Abstract
Abstract This paper aims to outline the language politics in Nepal by focusing on the influences and expansions shifted from Global North to the Global South. Based on a small-scale case study of interviews and various political movements and legislative documents, this paper discusses linguistic diversity and multilingualism, globalization, and their impacts on Nepal’s linguistic landscapes. It finds that the language politics in Nepal has been shifted and changed throughout history because of different governmental and political changes. Different ideas have emerged because of globalization and neoliberal impacts which are responsible for language contact, shift, and change in Nepalese society. It concludes that the diversified politics and multilingualism in Nepal have been functioning as a double-edged sword, which on the one hand promotes and preserves linguistic and cultural diversity and on the other hand squeezes the size of diversity by vitalizing the Nepali and English languages through contact and globalization.
Highlights
IntroductionMulticultural, multiracial, and multi-religious country. Despite its small size, Nepal is a country of linguistic diversity with four major language families, namely, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Dravidian (Munda), and Austro-Asiatic, and one language isolate, Kusunda (Poudel and Baral 2021)
Nepal is a multilingual, multicultural, multiracial, and multi-religious country
This paper aims to outline the language politics in Nepal by focusing on the influences and expansions shifted from Global North to the Global South
Summary
Multicultural, multiracial, and multi-religious country. Despite its small size, Nepal is a country of linguistic diversity with four major language families, namely, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Dravidian (Munda), and Austro-Asiatic, and one language isolate, Kusunda (Poudel and Baral 2021). Both monolingual and multilingual ideologies remained as points of debate in political and social spaces. Research related to language politics focuses on identifying and critiquing any sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use (Dunmre 2012: 742; Silverstein 1979: 193). In this context, every political movement is the outcome of different conflicting ideas between language users and linguistic differences running through any society (Pelinka 2018). This paper tries to overview the language politics in Nepal which has been influenced by various external and internal factors
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