This presentation focuses on processes of successful intergenerational indigenous language transmission in Pewenche families in south Chile. Family language policy research has established that what happens linguistically in families is also influenced and shaped by policies, discourses, and practices on different scales in society. In Chile, the situation of indigenous families has been marked by processes of linguistic and cultural assimilation, land theft and forced migration which altered Indigenous ways of material subsistence and cultural reproduction. Over the last decades, slow and limited institutional changes have been introduced to promote Indigenous languages (such as a Bilingual Intercultural Education Program) with little success. At the same time, neoliberal and globalization influences have also intensified in all aspects of Chilean society, also reaching rural indigenous communities and families like those in this study.
In this historical and contemporary context, I will discuss the ways in which some Pewenche bilingual families have managed to maintain the intergenerational use and transmission of their indigenous language (Chedungun) at home despite the structural constraints and limitations in the other social spaces they navigate, which subordinate and discriminate against their indigenous language. The analysis of these families' actual language practices and of ethnographic interviews to parents and children shows that notions of family and family-making, parental agency, a strong indigenous identity, and, most importantly, what parents and children refer to as 'habit', appear to explain the sociolinguistic order in these families. I argue that these families have transformed their homes into veritable safe-houses (Canagarajah, 2004; Pratt, 1991) for linguistic resistance, the transmission and use of their indigenous language (more specifically, the deployment of their full linguistic repertoire), and the construction of complex identities. This process is accompanied by an attitude of detachment and disengagement from the language regimes, ideologies, and practices of not only those family external spaces where Spanish monolingualism is dominant, but also from spaces that may be seen as contributing to the promotion of their Indigenous language.
References
Canagarajah, S. (2004). Subversive identities, pedagogical safe houses, and critical learning. Critical pedagogies and language learning, 116-137.
Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 91, 33-40.
