Bolii | बोली | భాష | Language | Lingvo

Arabic in Israel and Denmark

2011-12-03T17:12:00.001+05:30

A September 2011 report in Aljazeera details Israel's plans to downgrade Arabic from an "Official language" to a "Language with special status". But as the report goes on to say:

"Because Israel has long neglected Arabic and its speakers, Zaher doesn't feel that downgrading the language's status will result in practical changes."

The news report gives several instances of discrimination against Arabic speakers. Do have a look.

Meanwhile, the last chapter of Multilingual education works: from the Periphery to the Centre (more November-2011-reading) asks, "But does this research knowledge translate into educational action? There seem to be three main trends..." (320), say the authors Kathleen Heugh and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. The most negative of these is:

"Research results are completely ignored. Denmark is an example of this: despite authorities having had massive information, there are not even early-exit transitional programmes for immigrant minority children; most mother tongue as a subject teaching has been cut out, and the Minister of Education allows schools to forbid even the speaking of a minority language during breaks (in the latest case, in November 2009, Arabic, see http://politiken.dk/indland/article846430.ece). (320)"

Israel's discrimination against Arabic seems very much a part of this pattern.

Language & education - current reading

2011-11-22T02:04:00.001+05:30

Quite a lot of language-related reading to report. Prof Saeed Farani (visit his online bookstore Sufiwisdom.org) alerted me to Speaking Like a State: Language and Nationalism in Pakistan by Alyssa Ayres. This is a good study of the divisive and exclusionary language policies of Pakistan, and what the country can learn from the language policies of India and Indonesia.

A reference there led me to "Language Policy and National Development in India" (2003) by Jyotirindra Dasgupta, an excellent account of language policy and politics. This essay (in a book called Fighting Words) was particularly interesting because it argues (among other things) that language conflict in India in fact has contributed to deepening democracy.

Meanwhile, IIIT's library acquired Probal Dasgupta's Inhabiting Human Languages: The Substantivist Visualization (2012) -- a stimulating essay on translation and Esperanto as key tools to democratize traffic between and within languages.

And then there are these studies (I reproduce the details from my email to the IIIT library):

1. S. Manoharan, V. Gnanasundaram, "Linguistic Identity of an Endangered Tribe Present Great Andamanese (Andaman and Nicobar Islands - India)" (2007), XVIII + 122, Rs 150

2. H. R. Dua, "Language Use, Attitudes and Identity Among Linguistic Minorities" (1986), V + 129, Rs 34

3. Jennifer M. Bayer, "A Sociolinguistic Investigation of the English Spoken by the Anglo Indians in Mysore City" (1986), IX + 154, Rs 18

4. Jennifer M. Bayer, "Dynamics of Language Maintenance Among Linguistic Minorities (A Sociolinguistics Study of the Tamil Communities in Bangalore)" (1986), IX + 124, Rs 13

The address for ordering these is at the bottom of this page: http://www.ciil.org/PubBook.aspx

I'm currently reading the second in that list -- especially interesting since the linguistic minority Dua treats is "Dakkhani Urdu Speakers in Mysore". Much of what he says applies to just such speakers in Hyderabad (where I live).

More about these books in other posts.

Education in mother tongue essential - ASER

2011-11-07T14:35:00.000+05:30

ASER, whom we've met several times in this blog, has a new report Inside Primary Schools: A study of teaching and learning in rural India (PDF). The study tracks about 30 000 children over a period of one year.

For about 10% of those children the school language was different from the home language. They consistently attend and learn less compared to the 90% for whom the school and home languages were the same (see Table 6.14 "Home/School language and children’s learning and attendance", p. 69).

As the authors - Suman Bhattacharjea, Wilima Wadhwa, and Rukmini Banerji - note:

"Children whose home language is different from the school medium of instruction face enormous additional problems at school. Given the lack of bridging mechanisms to enable a smooth transition from one language to the other, these children tend to attend school far less regularly. Whereas across both classes, about half of all children whose home language was the same as the school language were present in school on all three visits, this proportion is far lower among children whose home language was different from the school language (Table 6.14). Learning outcomes for these two groups of children are unequal to begin with and these differences accentuate over the course of one year, both in [class] 2 and in [class] 4." (pp. 68-69)

Here are the key findings of this report (p. 8):

20% of children surveyed are first generation school goers. Less than half of all households have any print material available, so children do not have materials to read at home.
Children are learning in the course of a year, but even in states with the best learning outcomes, children’s learning levels are far behind what textbooks expect. At each grade level, children’s starting point is well below that of their textbooks.
Children whose home language is different than the school language of instruction learn less.
Attendance is the most important factor in children's learning.
The average number of children present in each classroom is low, but in most classrooms children from more than one grade are sitting together.
Child-friendly practices, such as students asking questions, using local examples to explain lessons, small group work, have a significant impact on children's learning.
Teachers can spot mistakes commonly made by children, but have difficulty explaining content in simple language or easy steps. Teacher characteristics such as qualification/degree, length of training, and number of years of experience make little difference to children’s learning.

And the key policy recommendations (p. 8):

Textbooks need urgent revisions. They need to start from what children can do and be more realistic and developmentally appropriate in what children are expected to learn, with clear learning goals and sequence.
Systems must be put into place to track attendance, not just enrollment, and ensure regular reporting and monitoring of this attendance.
Mother tongue instruction and programmes for language transition need to be introduced and expanded.
Teacher recruitment policies need to assess teachers' knowledge, but more importantly their ability to explain content to children, make information relevant to their lives and to use teaching learning materials and activities other than the textbook.
State teacher education plans should invest in the human resource capacity of academic support structures, like Block and Cluster Resource Centres (BRC/CRC) and District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET), to enable them to help improve teaching and learning quality via in-service training and classroom visits.
As per RTE [Right to Education Act], indicators for child-friendly education need to be defined and measured regularly as a part of the markers of quality.
Libraries, with take-home books for reading practice at the household level, should be monitored as part of RTE indicators. Family reading programmes could also be part of innovations to help support first generation school goers.

ASER studies and surveys have considerable impact. Let us hope some of these recommendations find their way into policy. As the study concludes:

"this study has provided a host of insights about influences on teaching and learning that can help align policy with what children need in order to learn well. As new provisions are put into place for teacher recruitment and training, student assessment and tracking, textbook content, and so on, we hope that these ideas will be debated vigorously and tested in practice."

PROBE revisited

2011-10-10T19:20:00.000+05:30

Probe Revisited: A Report on Elementary Education in India (OUP 2011) is the book-length version of the study that was reported in The Hindu and Frontline in 2009 (I blogged about those reports here). As one of the partners of the study, CORD, says: "Despite a quantum leap in the number of children able to access schooling in the last 10 years, the situation continues to be dismal."

Just how dismal can be guaged from a 2010 Working Paper for Oxfam: Elementary Education in India: Progress, Setbacks, and Challenges. This document was co-authored by A. K. Shiva Kumar -- one of the authors of the PROBE report. As it says:

"Even today, despite progress, nearly all the problems admitted in 1950 are still waiting to be tackled. Physical infrastructure is inadequate, not all children are enrolled, retention is poor with girls lagging behind boys, drop-out rates remain high, children belonging to scheduled caste, scheduled tribe, and Muslim communities are largely excluded, inequalities persist, quality is poor, and learning achievements are low."

To the above list of old problems, the Working Paper adds the "de-professionalization" of teaching. "The last decade has witnessed large-scale appointment of local 'contract teachers' (shiksha karmis, shiksha mitras, para-teachers, etc.) at salaries far below those paid to permanent teachers in the same government schools. The survey found that contract teachers account for nearly 40 per cent of all teachers in government primary schools."

Disappointingly, nowhere does the Working Paper mention issues of medium of instruction as barriers to universal access and inclusion, especially for linguistic minorities. As we saw above, it notes the disproportionate exclusion of indigenous children (and other minorities), but does not even touch upon language policy in education. Let us hope that the book-length PROBE study notes the need for a mother-tongue based multilingual education.

How many English-speakers in India?

2011-06-22T20:00:00.001+05:30

"How many English-speakers in India?" A member of the Esperanto discussion group UEA-Membroj had this question. He went on to say:

"Here's one of the web-pages: WolframAlpha. They assert that in India more than 18% of the inhabitants speak English. An absurd figure... Many years ago I read that [in India] only 0.1% of those appearing for the school-leaving examination succeed in passing in English...."

To which Probal Dasgupta replies: "The truth must lie somewhere between 0.1% and 18%.

Here's my take (in Esperanto):

Perhaps it might be useful to start with David Graddol's booklet English India Next (2010; there are also a couple of video-interviews with him on that page). See, especially, the section "How many speak English?" (pp. 66-68).

He gives some well-known numbers:

- Under 1%: National Knowledge Commission: Report to the Nation 2006-2009 (2009): "Indeed, even now, no more than one per cent of our people use it as a second language, let alone a first language." (p. 27)

- 3%: David Crystal, English As A Global Language (2003: 46): "A figure of 3%, for example, is a widely quoted estimate of the mid-1980s (e.g. Kachru (1986: 54))."

- 10.4%: Census of India 2001: David Graddol: "the 2001 census data (released in late 2009) reports that 10.4% of the population claimed to speak English as a second or third language" (in the book cited above. I haven't been able to find the relevant table on the census website.)

- 18%: the WolframAlpha website link above. Once again, I haven't been able to find this percentage. As far as I can see, that page gives only native-speaker figures.

- 20%: Encyclopedia Britannica (2002). Cited in Crystal 2003 (above, p. 46).

- 33%: An India Today survey (18 Aug 1997): "contrary to the census myth that English is the language of a microscopic minority, the poll indicates that almost one in three Indians claims to understand English, although less than 20% are confident of speaking it." Cited in Anderman and Rogers, Translation Today:
Trends and Perspectives (2003: 160). The page in Google books: http://bit.ly/lpmnjr

The influential Crystal (2003, above: 47) cited this figure in a footnote ("A 1997 India Today survey reported by Kachru (2001: 411)" -- looks like Crystal himself hadn't seen the survey!). Now it began to be cited often. As far as I know, no one has confirmed or refuted the claims of this survey.

Thus it is that Graddol concludes: "No one really knows how many Indians speak English today - estimates vary between 55 million and 350 million - between 1% of the population and a third." (p. 68)

On the other hand, India's biggest school-education survey ASER (about which I've blogged before) in its 2010 report says that in rural India more and more children (6-14 year-olds) are registering in private schools (i.e. non-government, fee-paying and, for the most part, English-medium: the regional language is one of the subjects taught). The all-India figures of children in private schools grow from 16.3% of all children in 2005, to 21.8% (2009), to 24.3% in 2010. The growth has been particularly striking in South India.

So, during the coming years we will certainly see many more people whose medium of instruction in school was English. But if we ask ourselves about the quality of education, we get a rather different picture.

In government schools in rural India, in 2007, only 57% of the children in the 5th class (~ 10-year-olds) could read a class TWO textbook. In 2010, this proportion fell to 50% -- half of the children couldn't even read a class 2 text! And this was in the main regional language -- the mother-tongue for most of the children (excluding children of linguistic minorities and tribals).

In the same period, for rural private schools, this fall was from 69% to 64%. I wondered what language these private school children were tested in. On querying, ASER Centre, on Facebook clarified that "the children were tested at home. They were tested [in] the language of the state. In [a] multiple language situation the children were given an option of a language they felt comfortable in."

And yet, in private schools in 2010, over a third (36%) of class 5 children were already 3 years behind in their reading skills.

Confronted with such critical gaps, we perhaps should not expect very much by way of English-language capability in these children. Indeed, perhaps capability in any language.... :-(

Chotro 4 to showcase 800 languages

2011-06-05T14:45:00.000+05:30

The following announcement was posted on the Iaclals Yahoogroup (which I moderate). I have not seen it yet elsewhere on the net, and am therefore posting the announcement in full. Three striking things about this Chotro:

No time in the known human history representatives of 800 natural languages have come together on a single platform. The World Language Meet and CHOTRO FOUR will no doubt be a major media story globally.
The time allotted for presentation of papers will be limited to 20 minutes; but there will be an audience of more than 500 for every presentation.
Since the Conference is about Intangible Heritage and Languages and Literature in Oral Traditions, or about Oral Traditions, Power Point Presentations will be discouraged.

No PowerPoint, but they do want the full text of the papers by 15 November 2011. And they plan to publish the proceedings.

Incidentally, I've blogged before about one of the organizers, Ganesh Devy, who is coordinating the People's Linguistic Survey of India.

Here's the announcement:

CHOTRO FOUR
January 6-8 2012
Vadodara, INDIA

IMAGINING THE INTANGIBLE
Languages, Literature and Visual Arts of the Indigenous

Bhasha Research and Publication Centre

In association with

European Association for Commonwealth
Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS)

Call for Papers

In the past, Bhasha Research and Publication (BRPC) and the European association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS) have held three unconventional conferences in a format that has by now come to be recognized among academics and activists as Chotro.

