Bilingüismo y educación: la diferenciación social de la lengua escolar

Abstract

In Paraguay, an officially bilingual country, the national population has two main languages, which are very different from each other, both in its lexical, morphological and syntactic dimensions. But above all, the distinction between them is their sociolinguistic nature and it is expressed in a complexity of use and interaction cases. There are social groups whose sole language is the Spanish, others have the Spanish language as their main language but they also speak Guarani, and others, meanwhile, have as their main language Guarani but also speak Spanish and, finally, an important group of society has the Guarani as their single language. This range of situations has an elective affinity with social differentiation, qualifying modes of knowledge construction for Groups speakers of different varieties as pedagogical schemes existing in society. Just how the Paraguayan educational system is designed, social groups with better school performance are those whose command of Spanish, esteemed and preferred by the economy and politics, is the most efficient. However, given that the educational system established and legitimated a bilingual education program, educational inequalities must be explained by a perspective that takes into account the sociolinguistic varieties, in order to show what factors explain these disparities and what the working class response is regarding their disadvantaged status in the social structure.