Locating Multilingual Education in Nepal

Abstract

AbstractWhile Nepal’s schools for many years attempted to homogenize the population through adherence to a single way of being Nepali citizens, recent years have seen official recognition and even support for the diversity of Nepal’s populace. Policies supporting multilingual education using students’ ‘mother tongues’ is one such attempt. Fulfilling the constitutional right to education in the mother tongue is a challenge, not only due to practical challenges and ideological opposition but also because language shift towards using more dominant languages, such as Nepali, in the home means that many children today do not learn minority languages before arriving in school. In the case of the Dhimal community in the southeastern plains of Nepal, the small number of children who acquire the Dhimal language as young children has posed a challenge for introducing Dhimal language classes in schools. In this chapter, which draws from 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I investigate discursive connections drawn between the Dhimal language and the location of the community. In some cases, activists employed the connection of the language to the place, rather than the needs of students, as an argument for teaching Dhimal in school. In Dhimal language classes, though, textbooks and teachers located the Dhimal language in the Nepali nation, rather than emphasizing the place where Dhimal is most often spoken. This investigation of multilingual education and location illustrates some of the myriad tensions and challenges involved in developing inclusive, multilingual schooling.