Language- a contentious issue in multilingual Malaysia?

Professor Maya David

In multiethnic Malaysia the language for education issue has always been a contentious issue. Language embodies or involves deep cultural, religious and ethnic issues. From independence in 1957 and till today the choice of language as a medium of instruction has resulted in constant and continuous public discussions resulting in compromises or forms of accommodation and segregated educational systems leading to polarisation and cleavages in Malaysian society. The choice of Malay as the national language and medium of instruction has empowered some ethnic groups and disempowered others. Ironically, it has even disempowered those whom it was supposed to empower! For example, today many Malay graduates are unable to find jobs due to lack of proficiency in the English language. The education policy has also resulted in unequal access for minority ethnic groups whose Mother tongue did not feature in the schooling system. This has resulted in language grievances from both the vernacular and aboriginal population. For example, the

Chinese community, which comprises about one fifth of the Malaysian population, has been deeply unhappy over the official denial of the building of upper secondary Chinese schools and the non-recognition of the school leaving certificate.

Whilst the national language is seen as the mainstay of nationalism and unity it is clear to many that other languages like the English language and Mandarin aid in finding employment. With the rising influx of Chinese interests in South East Asia and the country’s dependence on foreign investment and trade the increasing role of both the English language and Mandarin have to be weighed against the rights and voices of Malay language nationalists. Diplomatic discourse is essential to help Malay nationalists understand the role of these other languages. In essence, there must be negotiation between the need to accommodate multiculturalism in a globalised world and Malay dominated nationalism.

Language, it is therefore clear, has a critical role to play both in creating conflict and mitigating such conflict. Language related issues are constantly creating conflictual situations in multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic Malaysia. For instance, not so long ago the use of the lexical item Allah in bibles in the Malay language was deemed unacceptable and resulted in litigation. The latest language in education controversy is the introduction of the Khat calligraphy in primary schools by the Malay Islamic Minister of Education under the new Government has inflamed anger and conflict. Chinese educationists claim that it is a way of Islamization of the non- Muslim school going population. How this and other conflictual situations which arise due to language in education policies, which have been constantly changing in the 60 over years since independence, are negotiated and to some extent, resolved will be discussed in this paper.

Contentious consensus: challenges of diversity to identity based language policies

Ritu Jain.

Language policies in Singapore have long served as tools for the management of its linguistic diversity comprising mainly the Chinese, Malay, and Indian vernaculars. Officially designated community ‘mother tongues’ (i.e., Mandarin, Malay, Tamil) have not only been used to strengthen nation-building and maintain ethnic harmony, but also as instruments of socio-economic development. This presentation draws attention to the under-studied languages of the ‘Indians’ in Singapore: the role of Tamil in the linguistic representation of Indians and the challenges posed by such singularity to the immensely diverse represented South Asian population.

The presentation begins by tracing the process by which Tamil became established as the pan-Indian identity; evaluates policy measures necessitated for the accommodation of languages (in education) marginalized through such representation; assesses implications of the availability of choice as well as of the preference of Hindi among the more recently arriving immigrants; finally, it highlights the Scylla and Charybdis dilemma of contemporary policy makers: reinforcing the majority linguistic identity (Tamil) disadvantages those with alternate language affiliations while acknowledging additional languages enhances the risk of a contending identity and a potential breach of community harmony.

The presentation concludes with a discussion of the implications of linguistic representation of collective identities to the management of pluralist populations. It suggests that linguistic diversity and identity based language policies are mutually challenging and proposes the delinking of identity from education policies to avert predicaments posed by the dominant linguistic identity to contending identities in linguistically heterogeneous societies.

