Sole Official Language Research Articles

The impact of monolingual language policies on the multilingual language ecology of Sri Lanka

AbstractThis qualitative study examined the role of different languages used in the country in the lives of 12 participants from the four main ethnic groups of Sri Lanka (i.e., Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher). It sought to understand how monolingual language policies have impacted upon the country's plurilingual language ecology. The study examined the language ideologies of participants to understand how structures of social power have worked through monolingual language policies to influence and shape their language behaviors and practices. While the impact that language policies have had on different Sri Lankan languages has been examined, no study has analyzed it through the point of view of language ideologies of actual speakers of different languages. The observations made by the participants show that the monolingual ideologies of the language policies of 1832 and 1956, by assigning sole official language status to English and Sinhala respectively, have caused them to gain dominance and diminished the status of other languages, thereby altering the plurilingual language ecology of Sri Lanka. Their observations also showed how the 1956 policy's establishment of Sinhala as the dominant language within the language ecology of the country had elevated the position of the majority community—the Sinhalese, and strengthened the power of the then government which had ridden into power through the Sinhalese majority vote. The analysis of data also indicated that, although the 1956 policy was implemented with the aim of dismantling the structures of power introduced during colonial rule, both policies have served to support and reinforce a social hierarchy based on a Western model. What the data revealed about the role that the two monolingual language policies of 1832 and 1956 seem to have played in establishing and reinforcing the dominance of Sinhala and English respectively, suggest that although political subjugation of the country by European powers has officially ended, Sri Lanka continues to operate within the structures of power established during colonial times.

Spatial Perspectives on Adopting and Developing the Two-Way Immersion Program in Estonia’s Kindergartens: Resources & Risks

Ethnic and racial segregation is a common challenge around the world, and resistance to school integration is all too familiar. Exceptions to these patterns thus merit special attention, particularly in contexts where communities have maintained high degrees of separation for generations. In Estonia, where the dominant Russian-speaking minority throughout the Soviet period seldom learned the language, (re)independence in 1991 reversed the ethnic power structure and left most Russian residents with little to no competency in the sole official language of Estonian.

The Four Nationality Thesis: a Conceptual History of a Forgotten Idea

Abstract This article historicizes the ethnicity idea, which has anachronistically come to shape academic understanding of Sindh and Pakistan across a broad period of history. Instead, the Four-Nationality Thesis, and other ideas, animated politics in Pakistan’s earlier decades. The Four Nationality Thesis, which drew on global leftist thought, conceived Pakistan as a set of nationalities, corresponding to its provinces, which were conceived to be distinct, culturally, linguistically, historically, and territorially. It provided the conceptual framework for a federalist politics against the unitary state of Pakistan. When the Sindh government made Sindhi the sole official provincial language in 1972, the ensuing conflict highlighted the conceptual limitations of the nationality idea, and its territorialization of culture. In short, this article argues that the history of concepts is necessary to understand politics in Sindh and Pakistan.

Language visibility in the public space: the linguistic landscape of Masvingo, Zimbabwe

This article investigates the language situation in the public space in Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe, from a linguistic landscape point of view. The data consists of written information displayed on billboards, road signs and buildings. Data were also generated through in-depth interviews and documentary study. The theoretical underpinnings of the study are founded in the linguistic landscape and post-colonial theories. The study established the overwhelming dominance of English both in the cityscape and landscape. While Shona, one of the major indigenous languages of Zimbabwe, appears in a few instances in the form of proper names, most local languages are not part of the visible signs on roads, billboards and buildings in Masvingo. This gives English de facto status as the sole official language, regardless of the fact that the constitution of Zimbabwe officially recognises 15 indigenous languages in addition to English. This silencing of indigenous languages has serious implications for equity in language use in Zimbabwe. The study recommends equitable treatment of languages in the public space to ensure that the languages and cultures associated with all languages of Zimbabwe do not gradually die.

