Vanishing Voices

Quechua woman and child,
Andes, Peru

The International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples is the 9th of August. A version of this post also appears in the August 2023 issue of the Azim Premji University newsletter Forests of Life.

The Esperanto version of the essay is called "Made-to-disappear voices" ("Malaperigataj voĉoj"). The Esperanto title makes clear that these Indigenous languages are not vanishing  "voluntarily" - they are being made to disappear! Read on....

Imagine that you speak the following languages:

• You can have 13 consonants in a row! The Salishian language Nuxalk (pron. nuhalk), spoken in British Columbia in Canada, has the word clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts', which means "then he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant". Do tell us: how do you pronounce that word?! ("Nuxalk", Wikipedia)

• You don't say "my left arm". Instead, you say "my north / south / east / or west arm", depending on your actual orientation! Speakers Warlpiri in Central Australia use the cardinal directions; an absolute frame of reference. (Levinson and Wilkins, 2006)

• You must use one of 10 genders! The Yuchi in Oklahoma, USA, use "six [genders] for Yuchi people (depending on kinship relationships to the speaker), one for non-Yuchis and animals, and three for inanimate objects (horizontal, vertical and round )"! (The Guardian, 2008)

Those are just three of the strange and wonderful (for me!) world-descriptions from the approximately 7000 languages ​​of the world. And these are vanishing voices - we are making these Indigenous languages disappear! This article explores why this is happening, what we are losing, and one definite "must-do".

Half of the world speaks
these 25 languages.
Source: Terralingua.org

Half of the world speaks one of 25 major languages: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali.... The other 50% speak all the other 6975 or so languages! So, there are a lot of small languages in the world. For example, Aiton (1500 speakers), Muot (930), Zangskari (12,000) - all three are Indigenous languages ​​from India. (Do also remember that we only have approximate numbers for many Indigenous languages - they just aren't important enough!)

All over the world, these small languages ​​have been in contact with the larger ones around them. However, historically, rarely has this contact been peaceful. Speakers of big languages ​​have come with modern weapons in search of slaves, natural resources, and land. Indigenous peoples who survived (many, many were killed) have had to abandon their language and culture (along with their land). This continues. Their children are forbidden to speak their languages ​​in school, and the government and the courts do not speak their languages ​​either. With no alternative, speakers of Indigenous languages shift to dominant languages. This is why the shift is not "voluntary". It is no wonder that of the 424 languages ​​spoken in India (according to Ethnologue), 131 are "Endangered", that is, "it is no longer the norm for children to learn and use this language".

Places of high biodiversity are also
places of high linguistic diversity.
Source: Terralingua.org

What do we lose when we lose a language? As our initial examples show, each language is a unique way of looking at the world. But here's another thing: look at the places of high biodiversity in the world; for example, Papua New Guinea (839), Indonesia (704), Arunachal Pradesh (90). The figures in parentheses are the number of languages ​​spoken there. Biodiversity diversity correlates with linguistic diversity! The biocultural link is that the knowledge to sustainably take care of this biodiversity is encoded in these Indigenous languages. So, even for purely "selfish" reasons, the world must ensure that Indigenous languages ​​flourish.

It's also an ethical question, is it not? Linguistic human rights are as important as other rights. And the freedom to practice one's own culture includes its languages. Plus it is also about education. Tons of research (as well as common sense!) tells us that children learn best in the language they know best. Depriving a child of that is cognitive violence! For society, the cost is twofold. One, repeated years, dropping out of school, and low economic productivity - a massive waste of resources! And two, poorly prepared citizens for democratic participation - perhaps an even more serious cost!

So what should we do? Many things need to be done, but clearly education has to be one of our starting points. Bringing mother tongues ​​into education will make all education more effective. This will revitalize Indigenous languages ​​as languages ​​of modern knowledge. Meanwhile, their speakers will continue to take pride in their cultural heritage. However, in addition to learning in their own languages, children also need high-quality teaching in the other languages ​​they need to know - the regional language and English, for example. This idea is at the core of Mother-Tongue Based Multilingual Education (Mohanty et al., 2009).