‘Sinhala-only’ Policy Revisited: Pre-independence Discourses on Official Language

Sandagomi Coperahewa

In 1956, eight years after political independence, the Official Language Act No.33 of 1956 (popularly known as the ‘Sinhala-only’ Act) made Sinhala the sole official language of Sri Lanka, replacing the ex-colonial language, English. It has become a firmly established belief among political and social historians that Sri Lanka’s language controversy emerged during the 1950s over the selection of an official language. Moving away from this dominant paradigm of post-independence language politics, this paper focuses on the pre-independence discourses on ‘national language’/ ‘official language’ and shows how the idea of one official language first emerged in the colonial setting and continued to the post-colonial era. Utilizing previously unexamined sources, the analysis traces pre-independence discourses and ideological strands of “Sinhala-only” language policy and shows that the subsequent hegemonic demand for ‘Sinhala-only’ followed on from a colonial legacy. The central argument of this paper will help to revise understandings of the history of the country’s debate on official languages.

RECENT LANGUAGE PROTESTS IN ODISHA: SOME OBSERVATIONS

B.N.Patnaik

During the last five years, language matters have become a fairly hot topic for the media in Odisha, both print and electronic, which had not been the case for decades. Serious concern has been expressed by many Odia linguists, language activists and intellectuals about the neglect Odia has been receiving in administration and education. The domains of the use of Odia have been shrinking and today, many, especially in the urban areas, are encouraging their children to use more Hindi and English in preference to Odia. The apprehension is that if this trend persists, then in about five decades, Odia may become the language of limited communication in Odisha.

Odia language activists have demanded that Odia be used at all levels of administration and be the medium of instruction at all levels, at least at the primary and the secondary levels. Some have demanded the setting of an Odia University and some have been trying to impress upon the Odia speakers to speak and write in pure, that is, unmixed Odia.

The paper is basically a critique of some of the more important efforts of the Odia language activists and the State government’s response to the same. In conclusion, it suggests some affirmative action that must be taken to deal with the situation of Odia today.

Language contact in North-Eastern India: Some traits

Tista Bagchi

Language contact has been recognised as a significant domain of inquiry as regards the ecology of languages in the world since over a half-century (Weinreich 1963). In relation to linguistic history in South and South-East Asia, contact among different languages and language families (Thomason & Kaufman 1988, Mufwene 2001) is an especially intricate and academically worthwhile topic of inquiry and analysis. It turns out that four of the five major language families identified as being spoken within the boundaries of India are represented by the multitude of languages in use in the geographically and culturally rich North-Eastern region of India, which latter is also significant for its borders and its historical contact with South-East Asia: the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan family represented by the bulk of the languages used in this region, the Austro-Asiatic family represented by Khasi-Pnar and by Munda-speaking migrant workers, Indic, and even Dravidian (given especially the presence of Tamil settlers at the Manipur-Myanmar border, besides Dravidian-speaking diaspora in cities of the region). Besides these, at least one more language family of South-East Asia, the Tai-Kadai family, is represented in Upper Assam / Eastern Arunachal Pradesh in this region (Das 2014). Decades and even centuries of contact have resulted in interesting patterns of emergence, shift, and maintenance: Nagamese has emerged as an interesting “contact language” (or “pidgin creole”) that is widely used in the region, incorporating grammar and lexical items from languages cutting across family boundaries (Bhattacharjya 1994, Velupillai 2014); several Tibeto-Burman languages seem to have partially lost the tone phonology that characterises many Sino-Tibetan languages, and their word order typology has been largely homogenised to those of Indic and Dravidian languages, while significant phonological variation has come to characterise Silchar Bangla (Dey 2010, 2014); and, by contrast, Khasi and (to some extent, at least) Pnar seem to have resolutely maintained their distinctive typological patterns in morphology (with predominant prefixing) and in syntax (with SVO and P-DP word orders, maintained in Vietnamese farther south-east of India; cf. also Lyngdoh 2012). This presentation focuses on these various cross-processes of language contact and accommodation / maintenance found to have occurred in this historically and strategically significant region of India bordering South-East Asia.

