Inari Sami reborn

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (some of whose talks are here) sends this information on the "seriously endangered" language Aanaar Saami (which the English Wikipedia calls Inari Sami).

Suvi Kivelä, journalist and director of the Aanaar Saami archives, has made a 9-minute documentary about her mother-in-law and her two sons and the revitalization of the Aanaar Saami language (which has some 350 speakers). The documentary "Reborn" in now on YouTube with English subtitles.

Tove tells us that everyone in the documentary is speaking Aanaar Saami. The only ones who speak Finnish are the father of Suvi's children and the priest. We also learn that the project has now "produced" a Saami-speaking priest too.

Hopefully, the project will be useful for other indigenous groups as well.

Indian survey records 630 languages so far

The People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) has already listed and described 630 languages in 27 states of the country. The Survey's Chairperson, Ganesh Devy, reported this at a workshop held here in Hyderabad on 31 May 2012. We have met Dr Devy and PLSI before in this blog.

In the workshop there were about 10 speakers of various indigenous (tribal) languages of Andhra Pradesh. They have been working with the state wing of the national universal elementary education program, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). Working with indigenous communities, these resource-persons and their colleagues have collected information on 16 indigenous languages, which they have rendered into Telugu. The task of the 10-or-so English-speaking Telugus in the workshop is to translate the Telugu information into English. The PLSI team will later translate into Hindi as well. Thus PLSI envisages diverse information on Indian languages in the language itself, the dominant regional language, Hindi, and English. (The PLSI website lists publishers in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Odia.)

The SSA resource-persons raised many issues regarding multilingual education (MLE). Several spoke of the apathy in the bureaucracy, once one leaves the village-level and goes upwards through the education department: unfulfilled promises to develop learning materials in the mother tongue; warehouses filled with textbooks which have not been distributed to the schools; primary schools teaching in Gondi side-by-side with schools teaching in Telugu -- but the examinations are only in Telugu!

They said that the range of official attitudes to MLE ranged from ignorance to indifference to hostility. Indeed, Dr Devy remarked that "even in the highest circles of bureaucracy in Delhi" he has heard MLE being described as "mother language education"! But Dr Devy also announced that for the first time, the Government of India has set up a committee specifically for education of indigenous peoples.

He said that the PLSI data will help policy-makers a great deal.

Mother Language Day 2012

Nelson Mandela once said that "if you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart". Thus, Irina Bokova, Director-General of Unesco, begins her message (links to PDFs in the official languages of the UN) for this year's International Mother Language Day (IMLD), celebrated on 21 February every year.

The theme for IMLD 2012 is "Mother tongue instruction and inclusive education". Prominent in this year's celebration is the crucial role mother-tongues play in the right to education.

Among the interesting resources on the Unesco page are an article "Nisha's right" from The Kathmandu Post; an interview with Colette Grinevald: "Speaking your mother tongue is not a disability!"; as well as the following brief podcasts from SOAS radio (a resource well worth bookmarking):

• in English: Peter Austin on "Bangladesh, Australia and the importance of Mother Language Education"
• in Russian: Elena Giniotyte on "Archi, an Endangered Language in the Caucasus"
• in Mandarin: Lianhong Yo on "Language and Nation Building in Singapore"
• in Arabic: Samah Bushra Yousef on "Bilingual Education in Burkina Faso"
• in Portuguese: Helena De Moraes Achca on "Bilingual Education in Bolivia"

Common Voices 7 & 8 - on Knowledge Commons

At the January 2011 conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons (IASC) held in Hyderabad, the "knowledge commons" were also discussed. The latest issues of the newsletter Common Voices bring together the deliberations.

Here are the contents of the two issues:

CV 7

Editorial: "Perspectives on Knowledge... Going Beyond Dichotomies"
A Giridhar Rao, "Linguistic Diversity in the Knowledge Commons"
Editorial: "The Loss of (Traditional) Ecological Knowledge among Communities"
Kabir Sanjay Bavikatte, "Stewarding the Commons: Rethinking Property and the Emergence of Biocultural Rights"
Editorial: "Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property Rights"
Editorial: "Traditional Ecological Knowledge: The Key to Effective Fisheries Management"
Shalini Bhutani and Kanchi Kohli, "Traditional Knowledge and 'Commons' Sense"
Venkatesh Hariharan, "Is IP Another Bubble about to Burst? A View from Another Civilisation"

CV 8

Editorial
Shiv Visvanathan, "The Logic of Knowledge Commons"
David Bollier, "Exclusive Control or Sharing: Which Creates Greater Value on the Internet?"
Editorial: "The Socialisation of Science: India's Knowledge Swaraj"
Harro Maat, "Knowledge, Technology and the Politics of Rice"
Wiebe E. Bijker, "Experimenting for a Knowledge Commons: Public Debate on Nanotechnologies in The Netherlands"
Pankaj Sekhsaria, "Jugaad as a Conceptual and Materials Commons"
Lawrence Liang, "A Handful of Concepts to Understand Openness and to Battle Simony"
Ravi Shukla, "Uncommon Identities: Approaching the Aadhar (UID) Scheme as a Digital Commons"

Hope you find the contents interesting.

India's crisis in learning

The ASER 2011 report and the PISA 2009+ survey -- it's been a harsh January for the Indian educational system. Rukmini Banerji's "The crisis in learning" and Lant Pritchett's "The first PISA results for India: The end of the beginning" provide depressing summaries. Ajay Shah ("Education in India at the crossroads") and Banerji suggest solutions.

Do bookmark Ajay Shah's blogpost "Education in India: A compact reading kit". Also worth watching is this overview "PISA - Measuring student success around the world".

Arabic in Israel and Denmark

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

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.