Paraguay, is linked to sociopolitical evolutions of the country and from 1989 it is at the center of a consequent project of building a democratic society through the original project of Bilingual Education. The Bilingual Education project, which I am going to present here, is a means to create a completely bilingual state. It was set up by the democratic government of Paraguay in 1994, as a way to build a fair bilingual and multicultural society within a generation, according to the Paraguayan Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC). This plan is supposed to last about 25 years (between 1994 and 2020) and makes compulsory the first years of education in the child's mother tongue, that is to say one of the two official languages. Children are also taught the other language as a second language. We can wonder if the fact of establishing Guarani as an official language is a way to improve its image or if it increases the risk of dissolving its culture in a recomposed country. So I'll start by giving you an overview of the linguistic situation in Paraguay, then I will focus on Bilingual Education. And last but not least I will develop a few issues raised by this project. I'd like to point out the fact that all the data used in this presentation are based on Mrs Pic Gillard thesis entitled: Le plan d'enseignement bilingue au Paraguay: incidences sociolinguistiques and on a study carried out during the five first years of the plan, that is to say between 1994 and 1999.

In order to understand the importance of both Spanish and Guarani nowadays in Paraguay, we need first to take a quick look at the political upheavals over the past few years. In 1973, during the dictatorship, Stroessner imposed education in the mother tongue of the child. With the Guarani for instance, the idea was for the children to use this mother tongue 1

as a springboard to have an access to Spanish education in the following years. It was a transitional bilingualism whose aim was the substitution of Guarani by Spanish. Yet, there was such a huge cultural resistance at the time that Stroessner's plan failed. After the fall of the dictatorship, a new Constitution was created in 1992 and a new democratic government arrived on the political stage. In the article 140 of this Constitution, it is stipulated that Paraguay is a bilingual and multicultural country and this is the cornerstone of the new democracy. The educative community will serve as the best tool to spread this new ideology. Concerning Bilingual Education, one must bear in mind that it is not the same as in other Latin-American countries where the teaching of the basic in the mother tongue is reserved to indigenous children. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that in Paraguay both Guarani and Spanish are defined as official languages by the Constitution, as opposed to national or indigenous language. Guarani is never called indigenous language in the Constitution. The mother tongue can be either Guarani or Spanish and the teaching of Guarani applies to all the population, whatever their ethnic or linguistic origins, just like Spanish.

The Bilingual Education project in Paraguay is a way to create a bilingual nation within 25 years between 1994 and 2020. This project is not only political (with the democratization of the country), but also intercultural because it produces a new identity, not only Guarani, but both Guarani and Spanish. This project of bilingual education is multifaceted:

On the political level it is a way to reinforce the democracy because by learning the language of the other, diglossia decreases and the society seems more egalitarian, linguistically speaking. Education is also accessible to more children.

On the cultural level, the Bilingual Education Plan reinforces the Paraguayan cultural identity in front of the Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries of the Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and soon Venezuela). The importance of the Paraguayan bilingualism finds its roots in the myth of the Paraguayan Man made out of the best of the Spanish Man and of the Guarani Man. 2

The didactic of Guarani is based on several values to form a citizen able to evolve in a bilingual multicultural society. So the acquisition of literary skills is completed by a large range of extra linguistic knowledge, since language is a cultural practice. That's why the teacher doesn't focus only on the language but also takes the pupil's ethnic and social origins into account. The main objective is the respect of the two languages that are on the same level according to the Paraguayan Constitution. Another objective of this project is social justice. In the past, the Guarani speaking child had to overcome a double difficulty: learning Spanish on the one hand and learning how to read and write on the other hand. This handicap led to a very high number of pupils who dropped out of school. Some of them didn't go further than primary school. That's why there were so many illiterate people in rural areas (82.9% in 1998). With the Bilingual Education Plan, Guarani is used by Guarani speaking children to learn the basics and Spanish is used by Spanish speaking children to learn the basics. Furthermore, Guarani and Spanish are taught to all the national community. So the two languages are equal. The aim of this project is also to have a trained, educated and qualified population to take part in the economic development of the country and in the political sphere. As for culture, bilingualism allows a better knowledge of the language of the other, a better understanding of his culture and so it is a way to have an access to his vision of the world. Teaching Guarani to Spanish speaking people means recognizing that Guarani possesses a cultural world as important as the Hispanic one. It is also a way to increase social interactions between people from different social communities.