CHOTRO FOUR

is being convened at Vadodara, from the 6th to the 8th January 2012. It will be held side by side with the World Language Meet in which representatives of nearly 800 languages are expected to participate for presenting the survey of their own language(s)

BRPC and EACLALS now seek to initiate discussion on:

Culture and Development/ Culture for Development
Notions of the Intangible in Relation to Oral Traditions of Literature,
Traditional Knowledge of the Indigenous,
Threatened and Endangered Languages,
Semantics of Intern-generational Oral Communication,
Visual Anthropology of Indigenous Arts,
Aesthetics of Representation of Inheritance,
Oral Translations, Memory Based Performance Traditions,
Colonialism and Cultural Amnesia,
State Structures and Language Loss,

Towards this end, the organizers seek papers for presentations. All attempts will be made to have the presented papers published in theme based volumes through reputed publishing houses. Papers presented in previous Chotro conferences have been published by Orient Blackswan in two volumes, and are being published by Routledge in two further volumes. The length of papers should be not less than 4000 words and not more than 6000 words.

Registration:

For registration in CHOTRO FOUR, scholars/ cultural activists should send by email the following information latest by the 31st July 2011 to ganesh_devy@yahoo.com; Geoffrey.davis@web.de; shae_bhasha@hotmail.com:

Name
Gender ( necessary for proper allotment of accommodation)
Institutional Affiliation, if any
Title of the proposed paper
E-mail address and Telephone Number

Conference Fee:
There will be several categories of conference fee:

Overseas participants from Australia, Western Europe and North America: GBP 80/ Euro 120/ USD 150
Overseas participants from African Countries, South America and Eastern Europe: USD 80
Participants from South Asia: USD 50, Indian Rs. 2000

There will be no additional charges for accommodation and meals during the days of the Chotro. The Organizers will provide hotel accommodation on room sharing basis and all meals during the days of the Chotro.

ABSTRACTS:

A 200 word abstract of the paper proposed for presentation must be sent together with the mail indicating interest in participating Chotro. Acceptance of papers will be communicated latest by the 15th August 2011.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS:

Full text of the paper will be expected by the 15th November 2011. Participants whose papers are short listed for publication will be informed about the theme of the volume and the publication details by the 15th January 2012. The full and revised text of the papers selected for publication will be expected by the 31st March 2012.

TRAVEL, VISA AND LOGISTICS:

CHOTRO is not a formal association or organization. It is very much a voluntary effort to focus on the shared heritage and destiny of the indigenous of the world. Therefore, overseas participants are strongly advised to apply for Tourist Visa.

VADODARA (also spelt as BARODA) is situated approximately 400 kms north of Bombay (also spelt as MUMBAI) and 1000 kms south of New Delhi. The city is connected with Mumbai and Delhi by train and air. The nearest airport is 1km from the city and is named VADODARA. There is another airport at a sdistance of 140 kms at AHMEDABAD and inexpensive pick up taxies are easily available to ferry you to Vadodara.

THE UNIQUE FEATURE OF CHOTRO FOUR:

No time in the known human history representatives of 800 natural languages have come together on a single platform. The World Language Meet and CHOTRO FOUR will no doubt be a major media story globally.

The time allotted for presentation of papers will be limited to 20 minutes; but there will be an audience of more than 500 for every presentation.

Since the Conference is about Intangible Heritage and Languages and Literature in Oral Traditions, or about Oral Traditions, Power Point Presentations will be discouraged.

Every participant will have an opportunity of listening to several hundred languages.

CHOTRO FOUR is designed as A NEVER BEFORE event.

Join us in the exciting work of providing voice to the voiceless!

K. K. Chakravarty
Chair
Bhasha Research and Publication Centre

Geoffrey Davis
Chair
European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies

Ganesh Devy
Founder, Adivasi Academy
Head, People’s Linguistic Survey of India

Education in Bihar - challenges

2011-04-15T20:47:00.001+05:30

Following up on the Bihar Report which I'd blogged about in February, here is Rukmini Banerji's excellent essay "Challenging Bihar on Primary Education" (PDF) in EPW (12-18 March 2011). The style she adopts is an engaging one of analysis interspersed with anecdotal raportage.

Like the other report, she too readily acknowledges the strides the state has made: "It is evident that there has been a massive infusion of inputs into the system at a very fast pace. Government expenditure on elementary education has increased enormously, basic educational indicators like access and enrolment are rising and the student-teacher ratios are becoming more favourable." But is that enough? Is it resulting in better educational outcomes? Not yet, she says. And a big part of the problem is that the teachers themselves seem to be inadequately trained.

"The findings from the language tasks completed by teachers are equally sobering: less than 50% of teachers could meaningfully summarise a Standard 5 level text. Four difficult words from the Standard 4 level text were selected and teachers were asked to write the meaning of each word in simple language. Less than 50% of surveyed teachers could do this task correctly. When asked to write a few sentences, the teachers made several spelling mistakes."

She concludes:

"What do we see for primary education in the state in the future? There are massive challenges: there is political will at the top and there are aspirations and demands from below. It is the middle of the delivery system that is rusted and needs overhauling and repair. The need is to understand the nature of the rust in the system. Incentives need to be aligned to interests so that we see initiative and energy inside the system. Schools are being built, children's enrolment is rising, teachers are coming in but these must translate effectively into changed behaviours if they are to lead to big improvements in children’s attendance and substantive increases in learning levels."

English from class 1 in Andhra Pradesh

2011-03-25T20:25:00.002+05:30

A somewhat alarming February-2011 report in Deccan Chronicle - "English medium proposed in all government schools" - has morphed into a March-25th report - "AP schools to teach English from Class 1". Let us hope that the latter report is not a preliminary to implementing the February announcement. It is fine to "introduce English as a second language from Class 1 in all government schools... from 2011-2012". (It is now being taught from class 6.) But introducing English as a medium of instruction is a bad idea. Here's why.

The state's education system finds it difficult enough to impart education in the mother-tongue. The state's performance in the ASER survey is fairly dismal:

only 60.3% of class 5 children (~ 11-year-olds) can read a class 2 text; nearly 40% cannot.
of class 5 children, 18.3% can recognize the numbers 11-99, but cannot do subtraction; 37.7% can subtract, but not do division; 40.5% of class 5 children can divide. Nearly 60% cannot.

Nor is the situation in private schools much better. ASER reports that between 2007-2010, in private schools, some 5-10% more children have been able to do the reading and arithmetic tasks mentioned above.

And all this is in the mother-tongue, Telugu.

(As in other parts of India, in AP too, indigenous/tribal and minority children get only the dominant regional language - in AP's case, Telugu - as the medium of education, except for the small fraction that can afford to send children to an "English-medium" school. Combined with all the other systemic problems, education in a non-mother-tongue results nation-wide in a third of the enrolled children being "pushed-out" before class 5. And in AP, within the first 10 years of schooling, 82% of indigenous children leave school. References in my 2010 paper in Languaging.)

To come back to private schools in AP, their only-slightly better performance hasn't stopped parents from choosing them. As ASER reports, "Between 2009 and 2010, the percentage of children (age 6-14) enrolled in private school has increased from 29.7% to 36.1% in Andhra Pradesh."

The March-2011 report in Deccan Chronicle gives even more disquieting figures: "the percentage of enrolment... in government schools... came down... from 82.48 to 55.72 [percent] in primary and upper-primary schools, while private school enrolment increased from 17.52 to 44.28 percent... [between] 1995-96 and 2009-10."

With the quality of education in Telugu being what it is, introducing English as a second language is hardly likely to make much of a difference. And making English the medium of instruction is likely to prove disastrous.

Dialect of Hope - Article on Esperanto

2011-03-08T11:16:00.000+05:30

The March issue of the magazine Channel 6 has an essay on Esperanto: "Dialect of Hope".

The authors, Majaz and Subbu, are university friends, now freelancing. They dropped by and spent a couple of hours learning about the language and the community. By the end of the session, Majaz was intrigued enough to give Esperanto a shot! I'll probably run into him some day in the Tujmesaĝilo (chatroom) at Lernu!. :-)

Do read their Dialect of Hope".

Language skills talk on IMLD

2011-02-22T14:18:00.000+05:30

Yesterday - on the International Mother Language Day (IMLD) - I gave a talk on "language skills" to about 30 Technical Officers of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). This one-and-a-half-hour session was at the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), Hyderabad. I kept coming back to IMLD throughout the talk.

On the question of language skills, I proposed three perspectives:

a long-term perspective on language and education (in the Indian context)
a medium-term view of Esperanto as a tool to think about language skills
a short-term list of useful web resources to improve language skills

The "long-term" section rehearsed some of the arguments of my Languaging paper. It dwelt on the kinds of structural issues that the PROBE (2006) and the ASER 2010 reports deal with: no teachers; and when there are, no teaching happening on the day the researchers visit; plus, in any case, not much learning happening - the poor quality outcomes that ASER highlights. Meanwhile, non-MT (mother tongue) education for children of linguistic minorities and indigenous peoples contributes to their high-rate of "push-out" (82% in Andhra Pradesh).

On the positive side, I mentioned the initiatives in Orissa and at Bhasha in Gujarat, which show that multilingualism works.

This section also touched upon the society-wide consequences of English as the medium of higher education in India: poor participation in higher education and poor skill-sets.

The next view on language skills introduced Esperanto briefly: idea, structure and community. I focused on the "global education" and "effective education" sections of the Prague Manifesto, arguing that Esperanto offered a means to high-level multilingualism, necessary in an age of globalization, and essential for peace-building and collective action in the face of transnational threats. Esperanto's effectiveness as a preparatory language for further language learning, and its role in "decolonising" the mind were also mentioned.

The short-term view on language skills rapidly listed a few useful websites: (multilingual) dictionaries, (specialist) encyclopedias, databases, writing and usage tools, and the like.

Since Esperanto was for this audience the most exotic part of the talk, I ended with Reto Rosetti's translation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

The talk was part of a course called "Personal excellence for professional development". As may be inferred from the report, I interpreted both terms widely, as the rather bemused listeners noted.

Bihar education report

2011-02-02T10:24:00.001+05:30

A new report from Patna, Bihar has some positive things to report on the state of education in that state. The report, due to be released by Amartya Sen on 4 February, is from Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI), Pratichi (West Bengal) and Centre for Economic Policies and Public Finance. The following is taken from a "curtain-raiser" in Indian Express; it gives a glowing report to the state government.

"The most startling finding is the phenomenal rise in children's enrolment in Classes VI to VIII, credited primarily to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar coming up with the idea of distribution of free school uniforms in Class V and bicycles for those getting into Class IX, along with midday meals. While earlier only girls were being given the free cycles, even boys are entitled to the same now.

"Parents and students vouch that while the government provides bicycles only from Class IX, it has boosted fresh enrolment from Class VI itself."

While the uniforms and bicycles have no doubt played a role, a more substantial statistic is that there is a "jump in the number of schools — there are now 114.3 schools for every one lakh people in the state, against just 60 three years ago."

The impact on vulnerable groups has been startling. As the ASER report for Bihar [PDF] shows, the proportion of "out-of-school" 11-14-year-old girls has fallen from 17.6% in 2006 to 9.7% (2007), 8.8% (2008), 6% (2009), to 4.6% (2010).

The most critical remark in the Express story is a last-sentence observation: "The report comes hard on the general status of the midday meal scheme, criticising the way it is run."

ASER 2010 released

2011-01-14T13:26:00.000+05:30

From the ASER press release:

"Conducted every year since 2005, ASER is the largest annual survey of children in rural India. Facilitated by Pratham, ASER is conducted each year by local organizations and concerned citizens. In 2010, ASER reached 522 districts, over 14,000 villages, 3,00,000 households and almost 7,00,000 children."

For me, the really bad news is that teacher absenteeism is increasing and student attendance has not increased:

"The all India percentage of primary schools (Std 1-4/5) with all teachers present on the day of the visit shows a consistent decrease over three years, falling from 73.7% in 2007 to 69.2% in 2009 and 63.4% in 2010.

For rural India as a whole, children's attendance shows no change over the period 2007-2010. Attendance remained at around 73% during this period. But there is considerable variation across states."

Other key findings:

Enrollment: 96.5% of children in the 6 to 14 age group in rural India are enrolled in school.
Out of school girls: 5.9% of girls in the 11-14 age group are still out of school.
Rise in private school enrolment: Enrollment in private schools in rural India increased from 21.8% in 2009 to 24.3% in 2010.
Increasing numbers of five year olds enrolled in school: Nationally, the percentage of five year olds enrolled in schools increased from 54.6% in 2009 to 62.8% in 2010.
Nationally, not much change in reading ability, except in some states: Even after five years in school, close to half of all children are not even at the level expected of them after two years in school. Only 53.4% children in Std V could read a Std II level text.
Math ability shows a declining trend: On average, there has been a decrease in children’s ability to do simple mathematics.
Middle school children weak in everyday calculations: About two thirds of all children could answer questions based on a calendar and only half could do the calculations related to area.
Tuition going down for private school children: A clear decrease is seen in the incidence of tuition among children enrolled in private schools across all classes up to Std VIII.
RTE compliance: ASER 2010 found that over 60% of the 13,000 schools visited satisfied the infrastructure norms specified by the RTE. However, more than half of these schools will need more teachers. A third will need more classrooms.