In itself, that proposal is not enough. The rights of Indigenous peoples need to be strengthened in many other domains as well. But whatever strategy society adopts, education should be among its main components. Only then will there be generations who will continue to marvel at these diverse ways of being human!

References

Levinson, S. C. and Wilkins, D. P. (eds.) 2006. Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486753

Mohanty, A. K., Panda, M., Phillipson, R., Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (eds.) 2009. Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. https://orientblackswan.com/details?id=9788125036982

The Guardian, “Peter K Austin's top 10 endangered languages”. 27 August. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/27/endangered.languages

Wikipedia. “Nuxalk”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuxalk_language#Syllables.

Multilingual education in India: tasks and challenges

"Multilingual education in India: tasks and challenges" was the (online) talk I gave on 22 August at the London Esperanto Club (in Esperanto). Some 60 Esperantists from around the world logged in. The 30-minute talk followed by an hour's conversation with the audience is available here on YouTube. Do listen to some of it if you want to hear Esperanto spoken more or less as an everyday (second) language! :-) Absorbing as the discussion was, in this post, already too long, I will limit myself to a report on my talk.

The talk began by setting the context of Azim Premji University's social purpose and engagement with school education in India. We then launched into the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020 [PDF]) -- more precisely, to this recommendation:

Wherever possible, the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, but preferably till Grade 8 and beyond, will be the home language / mother-tongue / local language. Thereafter, the home / local language shall continue to be taught as a language wherever possible. This will be followed by both public and private schools. (Para 4.9, p. 12)

However, before looking at the recommendation more closely, I said that the urgent task at hand during the pandemic was to reopen schools. This has to be done safely. Governments and NGOs like Azim Premji Foundation are putting together guidelines and resources for this. The educational needs of the most vulnerable learners -- Dalits and Adivasis; the nutritional needs of growing children being met through the mid-day meal scheme; the rising incidence of child labour; and especially for girls, early marriages -- these are all aspects of that urgency. The longer the school remains closed, the greater the number of children who will never return to school.

We then came back to the mother-tongue education recommendation in NEP 2020. We noted the difficulty of specifying the mother tongue. Bhojpuri is a case in point. Although it has 51 million native speakers, it is listed (PDF) in the Indian census 2011 as one of the 56 "mother tongues" under Hindi -- as part of the "Hindi belt". Thus, if a Bhojpuri child is being taught in Hindi, it is misleading to claim that the child is being educated in their mother tongue. In operationalizing the policy, the compound "home language / mother-tongue / local language" will need a more nuanced approach.

A second difficulty with the NEP 2020 recommendation is the last sentence in the part cited above: "This will be followed by both public [that is, free] and private [fee-paying] schools." Now, the profit-model of private schools in India crucially depends on English-medium teaching: it is their USP! No wonder, then, that this recommendation has come in for some severe criticism from this vocal and influential lobby. See some of the links in the initial part of this sensible article by Shoaib Daniyal, "Why is India obsessed with English-medium education -- when it goes against scientific consensus?" How policymakers will get this lobby to the table remains to be seen. There may be possibilities in the promise of bilingual education that is mentioned later in the talk.

Fortunately for the private-school lobby, NEP 2020 itself provides several "escape routes"! In the passage cited above, "wherever possible" occurs twice; the 60-page document offers many such "opt-outs, modifications, alternatives, claw-backs" -- as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas has called them. Instead of framing the issue as a matter of linguistic rights, the document presents it as a desirable. Thereby, those reluctant to implement the recommendations will find it easy to not act.

A third battle front for the NEP 2020 recommendation is the fact that in several states the public school system itself is switching to English as medium of instruction! Karnataka has identified a thousand government schools where English-medium education is being given. Neighbouring Telangana is currently training nearly 2000 elementary school teachers to teach in English. These states have adopted English in order to counter the "outflow" of children from regional-language medium government schools to English-medium private schools.

