From Fluidity to Discretization… and Fractal Recursivity? Opportunities and Challenges Underpinning the Introduction of Minority Languages in Kachin State’s government schools (2011-2020)

Abstract

In Myanmar, the 2011-2020 period—before the February 2021 military coup—has witnessed limited but steadily increasing momentum in terms of introducing ethnic minority languages (as subjects and oral media of instruction) in government schools, a shift liable to bring significant educational and political benefits, while contributing to the preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity. Focusing on Kachin State, this article deals with the underlying challenges and inherent tradeoffs of producing a list of languages (as opposed to mere dialects) to be introduced in formal education. We argue that this educational shift, despite its genuine and multiple potential benefits, also contributes to an ethnolinguistic discretization process, reinforcing the conditions for the mobilization of labels within labels, in fractal patterns, through recursive ideological layers of common languages on the one hand, and the affirmation of ethnolinguistic distinctiveness, on the other. While the political and educational landscape described in this paper has been deeply shaken and transformed by the 2021 military coup (with arguably a strengthening sense of belonging to the Kachin ethnic identity, and a greater attractiveness of the Jinghpaw language) these language politics and decentralization challenges should nonetheless be taken into account, when envisioning the future of education in a federal state.

Keywords

• Myanmar
• Kachin
• ethnicity
• education
• language policy
• language politics