EDUCATION SYSTEM AGAINST LANGUAGE TRANSMISSION? CASE OF MINORITY LANGUAGES IN INDIA
DOI: 10.23951/2307-6119-2021-3-70-80
The paper deals with the intergenerational transmission of six minority languages in India, three Indo-Aryan languages, viz. Kumaoni (state of Uttarakhand), Kullui (state of Himachal Pradesh), Western Marwari (state of Rajasthan) and three Munda languages, viz. Sora, Remo and Gutob (state of Odisha). None of these languages has an official status or standardized written form, all of them are used almost exclusively for oral communication, poorly described and, to one degree or another, endangered. The data come from sociolinguistic surveys conducted by the authors in the states of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Odisha in 2014–2018. One of the tasks during the sociolinguistic study in the areas of the above-mentioned minority languages was to identify the main factors of the intergenerational transmission loss. We claim that the modern education policies in India are one of the main factors disrupting language transmission. School education is conducted in the state official languages, and minority languages are not involved in it. Speaking minor languages is restricted by teachers at school, while the importance of the official languages is imposed on children. We note also the facts that the social level depends directly on the results of school exams and that Indian education is highly directive and excludes any dialogue. All of the above causes a great stress for students and their families. In this regard, parents try to protect their children from problems of mastering the language of education, and prefer not to speak with them in their native languages. Another major factor contributing to the negative image of native languages are linguistic prejudices taught in India as part of the school curriculum. This includes the division of idioms into languages (official languages) and dialects (minority languages), fixing the concept of “native language” for the official state language, the idea that the language should have a script on an original basis that differs from the scripts of other languages etc. Special attention is paid to such a phenomenon of India’s reality as linguistic discrimination of people from tribal (“untouchable” in Hindu tradition) ethnic groups within the school. In addition to the education system problems in India, the authors mention attempts to solve them by initiatives of language activists and the government. A number of measures to promote multilingual education are included in the MultiLingual Education (MLE) program, which is currently the most widely adopted in the state of Odisha. Considering structure and functioning of the MLE program in Odisha we discuss the possibility of its application in other regions.
Keywords: sociolinguistics, endangered languages, language vitality, Indian languages, Indo-Aryan languages, Munda languages, multilingual education
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Issue: 3, 2021
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: LINGUISTICS
Pages: 70 — 80
Downloads: 806