Cogent Education (Dec 2024)
Barriers to language maintenance and multilingual schooling: examining the language policy provisions in Nepal’s constitutions
Abstract
Despite Nepal’s huge linguistic diversity, maintaining minority languages and providing the mother tongue-based education to non-dominant language children are Nepal’s two major obstacles. Scholars have pointed to a negative consequence of the standard language ideology on non-dominant language maintenance and mother tongue-based schooling. Using the critical discourse analysis, this paper analyzed the discourse of Nepal’s two recent constitutions, which have largely been celebrated as transformative language policy texts in favor of non-dominant languages. Analysis of constitutional discourse has implications for language-based equity, home language-based schooling, and the maintenance of non-dominant languages. The current analysis revealed that Nepal’s recent constitutions have employed marginalizing linguistic categories of foregrounding, indexicality, backgrounding, and erasure in promoting the dominant language ideology, which can be rationalized to deny or delay linguistic rights and the mother tongue-based education. While the current research found the new constitution being more assertive than the previous one in support of multilingual schooling and the maintenance of non-dominant languages, existing constitutional provisions are insufficient to alter the current dominant language-based medium of instruction priority and linguistic domination. The continuation of the current language practices weakens the prospects for non-dominant language maintenance and home language-based schooling and legitimizes the state’s inaction in implementing constitutional provisions. This paper concludes that analysis of language policy discourse is important to dig up the roots hindering non-dominant language development and the mother tongue-based schooling and locating the sites of linguistic marginalization.
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