Originality and plagiarism: some issues at the communication-academia interface

Probal Dasgupta

In this paper, the terms of reference familiar from the language rights perspective that stresses the importance of education (especially early education) in the learner’s mother tongue are sought to be connected, in the context of the research tradition of substantivist linguistics, to issues in what has often been viewed as a different domain, that of the freedom of speech. This conceptual exercise is shown to have practical implications for those concerned with the implementation of human rights in several domains.

Why should a research programme in linguistics that highlights the relation between spoken language and written language be called substantivism? The reference is to the fact that professional linguists have traditionally used the term ‘substances’, rather than ‘media’, to refer to the phonic medium (or substance) of speaking and the graphic medium (or substance) of writing. Those of us who are substantivist linguists discourage the formalist mainstream’s willingness to examine abstract forms taken out of the context of concrete exchanges, spoken and written.

This is why we take an interest in issues of free speech and originality (Dasgupta 2017). In the present paper, we seek to connect such inquiry with the familiar thread (Mohanty et al. 2009) that focuses on the right of children to receive primary education in their mother tongue and secondary education in a basket of languages that continues to maintain high proficiency in the mother tongue while welcoming the addition of optimal proficiency in some widely used language of practical importance such as English.

Instead of delving deep into theoretical and conceptual issues in some arcane terminology, we begin with a practical issue that is bound to arise in the not too distant future. Readers are aware that certain gatekeeping systems already use electronic search tools in order to detect plagiarism. University students submitting term papers or dissertations are required to have their work vetted by such systems so that the texts are accorded preliminary acknowledgement as being, on the face of it, their own writing, not copied from the works of others. In recent years, this has become an arena of controversy, concerning matters that I am not raising here, but merely flagging for independent attention. Our focus now is on linguistic issues. Given the current state of the art in the technology of electronic searches, the gatekeeping systems compare English writing with English writing, Bangla writing with Bangla writing, etc. In other words, if you submit an English dissertation of which large parts are surreptitiously translated from somebody else’s Bangla writing, the software will be unable to detect your plagiarism, for it is not capable of comparing your English text with the Bangla archive.

However, progress in rough and ready machine translation has attained reasonably high standards in this decade. One can foresee that technologists should be able to harness an electronic search engine to reasonably proficient automatic translation modules in the near future. When they do so, plagiarism detection software will cross the language barrier. Let us consider in advance some implications that will become ethically, scientifically and aesthetically important at that moment, and that will also spill over into the political dimension.

The political right to free speech is seldom considered in these terms. Even a moment’s reflection, however, makes it obvious that in order to express dissent from a received view, in order to look a powerful system in the eye and say “You have been falsely stating that the earth is flat; in fact the earth is round”, the dissident needs to be able to quote the authorities to the effect that “the earth is flat” before going on to assert the heretical view that the earth is round. Naive plagiarism software may try to stop the dissident by saying, “Excuse me, when you use the word sequence the earth is flat, you are guilty of plagiarism; our algorithms detect five hundred million hits for the sequence the earth is flat; therefore you must rephrase your sequence before we allow you to submit your text”. We all know that these systems have to be upgraded into second approximation systems capable of telling true from apparent cases of plagiarism. However, we have yet to converge on a clearly articulated account of what would count as true plagiarism.

A theory of plagiarism would by the same token also be a theory of originality, of serious creativity. And creativity is of course not amenable to exhaustive scientific unpacking, despite the many attempts to bring scientific inquiry to bear on it.

Some of the concerns in this area do not at first blush appear to have anything to do with matters of language as such. For example, consider the paradoxical fact that the authorities responsible for the well-being of universities – in the final analysis, government officials who monitor the progress of the country’s university system – are required by their mandate to exert two opposing kinds of pressure. They want the youth of the nation to grow into a strong and competitive population capable of vying with the best in the world; consequently, they wish to foster originality, which (to put it crudely) means creating new propositions that others have not enounced before. But they also, especially in tradition-bound societies, want the young to be respectful of and subservient to their elders, and disciplined along the lines chosen by the authorities; therefore, they wish to foster conformity, which at a first approximation means repeating old statements that others have uttered earlier.