The Relevance of EFL', 'ESL' and Other Such Terms in Contemporary Contexts: The Case of Malaysian English

English in Malaysia has undergone several phases since it entered the country during the colonial period in the early nineteenth century. During the colonial period, English was used mainly for communicating between the colonialists and traders. English was the official language together with Malay when the country attained independence in 1957. However, it lost its status as an official language after ten years, in 1967, when Malay was made the sole official language. The medium of instruction which had been English gradually changed to Malay during the 1970s and 1980s with a deliberate reduction of the role of English in schools. In later years, nevertheless, there was official promotion of English arising from Malay being already firmly established as the national language and the need to keep abreast with global and regional changes. The status of English has, thus, shifted several times throughout the country’s post-colonial period. While it became the “second most important language” nationally and politically, there emerged some variation in its status in some domains, in speech vs writing and, of course, among individuals. Dynamic changes in Malaysian English have also taken place. This paper examines the developments in terms of the status of English in Malaysia, including terms like ‘EFL’ and ‘ESL’ which have been used, and discusses if they are still adequate. We will show how the status of English and the contexts of its uses have changed and why a single term, say ‘second language’, is of little use and has been throughout its history. We will conclude with tentative propositions of what might happen in the future.

DOES THE CHOICE OF LANGUAGE IN TESTS HAVE AN IMPACT ON GENDER EQUALITY IN PRIMARY EDUCATION? A CASE STUDY IN SENEGAL

Purpose: The present study analyses the possible impact on gender equality when using a language familiar to students in tests at primary schools in Sub-Saharan Africa where a European language is the unique medium of instruction and assessment.
 Methodology: To this aim, students at grades 3 and 6 (83 girls and 66 boys) in primary schools in rural Senegal were given two different tests: Mathematics problem-solving tasks and multiple-choice questions of Social Sciences. They were divided at random into a control group if they received the tests in Seerer, the local language familiar to them, or French, the sole official language in the Senegalese education system. After data collection, results were codified for analysis considering two variables: Gender and grade. First, we calculated both the percentage of students who scored the set mark and those who obtained the highest scores. Second, we checked for statistically significant differences between groups by means of One-Way-ANOVA and Tukey tests.
 Findings: Although Seerer as language of tests was found to benefit both genders, results suggest that its use may especially determine girls’ success at school: Girls in the experimental group obtained higher results than girls in the control group, especially the youngest, and many reached the highest scores.
 Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: Findings suggest that first, the use of a language familiar to students in tests seems to have positive effects on their academic results, and second, that it may play a role in bridging the gap between genders in some education models thanks to the evident benefits for girls, especially young ones. Such results might be taken into consideration by education authorities together with other existing examples to introduce local languages in the education system of Senegal and other Sub-Saharan countries where only a European language is employed, as it seems to contribute to reaching gender equality in education. We suggest that local languages could be used in tests from the lower levels of primary education in bilingual programs, thus favouring transfer of linguistic skills and content from the local to the European language, and increasing school success

Towards the Arabisation of Algeria

The Algerian linguistic case differs from the other Arabic-speaking nations’ situations in terms of the coexistence of a number of languages and varieties. Throughout history, Algeria has been colonised and visited by diverse people with divergent cultures, origins and tongues. In fact, after winning its independence in 1962, the authorities started immediately thinking about restoring their identity through the imposition of Arabic as the sole official and national language of the country and Islam as its only religion. Right after the implementation of this policy, various sides made a fuss and expressed disagreement, including the Francophones and the Berberophones. It is noteworthy that despite all the obstacles that the Arabophones have faced and in spite of language competition and the appearance of an international tongue like English in an era of globalization, Arabic remains an official language that one can find in interesting domains and sectors, viz. administrations and education as well.

The linguistic landscape of Bukhara and Tashkent in the post‐Soviet era

The sociopolitical changes that have taken place in Central Asia since the downfall of the Soviet Union have had a significant effect on the linguistic landscape of Uzbekistan. Russian, the dominant language of the Soviet era, lost its power and prestige in the wake of independence. Uzbek, the mother tongue of the local people, became the country's sole official language, while English, once considered the language of the Western bourgeoise, started to flourish as the most popular foreign language in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. Using the concept of linguistic landscape, this study analyzes the presence and use of Uzbek, Russian, and English languages on public and private signs in two major Uzbek cities. The findings of the study reveal that even though it has been almost 30 years since Uzbek was declared as an official language, its presence on public and private signs is not as widespread as people might think.

