In recent years, state policymakers have responded to the demands of Indigenous peoples with cultural and linguistic recognition, and such recognition has influenced how traditionally marginalized peoples self‐identify. This article examines how teachers in an intercultural bilingual school in Quito, Ecuador, coach students to speak successively in Spanish and Kichwa in greetings and songs as they model languages as discrete, commensurate, and orderly. Through semiotic processes of diagrammaticity, multilingual ways of speaking align with nonlinguistic markers, such as regional forms of dress, to illustrate a sanctioned form of Indigeneity as the identities of the students. Drawing on the concept of “misfire,” the article shows how, in the process, the students speak “incorrectly” in Kichwa but successfully illustrate their citizenship identities for non‐Kichwa‐speakers. Such actions foreground sanctioned traits, helping students to pass through public spaces and gain funding for intercultural bilingual education. State recognition thus paradoxically orients use of Indigenous languages towards those who do not understand them.

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Can Indigenous language use transform state politics? In Ecuador, speakers of Kichwa (Ecuadorian Quechua) head a national, intercultural bilingual school system that promotes and teaches Indigenous languages. In their professional roles, they give speeches during which they speak as national state agents. Most commonly, they begin such events by using standardized Kichwa to greet and welcome attendees and then switch to Spanish. Although brief, such greetings serve to mark the state as intercultural. However, they also make Kichwa commensurate with Spanish. Speakers encounter a conundrum in how more extensive or illegible Kichwa speech may not demonstrate a modernist, commensurate form of Kichwa for non-Indigenous-identifying addressees and may even trigger anxiety or censure from Ministry of Education higher-ups. Yet, Kichwa state agents simultaneously risk angering Kichwa-speaking addressees with intralinguistic shift and restricting a movement to reclaim a language to curtailed speech acts within extensive non-Kichwa (Spanish) speech, further prioritizing that language and addressees who speak it. Their dilemmas indicate the challenges of language standardization in recognition politics and illustrate how semiotic processes of entextualization and enregisterment are integral to commensuration.

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In Ecuador directors of Indigenous education administer a Kichwa proficiency exam as a requirement for employment. This article considers promises and challenges of the exam, such as how standardized language ideologies manifest in it, and what it says about how institutional knowledge is classed, racialized, and urbanized. Furthermore, though research often describes audit culture as hegemonic, almost everyone associated with the intercultural bilingual school system, including examiners, expressed concerns, yielding a pathway to alter or contest such initiatives.

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This chapter describes current formal bilingual intercultural educational programs throughout the central Andean region (Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru), focusing on both regional trends and developments of bilingual intercultural programs in each one of the abovementioned nation-states. After a brief historical overview, we discuss a number of recent transformations that are purported to offer inclusive education for Indigenous populations in the region. Some of the ongoing pressures, challenges, and expectations placed on language education are also discussed.