Analysis of educational policies and the challenges of the Garifuna indigenous language in Honduras

Abstract

The main purpose of this research is to study analyses the educational policies and challenges of the Garifuna indigenous language in the context of the Honduran intercultural bilingual education policy. Initially known until much of the twentieth century as black Caribs, the Garínagu are the expression of a process of mixture between Africans of different origins and Carib-Arawak indigenous peoples. That occurred during the colonial period in the Lesser Antilles, mainly on the island of San Vicente (Yurumein). This research aims to analyze, from a critical approach, the effects of the implementation of educational policies, such as bilingual intercultural education, on the Garifuna language and thought, considering that these policies promote sociolinguistic elements related to linguistic minority. For the purposes of this study, linguistic minorization is understood as a social, political, and cultural process that involves the role of restrictive social rules in relation to the language itself – the Garifuna language- that is, that language cannot be used in certain areas, compared to the rules of expansive use characteristic of the dominant language in Honduras (Spanish). The study is based on a hypothesis, based on a theoretical framework that proposes to use historical-cultural-decolonial critical approach. Therefore, domain structures are not unique to realities such as Latin American or Honduran where different languages, dialects, or forms of thought other than so-called universal languages have historically coexisted, as is also the case in many countries around the world.