Social Scientist issue on education in India

2010-12-06T22:38:00.000+05:30

The current issue of Social Scientist (Sep-Dec 2010; vol. 38, no. 9-12) has some excellent articles on the current state and future of school and higher education in India. Together, these essays constitute a powerful critique of the recent and forthcoming education "reforms" in the country.

As Prabhat Patnaik argues in the Editorial: "education is being transformed into a commodity, like automobiles or washing machines, that will be produced by capitalists for profit and bought by those who can afford it."

If these analyses (see Contents below) are accurate - the arguments are certainly cogent and forceful - then we as a society are headed for some very bad times indeed.

On the subject of language, Anil Sadgopal (whom we've met before in this blog), in his thorough-going critique of the Right to Education Act (RTE), considers "The question of mother-tongue and multi-linguality":

"The knee-jerk policy response assumes that learning of 'good' English is best achieved through English medium schools, starting from nursery or kindergarten stage upwards to higher education.... This policy discourse also ignores the global research that reinforces the powerful pedagogic role played by the mother tongue as part of the multi-linguality (this may include English too) of the majority of the children in plural societies like ours in acquiring subject knowledge as well as learning languages other than one's mother tongue....

"The consequence of this misconception and lack of a sound policy is the widespread phenomenon of a rapid attrition of the capacity to articulate one's thoughts or ideas. The vast majority of the Indian children grow up in the prevailing multi-layered school system without acquiring the capacity to learn and articulate in either the state language or English and, in the process, losing the capacity to do so in one's mother tongue as well."

As I've blogged earlier, RTE includes the following opt-out: "medium of instructions [sic!] shall, as far as practicable, be in child's mother tongue".

Contents

1. Editorial Prabhat Patnaik
2. "Towards Democratization of Education in India" Amiya Kumar Bagchi
3. "Right to Education vs. Right to Education Act" Anil Sadgopal
4. "Education and the Politics of Capital" Ravi Kumar
5. "Policy Crisis in Higher Education: Reform or Deform?" B G Tilak
6. "UPA's Agenda of Academic 'Reforms'" Vijender Sharma
7. "Advantage In-bound Trade in Higher Education, or Advantage Human Capital in Out-bound Trade" Binod Khadria
8. "Governance of Indian Higher Education: An Alternate Proposal" Dinesh Abrol
9. "Commentary: Science Education" S. Chatterjee
10. "Obituary: Tapas Majumdar" Prabhat Patnaik

Barasana revitalization

2010-10-15T11:47:00.001+05:30

In the August number of Scientific American, Wade Davis reports that "the once endangered Barasana are experiencing a powerful rebirth". He attributes this directly to a 1991 decision of the Colombian government which "granted the Indian peoples of the Northwest Amazon legal land rights to an area the size of the U.K."

In an otherwise grim recounting of the "last of their kind" (the title of the photo-essay), the Barasana are a lone ray of hope. Curiously enough, Davis concludes with hope:

"That cultures do not always fade away but rather may be casualities of other societies' priorities is actually an optimistic observation, because it suggests that if humans are the agents of cultural decline, we can foster cultural survival.... Our goal should not be to freeze people in time. Instead we must find ways to ensure that in a pluralistic, interconnected world all peoples may benefit from modernity without that engagement demanding the sacrifice of their ethnicity."

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (2009) is his new book. In January 2010 Davis gave a talk based on that book at the Long Now Foundation. That talk is now archived on ABC's Big Ideas site.

MT as bridge language of instruction in SE Asia - report

2010-09-18T18:09:00.000+05:30

Just received a link to this 2009 publication, Mother tongue as bridge language of instruction: policies and experiences in Southeast Asia. Will blog more on it later, but for now here's what the blurb says:

This publication, 'Mother tongue as bridge language of instruction: policies and experiences in Southeast Asia,' presents a compendium of language policies, case studies, and general recommendations for mother tongue-based education in Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) member countries. It provides insights that may further strengthen each country's policies concerning language of instruction as a way to achieve education for all. This book is a result of a consultative workshop organized by the SEAMEO Secretariat and the World Bank for SEAMEO member countries in February 2008.

The workshop aimed to increase understanding of the issues and strategies related to basic education for ethnolinguistic minority communities in Southeast Asia. Above all, this book takes the position that the learners' mother tongue is a bridge to further education, and that multilingualism is a tool for building bridges between people.

Here's the table of contents:

Contents

Foreword
Dato' Dr Ahamad bin Sipon, Director, SEAMEO Secretariat

Chapter 1 Introduction 8
Kimmo Kosonen and Catherine Young

Chapter 2 Language-in-education policies in 22
Southeast Asia: an overview
Kimmo Kosonen

Chapter 3 Various policies in Southeast Asian 44
countries

Introduction 44

The evolution of language-in-education policies 49
in Brunei Darussalam
Gary Jones

Education policies for ethnic minorities in 62
Cambodia
Neou Sun

Regional and local languages as oral languages 69
of instruction in Indonesia
Maryanto

Policies, developments, and challenges in mother 76
tongue education in Malaysian public schools
Ramanathan Nagarathinam

Language-in-education policies and their 84
implementation in Philippine public schools
Yolanda S Quijano and Ofelia H Eustaquio

Language and language-in-education policies 93
and their implementation in Singapore
Elizabeth S Pang

Language policy and practice in public 102
schools in Thailand
Busaba Prapasapong

Language-in-education policies in Vietnam 109
Bui Thi Ngoc Diep and Bui Van Thanh

Chapter 4 Good practices in mother tongue-first 120
multilingual education
Catherine Young

Chapter 5 Case studies from different countries 136

Introduction 136

Mandarin as mother tongue in Brunei 139
Darussalam: a case study
Debbie GE Ho

The mother tongue as a bridge language of 148
instruction in Cambodia
Un Siren

A case study on the use of Kadazandusun in 153
Malaysia
Sandra Logijin

The mother tongue as a bridge language of 159
instruction in two schools in La Paz, Agusan del
Sur, the Philippines: a case study
Yolanda S Quijano and Ofelia Eustaquio

Bilingual literacy for the Pwo-Karen community in 171
Omkoi District, Chiangmai Province: a case study
from Thailand
Wisanee Siltragool, Suchin Petcharugsa & Anong Chouenon

A mother tongue-based preschool programme 180
for ethnic minority children in Gia Lai, Vietnam
Hoang Thi Thu Huong

Chapter 6 The way forward in Southeast Asia: 190
general recommendations
Kimmo Kosonen & Catherine Young

References 196

Contributors 207

People's Linguistic Survey of India

2010-08-20T00:19:00.000+05:30

Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, the Baroda-based organization for indigenous peoples, has launched a People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI). In the words of G N Devy, who is the founder of the Bhasha trust, and who is leading the initiative:

"Bhasha... convened a national meet of language representatives in March 2010 in which representatives of 320 languages had participated. [Among those invited to speak was Probal Dasgupta, President of the World Esperanto Association - Giri.] It was decided during the concluding session that a People's Linguistic Survey of India be attempted by networking linguists, cultural organisations and NGOs working with language issues.

"Bhasha Centre has already commenced the work and has completed the mapping of three Himalayan states, and has initiated work in three other states."

One of those three states is Andhra Pradesh. On 9 August - appropriately, the International day of the world's indigenous peoples - Bhasha and Osmania University Centre for International Programmes (OUCIP), got together at OUCIP some 30 interested individuals from academia, government and civil society to brainstorm. At the end of the session, participants agreed to write entries for the PLSI on 16 languages spoken in Andhra Pradesh. Other languages spoken in the state will be taken up in the next phase of the project.

Prof Devy emphasized that this was a people's survey; the idea was to get as complete a "snapshot" as possible of the language as it exists today, and to do so using speakers of these languages to write the entry.

The proposed format for each entry is also interesting. Apart from a basic, linguistic description, the survey will also record a brief (1000-word) history of the language; a short bibliography; four or five songs or poems and tales (translating them into English and Hindi); kinship terms; proverbs; colour terms; time and space concepts, and so on - a people's linguistic anthropology, in fact.

As many participants affirmed, a massive project such as this promised new knowledge and new understanding of the consequences of our development models. One participant spoke of the need to "re-invent knowledge categories", so that they serve the Indian reality.

It is to be hoped that such a project will also improve the quality of conversation between India and Bharat.

Language policy in Pakistan

2010-08-11T22:34:00.000+05:30

Writing in Dawn on language policy in Pakistan, Shahid Siddiqui describes "two competing schools of thought" which tend to "totally reject" each other in Pakistan:

"The school of thought that is in favour of Urdu or the local languages does not see any role for English. The other school of thought, which favours English, considers native languages insignificant. Since the latter is in power, local languages are either ignored or their potential underestimated. No institutional support is provided to them and they are being subjected to a slow death. The painful fact is that many students who are being educated in English-medium schools find it difficult to read a book written in their mother tongue. Many do not know how to count in Urdu or in their mother tongue. The reason is obvious: they are exposed to English primers before any other reading material. They start learning the English alphabet before any other."

This makes it seem that Urdu and all the other languages of Pakistan (Ethnologue lists 72) are in the same boat, "menaced" by English. But earlier in the essay, Siddiqui laments the neglect of "local languages" when Urdu became the national language of the country.

"The other local languages spoken in the provinces, including Punjabi, Sindhi, Pushto and Balochi, were unfortunately either ignored or relegated to an inferior status. This attitude was manifested in the lack of institutional support offered to these languages. A case in point is Punjabi: it is the mother tongue of about 50 per cent of the citizens of Pakistan but is not taught as a subject at school level. Thus the children of Punjabi families cannot read or write in their mother tongue and are literally cut off from the rich literary heritage of their language. To a lesser extent this is true of other Pakistani languages as well."

So, English menaces Urdu, while Urdu menaces "other local languages". Siddiqui recommends that "we should be striving for a balance between English and the local languages. Such a balance can only be achieved if our local languages are given respect and validation through institutional support. This would mean introducing them in primary classes as a subject."

As this blog has often remarked, "local languages" (read mother tongues) need to be the medium of instruction, the main teaching language, for the first eight years, not merely "a subject" in primary classes. All the research shows that an "early-exit" to a dominant language does not result in high-level multilingualism.

On "drastically mainstreaming" the Jarawa

2010-07-08T09:31:00.000+05:30

An Indian member of parliament (MP) from the Andamans has caused a furore with his proposals about the Jarawa. He himself is not a tribal.

He observes that the "drastically reduced hostility" between the Jarawa and the "mainstream population" has "emboldened both sides... into frequent meetings". This is in spite of the official policy of "isolation / no contact".

These interactions, the MP says, "are resulting in inculcation of undesirable knowledge and habits as well as injection of race impurity.... [I]f the current policy and treatment continues, it will not take much time in total annihilation of the Jarawa entity."

But the MP's recommendations (PDF) to counter these developments are troubling. He urges that "quick and drastic steps be taken to bring the Jarawa up to the basic mainstream characteristics."

For this he recommends "weaning away" 6-12 year-old Jarawa children to "a normal school atmosphere, where they [will be] very quickly trained in personal hygiene, use of clothes and basic reading and writing skills. They [will] also [be] exposed to eating habits of simple mainstream people and modern amenities such as television and motor vehicles."

He cites examples from the tribes of Jharkhand (including the Birhor) to declare that "the final result was training the entire population into a village identical with any other village of ST [scheduled tribe] population in Jharkhand."

Nor does he stop there. He also advocates that restrictions on construction within the Jarawa reserve be lifted in order to build a railway, and upgrade the highway running through the reserve.

Condemnation of these proposals has been swift and widespread. Survival International, the "movement for tribal peoples", has summarized some of them. The MP's remarks have also sparked off a discussion on the e-group "andamanicobar", including this thought-provoking post by Madhusree Mukerjee.

(Disappointingly, Survival International's otherwise excellent study Progress can kill does not at all mention the role of the state's language policies and medium of education decisions in the decimation of indigenous peoples. For that you will need to go to the e-book by Skutnabb-Kangas and Dunbar mentioned below.)

I recently blogged about the e-book Indigenous Children’s Education as Linguistic Genocide and a Crime Against Humanity? A Global View. See chapter 4 (Examples 15, 20, 29, 30, and 31, for instance) for horrifying descriptions from all over the world of the consequences of such "drastic mainstreaming". An earlier post of mine tells the same tale - of the plight of indigenous children from Meghalaya sent to Karnataka, a 50-hour train journey away, in order to be made into "Hindus".

Let us hope that the uproar within the country and internationally will result in rethinking the MP's proposals about the Jarawa.

Linguistic human rights in India: policy and practice

2010-07-05T18:35:00.000+05:30

Last month EFLU's new journal Languaging published my article "Linguistic human rights in India: policy and practice".

The issue is not (yet?) available online. But the link above will take you to the PDF version of the manuscript that I submitted to the journal.

Comments, as ever, welcome!

Languages on Worldmapper

2010-07-02T09:14:00.000+05:30

Spent a happy hour in the Languages section of the visually remarkable Worldmapper site. (The maps, or "cartograms" on that site "re-size each territory according to the variable being mapped".)

