What does a bilingual school for minority languages like Nasa Yuwe or Basque mean?

Abstract

Most of the young speakers of Amerindian minoritized languages are in fact bilingual due to the overwhelming presence of dominant languages. Bilingual/multilingual schools are never-theless necessary to guarantee literacy to the speakers in their two languages and to ensure a future to the minoritized languages. But not all the bilingual schools achieve that goal. We (Basque)  are  well  aware  from  our  own  experience  how  important  is  the  school  to  achieve  this aim, but we also know the difficulties it entails. In the North of Cauca (Colombia), in the region of Toribío, two immersion schools in Nasa Yuwe language have been created in 2013 following the local demand and the impulse of ACIN indigenous association of the Nasa re-gion. Those Wasakkwêwe’sx schools are a real pedagogical challenge because the traditional bilingual schools (the PEIB: programas de educación intercutural bilingüe) seem even unable to preserve the knowledge transmitted by the families, and, as a result, the native language progressively vanishes.In this paper we analyze the development of this school project thanks to the Basque-Nasa exchange program that has already an accumulated experience of three years. In order to achieve success of a bilingual school with a minoritized language, we shall emphasize the features of popular and local institutions concerned in the organization and support of the experience  and  also  the  necessary  interdisciplinarity  of  the  task.  To  sum  up,  the  bilingual  school can be conceived as a global initiative of development and an alternative to ensure the survival of languages like Nasa Yuwe.