Dictionnaire des Francophones

Dictionnaire des Francophones Jason Siegel (bio) Dictionnaire des Francophones. https://www.dictionnairedesfrancophones.org and as apps from the Google Play Store and the Apple Store. Paris: Ministry of Culture, 2021. Free of charge. The Dictionnaire des Francophones (DDF), bearing the imprimatur of France’s Ministry of Culture, is a laudable attempt to create a dictionary of the French language from far and wide. It represents a genuine effort to recognize that there is value in documenting the dialectal and sociolectal variation found across the Francophone world. In a country famous for its tendencies toward centralization and its reverence for a rigidly standardized form of its sole official language, the DDF attests that ideas about decentralization in France and the value of la Franco-phonie to the status of French as a world language have been accepted at the highest levels of French government. It is a way of demonstrating that the French language is not solely the remit of the venerated French Academy, but also of each and every speaker of French around the world. As such, it is committed to being a work its users can participate directly in building and monitoring and is largely based on the French Wiktionnaire (Wiktionary), another participatory dictionary. Because this is an online dictionary and very clearly still a work in progress, I will discuss the areas of the DDF that ought not to change and then some aspects that must be dealt with rather soon. Starting a dictionary with such a broad scope from scratch would have been a massive undertaking, so the DDF is cleverly scaffolded on existing resources that already meet its criteria of inclusivity. In addition to the aforementioned Wiktionnaire, it incorporates the Inventaire des particularités lexicales du français en Afrique noire, the Dictionnaire des [End Page 221] synonymes, des mots et expressions des français parlés dans le monde, the work Belgicismes—Inventaire des particularités lexicales du français en Belgique, the Dictionnaire des régionalismes de France, and the Base de données lexicographiques panfrancophone, with terminological databases FranceTerme and the Grand Dictionnaire terminologique (Québec) to be added in coming months. Comparisons between the DDF and several of these sources indicates that they were imported into the online version without deliberate modification. By virtue of harvesting these existing lexicographic and terminological resources, the DDF claims to have 400,000 entries from around the world, with particular attention to Europe, Africa and the Americas. The web and app interfaces are very similar. The front matter is easy to locate and to understand. There are Search and Help buttons at the top of each page, and a drop-down menu in the top right corner of each page explains the history and purpose of the DDF and, to a lesser extent, that of its source materials. It gives mostly good information on the characteristics of the Francophone world (though it inexplicably excludes the Antilles as a notable location where French Creoles are spoken). Important for a work inviting contributions from the public, there is a good section on how to write a sense for a dictionary, with explanations that are clear and light on jargon; they would be suitable as part of any introductory lexicography course. On the page about understanding an entry, discussions of French grammar are interspersed with information about the use of certain labels such as vieilli ‘old’ and familier ‘familiar’. Some of the jargon in the grammar discussions is used in entries (such as tense and person vocabulary), while other terms are not found as labels in the dictionary (for example, certain sense relations such as holonyme ‘holonym, whole-for-part metonym’ and par litote ‘as under-statement’), slightly undermining the quality of the section. For lexicographers looking to understand the project better, the description of the project laid out in Dolar et al. (2020) would be even more useful than the front matter. The DDF has several features that I believe are important for the user and for the mission. The first notable departure from other French dictionaries is the privileging of regional senses over worldwide senses. For example, the entry quitter ‘leave (tr.)’ lists senses from the Caribbean...