It is too early to say whether the project has worked, but now that government schools themselves are offering English-medium education, parents have started to pull their children out of private schools, and admit them into public schools. The current pandemic, in which millions have lost their livelihoods, has made this option even more attractive. To that extent, one might say that the project is successful.

As I noted in the talk, this third difficulty has shown up a certain incoherence between the NEP 2020 recommendation and the state governments' language policies. This has begun to be noticed elsewhere too as the title of this article indicates: "Will the NEP Throw a Spanner in Jagan Reddy's Plans for English-Medium Education?" What then might be the way forward?

One possible solution seems to be to develop various models of bilingual education. By this, NEP 2020 means English and a regional language. The document mentions bilingual education at several places. For example here:

Students whose medium of instruction is the local / home language will begin to learn science and mathematics bilingually in Grade 6 so that by the end of Grade 9 they can speak about science and other subjects both in their home language and English. In this regard, all efforts will be made in preparing high-quality bilingual textbooks and teaching-learning materials. (Para 4.12, p. 12-13)

If that is indeed the aim, then the extensive English-training programmes that some states are currently undertaking can be seen as preparatory capacity-building for a transition to bilingual education. As the document notes, a great deal of material will need to be developed. In fact, NEP 2020 recommends the setting up of an "Indian Institute of Translation and Interpretation" (IITI) (Para 22.11, p. 53). The availability of such "high-quality" material might prove to be attractive to the private-school system -- including for-profit educational start-ups -- as well.

The bilingual material will need to be both "from-below" (school textbooks and supplementary material for students) as well as "from-above" (teacher training material and university-level material). For decades, governments as well as NGOs have sporadically prepared bilingual material, often for Adivasi children -- that is, bilingual textbooks in the regional language and an Indigenous language. The main reason for these projects not scaling up is lack of sustained state and institutional support: they depended crucially on individual activists and sympathetic officials in the education bureaucracy. The Odisha project (about which I have blogged before) is one of the few with some sustained government support. Perhaps with an IITI that gap will be closed.

Meanwhile, in the sphere of higher education -- the "from-above" as I called it -- the talk gave two examples of intiatives already underway. The first is the "Translations Initiative" (TI) at Azim Premji University. A major objective of TI is to make all the readings of the various programmes of the university available (initially at least) in Hindi and Kannada as well. This will enable access to higher education to a much larger pool of students than only those proficient in English. Simultaneously, TI is organizing "seminars in Indian languages on subjects related to school education in collaboration with different Universities across India".

In alignment with TI is the second initiative that I mentioned in my talk: the National Translation Mission (NTM). I have blogged recently about its work of translating "knowledge texts" into all of India's 22 Official Languages. Hopefully, these initiatives -- those from-below and those from-above -- will together create a sustainable ecosystem for multilingual education in India.

Zooming out, the talk located the 60-page NEP 2020 in the context of a federal democracy: consultation, collaboration, and consent are necessary. And these have to be between multiple stakeholders: central government, state governments, and non-governmental agencies. Further, in the Indian constitution, education is in the Concurrent List -- states too can legislate on the subject. In such a political structure, a readiness to dialogue becomes that much more important.

Finally, the talk acknowledged that the road ahead was long, the challenges would need much work, and the task by its very nature was transgenerational. But without persistence, there would be no way to see the optimism that the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz holds out to us:

"It is but a night" by Faiz

The heart is not without hope
It has only not tasted success
Yes, the night of sorrow is long
But it is but a night.

Linguistic human rights in India: policy and practice

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!

Indigenous children's education: E-book

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.

Skutnabb-Kangas on MTM Education

"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)

Indian Folklife issue on multilingual education

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!

Education Bill - three critiques by Anil Sadgopal

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

Language, Education and (violations of) Human Rights

"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).