Educational Implications of Language Seen as Multilinguality

Abstract

Abstract The western/ colonial perspective on Language has forced the world to conceptualise language in terms of a pairing of a syntax and a lexicon , a highly rule-governed monolithic system which can potentially have only a single accurate articulation grammatically. Irrespective of whether it comes from the traditional structural perspectives or from the more recent generative ones, the formal homogeneity of the system is maintained intact. These perspectives have also isolated language from society in general and childhood, education, justice and human rights in particular. For its own profits and administration, the colonial powers found it imperative to chart out discrete geographies, document languages and distinct sociolinguistic communities. It was made imperative to label languages and classify people according to a language the documenters thought those people spoke. The multi-layered continua spread along diverse geographies and cultures were thoughtlessly dissected at arbitrary points into discrete units. In the case of the Indian sub-continent (as also in other colonised countries), in spite of its divisions into different castes and tribes, there was no break in communication across fields, hills, mountains and rivers; in fact, variability in linguistic behaviour facilitated communication. The colonial intervention had, and continues to have, disastrous impact on the local ontologies and epistemologies; specifically on the education system as a whole. The diversity of voices in which India spoke and the heterogeneity of its cultures, rituals and knowledge systems was undermined comprehensively to the extent that people started treating their own languages and cultures inferior to that of the global North. With its techniques of segmentation and classification, structural linguistics privileged the uniqueness of every language suggesting that every language is different; languages were thus to be taught in terms of drills of patterns in the target language with a deliberate effort to keep the languages of learners suppressed so that they may not interfere with the learning of the target language. As opposed to this, the generative paradigm regarded all languages as being similar since they were all governed by the same innate Language Faculty manifested in the Universal Grammar. That the nature of language is essentially fluid and porous was not appreciated at all. Languages don’t need passports to travel across to other languages; Multilinguality subsumes Universal Grammar and is multiversal in its spirit. It is only the intervention of Multilinguality in the domain of education that can begin a process of decolonisation. Multilinguality constitutes a space where every child’s voice can be heard in the classroom; it also offers itself as an easily accessible platform for introducing students to the preliminaries of scientific enquiry ensuring cognitive growth and social tolerance. Students soil their hands with collection of data (plenty of it in their own minds), classification and categorisation, rule formation and hypothesis testing. They also find a space for the articulation of their cultural practices. Most of all intervention of Multilinguality into education creates a space for critical enquiry and rational analysis creating potential for ensuring social justice.

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