Materials, Medium, and Language Policies in India

Abstract

Language policies of an inherently multilingual country like India should be designed on the basis of societal attitudes toward different languages, their functional values in the various domains, materials available in languages, medium of education, medium of governance, medium of research, and medium of thinking in cognitive domains. They need to be determined by language specialists, who can act as catalysts in the process of social engineering that inevitably involves both people and politicians. India is a conglomeration of States organised on the basis of regional languages. In fact, all Indian languages and imported languages on account of colonization and imperialism are minority languages. This bitter linguistic reality caused social tension before, at the time of, and after independence when discussions were focused on selecting the national language of the country and the official language of the Union Government of India. Even now, language matter in India is an essentially emotive issue. Politicians prefer the- less-said-the-better policy.’ No scientific investigation has been employed to design language policies that are acceptable to people speaking different regional languages and therefore implementable in all the regions of the country. The lack of language policies in Independent India designed by language experts has caused mental agony to millions of school-going children and their parents who prefer English as medium of instruction, has provided space for politicians to play manipulative and divisive politics in the name of language, and has caused a kind of guilt and uncertainty in the mind of English language teachers. This paper aims at exploring what Tamil parents think of educational language policies in the country. Hypothesis and thesis would be substantiated with attitudes collected through a survey administered among parents.