The making and unmaking of languages in schools

Abstract

This paper discusses some of the issues and challenges of languages-in-education in multilingual polities such as India. The paper critically examines the relationship between languages of the school and languages of the surroundings and looks at ways in which this relationship can be made symbiotic. One of the major tasks undertaken by modern nation-states is the creation of languages-of-the-states from the ecology of the languages-of-the-people. While the former is discrete, explicitly codes and has relatively sharp boundaries the latter can more accurately be described with the help of the metaphor of flow and as having fuzzy boundaries. The creation of discrete languages from fluid linguistic varieties has been an area of major concern and constitutes as major chunk of language politics over the past few centuries. Standardization of languages is thus a need of nation-states. What is crucial is the ways in which the standardization process is implemented and therein lies the nature of language politics involved. If the process is such that it creates an antagonistic relationship between languages-of-the-states and languages-of-the-people then a large part of our linguistic diversity will be pushed to the brink of extinction. One way of developing a symbiotic relationship is to take a closer look towards the possibilities offered by diglossia. If an H could be developed in a way that it does not offer an advantage to any particular group by limiting its use to monitored use of language as such then the L’s can peacefully coexist in the domain of spontaneous, unmonitored use of language. If, instead, the L of a particular group is developed for H functions then it creates an avalanche of preferences towards that particular variety at the cost of other L’s.