In his ethnography of Kichwa language education policy in Ecuador, Nicholas Limerick demonstrates the double binds of advancing the use of an Indigenous language in schooling and, more broadly, operations of the state. The book’s nine chapters are divided into three sections, a two-chapter introduction, a second section outlining the histories of bilingual education (chapter 2) and standardization efforts for Kichwa (chapter 3) in Ecuador, and a third section comprising a conclusion and three ethnographic chapters following the work of state agents navigating the use of Unified Kichwa within different contexts.

The ethnographic research was conducted in the offices of the National Directorate of Bilingual Education, two bilingual schools in the capital city Quito, Kichwa-speaking homes, and professional conferences. Limerick illuminates how the officialization of Kichwa introduces predicaments, or double binds, for professionals and community members alike. Central among these are the inequalities among the diverse varieties of Kichwa spoken in Ecuador vis-à-vis the prominence of Unified Kichwa, the official standardized variety. For example, Limerick identifies challenges that arise from the misalignment between the Unified Kichwa, based primarily on the Imbabura varieties spoken in the country’s north, and the multidialectal situation among Kichwa-speaking students in bilingual programs of the capital city who hail from across the country. A key insight is that language shift in this context concerns not only the shift to the colonial language, Spanish, but also to the official standardized Unified Kichwa.

Close attention is paid to the language of textbooks and policy documents, but also to the contexts of their production, including a fascinating account of the collaborative translation of the Organic Law of Intercultural Education in chapter 5. This chapter presents one of the central double binds of the book’s title: Kichwa monolinguals encounter the Unified Kichwa of the translation as a foreign language, begging the question for whom does the translation exist? Readers who command the standard register are themselves bilingual in Spanish, often professionals within the realm of bilingual education. Moving from the textual to the interactional, there is a critical account of Unified Kichwa greetings in school day routines (“Good morning, teacher”) and occasions of political assembly demonstrating the sometimes-awkward misfires resulting from standardized calques.

Another argument convincingly made at many points is that state recognition of the Indigenous language involves not only commensuration between the linguistic codes Spanish and Kichwa, but between dominant and Indigenous norms, practices, and institutions. Attending to the effects of these processes concerns identifying what is lost in translation and also what is transformed; just as Spanish calques enter Unified Kichwa, a phenomenon Limerick attends to extensively in his linguistic analyses, so too do epistemological and cultural calques of Western schooling and institutional protocols. Recognizing Indigenous Languages grapples with the predicaments of Indigenous language standardization in an account that combines the history of these processes, close textual attention to policy and educational materials, and ethnographic accounts of language in use.