Evaluating Academic Literacies Course Types

Evaluating Academic Literacies Course Types

India’s Influence on Sri Lanka’s Language Issue and Linguistic Nationalisms in the Late 1940s and 1950s

The aim of this research was to examine the influence and impact of India's language issue on determining the characteristics of Sinhalese and Tamil linguistic nationalisms and the commencement of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. The research, which was based on secondary data, used interpretive approach for the analysis. It found that the language issue of India influenced both the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils in Sri Lanka to adopt inflexible and radical stances on language. On one hand, while the arguments and policies of Hindi language loyalists of North India encouraged Sinhalese to justify their demand to make Sinhala the sole official language, the radical Tamil linguistic nationalism prevalent at that time in South India ignited fear among Sinhalese that led them to be uncompromising on language issues. On the other hand, South Indian Tamil linguistic nationalism provided Tamils with both ideology and inspiration for a radical stance and activism, and profoundly influenced the development of a Tamil group identity that was solely based on language in Sri Lanka. The study proves that the conditions for the development of such an identity were largely unavailable domestically at that moment. Hence, it is clear that the influence and impact of India's language issue was very deterministic in characterising the two nationalisms; Sinhala and Tamil in Sri Lanka which later on collided with each other and resulted in an ethnic conflict.

Linguistic landscape in Kuala Lumpur international airport, Malaysia

ABSTRACT This article presents the results of a small-scale study on the linguistic landscape in the two terminals of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Thirty-one digital photos of non-identical signs out of a total of 368 ‘top-down’ signs identified in the public space were collected, and questionnaires were administered to airport users to gauge their attitudes towards the languages used on the multilingual signs in the two airports. The findings showed that (1) Malay, which is the sole national and official language of the country, is displayed in the dominant position in all the multilingual signage. (2) English, which is displayed below Malay, indexes English as the second most important language after Malay besides being the language for international communication. (3) The display of Japanese, Arabic, and Chinese at the same level and in the same-sized font indicates that these languages are given equal priority in a top-bottom system. (4) Most of the two airport users agreed that a combination of Malay and English should be used on the signage in Malaysian airports and are happy with its multilingual environment. However, some local Malaysians strongly feel that Tamil should be added to the signage.

Possessive pronouns in indonesian language

Indonesian, which is called bahasa Indonesia by its speakers, is classified as a Malayic language of Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian language family [2]. It is spoken mainly in the Republic of Indonesia, as the sole official and national language and as the common language for hundreds of ethnic groups living there. In Indonesia 22.8 million people speak Indonesian as their first language, while more than 140 million speak it as their second language. It is over 80% cognate with Standard Malay, which is spoken in Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore[2]. Indonesian is an agglutinative language with a rich affixation system, including a variety of prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes, and reduplication. In general, grammatical relations are only distinguished in terms of word order. Indonesian is a diglossic language. The high variety of Indonesian, also called bahasa resmi ‘official language’ or bahasa baku ‘standard language’. This work will analyse examples in these two types of language forms. This article analyse the means of denoting possessiveness and possessive pronouns in Indonesian language.

Maintaining Minahasan Languages Through Oral Tradition

According to Ethnologue, Minahasan languages, such as Tontemboan, Tombulu, Tonsea, Tolour, Tonsawang, Ratahan, Ponosakan, and Bantik are categorized as threatened and even shifting. It means that if there are no actual measures to rejuvenate the languages, it could be foreseen that Minahasan languages will be left with no native speakers. Mainly treated as vernaculars, and with the internalization of Manado Malay as the lingua franca in Minahasa and Indonesian language as the sole official language in Indonesia, both factors gave impact to the condition of Minahasan languages. That being said, in general, Minahasan languages have less prestige than Manado Malay and Indonesian in daily communication in Minahasa.Therefore, in this paper, I would like to argue the importance of language maintenance, especially for endangered languages in Minahasa that such languages should be learned and used by people in Minahasa according to their areas. Moreover, I would explain what are considered to be oral tradition and the previous examples of documented oral tradition in Minahasan languages, then the reason of the importance of oral tradition in language maintenance and language learning.Keywords: Oral Tradition, Minahasan Languages, Language Maintenance

Language rights in the constitutions, organic acts, and statutes of the territories of the United States and the Freely Associated States

AbstractThe constitutions, organic acts, and statutes of the territories of the United States and the Freely Associated States are given an exhaustive screening to identify legal language defining the linguistic obligations of each territory or associated state and the language rights of individuals and groups dwelling within. The author suggests that the territories of the United States and the Freely Associated States are well served by “hands-on” policies declaring provisions that protect the rights of language minority groups, or of all people living in the territory (i.e., Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa) and associated states (i.e., the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau). As in many states in the United States, the absence of an explicit language policy in the United States Virgin Islands has not prevented it from practicing implicit language policies that promote the use of English while also allowing minority languages to be used in the territory. Unlike many states in the United States which declare English as the sole official language and/or enact provisions to protect official English, none of the territories and associated states of the United States declares English as the sole official language or establishes provisions that hinder the rights of language minority groups.

