Community agency and activism for mother tongue education: The case of the Yaakthung language in Nepal

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Actors, activism, and agendas: Pathways to multilingual education policy creation and enactment across contexts

Proposal

The discourse of language rights has become a major topic of discussion in Nepal’s public policy. Since 1990, Indigenous and ethnic minorities have been demanding mother tongue education to ensure their linguistic and cultural rights. The 2015 Constitution guarantees citizens' rights to speak and obtain education in their mother tongue. Similarly, the 2018 Compulsory and Free Education Act and the 2019 Nepal Education Policy underscore the provision of mother tongue education up to the basic level of education. However, these policies have hardly been implemented in schools (Phyak, 2022). Studies have consistently highlighted the lack of awareness of the Indigenous communities as one of the major reasons affecting the implementation of mother tongue education (e.g., Ministry of Education, 2017). This finding not only misrecognizes the historical struggles of Indigenous peoples for language rights but also blames them without acknowledging the structural conditions shaping the power and legitimacy of languages. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the deficit views about Indigenous communities are resisted through grassroots activism. I specifically explore and discuss two research questions: how do Indigenous organizations play activist roles for mother tongue education? What ideological challenges do they experience, and how do they negotiate them to enact mother tongue education?

Drawing on ‘engaged language policy’ (Davis & Phyak, 2016) and ‘language activism’ (Florey, 2008) as theoretical frameworks, I explore how Kirat Yaakthung Chumlung (KYC), the community organization of Indigenous Yaakthung peoples, has played an agentive role in reclaiming linguistic justice in education. Founded in 1989, the goal of KYC is to preserve and promote the Yaakthung language, culture, art, and history. Using the participatory research method, informed by the Yaakthung philosophies of Chumlung and Tangsing, I collected data about KYC’s activism through participatory workshops, community engagement meetings, and oral histories of KYC members. The participatory workshops include the Yaakthung Language, Culture, and Art, and the Indigenous Teacher Education Program. Community engagement meetings focus on how the KYC makes collective decisions, sets agendas, and distributes roles among its members to lobby and negotiate their demands for mother-tongue education with government officials and school administrators. I used the oral history method to collect the stories of activism of KYC’s key leaders.

The findings of the study show that KYC’s language activism is shaped by three major discourses: identity politics, language preservation and language rights. The findings reveal that KYC utilises these discourses in community meetings, memoranda, delegations with government officials, and teacher workshops. Yet, KYC deficit ideology and the ideology of optionality as two major ideological challenges in their activist efforts for mother tongue education. KYC negotiates these challenges by educating its members through researchers and teachers. This study provides critical insights into understanding the role of Indigenous community organisations as key actors in the creation and implementation of language policy for mother tongue education. It expands the scope of language policy research by highlighting the centrality of grassroots activism of community organizations.

Author

• Prem Phyak, Teachers College, Columbia University