New Languages of Schooling: Ethnicity, Education and Equality in Nepal

Mother-tongue education has remained a controversial issue in Nepal. Scholars, activists and policy-makers have, on the one hand, favored mother-tongue education from the standpoint of social justice. Against these views, others have identified this as predominantly groupist in its orientation and not helpful in an imagination of a unified national community. Taking this contention as a point of inquiry, this paper aims to explore the contested space of mother-tongue education to understand the ways in which people position themselves within the polarizing debates of ethnicity-based claims on education in Nepal. Drawing from the ethnographic fieldwork in mother-tongue education school, in this paper, I illustrate that the students made meaning in their everyday world by maintaining the multilingual repertoire that included their mother tongue, Nepali and some English; multilingualism was used as a strategy for mother-tongue education. I propose a notion of simultaneity to explain this attempt to seek membership into multiple groups and display of apparently contradictory dynamics. The practices in these schools, on the one hand, display inward-looking characteristics through the everyday use of mother tongue, the construction of unified ethnic identity and cultural practices. On the other hand, there were outward-looking dynamics of making claims in the universal spaces of national education and public places. The salience of these processes is the simultaneous membership to multiple groups, claims over public spaces and in the spaces of nationalism, hitherto associated with Nepali. This paper illustrates that contrary to the essentialist categories espoused in both nationalist discourse and ethnic activism, students in these school display affiliation to multiple languages and identities that were seen as neither incompatible nor binary opposites

TRANSLATING A MOTHER TONGUE

Most Indonesians of my generation are multilingual; we can at least speak two or three languages, namely Indonesian, English, and a local language. This paper reflects my personal effort in discovering how the languages are positioned in my mind. I assume that Javanese was the first language I acquired, followed by Indonesian, and then English. As I grew up, Javanese became the language I use mainly at home or to certain people only. Indonesian and English, on the other hand, seem to be taking the more dominant place in terms of level of proficiency and amount of usage. Needless to say, I only use my mother tongue in informal conversational level. By translating Javanese literary work into English, relying on translation theories and language of thought, this project helps me assess my real mastery of a language I call mother tongue. The reflection on the translation process shows that my oral proficiency in the mother tongue is perceived to be higher than reading and writing proficiencies. The reading comprehension skills in the register of literary texts are lower than expected because of my intensive exposure to other languages

Adoption of technology in teaching of language: A critical assessment of Punjabi(mother tongue)

Mother-tongue plays a paramount role in child’s development. It is the heart and soul of child's education. It is the foundation on which the personality of the child is built. The study of mother- tongue is of dire necessity on psychological, intellectual, emotional and cultural grounds. It is our duty to adopt and adapt mother-tongue as medium of all non-linguistic subjects, thereby making it easy and interesting for the child to learn these subjects. Teachers rarely use teaching technology like multimedia, instructional technology etc. They adopt lecture cum text book method-a boring procedure. Students are made to mug up even stories and poems. Students are passive partners in the learning process. No attempt is made to arouse their creativeness or encourage their self-expression so what they learn is poor learning. This calls for drastic changes. Language learning is a part of education in the wider sense. One of the important causes for the deterioration of the standard of mother-tongue (Punjabi) in Punjab is inadequate provision of teaching aids. In the present study, an attempt has been made to arrive at some precise conclusions.Punjabi,mother tongue, technology

PERMASALAHAN PENGUCAPAN BUNYI VOKAL BAHASAINGGRIS

The English language learners might have problems in the pronunciation of English vowel sounds. It is assumed that the sound system of the mother tongue, in this case Javanese has, to some extent, affected the pronunciation of English sounds. For example, the word ‘English’ that should be pronounced /IŋlIʃ/ is pronounced /ɛŋlIʃ/, and the word ‘name’ that should be pronounced /neim/ is pronounced /nɛim / or /nɛm /. Due to this phenomenon, this paper will discuss the problems of pronunciation of English vowels produced by learners whose mother tongue is Javanese or Indonesian. The participants of study are students of non- English Program. Based on the observation and in-depth interviews with the participants it shows that the mispronunciation the English words is caused by the inadequate process of learning English and the influence of the sound system of Javanese as the mother tongue in the process of learning

LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE OF BALINESE MOTHER TONGUE THROUGH THE TRADITIONAL STORY TELLING (

Maintaining language in particular mother tongue in a community is cumpulsory because it shows identity and attitude of appreciation toward the ancestors’ inheritance. This research is a descriptive qualitative research which aims at investigating the language maintenance of Balinese mother tongue. The research aims to find out whether the habit of telling story (mesatua)(mesatua)is still done in Batu Bulan Village of Gianyar Regency. This research applies Hoffman’s framework; interview and questionnaires were used as the technique in collecting the data. It can be found that the habit of storytelling (mesatua) is rarely done due to the development of modern world and technology. There is a tendency of language shift by parents in conducting storytelling to their children; shifting from mother tongue to national language. The activities were usually done orally by the parents or grandparents. There are many story told to the children and major stories told were I Lutung jak I Kakua, Siap Selem serta I Bawang jak I Kasun

Untying the Mother Tongue

Untying the Mother Tongue explores what it might mean today to speak of someone's attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of ‘mother tongue’, rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions.Introduction | ANTONIO CASTORE AND FEDERICO DAL BO | 1-9But You Don’t Get Used to Anything: Derrida on the Preciousness of the Singular | DEBORAH ACHTENBERG | 11-24Philosophy’s Mother Envy: Has There Yet Been a Deconstruction of the Mother Tongue? | MICHAEL ENG | 25-43‘My Mother Tongue Is a Foreign Language’: On Edmond Jabès’s Writing in Exile | FEDERICO DAL BO | 45-83The Mother Tongue at School | JAKOB NORBERG | 85-103Scarspeak: Thinking the Mother Tongue as a Formative Mark | JULIANE PRADE-WEISS | 105-126The Shuffling of Feet on the Pavement: Virginia Woolf on Un-Learning the Mother Tongue | TERESA PRUDENTE | 127-153‘I know you can cant’: Slips of the Mother Tongue in Fred Moten’s B Jenkins | JEFFREY CHAMPLIN | 155-163The Mother Tongue of Love and Loss: Albert Cohen’s Le Livre de ma mère | CAROLINE SAUTER | 165-179The Staircase Wit: or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller’s Prose | ANTONIO CASTORE | 181-210Wandering Words: Translation against the Myth of Origin in Fritz Mauthner’s Philosophy | LIBERA PISANO | 211-227ReferencesNotes on the ContributorsIndexUntying the Mother Tongue, ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, Cultural Inquiry, 26 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-26