‘Native-speaker’ varieties of English: Thai perceptions and attitudes

It is important to gauge and explore current Thai perceptions of and attitudes towards varieties of English. Language attitudes are some of the factors that affect language policy direction and institutional practices, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including Thailand, are adopting English as their sole official language in 2015, making such an investigation particularly timely. In Thailand little if any prior research had investigated attitudes. For this questionnaire-based study, research questions investigated which varieties 251 Thai learners of English thought they were actually using; which they saw as their target model; and also explored their attitudes towards different ‘native-speaker’ varieties – pre-work had indicated that such varieties still predominated over alternatives such as ‘English as a Lingua Franca’. Responses were analysed using both qualitative and quantitative keyword and content analysis. Findings indicated strong but diverse perceptions of the nature of varieties, and also said something about the dynamic nature of such perceptions and the attitudes of learners in Thailand. We conclude by suggesting how our findings might relate to the realisation of current language policy and practice in Thailand, and how they might serve as a stepping stone towards investigations of perceptions across ASEAN and beyond.

Weak language norm(s) versus domestic interests: Why Ukraine behaves the way it does

AbstractMany analyses of the role of international norms in world politics study those particular norms that can be classified as relatively robust. Furthermore, such analyses critique alternative theories which foreground the role of domestic interests in affecting the behaviour of state elites, by calling into question the presumed objectivity of interests. The present article takes a different tack to the largely similar challenge. Specifically, it shows – on the example of Russian speakers in Ukraine – that even weak and contested international norms, like the norm of language rights for national minorities, can have independent effects on the behaviour and policy of state elites. The latter holds, in demonstrable terms, if state elites act in ways that militate against their most salient apparent interests. In the Ukraine case, this article argues, such ‘interests’ are the protection of the Ukrainian language as the country’s sole official language. So the cause of the (variable) behaviour of elites in Ukraine lay in a weak and contested norm, namely the norm of language rights for national minorities.

Investigating a Disappearance: Multilingualism and Language Erasure in Assia Djebar’s La Disparition de la langue française

