Tamil-medium education

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

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.)

"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

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

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

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

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.