Multilingual Education and India

Dear MLE friends, Minority Rights Group International has released " Indigenous Languages: A View from UNICEF " . This seven-page document provides a succinct summary of UNICEF's view of indigenous languages, but was not included in the main report   State of the World's Minorities and

Dear MLE friends, Minority Rights Group International has released " Indigenous Languages: A View from UNICEF " . This seven-page document provides a succinct summary of UNICEF's view of indigenous languages, but was not included in the main report   State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2009. The summary statement on the end states: In conclusion, it is necessary to work for the maintenance and development of  indigenous languages and for their use throughout society. But it is also necessary  to work with the rest of the population, to promote a culture which respects cultural diversity and enrichment between cultures, in order to establish a framework for inclusive democracy. 

Dear MLE Friends, Last year a couple of people from South Asia participated in the MLE MA level course Payap University in ChiangMai offers in Thailand. In 2010 it will be offered again from Oct 11 till Nov 6th. The details are attached.

Dear MLE friends, Yesterday I visited the new MLE resource centre hosted by Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), sponsored by Unicef. They now have their own office on the campus and also have a nice website: http://www.nmrc-jnu.org/ The website already contains several good MLE related articles, has book references, pictures and other things. There is also a way to register yourself to subscribe to a newsletter: Worth doing!

Dear MLE friends, Kenya is not next door, but given the very interesting list of topics, I thought I should still share this conference announcement with you.

Dear MLE friends, Below is a short article by Dr Michael Tan of the University of the Philippines about the Philippino government's Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTBMLE) programme. It was published in a newspaper called the Inquirer. As mentioned before the Philippines government has decided to implement MultiLingual Education (MLE) in their primary schools. It will be interesting for us in India to follow that as it is an Asian country with many minority languages. A quote: “To implement the new policy, DepEd will support very basic work like developing orthographies (spelling system) for local languages to use for educational materials. Community involvement will be vital for this new program to succeed. Expect to see, in the years ahead, a renewed pride in local languages because of this new policy, even as the Filipino becomes more adept at acquiring proficiency in a second, a third, even a fourth language.”

Dear MLE friends, Most of the articles, research papers and newspaper clippings in this list are building a case to support MLE. However, there are also other voices. Some claiming that the tribal people themselves do not want it. Attached is an article making that claim. This brings out an important question: it seems that at this point the academic and NGO world is quite convinced that a multilingual approach will be best for the children on the long run, but have we been able to interact sufficient with the tribal communities themselves on this? Have we been able to find leaders who really represent the voice of the people themselves?