The title of Assia Djebar's 2003 novel La Disparition de la langue francaise provocatively announces the of the French language. Its content, which details the unsolved of its protagonist, offers readers a deceptively simple parallel between two disappearances. Berkane, the hero of the story and one of its narrators, disappears from a roadside in Kabylia in the same way that the French language disappeared from Algeria in the 1990s. These parallel disappearances could be said to evoke, in the case of the former, the murders of many Francophone intellectuals during the violence of the decennie noire, and in the case of the latter, strict Algerian Arabization laws that sought to replace French with Arabic in classrooms, in the media, and in official government business. However, this deceptive parallel yields an oversimplified interpretation, both of the novel's complexity and of the historical and linguistic situation in Algeria. Berkane does not necessarily represent the French language, nor is the French language precisely (or exclusively) what is disappearing in Djebar's Algeria. La Disparition begins with Berkane, a budding author, preparing to return to Algeria for the first time after over twenty years as a self-described exile in Paris. His fateful return takes place in 1990, mere months before the electoral victory of the Front Islamique du Salut would set off the decade of violence commonly referred to as the decennie noire. The narrative composition used to recount this return is structurally complex. Berkane's initial bittersweet homecoming is described, in a premiere partie, by two narrators who alternate in numbered subsections: Berkane and an unidentified narrator who uses the third person to refer to the protagonist. In this portion of the narrative, readers learn that Berkane has left behind a French lover, Marise, in Paris, but upon his return to Algiers he develops a relationship with Nadjia, an Algerian woman. A deuxieme partie exclusively uses Berkane's first-person narration and excerpts from his autobiographical writings to recount aspects of his childhood that seemed to have been buried during his time in Paris: his years in a French colonial school, his resistance to colonialism, and his subsequent time in a French prison as an adolescent. Yet the joy of his return is mixed with nostalgia for an Algeria that seems to be disappearing before his eyes, metonymized through the Casbah and its state of increasing physical disrepair. The novel ends with a troisieme partie, in which Berkane vanishes after embarking on a quest to relocate the centers in Kabylia where he was detained by French troops, an experience he planned to include in the autobiography he was writing. This closing section of (exclusively third-person) narration follows the reaction of three of those closest to Berkane: his journalist brother Driss, Marise, and Nadjia. Berkane's disappearance, however, remains unsolved. Not only do readers not know whether he has run away, been killed, or been kidnapped, they are also left in suspense as to the meaning of this disappearance. Who, or what, has really disappeared? Despite the novel's title, the putative of French is not extensively discussed in the text. One possible referent of this could be Algeria's Arabization legislation. After decades of French domination of the education system and suppression of the Arabic language, Algeria constitutionalized Arabic as its national language and declared that it would become the sole official language of education. However, the difficulty of implementing necessary educational reforms meant that after independence many Algerians were still educated in French. While French flourished in practice, in theory politicians described the disappearance of French from the Algerian curriculum as an ultimate goal that had yet to be achieved. Ahmed Taleb-Ibrahimi, education minister from 1965 to 1970, stated that Arabization would aneantir ce melange d'elements de cultures disparates, et souvent contradictoires, heritees des epoques de decadence et de la periode coloniale, de lui substituer une culture nationale unifiee, liee intimement a notre passe et a notre civilisation arabo-islamique (63). …

Uses and functions of English in Namibia's multiethnic settings

ABSTRACTIn a context where new English varieties from the Outer Circle have been receiving increasing attention, I propose to outline a descriptive approach to their uses and functions on the basis of their patterns of co‐occurrence with local languages across intra and inter‐ethnic boundaries. The case study I offer is Namibia, a multiethnic and multilingual African country where English has been the sole official language since 1990 without having had much local history prior to that date. The general question that I pose is to what extent and how English is used in informal interactions in Namibia. Considering Namibia's ethnolinguistic diversity as well as the locally widespread practice of code‐switching, the questions I more specifically ask are: What are the patterns of code‐switching with which English finds itself associated both within and across Namibia's inter‐ethnic boundaries, and how can they be characterized in terms of social function? On the basis of a corpus of intra‐ and inter‐ethnic interactions involving a range of Namibian ethnicities, I show evidence of a continuum of linguistic usage ranging from different patterns of code‐switching involving English and local languages to more or less monolingual English varieties. I finally place that evidence within the perspective of new Englishes theory, emphasizing the possible relevance of code‐switching patterns to the emergence of indigenized English varieties in general, and of an indigenized Namibian variety in particular.

From Languages in Competition to Languages in Complementation: Accounting for Language-in-Education Policy Formulation and Implementation in Zambia 1964 - 2014

This paper outlines the history of language-in-education policy in Zambia from 1964 to 2014. It examines some of the major factors which informed language-in-education policy formulation and implementation in the country in relation to four landmark phases: the 1966 proclamation of English as sole official language at national level and as language of classroom instruction from Grade One to the highest level of education; the 1977 education reforms recommendations; the 1996 language-in-education policy; and, finally, the 2014 declaration and implementation of the policy prescribing the use of familiar languages for instruction in initial literacy and numeracy from Grade One to Grade Four. The paper concludes that though English has remained the sole official language at national level over the years, there has been increasing recognition of the role of local languages as languages of classroom instruction. As a result, the early top-down and monolingual approach to language-in-education policy formulation and implementation, premised on the principle of languages in competition, has since given way to the bottom-up and multilingual approach, guided by the principle of languages in complementation. In order to consolidate the gains scored over the years, the paper argues for a comprehensive operationalisation of the current language-in-education policy through formulation of a comprehensive language development plan and the production of sociolinguistic surveys at both national and community level to aid teachers in determining which language or languages to use as media of classroom instruction in a given locality.