Multilingual Nations...Some Challenges

India: 437 Languages from 6 Language families

• 1947 (post Independence)
• HINDI (OFFICIAL LANGUAGE); an attempt to pull together disparate ethnic groups & bolster nationalism
• 15 recognized NATIONAL LANGUAGES, state boundaries established by virtue of linguistic homogeneity, but some states have no linguistic majority, so boundaries are disputed.
• Each State can also choose a REGIONAL LANGUAGE to use in local government affairs and education
• WRITING SYSTEMA: 11 different scripts
• ENGLISH, and its role:
• spoken by many
• used as a lingua franca in national government
• marker of advanced (university) education (elite status)
• used in the courts
• NOT associated with any ethnic group (neutral) so avoids increasing prestige of Hindu speakers in the north

• Standardization: Sanskritization of pronounciation
• Coined words for new terms gotten from mass media and formed by compounding, all examples of CHANGE FROM ABOVE
• Aspirin matre (aspirin tablet)
• cancer roga (cancer disease)
• akasavana (radio-voice from above)
• vicara sankirana symposium-thought confirmation)

• Lingusistic Minorities:
• language policies try to encourage uniformity of language and culture
• minority languages are marginalized and so are the people who speak them
• Elites favor English because it is less accessible to the masses
• 3 language formula for education is disputed in many states:
• regional, Hindi, English

•  Canada: French vs English
• Policy: "official bilingualism", blunts Francophone nationalism and economic lure for government jobs. Rejected by the province of Quebec for MONOLINGUALISM in French
• Predjudical stereotypes
• By age 12, people tested through matched guising see English as far superior to French, as well as the people who speak it

• English Only Amendment in the USA
• 1981: HR-123
• Proposition 227 (C); Reversed bilingual education laws
• Why are we so opposed to multilingualism here in the United States?

• Native Americans (US and Elsewhere)
• language attrition and death based on no formal status
• Use of Boarding Schools to Assimilate children
• missionization to facilitate assimilation

• Creole Languages
• Characterized by minimal morphological complexity
• no plurality on nouns
• no gender on pronouns
• no tense on verbs
• aspectal divisions are well-established

• rarely found in monolingual settings, instead characterized by situations of DIGLOSSIA
• low form next to a standard (high). Always associated with poverty, little education, low cultural esteem
• May be adopted as a NATIONAL or OFFICIAL language to express solidarity of a new nation (Jamaica, Haiti, Tanzania)
• examples
• haitian creole/french
• jamaican creole/english
• tagolog/spanish

Multilingual code switching in Hong Kong