HISPANIZATION POLICIES IN COLONIAL JUJUY

Abstract

The aim of this presentation is to stress the methods by which the linguistic policy was imposed by Spain in Jujuy, Province of Tucumán in the Viceroyalty of Perú, in the same way that this policy was introduced to its American colonies by means of laws, decrees, regulations and orders of the Indian Legal Corpus. In the process of colonization, the Mother Country settled its language, religion and culture. Together with the conquerors, came members of religious orders who were in charge of the evangelization of the aborigines as well as the teaching of Spanish language to them. Unfortunately, this aspect of the colonial history of the north of Argentina had not been studied by historians of language and education or by civil or ecclesiastical historians up to the XVlll century.
We lack of reliable documentation about the implementation of language policies in times of the first colonizations. In historical documents at the end of said century, there is information on orders of the central power that forced aborigines and Spaniards to speak only the “castilla” and that prohibited them to speak American languages. The study of these texts is in line with Louis Jean Calvet’s (1997:44) view, who emphasize two concepts derived from linguistic situations: the social practice of the speakers and the government influence on those practices. These two aspects were stated comparing the colonial historians’ descriptions about the linguistic behaviour adopted by the population in the presence of royal orders and the coercive discourse found in our documents, in which it is reflected that the Spanish Crown uses language as an instrument of dominion.