Now, it is indeed obvious that this moral and political contradiction that lies at the heart of the authorities’ relationship with the students in their care has certain effects that are of significance in the linguistics of discourse. However, critics may emphasize that linguists have no specific toolkit that enables us in this academic discipline to offer concrete solutions to the difficulty. In this sense, it is a moral and political problem with discursive side-effects, not a problem that linguists or discourse analysts per se are in a position to address. All that we can do on behalf of the discipline is to point up the salience of this problem, and to tell the public emphatically that designing adequate plagiarism software is not a neutral task amenable to purely technological characterization and solutions, but is an enterprise fraught with moral and political baggage – and needs to be debated in the public sphere.

It is important to note, however, that some aspects of the problems being flagged in this paper are of specifically linguistic import and are best addressed within our discipline’s terms of reference. In particular, what lies at the heart of the question of originality versus plagiarism has to do with the concept of making a contribution to knowledge or to art. Now, cognitive validity, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder at the level of the reference language in which the putative contribution is being offered. For it is the language that shapes the patterns of accessibility in the archive that exists in that particular language. Different speech communities configure pedagogy and access to subarchives differently. In order to ascertain whether a proposal is an original contribution or not, the evaluators needs to compare it with other propositions already available in the archive of the reference language with respect to which the evaluation is being done (some readers may need to be reminded that we are here using ‘archive’ as a technical term designating the set of all relevant documents in a given language, not in the sense of a building that physical houses certain historical records). But availability itself is a matter of access, which as we have seen depends on access pathways permitted (or facilitated) by the culture associated with the language.

For this purpose, it is inappropriate, for instance, to regard British English and American English as the same language, or for that matter Bangladeshi Bangla and Indian Bangla. In the Anglo-American case, while trade is reasonably free, patterns of sales and electronic access are shaped by forces that ordinary citizens are often ill-informed about, and these forces promote only certain forms and niches of trans-Atlantic access. It is wrong to imagine that Anglo-America is one huge archive where all documents are equally accessible to all viewers. In the South Asian case, we are all aware of the drastically limited options for commercial distribution and therefore of the skewed and constrained patterns of access.

In other words, at a first approximation, one must view Bangladeshi Bangla and Indian Bangla as at least two distinct archives. (Perhaps Indian Bangla should be viewed as segmented into several distinct archives; questions arise regarding patterns of mutual access between the Bangla archive of Tripura, say, and the Bangla archive of West Bengal; for the moment, we are setting those issues aside, but obviously they are of independent importance in their own context.) If someone says something new in West Bengal or something new in Bangladesh, then it is not fair for a computer system to say, “What you are saying is not original at all; it was said last year by so and so on the other side of the Indo-Bangladesh border”, even if plagiarism software is capable of accessing massive portions of the set of documents in both these countries, for it is unreasonable to assume that the author in question, and his or her readers, have that kind of access.

What is this supposed to mean for issues of fairness in the context of originality and plagiarism? What norms should university-deployed systems of gatekeeping adopt, for instance? One author alone obviously cannot run the risk of pontificating about this. All that this author is in a position to say is that substantivism helps us to realize that originality of speech and originality of writing are different; that originality for a child and originality for an adult are different even in the written mode; and that the principle of subsidiarity in the European sense can perhaps be seen as applicable, though it is worth our while in South Asia to contest the specifically European construal of subsidiarity. Even these preliminary ideas, of course, invite criticism; they are certainly not analytic truths, but must be demonstrated to stand up to scrutiny. The main point to be made is that there are issues to be faced here, and that most of the time we relegate these matters to technologists who are ill equipped to handle them.

