Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

MLE as an Economic Equaliser in India and Nepal: Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education Fights Poverty through Capability Development and Identity Support

This chapter discusses the relationship between the languages of Indigenous/tribal peoples and minority groups (ITMs), mainly tribal peoples and their poverty, and in particular in India and to some extent Nepal. Children can learn their own language and one or several dominant languages well if the education is organised to make this possible. The concept of crime against humanity has many features. First, they are particularly odious offences in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or degradation of one or more persons. Second, they are not isolated or sporadic events, but are part of a widespread or systematic practice of atrocities that either form part of government policy or are tolerated, condoned, or acquiesced in by a government. Third, such crimes can be perpetrated in time of war or in peace. Fourth, they are committed against civilians or, under customary international law, enemy combatants in armed conflicts. Keywords:crime against humanity; India; indigenous/tribal peoples and minority groups (ITMs); mother-tongue-based multilingual education (MLE); Nepal; poverty

Getting language rights right: A response to Makoni

The Makoni abstract is promising in that it sets out lucidly the challenge for scholars from Africa in the area of language and human rights. Makoni writes as though such scholars have made a substantial effort to engage with language rights (LRs) issues, but the bibliography suggests otherwise. The titles referred to indicate that African scholars are engaging with human rights (HRs) issues and with approaches to the identities and status of African languages and their speakers, but seldom with language rights per se or with the interface between language policy and LRs. Makoni does not define his central concepts, HRs, or LRs (or many other concepts that he uses, echo-systems, minorities, indigenous, etc).There is no evidence of profound knowledge of either field. His study fails to define and build on the considerable volume of scholarship on linguistic human rights (LHRs) worldwide, i.e. those LRs that many lawyers see, e.g. Eide (2010), de Varennes (1996), Dunbar (2001), Henrard (2000, 2010), Thornberry (1991a, b, 1997, 2002), Thornberry and Gibbons (1997) and LHRs-oriented sociolinguists and educationalists see as such basic LRs that they have to be treated as parts of the HRs regime. For LHRs, see the wide range of contributions to Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson (1994), Phillipson (2000), Kontra et al. (1999), and Skutnabb-Kangas (2000). Nor does Makoni mention efforts by international bodies such as UNESCO (2003), the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (Skutnabb-Kangas and Dunbar 2010), or ACALAN, the African Union-funded African Academy of Languages (2009) to promote an LHRs agenda, especially in formal education. Likewise, when Makoni presents and criticises ‘powerful NGOs’ and advocates of LRs, he fails to name any. This prevents the reader from validating any of his claims. He presents dozens of claims with absolutely no evidence or references (e.g. about what African and other minority groups ‘feel’ and ‘think’ about LRs and HRs discourses), and draws conclusions about causality where there are none. It is easy to construct strawpeople of one’s liking (or, here, disliking) and then to try and dismantle them. In fact, many of his constructive ‘critical’ points are shared by most LHRs advocates that we know. In addition, Makoni often seems to attribute subtractive and destructive either/or theorizing to his strawpeople: either individual or group rights, either language X or language Y, either negative or positive rights, either a community emic perspective or an outsider perspective, either economic market benefits or traditional identities, either the past or the future, languages as

Colonial Language Legacies: The Prospects for Kurdish

There is massive documentation of the oppression of the Kurds: scholarly books, personal and governmental accounts, and regular documentation of human rights abuses. Questions are asked in the European Parliament. The Council of Europe regularly investigates torture in one of its member states, Turkey. The Kurds even had a high media profile in the months following the Gulf war. Yet their desperate situation continues, despite the awareness of the international community, and even though the Kurdish right to self-determination, however it is defined, has been convincingly argued.1 This paper will not rehearse these familiar arguments, but will concentrate on how the oppression of the Kurdish language is outstandingly severe, and on the importance of language rights for liberation. It will also consider whether the language policies of many states which were formerly colonies represent an example to follow. nLanguage is the most important indicator of Kurdish identity. The right to have native-tongue education and medias has been the most important demand of Kurdish nationalism in the post-World War I period. In their attempt to survive linguistic genocide, Kurdish intellectuals, political activists and religious leaders struggled for the development of a unified national language. (Hassanpour, 1992)