The Indigenous living languages map presents a pretty good picture of the world's linguistic diversity (the uncertainty about numbers notwithstanding).

One surprise was the map of Languages not mapped: "The languages that we have not mapped tend to be confined to just a few often neighbouring countries; many are spoken by members of just one tribe." And then adds:

"Some of the largest of the languages included here are Telugu and Marathi, both have high numbers in speakers in certain regions of India...."

Hmm. The geographical boundedness of Telugu (74 m speakers) and Marathi (72 m) had not struck me until now.

The native-speaker numbers in brackets are from the Indian government's 2001 census. Other sources give other figures. UCLA's Language Materials Project, for instance, draws upon other sources to give Marathi "90 million people in India, 70 million of whom speak the language natively. The remaining 20 million people speak Marathi as a second language."

For Telugu, the profile says, "There are about 69,634,000 speakers of Telugu in India (1997 IMA). The total population in all countries is 69,666,000 or more. The total population of speakers including second language speakers is about 75,000,000 (1999 WA)."

Tamil-medium education

2010-06-23T20:37:00.001+05:30

Prof. Thiruvasagam, the vice-chancellor of University of Madras, made a strong plea for a mother-tongue medium education at the World Classical Tamil Conference 2010.

He poignantly describes "our very own children hailing from Tamil medium schools who are confident and happy individuals" and the shock when they encounter English as the medium of instruction in higher education:

"We have seen these children transforming before our eyes into timid, sullen individuals whose creativity and voice are silenced by the linguistic imperialism of English."

He also cites yet another figure for English-speakers in India: "the percentage of people speaking English is supposedly about 23%". He gives no source.

In contrast, the English Wikipedia in its table of Countries in order of total speakers - using government of India census (2001) figures - says 12% of Indians speak English (which still gives a 125 million plus people!).

But, of course, all these figures make little sense unless we have some idea of what level of speaking (or knowing) we are talking about. This is where the various levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) are particularly useful: "CEFR describes what a learner is supposed to be able to do in reading, listening, speaking and writing at each level."

To return to Coimbatore, the Tamil conference promises to be interesting. I'll be following it in English, of course! :-)

On the "outstanding success" of Esperanto

2010-06-12T00:23:00.000+05:30

The well-known Esperantist Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven (Vikipedio) has an interesting comment on the "outstanding success" of Esperanto. The context was a discussion on Sam Green's recent documentary Utopia in Four Movements (2010).

Lu wrote an article in the online magazine Libera Folio titled "Film on Utopia Ignores the Real Esperanto-world" (Esperanto version). Here's what he says in the comments section of his article (my translation):

"The language Esperanto had (around) one speaker in 1887. Several millions have learnt it since then, and between one and two hundred thousand regularly speak it today. From the position of the smallest language in the world in 1887, Esperanto has risen steadily and is today among the 50 internationally most-used languages in the world. Every hour there are 12 000 visits to the Esperanto Wikipedia, Vikipedio, on which count it occupies the 35th position among the world's languages (which, with the exception (more or less) of Indonesian, Norwegian and Hebrew, already existed before 1887).

"Among the foreign languages of Hungarians, Esperanto occupies the 18th position, and is 16th among Lithuanians. According to my knowledge no language in human history has progressed like this in only 123 years. (Not even English, which during the last century grew more slowly in percentage terms.)

"If a documentary film-maker presents something on Esperanto within 20 minutes, treating the whole thing as a "utopia", with human skeletons and hugely unsuccessful malls, is not adequate. I also expect that the documentary maker clearly present the outstanding success of Esperanto compared to other languages of the world."

The anxiety of Indianness (contd.)

2010-05-06T22:54:00.000+05:30

"The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil, makes a collective riposte for Indian poets writing in English. Thayil's anthology seeks to showcase a mature tradition, a canon of founding poets, and a take on the current English-language Indian-poetry scene."

This is what Michael Scharf says in the current issue of Boston Review. He adds:

"Thayil spends a significant chunk of his introduction rehearsing and shooting down vernacular critiques of Indian poetry in English: that it is a "failure of national conscience"; that it is "perpetuating colonialism in a postcolonial era"; that what it does is "essentially a conjurer’s trick" lacking a native tradition in India, inauthentic. His rebuttals dig deep into the history of the English language in India, going back to the mid-nineteenth century."

Scharf makes a third point that I found intriguing.

"Historically, vernacular literatures represent a response to literary languages that are perceived as cosmopolitan or universal.... India's regional-language speakers self-consciously positioned themselves against Sanskrit, a perceived universal, in order to define themselves and their literatures - a reaction known as vernacularization. Urdu, Persian, and Hindustani also played roles in Indian vernacularization, as did English, eventually. English itself, as a literature and as a language of statecraft, was created out of Latin’s shadow by the same process, part of a wave of vernacularization that also created written Spanish, French, and German. Bhasha writers define themselves against English as much as they once did Sanskrit and now do against Hindi, in some cases."

But Scharf's final point left me unconvinced. Citing Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih's "Blasphemous Lines for Mother", Scharf argues that the poem often "departs from standard English. Those departures - explored ironically in India by poets such as Ezekiel - turn them into identity markers." So far so Indian.

But then, he adds, "It is a transformation that requires English's relative neutrality". Requires? Not so. Writers often use "dialect" for distancing effects: against a background of "normative" Coastal-Andhra Telugu, Telangana poetry is very much an "identity marker". English then offers one more distancing tool.

Scharf adds: "Nongkynrih's poem is unthinkable in Hindi: that language still retains its connections to bhasha identity claims." Unthinkable? Not at all. You have only to see the inventively scatological uses of Hindi in Tarun Tejpal's The Story of My Assassins to see the possibilities!

Indigenous children's education: E-book

2010-05-01T20:53:00.000+05:30

Indigenous Children’s Education as Linguistic Genocide and a Crime Against Humanity? A Global View by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Dunbar has just been published as an e-book by the resource-rich website Gáldu, the Norwegian Resource Centre for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. From the preface:

As the title shows, the book argues that past and present Indigenous/Tribal and minority education, where children have a dominant language [non-mother-tongue] as the main instruction language in school, can be legally seen as a crime against humanity, according to relevant international instruments. This subtractive education teaches children (some of) the dominant language at the cost of their Indigenous mother tongues. It contributes to language shift, and thus to the disappearance of the world's linguistic diversity (and through this, also disappearance of biodiversity).

I found most interesting section 8.1.3 (p. 96) "Presentation of some concrete positive projects":

"First, evaluations of two central large-scale USA studies..., two small-scale studies (one Indigenous, from India and one immigrant minority study from Sweden...), and two large-scale African studies (dominated majorities, from Ethiopia and Burkina Faso...) will be summarised."

And the authors' eight recommendations:

1. The mother tongue should be the main teaching language for the first eight years.

2. Good teaching of a dominant local or national language as a subject.

3. Transition from mother tongue medium teaching to using a dominant local or national language as a teaching language.

4. Additional languages as subjects.

5. Context-sensitive cultural content and methods.

6. Well-trained bi- or multilingual teachers.

7. ITM parents and communities, and educational authorities need enough research-based knowledge about educational choices. Advocacy for sound models is necessary.

8. Systemic changes in school and society are needed to increase access to quality education. This includes knowledge about how the present system harms humanity.

Linguistic human rights in Iran

2010-02-25T10:22:00.000+05:30

We move from Linguistic human rights in Turkey to those in Iran.... Here's a free rendering of what my friend Reza Torabi in Tehran says in his Esperanto blog posted, appropriately enough, on the International Mother Language Day, 21 February:

"Mother! Where is my language?

"To complain about linguistic human rights in Iran is nothing new. Five languages in Iran have more than a million speakers: Persian, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Arabic and Baluchi. There are also a few other languages whose speakers don't reach a million but a few thousands, for example, the Armenians. In this note, I'd like to touch upon Azerbaijani, which is my mother tongue, and that of some 16-26% of the population of Iran.

"Azerbaijani is a "big problem" in Iran. Many have tried to strongly argue that "Azerbaijani is but an ancient form of Persian, and has no relation whatsoever to Turkish!" (Here's a slew of articles in Persian.) And that the Azerbaijanis are "pure Aryans", and that after the invasion of Azerbaijani territory by the Mongols, the population changed to a Turkic language (?!), and that....

"For 80 years now (since Reza Shah Pahlavi), many linguists, scientists and politicians have tried to prove this theory. The main aim was and remains to wipe out the Azerbaijani language and make the Azerbaijanis believe that "you are lost Aryans, and your language has been poisoned...." Nevertheless, they haven't entirely succeeded in "Persianizing" the Azerbaijanis.

"It's strange that the Iranian revolution changed nothing in this policy of wiping out Azerbaijani, and the new government followed the previous regime in its treatment of minorities, especially the Azerbaijanis.

"The systematic negation of the Azerbaijani language has caused the rise of radical movements in the Azerbaijani region of Iran. The Constitution recognizes the right to learn in the local (mother) language in parallel with the official language (Persian), but it's strange that Armenians (400,000) have a right to do so in their own language, but Azerbaijanis (more than 20 million) don't have a right to even study about their language in Iran (this is true also of the Kurds, the Baluchis, etc.).

"I now want to raise a simple question:

"Millions of people in Iran speak a language called Azerbaijani, which bears no relation to Persian.

"Why can the Azerbaijanis not study in their own language in spite of the fact that their right to do so is enshrined in the Constitution?

"Has the 80-year-old systematic disrespect of the Azerbaijanis in Iran had any success whatsoever?"

Linguistic human rights in Turkey

2010-02-15T00:17:00.001+05:30

While Turkey's President Abdullah Gul visited India, the Kurdistan National Congress sent an open letter to the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The letter declared that "The systematic political, cultural, social and economic genocide against the Kurdish people is still continuing".

Among the various forms of discrimination is language discrimination. Here's how Skutnabb-Kangas and Fernandes describe the situation in "Kurds in Turkey and in (Iraqi) Kurdistan – a comparison of Kurdish educational language policy in two situations of occupation":

"In Turkey even speaking Kurdish in public places has been forbidden until recently. Kurdish-medium schools are not allowed; Kurdish children do not even have the right to study their mother tongue as a subject in schools. In theory, courses in the Kurdish language can be taught to teenagers and adults but in practice the obstacles and conditions have been so many and so bureaucratically and legally demanding that there are next to no courses."

Only the abstract of this article, published in Genocide Studies and Prevention (2008, 3:1, 43-73), is available in the public domain. But, if possible, do please read the full article because it documents "a rare positive example where the earlier oppressed (Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan) do NOT turn into (linguistic) oppressors of others when they gain some power to control their own destinies."

Indeed, I'd welcome any account of a hitherto-oppressed group which, on gaining power, does NOT become another version of the erstwhile oppressor and reproduce the same pathologies of power.

Meanwhile, another activist Nurcan Kaya has authored the report Forgotten or Assimilated? Minorities in the Education System of Turkey (PDF) which calls upon Turkey to:

"play a historical role by bringing an end to the discrimination and the ignorance which has lasted almost a century. It is time to remember the forgotten ones, understand their needs, support their demands and fulfil Turkey’s obligations under international law."

Yet another report on the Kurds by the same organization, Minority Rights Group International, A Quest for Equality: Minorities in Turkey, (PDF) concludes wisely: "The state should not fear its own children. Not every one who asks for language and cultural rights demands territory."

Translating literature using Esperanto

2010-02-02T22:12:00.006+05:30

In Kolkata, on 29 January, there was a book launch of children's books translated into Bangla from three European languages, as well as a Bangla children's novel translated into those three languages. The translators used Esperanto as a bridge language for this project. The three books, published by Samtat Sanstha, are part of a 4-country project called "One Indian children's book in Europe - three European children's books in India", funded by the European Commission. The project has several partners and sponsors.

The books are the Bangla translations of: the Italian novel Diary of Jochjo Tempesto by Vamba; the Slovenian short-story collection I wanted to touch the sun by Tone Partljič, and the Croatian novel Wakajtapu by Joža Horvat. For their part, the partners translated (using an Esperanto translation) the Bangla novel Life of Damaru by Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay.

Probal Dasgupta, the Indian coordinator of the project, has a more detailed report on the launch and the project in a post on the Esperanto discussion list Landa-Agado.

From mother-tongue to many tongues

2010-01-08T21:50:00.000+05:30

"From mother-tongue to many tongues" is the title of my article in the current issue of the magazine Teacher Plus. The essay argues that a mother-tongue based multilingual education is both necessary and do-able.

The editors gave me a thousand-word limit. Listing all the references would have eaten up a large part of that word limit. So, I've re-published the article (with minor changes, and all the references) on my website. Do read "From mother-tongue to many tongues".

Comments, as always, welcome!

To sing with subtlety in these murderous times

2009-12-10T22:47:00.001+05:30

Today, on Human Rights Day 2009, I thought of an editorial I'd written almost exactly 7 years ago in January 2003, as guest editor of the Newsletter of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (Iaclals). I'd titled the editorial, "To Sing with Subtlety in these Murderous Times" - translating the title of a classic Esperanto poem by Kálmán Kalocsay (1891-1976): "Subtile kanti en ĉi murdepoko".

