Multilingual education reforms in Georgia in the post-Soviet period: discourses of ethnic minority integration

Abstract

This research analyses how effective multilingual educational reforms (MLE) have been in post-Soviet Georgia in helping ethnic minorities to learn Georgian as a second language in order to integrate into Georgian society. It also examines the language ideologies at play within the interactive dynamics of top-down and bottom-up discourses. This research used qualitative methods of analysis and the data was collected in February and March 2015. The research revealed that MLE processes in Georgia at the current time have not been effective in bridging the language gap for ethnic minorities due to the low proficiency of the Georgian language among ethnic minority teachers. Furthermore, MLE reforms have produced ideologies of exclusion rather than inclusion and the research has revealed a social hierarchy of languages (Weber in Multilingualism, education and change, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2009) is prevalent within Georgian society and in all spheres of language use. However, at the grass-roots level the research discovered that language shift is happening as a natural process externally to multilingual education processes among ethnic minorities in Georgia. This has been attributed to an increase in the motivation of ethnic minority populations to improve their economic opportunities within Georgian society though the use of social media and information technology.