South Asian Language Practices: Mother Tongue, Medium, and Media

This article explores how metapragmatic discourses on “good” and “bad” English in India are mobilized in ways that allow actors to negotiate their status as English speakers. Adopting an intersectional framework that highlights the relationality of colonial, racialized, and classed claims to authority, the article shows how the co‐naturalization of language and race shapes assessments of competency and legitimacy and how this is mitigated through anti‐Blackness and appeals to class status. These judgments of “good” and “bad” English work to reassert and undermine racialized authority over the language and position actors within an imagined, global stratified community of speakers. This ambivalent positioning not only helps actors negotiate relational legitimacy as English speakers but also works strategically to benefit certain speakers and reproduce colonial, class, and racial orders.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“RIPEnglish”: Race, class and ‘good English’ in India

Highet

2023

“…13. A rapidly growing literature addresses digital practices in India and elsewhere in South Asia (see Davis and LaDousa 2020;LaDousa and Davis 2022b; and Punathambekar and Mohan 2019 for overviews).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Annamalai (2021), in his comments on the 2019 draft NEP (see Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India 2019), notes that technological skills coupled with English are clearly important in helping India reach its stated goal of becoming a world leader in terms of economic growth and scientific advancement 5 . By leaving the role of English in the nation's development goals largely implicit, the current government is extending a “nativist” ideological position taken by several previous governments to promote Indian languages and avoid associations between English and foreignness (LaDousa and Davis 2022b).…”

Section: Mother Tongue and English In Postcolonial Indiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Postcolonial Language Ideologies: Indian Students Reflect on Mother Tongue and English

LaDousa

Davis

Choksi

2022

Self Cite

The 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) proposes a revision to the Indian education system. The document foregrounds “mother tongue,” a concept that has been highly salient in India since the mid‐nineteenth century, by specifying that students should learn in it. But it makes little mention of English, despite its importance, and the desire for it, at every level of education. The construction of nation and language in the NEP begs a question: how do the constructions, foci, and relative silences of policy resonate with people's understandings and uses of languages? This article incorporates interviews at an engineering university in western India, the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, to examine graduate students' reflections on mother tongue in relation to their multilingual practices on campus and at home. The students exhibited a range of ideological perspectives on mother tongue and English that are not addressed in policy measures. Using the heuristic of postcolonial semiotics, we show that the students were unable to simultaneously identify with the nation (via mother tongue) and English. We contribute to linguistic anthropology and South Asian studies by foregrounding people's metadiscourse in how they make sense of, and ultimately problematize, constructions of colonial and postcolonial policy.

“…In India, educational spaces bring into focus differences among students' linguistic backgrounds, socioeconomic classes, education aspirations, castes, races, and religions (LaDousa and Davis 2021, 2022; LaDousa, Davis, and Choksi 2022; Mathew 2018). However, there is never only one category or a binary of either/or designations of identities functioning to uphold social structures of exclusion and inclusion, especially in education.…”

Section: Mother Tongue Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Out)Caste language ideologies: Intersectional raciolinguistic stigma and assimilation from denotified tribal students' perspectives in rural India

Chandras

2023

In India, where elementary education is a fundamental right, significant barriers stall the attainment of educational equity through linguistic inclusivity. This article explores student identities by examining intersections of language, caste, race, and socioeconomic class to make visible complexities of privilege, discrimination, and connections between social structure, identity, and language in education. From qualitative ethnographic research with a settled nomadic Tribal community in rural India, this article highlights contradictions between recent mother tongue language education policies and experiences of social disparities and stigma for Banjara Tribal youth, who speak a different mother tongue language than the language of education. I draw together theories of intersectionality and raciolinguistics to show how co‐naturalized lines of language and identity are navigated through language ideologies to shift positions of Banjara student identities. Through learning Marathi, the regional lingua franca, students transform their marginalized sociolinguistic positions into mainstream aspirants of academic and social success.