The policy to safeguard the languages of Colombia’s ethnic peoples, implemented by the Ministry of Culture, included a self-assessment to take stock of the state of those languages in Colombia. In accordance with this policy, in 2008 the Ministry of Culture and Colombia’s Externado University (via its research on ethnic populations) agreed to administer this self-analysis using a survey as part of a “sociolinguistic self-assessment” project, which was so named because it was completed by the people who actually spoke the languages being studied.