I wrote the editorial during the week following the death of Sujit Mukherjee - The gentleman scholar, Ramchandra Guha called him. (And on 16 September this year, we lost my teacher Meenakshi Mukherjee as well.)

In January 2003 we were not only grieving for Sujitda. It was also the period between the Gujarat genocide and the Iraq war. All this and more I mentioned in the editorial, concluding:

"Can Writing Make a Difference? Do these murderous times need songs sung with subtlety? The answer -- from Gujarat, Ghosh, Chomsky and the thousands at the Asian Social Forum -- is a resounding Yes!"

I invite you to read the full editorial.

This Gift of English - review

2009-11-19T16:55:00.001+05:30

My brief review of Alok Mukherjee's This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India appears in the current issue of the literary magazine Muse India. The review ends with a plea for more cross-fertilization of ideas between literary studies people and sociolinguists.

Net resources for my references include E. Annamalai's paper on "nativization" of English in India: both the abstract and a PDF version of the full paper are available.

Robert Phillipson has written extensively on education and language policy in the European Union and elsewhere. Indeed in the subtitle of a paper, he asks: "English as an EU lingua franca or lingua frankensteinia?" His webpage links to much that feeds into his new book, Linguistic Imperialism Continued (Orient Blackswan and Routledge).

Likewise, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas has a rich website full of material that argues powerfully for linguistic human rights, and the crucial role education plays in securing (and more often, violating) these rights. I recently blogged about her presentation on mother-tongue medium education.

Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson co-edited with Ajit Mohanty and Minati Panda the excellent collection of essays on mother-tongue based multilingual education (which comes in two slightly differing versions from Orient Blackswan and Multilingual Matters). My recent blog on language and apartheid in South Africa drew upon one of those essays.

Indian languages in South Africa

2009-10-26T15:57:00.000+05:30

A school principal of Indian descent in South Africa is asking that his students be allowed to learn their "heritage languages" officially, instead of learning Afrikaans or an indigenous African language. In another report, students of Indian descent are saying the same thing: "We'd rather study Hindi".

The principal, Vishnu Naidoo, declares, that "Afrikaans is irrelevant to Indians in KwaZulu-Natal." Besides, recalling apartheid, he says that, "It is a crime to force Indian children to continue to learn the language of the oppressor." (See the essay "Language Policy and Oppression in South Africa" for a 1982-snapshot of language policy and politics in the country.)

The school does offer Tamil, Hindi and Urdu as additional subjects, but these are not part of the university points system.

But, as a Department of Education official points out, Afrikaans is not compulsory, and principals can apply for their pupils to learn any other of South Africa's 11 official languages. But Principal Naidoo says that his pupils avoid learning isiZulu (the most widely spoken home language) because it is "far too difficult for them".

Naidoo also asks: "Is it necessary for all pupils to do two languages at matric level?"

To which the Department responds: "We are a multi-lingual country, and therefore any two of the official languages have to be taught in all our schools."

Besides, as another report points out: "that there would be practical advantages to learning an indigenous African language rather than one of the Indian languages, which [are] rarely used in practice, even by the Indian community in the country."

But, of course, in matters of linguistic identities, "practical advantages" are never the only consideration. Here's a challenge for the Pan South African Language Board!

Skutnabb-Kangas on MTM Education

2009-10-16T20:41:00.000+05:30

"Literacy and Oracy in Mother-Tongue Based Multi-Lingual Education" is the title of a public lecture which Tove Skutnabb-Kangas will deliver at Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Moka in Mauritius. She argues that, "The most important PEDAGOGICAL reason for the world’s ”illiteracy” is the wrong medium of teaching" (slide 37) - and proceeds to present a vast amount of evidence to show that linguistic genocide and lack of LHRs (linguistic human rights) in education is co-responsible for

“illiteracy”, lack of school achievement, educational waste, poor life chances;
disappearance of groups/nations/peoples (through forced assimilation);
homogenising knowledges and ideas and preventing optimal multicreativity;
killing of the world’s languages and linguistic diversity, and TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge), as prerequisites for the maintenance of biodiversity. (slide 99)

As David Hough did in his essay (about which I'd blogged this July), Skutnabb-Kangas too spends some time answering some frequently asked questions:

Why should children be taught mainly through the medium of their mother tongue (MT) in school for the first 6-8 years? They know their MT already? (slide 107)
Parents want children to learn English (and French). If children are taught mainly through their MT the first many years, how do they learn English (and French)? (slide 112)
Isn’t it enough if children have the first 3 years in the MT and then the teaching can be in English? (slide 116)
Parents want English-medium schools. What are the likely results? (slide 121)

Her conclusion:

"Mother-tongue based MLE for the first 6-8 years, with good teaching of English as a second language and French as a foreign/second language, and possibly other languages too, with locally based materials which respect local knowledge, seems to be a good research-based recommendation for Mauritius." (slide 126)

Afrikaans and the mother tongue

2009-09-02T11:47:00.000+05:30

Kathleen Heugh's wide-ranging essay "Literacy and Bi/Multilingual Education in Africa: Recovering Collective Memory and Experience" in Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local (click here for ordering information) has an ironic example of the effectiveness of Mother-Tongue Medium (MTM) education.

"Apartheid logic included separate ethnolinguistic education systems. This meant eight years of MTM education for African children, followed by a transition to an equal number of subjects in Afrikaans and English in secondary school. The use of MTM education under such circumstances tainted its educational legitimacy amongst African language communities in South Africa....

"Resistance to the compulsory use of Afrikaans medium for half of the subjects in secondary school for African students culminated in a student revolt in Soweto in 1976. Government was forced to make Afrikaans medium optional and MTM education was reduced from eight to four years of primary....

"At the time, heated political debates deflected attention from the de facto achievements of MTM education in South Africa. The secondary school leaving pass rate for African students rose to 83.7% by 1976. The English language (as subject) pass rate improved to over 78%. Within a few years of the reduction of MTM education to four years and earlier transition to English, the school leaving pass rates declined to 44% by 1992, with a parallel decline in English language proficiency (Heugh 2002). Macdonald (1990) was to show that students could not become sufficiently proficient in English by the end of the fourth year to facilitate a successful transition to English medium in grade 5.

"Although African parents hoped that extended and earlier access to English in school would deliver higher-level proficiency in English and educational success, the educational gap between speakers of African languages and speakers of Afrikaans and English, who have MTM education throughout, has widened. The knock-on effect of this is that those leaving school and going into the teaching profession are now less well-equipped for teaching and there is a downward spiral of teaching competence across the entire system....

"Ironically, by accident rather than design, apartheid education offered optimal opportunity for first and second language development alongside cognitive and academic development from 1955-1976. Despite the intention of separate and unequal education, an unintended consequence was greater educational success than other educational policy in the region. (pp. 101-2)

Indians studying abroad

2009-08-24T21:47:00.003+05:30

"Previously, more than 71% of [Indian] students were based in the United States, while a small proportion went to the United Kingdom (8%) and Australia (7.6%). Since 1999, the absolute number of Indian mobile students has tripled, while the proportion of students going to the United States has declined to 56%. Meanwhile, an increased proportion of Indian students are going to Australia, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom."

These are among the findings of Unesco's Global Education Digest (GED) 2009. As a Unesco press release (DOC file) tells us, "In 2007, over 2.8 million students were enrolled in higher educational institutions outside their country of origin, a 53% increase since 1999."

"While China accounts for the greatest number of students abroad (about 421,100), other major countries of origin are India [153,30], the Republic of Korea, Germany, Japan, France, the United States, Malaysia, Canada and the Russian Federation. These ten countries account for 38% of the world’s mobile students among 153 host countries reporting data."

And more and more of these "mobile students" are going to Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and South Africa. For example, "France saw its share of global mobile students grow from 7.4% in 1999 to 8.8% in 2007. Due to global shifts in destinations, the following countries emerged as new popular destinations: China, the Republic of Korea and New Zealand."

And what are they all studying? Business administration (23%), science (15%), engineering, manufacturing and construction (14%), and humanities and the arts (14%).

The data shows a general, global improvement in women's participation in tertiary education. But it should be noted that the gender analysis in the Digest is based on data "from 102 or fewer countries and territories... In particular, data are not available for several high-population countries, such as Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Indonesia and Nigeria."

The Digest says, "India... accounts for 5.5% of the global total of mobile students. Yet, its outbound mobility ratio is very low with only 1 out of 100 tertiary students from the country studying abroad." Meanwhile, only 11% of India's population of tertiary age is in tertiary education; the figure for China is 23%.

The Digest concludes that tertiary education systems "that are highly subsidized by governments may cause equity issues in countries where a wide share of the population has no chance to access this education". It goes on to say that, "A well-designed system of private fees and targeted financial assistance for less-advantaged students could contribute to overcoming inequalities in the distribution of students who benefit from tertiary education."

But in countries where tertiary education participation is low, shouldn't the aim be to increase enrolment? And if that is indeed the aim, the alternative to subsidized public education is prohibitively expensive private education. The equity implications of that are much more severe. An informative report with a disappointing recommendation, I thought.

National security in education

2009-08-11T18:10:00.005+05:30

In an op-ed in The Hindu, "Questions of real national security", scientist and well-known public intellectual Pushpa Bhargava dicusses "agriculture security... education security, and health security". But in his five paragraphs on education, mother-tongue medium education finds no mention at all. This is a pity. Coincidentally, another part of the same newspaper reviews Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local - "a passionate call to respect and enshrine the inalienable right of all the children of the world to learn their languages and through their languages."

Bhargava rightly bemoans the quality of India's government-school education (which is overwhelmingly in the dominant regional language). What he does not say is that children of indigenous peoples and linguistic-minorities suffer doubly under such a system: a bad education made worse by a non-mother-tongue medium! This no doubt contributes to the official elementary-school drop-out rate of nearly 49%.

But Bhargava also disapproves of the extensive commercialization of both school and higher (including professional) education: "education has become a commodity to be sold and purchased." In the current ASER report on school education, Amit Kaushik in his essay "The Shift to Private Schools" alerts us that enrolments in private schools have increased from 16.4% in 2005, to 22.5% in 2008, even as "learning levels appear to be stagnating or declining":

"only 41 percent across Grades 1 to 8 [were] able to read simple stories in 2008 as opposed to 43.6 percent in 2005. Similarly, only 27.9 percent children across grades could do simple division sums in 2008, as compared to 30.9 percent in 2005. This decline is observed in both government and private schools, even though the latter continue to maintain a marginally higher level than the government schools, at least on an all India basis. However, as has been shown elsewhere in this Report, in many States there is little or no difference in the performance of government and private schools, and in many the performance of the latter is far lower than that of government schools in some of the other, more educationally advanced States. In an uncomfortably large number of cases then, receiving a private school education would clearly seem to be no guarantor of acquiring any significantly better learning."

Clearly, an English-medium education (among the attractions of a private-school education) is not helping these children learn at all! These schools are yet more instances of the "early-start and maximal-exposure" myths that I blogged about recently.

Back to Bhargava: "It is no surprise, therefore, that 80 per cent of the engineering graduates (in fact, graduates in all areas) India produces are unemployable." These are figures amplified by others, for example in this article in Outlook:

"In the intensely desired world of BPOs, IT majors and MNCs, language gatekeepers are turning down all but a minuscule number of applying graduates. According to Uma K. Raman, head, Skills Enhancement, HCL BPO, her company rejects 92-93 per cent of applicants for poor English. Sandhya Chitale, director, Nasscom's Educational Initiative, puts the rejection rate for non-engineering graduates applying to the IT and IT-enabled sector, both in "voice" and "non-voice" roles, at 82-83 per cent, for lack of soft skills, including written and oral English. About 65-75 per cent of applying engineers are rejected for the same reasons."

Anjali Puri, the author of that despairing essay "English Speaking Curse", says:

"The teachers make an important fundamental point, which I hear repeated, time and again, by teachers in other institutions. These problems have their roots in students being language-impoverished rather than just English-impoverished (that is, demonstrating a poor ability in regional languages too), and being virtually cut off from the humanities stream from senior school."

In other words, the education of these students is typical case of a subtractive multilingualism: the dominant, "prestige" language is rarely learnt well, and even when it is, this happens at the expense of the home language(s).

This is why Pushpa Bhargava should have emphasized the language question while speaking of an education system that promotes national security. He rightly identifies the need in India for "a knowledge society in which every citizen has a minimum amount of knowledge." The way to that is through mother-tongue medium based multilingual education.

The crucial message of Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local (click here for ordering information) needs to spread.

Pakistan's Urdu Dictionary Project

2009-07-29T14:56:00.005+05:30

Participating using Skype in an Esperanto language-festival recently in Maribor, Slovenia, I spoke on Urdu - the language and the culture. The longish report is on my Esperanto blog, and here's the link to the 15-or-so slides I had prepared for the 90-minute session (which included images of a kurtaa, salvaar kamiiz, some delicious birayaanii, and a couple of verses with Esperanto translations - and all the Urdu is in Nagari!).

