A constitutional response to language endangerment: The case of Nicaragua

Abstract

The scene is Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast, the eastern half of this Central American country. It is a multilingual region where, besides Spanish, English Creole and various indigenous languages are spoken by populations of speakers ranging from tens of thousands of Miskitu (Misumalpan) to thousands of Sumu (Misumalpan) to barely two dozen Rama (Chibchan) and a mere handful of Garifuna (Arawakan). The time is the decade of the 1980s and of the Sandinista Revolution, during which the legal, educational, and social status of these coastal languages changed through the process of establishing an autonomy statute for the region, a development that is sometimes referred to as the second Sandinista Revolution. This Autonomy project was a response to the war situation that developed on the Atlantic Coast, as both indigenous and Creole people rejected the Sandinista Revolution in its original form.

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