Bilingual Education also raises several issues. First concerning the issue of modernism and world globalization, Guarani is still said to act as a brake for the economic development of Paraguay because it is seen as a rural language not able to express the actual technological world, hence the necessity to resort to neologisms. With the globalization, Guarani is highly competed with English and has to find its place in the international economy. Furthermore, the real problem raised by the teaching of Guarani is not mainly to learn how to communicate, but to transform an oral language, dealing with the daily life, into a language allowing a written production. Indeed, oral Guarani developed itself in a diglossic 3

context. It is used to express feelings, humor, poetry and to explain the reality of the rural world, as opposed to Spanish which has a more universal value. The origins of Guarani are also linked to the relationships between the culture of the Guarani and nature. Indeed, this culture is based on an animist religion: Men have a respectful relationship to nature; they don't try to dominate it. It is also worth highlighting the importance of the oral speech for the Guarani. Discourse gives power to the one who is be able to talk for hours and hours on any subject. Written Guarani is not able to convey properly the thought as in oral Guarani. The government uses Guarani to transmit national values that are often very different from Guarani values el modo de ser . The literary creation in Guarani will always be essentially different from the oral creation because it will hardly be able to transmit the magical and lyrical thought just like in oral creation. Moreover, Guarani has several variants: such as Guarani of indigenous communities (discourse and magical thought), Guarani of aborigines from different ethnic groups, Paraguayan Guarani, Jopara and Guarani taught at school. Yet all these variants that exist nowadays might be reduced to only one (the one that is taught at school) at the dawn of 2020. On the social and psychological level, Guarani is enhanced and valued in the bilingual context, that is to say at school and in the institutions, but it is depreciated in the monolingual context. The more it is disconnected from its ethnic origins, the better it is accepted and recognized as a part of the national identity. Besides, the fact of writing Guarani cuts it from its roots, in its form, content and mental representation. The good use of this language doesn't depend on grammar laws so the monolingual Guarani speaking pupil finds himself in a conflicting situation between the Guarani that he is used to speaking at home and the one that is taught at school. His behaviors in terms of language are completely blurred: they experience a real trauma. Indeed, oral Guarani spoken in Paraguay nowadays (called Jopara) is different from its original ethnic form which is still used in some communities during religious ceremonies and also from the written Guarani taught at school. Some people whose mother tongue is Guarani don't recognize themselves in this new academic Guarani and reject it. Some parents for instance feel dispossessed from their mother tongue, which is monopolized by the state. The parents' language starts to be seen as the bad language and parents are dispossessed of their role of transmitting their language (and by extension their culture) to their children. So the Bilingual Education project provoked many frustrations among the older generation. The development of the Guarani in a bilingual and intercultural context 4

led to an intra-communitarian diglossia and an inter-generational break. This break appears between literate and illiterate Guarani speaking people too. The risk is that an intraGuarani diglossia may emerge in the long run.

As a conclusion, The Bilingual Education project is a huge developmental, political and cultural enterprise, whose real sociological results will only be seen in 2020. Up to now, on the one hand we can say that it is a silent revolution that can serve as an example for other nations for the recognition of minority languages. But on the other hand, it also raises several issues, such as the expansion of the Guarani on the detriment of other indigenous languages in Paraguay. The Paraguayan identity has developed itself around the myth of bilingualism and biculturalism, leaving apart other languages and cultures. What is also at stake here is the disappearance of the whole culture represented by the oral Guarani more than the disappearance of the Guarani itself. Moreover, one of the objectives was to promote the Paraguayan identity and to reinforce democracy. But since the beginning of the project, linguistic behaviors have shown that bilingual education strengthens the Spanish-Guarani identity, on the detriment of the Guarani identity. With Bilingual Education, every Paraguayan will have the opportunity to learn both Guarani and Spanish but within one or two generations the monolingual part of the population might disappear.

Bibliography: C. Gillard, Le plan dducation bilingue au Paraguay: incidences

sociolinguistiques. Lille : Atelier national de Reproduction des Thses, 2002 F. Coulmas, The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997