While looking around on the Net, I came across a report by Rauf Parekh on Pakistan's Urdu Dictionary Project. Dr Parekh traces the interesting history of the project, its predecessors and sources of inspiration (the OED, of course, among others), the scholars associated with the project, and the project's ups and downs. But he also tells us that 21 volumes have already appeared and the last is under preparation! A truly magnificent project! And as he reminds us:

"Moreover, after the publication of the last volume, there still remains to be published an index and a bibliography enlisting the works cited. It would definitely take another volume. Then there is the project of shorter versions of the dictionary and many other spin-offs such as dictionaries of synonyms, antonyms, idioms, proverbs and technical terms."

Dr Parekh also informs us that:

"A similar scheme was launched in India and several scholars were hired by the Indian government to compile a greater Urdu dictionary. But the project in India could not take off and it was abandoned probably due to lack of political will and Urdu’s comparatively lesser status in India. By now the Indian scholars, too, had begun to look to the UDB [Urdu Dictionary Board] for an authentic dictionary...."

Let us hope that this project will further deepen the collaboration between the two countries on this shared cultural treasure - Urdu.

India's Supreme Court on mother and other tongues

2009-07-21T23:10:00.004+05:30

"SC frowns at states' pro mother-tongue, anti-English policy" said the headline:

The apex court rejected the argument of senior counsel PP Rao appearing for the state [Karnataka] who, quoting experts, claimed that the mother tongue was essential to be imparted at an impressionable age for the overall intellectual and cultural development of a child.

"Parents are ready to pay Rs 40,000 to Rs 50,000 for getting their children admitted in English medium schools. This is the real state of affairs. They do not want to send them to schools of their mother tongue. It should be left to the parents," the bench observed.

The court is right, of course: "This is the real state of affairs." Where it is wrong is in rejecting the overwhelming evidence of the effectiveness of mother-tongue medium education.

But it is not enough for Mr PP Rao to present this evidence. What he ought to have impressed upon the court was that it is not about mother tongue or "other" tongue; bilingual education is about acquiring both Kannada and English: additive bilingualism.

And the research is unequivocal on that as well. Coincidentally, I was just reading Stephen Krashen on bilingual education:

Scientifically valid controlled studies have been done, and they consistently show that students in properly organized bilingual programs acquire at least as much English as comparison students in all-English programs, and usually acquire more. The most recent review of this research is Greene (1997) (see also Willig, 1985), who used statistical tools far more precise than those used in previous reviews. Greene concluded that the use of the native language in instructing limited English proficient children has "beneficial effects" and that "efforts to eliminate the use of the native language in instruction ... harm children by denying them access to beneficial approaches."

Studies from other countries are very consistent with results from the United States. Children in well-organized bilingual programs acquire as much of the second language as those in "immersion" programs or more. Studies confirming this have been done with Turkish and Urdu speaking children in Norway, Punjabi speaking children in England, Turkish and Arabic speaking children in the Netherlands, Finnish-speaking children in Sweden, Gapapuyngu speaking children in Australia, and Tzeltal and Tzotzil speaking children in Mexico (Krashen, 1999a).

All the references are in Krashen's critical review.

This is a case where research results have not yet entered public awareness on the subject. Just as the Court would not leave many, many educational matters "to the parents" (or to teachers or school management), bilingual education too is a subject on which it should be guided by worldwide research. The fact is that children in Karnataka can speak about chemistry or geography in both Kannada and English - just as children in good bilingual programs across the world do.

Indian Folklife issue on multilingual education

2009-07-08T08:50:00.003+05:30

The April 2009 issue of Indian Folklife (IFL) has been guest-edited by Mahendra Kumar Mishra. Dr Mishra is the author of Oral Epics of Kalahandi (review here [PDF]). He also writes an Education Diary, an excerpt from which is on the net - "The Magic of the Mother-Tongue".

The theme of this issue of IFL is multilingual education (MLE). In his editorial Dr Mishra acerbically speaks of the poor education that indigenous children receive: "Looking at tribal education in the Indian context, it is evident that not much effort has been made for the education of tribal children, except providing them inappropriate education." He argues for the important role folklore can play in the school curriculum.

The next essay is Tove Skutnabb-Kangas's hard-hitting "Linguistic Genocide: Tribal Education in India":

"subtractive dominant-language medium education for ITM [indigenous/tribal and minority] children can have harmful consequences socially, psychologically, economically and politically. It can cause very serious mental harm: social dislocation, psychological, cognitive, linguistic and educational harm, and, partially through this, also economic, social and political marginalisation. It can also often result in serious physical harm, e.g. in residential schools, and as a long-term result of marginalisation - e.g. alcoholism, suicides and violence."

She cites examples from Orissa, Nepal and Ethiopia of successful "additive" mother-tongue based MLE programs to show both their pedagogic effectiveness, and to show that even relatively resource-poor education systems can deliver more just and inclusive education.

David Hough in the next essay describes the Nepal Multilingual Education Project and its efforts to build a curriculum "bottom-up" in close consultation with the community:

"In order to make MLE sustainable nationwide by 2015 – the UN mandate for Education for All – local communities must take control of curriculum development, teacher training and methodology. If each community, after developing their own program, goes on to train five new communities, the goal can be reached. This approach is known as Cascading."

His essay ends with a very useful set of Frequently Asked Questions about multilingual education.

Iina Nurmela's article too is based on the Nepal experience. She fleshes out her field-notes into an absorbing essay on transgenerational cultural transmission:

"We have walked a long way since the first visit in the hot month preceding the monsoon. That day, no one thought their language or culture had a place inside the school. In seven months since, they are implementing their own mother tongues as the media of instruction in grades 1 to 3 through models they devised themselves."

Of the other essays in the issue, one focuses on mother-tongue revitalization in Hawai'i, and asks: "What can outsider non-Natives do to be helpful for realising these rights, then?" Citing another researcher, it answers: outsiders should

"... work collaboratively with Native allies, listen carefully to our wisdom as well as our concerns, interrogate unearned power and privilege (including one’s own), and use this privilege to confront oppression and “stand behind” Natives, so that our voices can be heard."

Another essay in this issue is on the Intercultural Bilingual Education program in Peru. This essay ends with the very interesting observation that:

"Thus bilingual education does not in itself guarantee a break with colonial social structures. On the contrary, Peruvian history shows that bilingual education from the 1950s until today has mainly served to assimilate the indigenous population to the dominant political, economic and social order. The introduction of the concept of interculturality by indigenous organisations in the 1970s was crucial, and has resulted in a permanent focus on the cultural hidden curriculum in teaching methods, educational materials and curricular content and on the ways in which formal schooling reproduces colonial power relations."

The issue ends with Dhir Jhingran's essay "Appropriate education strategies in diverse language contexts".

A rich issue indeed. Do read it!

Meghalaya kids in RSS schools in Karnataka

2009-06-26T20:27:00.004+05:30

The current issue of the magazine Tehelka has a horror story on the plight of indigenous chidren from Meghalaya studying in Karnataka in schools run by the "Hindu revivalist organization" RSS.

I'll just stick to one aspect of the outrage - the language side of it. Excerpts from "A Strange And Bitter Crop" (Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 26, Dated July 04, 2009):

"In all the schools that TEHELKA visited seeking information about children from Meghalaya, the school authorities summoned the children from their classes and instructed them to introduce themselves in Kannada. For the authorities, it was a matter of great pride that children who had no association with Kannada had been taught the language well. That students who did not know a word of Sanskrit earlier now recited Sanskrit prayers with great clarity. In... BG Nagar, Mandya district, the headmaster, Manje Gowda, flung a Kannada newspaper at a student from Meghalaya, ordering him to read it. Obediently, in a low voice, devoid of any expression, the boy proceeded to read a few sentences, before quietly folding and placing the newspaper back on the headmaster’s desk. Till he was sent away, the boy never looked up. In school after school, the same scene unfolded with variations in the demonstrations of skill and familiarity with Kannada and Sanskrit....

"A consequence of completely immersing young children from Meghalaya in a Kannada-speaking environment was visible at the Deenabandhu Children’s Home in Chamarajnagar district. A caretaker at the Home described one child’s growing familiarity with Kannada, “Sibin [one of the children at the Home] has picked up a lot of Kannada in the two months he has been here. During a phone call from a relative back home, he kept answering questions in Kannada which obviously they did not understand at all.” In a shocking display of insensitivity, the caretaker burst into laughter at what she thought was a hilarious incident and added, "For 45 minutes, a woman, I assume his mother, kept trying. Sibin, of course, had no answers since he had forgotten his own language." She giggled. The caretaker then proceeded to teach Sibin the Kannada word for dinner."

Earlier we are told that:

"In a chilling admission, an RSS worker in Shillong... told TEHELKA that care is always taken to ensure that any siblings are separated from each other. "It is easier to discipline them if they are not together. We have to control them if we have to mould them. The lesser the contact they have with home, the better it is, really," he stated."

Not surprisingly, the author says, "The physical and mental impact of studying in school environments diametrically opposed to their culture, language, religion, and food habits has been devastating."

For a detailed account of how the children are taken from their homes and communities, and a completely frank admission by the people doing this of their intentions, do read the entire article.

Language discrimination in Mizoram

2009-06-15T09:26:00.003+05:30

"The teachers in Chakma areas [in Mizoram] are Mizos who do not stay in the village of their appointment, and are unable to teach the Chakma children who do not understand either the Mizo tongue or English. Clearly, the appointment of Mizo teachers is not benefiting the targeted populations (at least in the case of the Chakmas), and hence is a futile exercise." Paritosh Chakma, "Mizoram: Minority Report" (PDF file), EPW, 6 Jun 2009.

Nor is this all. As Paritosh Chakma reports in his blog: "The state government of Mizoram has passed several Recruitment Rules where "working knowledge of Mizo language at least up to Middle School standard" has been either made a compulsory requirement of educational qualification or as a "desirable qualification".

As I commented on this post: [This] rule ... goes against the National Commissioner of Linguistic Minorities (NCLM) "Safeguards for Linguistic Minorities". The safeguard in question is the following:

i. No insistence upon knowledge of State’s Official Language at the time of recruitment. Test of proficiency in the State’s Official Language to be held before completion of probation

Using the NCLM's various Reports, Mr Chakma came back with another post on his blog, this time with a thorough indictment of the state government's practices of language discrimination.

In Mizoram, Chakma is not the only minority language discriminated against, of course. NCLM's 43rd Report (2004-5) (DOC file) recounts a visit to a Nepali-medium school in Aizwal which revealed that, "[since] Mizo was not taught there up to upper primary standard.... those desirous of joining the [government] services are at a disadvantage."

As Paritosh Chakma concludes, "the discriminatory Recruitment Rules must be scrapped to remove the language hurdle for linguistic minorities in state employments."

Reforming Pakistan's textbooks

2009-06-10T22:04:00.003+05:30

"Awaiting changes to a syllabus of hate", Nirupama Subramanian's excellent op-ed piece in The Hindu (9 June 2009) argues that "the education imparted to Pakistani children is flawed and encourages extremism, intolerance and ignorance."

She cites the influential 2002-study of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad - The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan. The SDPI report details how the curricula of government schools systematically indoctrinate young minds, and just how urgent the task of curriculum-reform is in Pakistan. The report resulted in a new curriculum being drafted, but this has not yet been implemented.

Subramanian cites one of the authors of the SDPI report in conclusion:

Compared to the 1.5 million who study in madrasas, an estimated 20 million children are enrolled in government schools. Dr. Nayyar laments that in the five years since the publication of the SDPI report, children who were 11 years old at the time have completed their matriculation. They read the old textbooks, and learnt a way of thinking about themselves and the world that will prove hard to change.

"Another generation has been lost because the process has taken too long," he said. And until the new textbooks are introduced, millions of children will continue to learn in their Urdu lessons in schools about the differences between Hindus and Muslims in a hatred-generating way, about "India's evil designs against Pakistan" in their Social Studies, and that Bangladesh was a result of a conspiracy by India with assistance from "Hindus living in East Pakistan."

Schooling crisis in India

2009-02-25T09:22:00.004+05:30

"Struggling to Learn" about sums it up. The 2006 visit by De and colleagues was a follow-up to a 1996 survey of "primary schools in about 200 villages in undivided Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh". A decade later the team found "many signs of positive change": enrolment rates, gender disparities, infrastructure, cooked mid-day meals - all showed improvement.

But quality of teaching remains a big worry: "barely half of the children in Classes 4 and 5 could do single digit multiplication, or a simple division by 5". These results reinforce the abysmal findings of the ASER 2007 report about which I'd blogged in passing, in November 2008.

De and colleagues report on the continuing plague of insufficient teachers and teacher absenteesim, also noted by filmmaker Umesh Aggarwal in his documentary on the dismal condition of schooling in Rajasthan. Indeed, the Andhra Pradesh government is currently recruiting over 47 thousand teachers - how did they allow such a huge shortfall to build up?

Meanwhile, Krishna Kumar, head of the national education council NCERT, recently revealed that India currently needs 500,000 teachers; a number that he said will shoot up to 6 million in the near future. An April 2008 report in The Guardian said that the "world needs to find and fund an extra 18 million teachers by 2015 to cope with its burgeoning pupil population".