A speech community associated with movements for the linguistic rights is perhaps especially clearly a stake-holder with regard to questions of what I propose to call ‘cognitive originality adjudication’; thus, speakers of Bangla are likely to want to debate them more sensitively than certain other communities. Obviously, the connection with language rights has to do with the fact that the point of struggling for these rights is to ensure that the capacity for original and spontaneous self-expression attains full flowering. If even tentative conclusions to the debate about cognitive originality adjudication can be reached for Bangla, one might then try to export those ideas to other regions and domains. For English, one would imagine that there would be multiple debates, staged in very different ways depending on domain-specific exigencies. It would be fatuous to second-guess the way such debates might proceed in a particular landscape. By pressing this key one is of course highlighting the possibility of staging similar debates in the case of linguistic landscaping.

Bibliography

Dasgupta, Probal. 2011. Inhabiting Human Languages: The Substantivist Visualization. New Delhi: Samskriti and the Indian Council of Philosophical Research.

Dasgupta, Probal. 2017. Rethinking free speech. Shailendra Kumar Singh et al. (eds.) Ways with Language: A Festschrift in honour of Professor Udaya Narayana Singh. New Delhi: Lakshi. 3-5.

Mohanty, Ajit K.; Panda, Minati; Phillipson, Robert; Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (eds.) 2009. Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.

Negotiating borders: The sociolinguistics of linguistic reorganisation of states in

India

Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi

The linguistic reorganisation of Indian states was an important milestone in post-

independence India. Various aspects of the reorganisation have been studied by social

scientists; these include the visceral linkage of the reorganisation with the colonial history of

the region and colonial practices, the geography and geopolitical connotations of

reorganisation, its implications for building nationalism, the relative significance of religion

and language in the reformation of administrative units in India, language movements,

constitutional provisions for linguistic minorities, and so on (e.g. Brass 1974; Benedikter

2009; Kulkarni-Joshi 2015; Sarangi and Pai 2016; Sengupta 2018). While homogeneisation

and mainstreaming which were implicit in the reorganisation exercise are becoming visible

today in most of the country, some inter-state boundaries remain disputed. This paper will

assess the sociolinguistic impact of linguistic reorganisation especially in the case of such

disputed borders. From a sociolinguistic point of view, language is both a product of

sociohistorical processes and an instrument for forming and transforming social orders. This

paper specifically aims to provide a perspective on the perceived role and use of language in

the disputed Maharashtra-Karnataka border region. The following are some of the issues we

hope to address: (i) The emergent role of language in this region, first as a means to define

the inter-state boundary and later as a means of controlling the boundary. (ii) How and why

language-related provisions and safeguards in the Indian constitution (especially articles

29(A) and 30) have been a failed promise in this border region. (iii) How bilingual speakers

in the border area may or may not use translanguaging as a discursive practice in

communication. (iv) Also, how practical (economic) considerations, such as those described

elsewhere by Bourdieu (1977), are prompting formerly bilingual communities in the border

districts to prefer the new (local) state language over their heritage language, paving the way

for language shift. (v) Importantly, we will investigate whether the assertion of ‘subjective

self-consciousness’ is playing a role in festering the border dispute. Finally, we will compare

the sociolinguistic outcome of reorganisation in the Marathi-Kannada border region with

outcomes for other disputed borders in the country (e.g. Punjab-Haryana and Karnataka-

Kerala) and present a critique of language-based reorganisation in India.

References

Benedikter, T., 2009. Language Policy and Linguistic Minority Rights in India. Transaction

Publishers, London.

Bordieu, 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and

New York.

Brass, P., 1974. Language, Religion and Politics in North India. CUP, Cambridge.

Kulkarni-Joshi, S. 2015. ‘Language and Religion: a perspective from border towns post

linguistic reorganisation of India’ in Language and Communication, Special Volume on

Language and Religion. Ed. Malcah Yaeger-Dror. 2015, 42:75-85.

Sarangi, A. and S. Pai (eds.). 2016. Interrogating Reorganisation of States: Culture, Identity

and Politics in India. Routledge India.

Sengupta, P. 2018. Language as Identity in Colonial India. Palgrave Macmillan.

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