In India's 2009-10 budget estimates, outlay for all education - primary, secondary, higher, technical, agricultural, scholarships - all education, constitutes 7.86% of the total central plan outlay: 326,680 m out of 4,156,910 m rupees. "School Education and Literacy" constitutes 71.03% of the total education outlay, or 5.59% of the total central plan outlay.

Is 5.59% enough to address the crisis?

Language Diversity on the Internet - New studies

2009-02-18T23:39:00.005+05:30

About the language diversity on the internet, a friend summarizes Daniel Pimienta's study to say that between 1996 and 2007, the proportion of English-language websites went down from 75% to 45%, and the proportion of English-language users from 80% to 32%. According to my friend, the study also has "figures for the proportion by country of people using French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English (where the US is massively dominant)".

Pimienta's paper is in French, which I don't know at all. It would therefore be very useful if someone could (dis-)confirm or nuance the conclusions above. The paper was presented in January 2009 at a conference in Mali; here's the list of presentations - in French and in English.

In another study, Languages and Cultures on the Internet - 2007, Pimienta and his colleagues declare that because of the rapid growth of pages in the internet (especially in Asian languages), and because of the growing use of context-dependant advertising (like Google AdSense), search engines can no longer represent accurately the distribution of languages on the internet. Depending on the search engine one gets dissimilar figures on the language diversity on the internet. The research group, in fact, concludes that it would be a good idea to have a separate search engine for Romance languages. Should Esperanto, for example, be included there?

This last study I translated into English using Google's Translation tool. The research results can also be read in Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian and Spanish. But not in English: are they trying to rub in the point that the internet is no longer only or mainly in English?

Esperanto: A tool for decolonizing the mind

2009-02-08T12:36:00.004+05:30

"Esperanto: A tool for decolonizing the mind" is the English version of the talk "Esperanto - ilo por la malkoloniigo" - that I gave at the 34th Catalonian Esperanto Congress in December 2008. Comments welcome!

MTM education in RtE Bill

2009-01-21T19:46:00.003+05:30

The Right to Education (RtE) Bill - about which I blogged the other day - says, "medium of instructions [sic!] shall, as far as practicable, be in child's mother tongue" (emphasis added).

As far as practicable; appropriate; wherever possible; adequate; substantial numbers; if there is sufficient demand; endeavour; within the framework of their education systems; pupils who so wish in a number considered sufficient.... Tove Skutnabb-Kangas gives many examples of these "opt-outs, modifications, alternatives, claw-backs" in her UEA-UNHCR talk in April 2008 in Geneva (slides 63-71) - I had blogged about this talk in October 2008.

From her recent keynote in Bamako, Mali, I copied her recommendations in a post on the Jharkhand forum. Here they are:

madhu prasad wrote:

> The pedagogically sound solution would be to retain the former as the medium of
> instruction but to introduce English as a subject, to be taught adequately
> and imaginatively, even from Class 1.

Yes, here are the main recommendations (slides 30-33) from a recent keynote by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, a language-rights activist:

Recommendation 1: the mother tongue should be the main teaching language for the first eight years

1a. All Indigenous/tribal and other linguistic minority children (hereafter, IM children) should have their first or own language (or one of them, in case of multilingual children) as their main medium of education, during minimally the first eight years (but absolutely minimally the first six years), in non-fee state schools.

1b. Even if the mother tongue might no longer be used as a teaching language after grade 8, it should be used orally in the classroom, and it should be studied as a subject during the entire education process.

Recommendation 2: good teaching of a dominant local or national language as a subject

2. IM children should have good teaching of a dominant local or national language as a second language, given by competent bilingual teachers, from grade 1 or 2. It should be studied as a subject throughout the entire education process. It should be studied as a second (or foreign) language, using second/foreign language pedagogy/methods; it should not be studied as if it were the children's mother tongue.

Recommendation 3: transfer from mother tongue medium teaching to using a dominant local or national language as a teaching language

3a. Some subjects can be taught through the medium of a dominant local or national language and/or an international language in the upper grades, but not before grade 7 and only if there are competent teachers.

3b. If necessary one or two practical subjects (physical education, music, cooking, etc) can be taught earlier through the medium of a second language, but cognitively and/or linguistically demanding subjects (such as mathematics or history) should be taught in the child's first language minimally up to grade 7, preferably longer.

Recommendation 4: additional languages as subjects

4. IM children should have an opportunity to learn other languages as school subjects, including a language in international use such as English, Spanish, French, Russian, Hindi, etc, if it is not a dominant local or national language mentioned in Recommendation 2 above.

This keynote - at the Bamako International Forum on Multilingualism (19-21 Jan), organized by the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN, the African Union) - is archived on her website.

The next three slides (34-36) give a slew of references to back up these recommendations. Skutnabb-Kangas concludes:

Research conclusions about results of present-day indigenous and minority education show that the length of mother tongue medium education is more important than any other factor (including socio-economic status) in predicting the educational success of IM students, including their competence in the dominant language....

Language and knowledge flows

2009-01-07T20:17:00.007+05:30

Yesterday, in Hyderabad, there was a seminar on "Knowledge Society and Uncertain Futures", organized by STEPS - Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability - "a global research and policy engagement centre, funded by the ESRC, bringing together development studies with science and technology studies."

STEPS is collaborating in a series of consultations in India: "Knowledge Society Debates: A series of events exploring science, technology and innovation in India, 5-13 January 2009".

The premise (detailed in the Background Paper) is:

Though divided by colonial legacies – and further separated by media emphasis on today’s techno-economic rivalries – India and Europe present many parallels in their engagements with the knowledge society. They share an awareness of culture and history (with all their contingencies), a vibrantly critical politics of technology, and an imperative for inclusion and a plural understanding of the public good.

The key speakers at the seminar were: D Balasubramanian, Brian Wynne, Sheila Jasanoff, V Balaji, Shiv Visvanathan, and G Haragopal. More about (most of) them in the seminar announcement.

I (of course!) intervened. Here's more or less what I said:

My name is Giridhar Rao; I am from the World Esperanto Association. No surprise then that I focus on language.

Seems to me that neither the deliberations here nor those in the European Commission report that Dr Wynne has authored, have focused on the link between language and knowledge flows. I wish to highlight two domains where this link is clear: indigenous knowledges and higher education.

A considerable amount of knowledge about biodiversity management is encoded in indigenous languages. This cultural diversity is fast disappearing, faster than biological diversity. For this reason too, it is important to safeguard and promote the linguistic human rights of indigenous peoples - who, as Shiv Visvanathan has reminded us, are very much our contemporaries. And all the research shows that mother-tongue medium education is the most effective countermeasure to this "linguistic genocide", as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas calls those policies that result in the death of languages.

In the domain of indigenous knowledges, one sees clearly the link between knowledge flows and language.

Language is a bottleneck in knowledge flows in the domain of higher education and research.

In India, poor overall teaching in schools means poor cognitive skills in English - the language of higher education in India. In applied sciences like agriculture this disjunct sets up its own barriers to knowledge flows - between the home language and English: the farmer in the field and his son in the university cannot communicate with each other.

And in international scientific collaboration, there is considerable (anecdotal) evidence of disruptions in knowledge flows caused by language asymmetries.

Even in the European Union, where teaching is not poor, and where, for most citizens, the language of higher education is the home language, even there, language plays an important role in knowledge flows.

The Swiss economist François Grin in his 2005 report (in French), "Foreign language teaching as public policy", (summaries: Fr, Eo) estimates that every year the European Union transfers 25 billion euros - that's billion: 10 to the power 9 - 25 billion euros to the United Kingdom for language-related reasons. These include the sale of English-language learning materials; the 700,000 or so EU citizens who visit UK every year to learn English; and the savings for UK resulting from not having to teach foreign languages.

Thus, in vastly different areas of the human experience - from indigenous peoples in India to the European Union - one sees asymmetries and disruptions in knowledge flows because of language-related factors.

It's clear that both India and the European Union need to manage their complex multilingualism much better for more efficient, cost-effective and democratic knowledge flows.

And it is precisely at this point that one can point to the 120-year-old history of the Esperanto movement in creating more democratic communication between peoples. But that is a theme for another seminar.... :-)

Thank you.

Education Bill - three critiques by Anil Sadgopal

2009-01-02T13:32:00.003+05:30

Here are three excellent articles by Prof. Anil Sadgopal arguing that the education bill just tabled in the Upper House of the Indian Parliament is deeply discriminatory, and needs to be radically amended or replaced.

1. "C For Commerce", Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 23, Dated June 14, 2008
http://tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=cr140608cforcommerce.asp

A new Bill seeks to put the constitutional promise of free and quality education for all at the mercy of market forces, warns ANIL SADGOPAL

2. "Education Bill: dismantling rights", Anil Sadgopal, Financial Express, Posted: 2008-11-09
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/education-bill-dismantling-rights/383177/0

3. "The 'Trickle Down' Trick", Tehelka Magazine, September 2007
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main34.asp?filename=Ws290907The_Trickle.asp

The Prime Minister’s promise of "6000 high quality schools" is clearly designed to divert attention from the issue of long-pending structural transformation in the school system, says Prof. Anil Sadgopal

20% Indian kids have different home and school languages

2008-11-13T20:27:00.004+05:30

Peru: 18.5%
India: 19.1%
Paraguay: 63.5%
Phillipines: 79.7%

These are the percentages of primary pupils in schools where school heads reported that for 'most' or 'all' pupils "First language [was] different from language of instruction". The data is from a 2008 Unesco report, A View Inside Primary Schools: A World Education Indicators (WEI) cross-national study (p. 56, Table 3.1).

These percentages have important implications for the global initiative Education for All, especially, its sixth goal, "Improve the quality of education". When so many have to struggle with a non-mother-tongue, what learning can happen?

With language barriers adding to the difficulties of minority and indigenous children, the findings of India's ASER 2007 report are not surprising at all: only 58.3% children in class 5 can read a class 2 level text (p. 32). For some 20% of the 41% who can't read even a class 2 text, the language of instruction must be a formidable challenge. In the Phillipines 80% suffer a non-home-language in the school. Imagine the challenges there in providing "quality education"!

The Unesco report, however, draws a very mild conclusion from the data:

"Schools and teachers needed to take these different linguistic backgrounds into account, not only in the development of language instruction but in other parts of the curriculum to ensure that all pupils had the opportunity to succeed academically."

No! A much stronger recommendation is warranted: ensure mother-tongue medium education. Only then will Unesco and governments have a chance to achieve the relevant Millennium Development Goals.

Kannada in a Greek play of 2nd cent. BC??

2008-11-04T19:06:00.006+05:30

Announcing the classical status of Kannada and Telugu, a Times of India report says, "Govind Pai proved that Kannada phrases like 'Mindeya?' ('Have you had bath?') were used in a Greek play of 2nd century BC."

'Proved', eh? The Wikipedia article on Kannada does not seem to've heard of this Greek connection.

However, Kamat's Potpourri - that fascinating "hodge-podge of Indian history, arts and culture" - does mention that the remarkable Pai identified "Kannada names from ancient Greek classics including Ptolemy".

Arapaho revitalization

2008-10-18T10:14:00.004+05:30

Its Native Tongue Facing Extinction, Arapaho Tribe Teaches the Young
By DAN FROSCH
The New York Times
October 16, 2008

"[O]nly about 200 Arapaho speakers are still alive, and tribal leaders at Wind River, Wyoming’s only Indian reservation, fear their language will not survive. As part of an intensifying effort to save that language, this tribe of 8,791, known as the Northern Arapaho, recently opened a new school where students will be taught in Arapaho. Elders and educators say they hope it will create a new generation of native speakers.

[...]

"Studies show that language fluency among young Indians is tied to overall academic achievement, and experts say such learning can have other positive effects."

Do read the full article.

Language, Education and (violations of) Human Rights

2008-10-13T08:46:00.004+05:30

"Language, Education and (violations of) Human Rights" is the keynote that Tove Skutnabb-Kangas gave at a symposium on "Linguistic Rights in the World, the current situation", at the United Nations in Geneva, in April 2008. The symposium commemorated the 100th Anniversary of the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA) and the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Skutnabb-Kangas argues forcefully that:

The most important Linguistic Human Right (LHR) in education for Indigenous peoples and minorities, if they want to reproduce themselves as peoples/minorities, is an unconditional right to mainly mother tongue medium education in non-fee state schools. This education (of course including teaching of a dominant language as a subject, by bilingual teachers) should continue minimally 8 years, preferably longer. Today, binding educational LHRs are more or less non-existent.

Meanwhile, as she points out, "According to pessimistic but realistic estimates, 90-95% of today’s spoken languages may be very seriously endangered or extinct by the year 2100."

She demonstrates that for children of indigenous and minority groups, dominant-language-medium education policies the world over are both widespread and destructive. She argues that these policies can be described legally (in international law) as "linguistic genocide" and "crimes against humanity".

Her "positive examples" of mother-tongue medium based multilingual education are from India, Nepal, Norway, Finland, and Ethiopia, and adds that there are encouraging reports also from Peru, Bolivia, and Bangladesh. But, as she says, "in today's situation there is a lot of nice talk and far too little action".

"Most countries are hypocritical", she concludes.

Her information-rich talk is best heard (or downloaded as an MP3 file) with the PDF of her presentation - both archived on Linguistic-rights.org (so far in English, Esperanto and French - more language-versions to be available soon).

European Day of Languages in Hyderabad

2008-09-27T00:18:00.009+05:30

Here's the final version (15 Oct) of a press release that I recently put together (there's also an Esperanto version).

On the occasion of

European Day of Languages

European Language Mela

20 October 2008
The English and Foreign Languages University
Hyderabad

Institutes in Hyderabad which teach European languages will come together on 20 October to celebrate the European Day of Languages. The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) will host a "European Language Mela".

"The event is the first of its kind in India, and will showcase the rich diversity of languages in Europe," said Professor Abhai Maurya, Vice-Chancellor, EFLU. He added, "The event takes on added significance in 2008, which the United Nations has declared International Year of Languages."

Participating institutes include Alliance Française, Goethe Zentrum, Osmania University, Universal Esperanto Association, and University of Hyderabad. As many as eight European languages will be presented – Croatian, English, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish – followed by a discussion.

Over the next few months, several Language Days are being planned by these institutes to present these languages and their cultures in greater depth.

Backgrounder

Launched in 2001, the European Day of Languages, which is traditionally celebrated on or around 26 September, promotes linguistic diversity as a tool for greater intercultural understanding. There are over 200 languages indigenous to Europe and many more are spoken by citizens whose family origin is from other continents.

Some factoids:

The mother tongues spoken by most people in Europe are Russian, German, English, French and Italian, in that order.

The non-European languages most widely used on European territory are Arabic, Chinese and Hindi, each with its own writing system.

Russia (148 million inhabitants) has by far the highest number of languages spoken on its territory: from 130 to 200 depending on the criteria.

Most countries in Europe have a number of regional or minority languages – some of these have obtained official status.

Due to the influx of migrants and refugees, Europe has become largely multilingual. In London alone some 300 languages are spoken (Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, Berber, Hindi, Punjabi, etc.).

Bilingualism. Let us recognize, use and cherish this resource. Bilingualism brings all kinds of benefits. Being bilingual can enhance your chances of successfully learning other languages. Learning a second language makes it easier to learn a third. Bilinguals may also have some advantages in thinking: there is evidence that they make faster progress than monolinguals in certain areas of early cognitive development and are in many ways more creative in their linguistic skills.

Bilinguals can communicate with a wider variety of people. Since bilinguals can experience two or more cultures in an intimate way, their ability can make them more sensitive in communication and more ready to overcome cultural barriers and to build cultural bridges. There are also important practical issues: bilinguals enjoy a potential economic advantage because a larger number of jobs becomes available to them. It is also increasingly accepted that multilingual companies have a competitive edge over monolingual ones.

Minority languages. Thus, in a globalizing world high-level multilingualism is very desirable. The conditions to achieve high-level multilingualism are quite favourable for the big languages. A 10-year schooling in the mother-tongue lays a solid cognitive foundation on which other languages can be effectively acquired. However, as in the rest of the world, in Europe too the situation of the smaller languages is far more uncertain – indeed, for the world as a whole, experts estimate that over this century, at least half of the world’s languages, and perhaps more, will die out. Within two generations all traces of a language can disappear when it is not spoken at home, and when children are not taught in it at school. It is this urgency that has prompted the United Nations to declare 2008 “International Year of Languages”.

As a community of nations committed to defending human rights – including linguistic human rights – Europe is seriously discussing strategies to ensure these rights for all its citizens. A range of proposals exist: initiatives to encourage citizens to learn the languages of the neighbours; a 'simplified' English; adopting a national language as one's own; declaring a national language as the official European language; and learning a planned language like Esperanto as a universal second language.

Europe's success in defending linguistic human rights, promoting linguistic diversity and democracy, and achieving a high-level multilingualism will be watched with great interest in other multilingual mosaics such as India.

As we – with our own complex mix of languages! – gather to celebrate Europe's linguistic diversity, these are some of the larger issues that we invite you to ponder over during the seminar. Indeed, we hope that our celebrations and deliberations will continue through the various European Language Days that we plan to organize during the next few months in Hyderabad!

Some useful websites

Council of Europe's official website for the European Day of Languages www.ecml.at/edl

European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages www.eblul.org

Unesco portal on Languages and Multilingualism www.unesco.org/en/languages

Dismal schooling in Rajasthan

2008-09-22T13:55:00.007+05:30

In the Sunday Magazine of The Hindu, yet another depressing article on primary schooling in India. Filmmaker Umesh Aggarwal's new film "Divided Colours of a Nation" takes us, as Kalpana Sharma tells us,

to a rural school in Barmer, Rajasthan. There are just two teachers for five classes. One of them is also the principal. On the day the filmmaker goes to the school, neither of the two teachers is present and only 25 out of the 188 students are at school. Not far away in a Bhil village, he goes to a government school. There are 90 students in Standards I to V but only one teacher. Yet another school on the Indo-Pak border in Rajasthan is deserted at 12.30 p.m. There are no children and the only teacher has been missing for eight days. Little wonder then that 50 per cent of students in Rajasthan have failed the Standard 10 examination in the last 10 years.

While this is the situation in distant villages, things were not very different in a government school not far from the national capital. Here, there were 18 classes, but nine had no teachers. Half way through the term, the children still had not received their textbooks.

I wonder what language the Bhil children were being taught in. Probably Rajasthani (or one of the langauges of that cluster). Almost certainly, the medium of instruction was not Bhili - or any of the related languages of the Bhil language group. The 2001 census tells us that there are 9.58 million speakers of Bhili. And Ethnologue reports: "Literacy rate in first language: 1% to 5%. Literacy rate in second language: 10%."

Just published: Why Languages Matter

2008-09-19T08:57:00.003+05:30

Just published by SIL International: Why Languages Matter: Meeting Millennium Development Goals through local languages. From the Unesco release:

Published in this 2008 International Year of Languages, “Why Languages Matter” provides readers with real life stories about how literacy programs in local languages are helping to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

In Indonesia for example, a program in mother-tongue prompted villagers to replant mangroves to stem the destruction of coastal areas. In Togo, a farmer began a chicken breeding business after learning about how to manage finances and resources in an Ifè adult literacy class. In indigenous communities of Mexico, bilingual teachers are noting that students who begin primary school in their mother tongue acquire literacy skills more quickly. In Benin’s Waama community, literacy classes in mother tongue are giving people access to basic health information and leading to improved overall health.

The brochure also highlights how partnerships can revitalize local languages. In Viet Nam for example, speakers of several closely-related languages now have a font that is usable on computers and the Internet, an initiative supported by UNESCO.

The MDGs were officially adopted by 189 United Nations member states in 2000. These goals seek to eradicate extreme poverty, universalize primary education, promote gender equality, improve health and ensure environmental sustainability by 2015.

Contact: languages@unesco.org

Related links

Download “Why Languages Matter” a SIL International publication

2008 International year of Languages

Languages in Education

Education and the Millennium Development Goals

Literacy and Mother-tongue medium education

2008-09-08T22:16:00.005+05:30

September 8 is International Literacy Day. The Wikipedia article tells us that "Some 774 million adults lack minimum literacy skills; one in five adults is still not literate and two-thirds of them are women; 72.1 million children are out-of-school and many more attend irregularly or drop out."

I blogged (in Esperanto) about this in April this year. An article had then just appeared in The Guardian which I drew upon. Grim stuff.

Unesco's focus this year is on Literacy and Health: "For instance, a study conducted in 32 countries shows that women with secondary education are five times more likely to be informed about HIV/AIDS than women who are illiterate. Another example: the rate of infant mortality is higher when the mother can neither read nor write."

Amazingly enough, neither the article in The Guardian, nor the Unesco release even mention mother-tongue medium education (MTME). It's not as if MTME's role is unknown - as the Universal Esperanto Association declares:

It has been shown in many large-scale studies in several countries that if indigenous and minority children have their education mainly using their own languages as the teaching language for the first 6-8 years (with good teaching of the dominant language as a second language, given by bilingual teachers), their general school achievement is better and they learn the dominant language better than if their teaching is through the medium of the dominant language.

So, the research is all there, and indeed, has been there for some time - see "Mother tongue first: Children's right to learn in their own languages". Similarly, UNDP's Human Development Report of 2004 tells us that of the children in sub-Saharan Africa who go to school, only 13% have access to mother-tongue medium education. That percentage for indigenous peoples in India is practically zero.

The 38% of India's adivasis who are literate (including the 14% literate adivasi women), can read only in the main regional language.

Top 10 endangered languages

2008-09-02T17:23:00.004+05:30

Peter Austin, a linguist at SOAS, presents a tantalizing list of strange and endangered wordbeasts. Excerpts:

"Jeru (or Great Andamanese) is spoken by fewer than 20 people on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.... The languages of the Andamans cannot be shown to be related to any other languages spoken on earth.

"... The Khoisan languages are remarkable for having click sounds – the | symbol is pronounced like the English interjection tsk! tsk! used to express pity or shame. The closest relative of N|u is !Xóõ (also called Ta'a and spoken by about 4,000 people) which has the most sounds of any language on earth: 74 consonants, 31 vowels, and four tones (voice pitches)....

"Yuchi nouns have 10 genders, indicated by word endings: six for Yuchi people (depending on kinship relations to the person speaking), one for non-Yuchis and animals, and three for inanimate objects (horizontal, vertical, and round)....

"Oro Win is one of only five languages known to make regular use of a sound that linguists call "a voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate"... similar... to the brrr sound we make in English to signal that the weather is cold."

In the discussion at Language Hat, responding to the following query:

"How do you save a language? It's not like breeding a few more pandas and giving them extra bamboo shoots. You can't keep the last two speakers of !Xóõ at the London Zoo."

Austin remarks:

"Outsiders, including linguists, can't "save" a language -- only the community where it is spoken can decide to do so by continuing to speak the language and passing it on to their children. Linguists can assist with the process of revitalisation by supporting communities in their desires and helping to produce materials (books, dictionaries, language lessons) and new contexts for language use (eg. radio, pop music). There are numerous examples where language shift has been reversed and endangered languages have grown in size and become less endangered, eg. Welsh, Maori, Hawaiian, and many examples where communities are struggling right now to make this happen, eg. Ainu, Gamilaraay (an Australian Aboriginal language). In many cases, dealing with pressing social and economic issues in minority communities like health, environmental degradation, and land ownership goes along with linguistic and cultural revitalisation, so the zoo is exactly the wrong analogy to bring up."

Cultural and Biological Diversity in a Rapidly Changing World

2008-08-29T12:51:00.006+05:30

In April 2008 a conference was organized in New York called "Sustaining Cultural and Biological Diversity in a Rapidly Changing World: Lessons for Global Policy". Here's what one of the organizers Terralingua has to say:

"The past two decades have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the links between cultural, linguistic, and biological diversity. These various manifestations of the diversity of life are under threat by some of the same forces, yet, both in scientific inquiry and in the realms of policy and management, nature and culture are often treated as separate and unrelated entities. This stems in part from the mutual isolation that has traditionally characterized training and work in the natural and social sciences, leading to limited communication or collaboration among fields concerned with sustainability in both nature and culture. Another contributing factor has been a limited appreciation of the relevance of the vast variety of approaches to human-environment relationships that have developed across the world’s diverse cultures, often through close interactions with the natural environment and based on a perception of humans as part of, not separate from, nature. Fragmented approaches have not been successful in arresting the growing erosion of the world’s biodiversity and of the vast and diverse pool of cultural knowledge, practices, and languages developed by humanity. This is resulting in an ever less diverse and resilient world."

Many of the speakers were interviewed. These interviews (in English) can be heard in the section "Vanishing and Re-emerging: Reviving Biological and Cultural Diversity" on the A World of Possibilities website.

I found the Ashish Kothari interview especially interesting for its emphasis on and optimism about community-initiated, and community-sustained movements.

This post is also on my Esperanto blog at Ipernity.

Learnt Icelandic in 7 days?! The incredible Daniel Tammet

2008-08-24T20:36:00.000+05:30

I've just read and seen interviews with the autist Daniel Tammet. According to the English Wikipedia, he not only has prodigious mathematical talents but also knows 11 languages: English (native-speaker), French, Finnish, German, Lithuanian, Rumanian, Estonian, Icelandic, Welsh, and Esperanto!

He changed his family name to Tammet, choosing, according to an interview, the Estonian word for the oak - 'I've always had a love of Estonian. Such a vowel rich language.'

He's even created a language. It's called Mänti - which comes from the Finnish word for the pine tree, according to a (frustratingly short) post on his (English) blog. A little more information about the language can be gleaned from his interview in The Guardian.

As if this is not enough, he's apparently learnt Icelandic in 2005 in one week! At any rate, he learnt enough of the language to be interviewed in it on national television in Reykjavik!

You can see a part of that interview in the BBC documentary, "The Boy with the Incredible Brain", which can be viewed on YouTube as five, excellent films. The interview with Tammet is in the last part.

Would be very interesting if a speaker of Icelandic could comment on the interview!

Esperanto version of this post: Lernis la islandan en 7 tagoj?! La nekredebla Daniel Tammet.