Struggle for a multilingual future: youth and education in Sri Lanka

The Struggle for a Multilingual Future examines the tension between the ethnic conflict and multilingual education policy in the linguistic and social practices of Sri Lankan Tamil and Muslim girls in Kandy, a city in central Sri Lanka. Postindependence language and education policies were part of the complex and multifaceted causes of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983 to 2009). However, in the last two decades the government has sought to promote interethnic integration by instituting trilingual language policies in the nation’s co-official languages, Sinhala and Tamil, as well as English, in government schools. Integrating ethnographic and linguistic research inside and outside two schools in Kandy during the last phase of the war, this book investigates the efficacy of the national reforms in mitigating ethnic conflict in relation to the way linguistic, ethnic, religious, and class differences are reinforced and challenged in schools, homes, buses, and streets. The author’s research shows how, despite the national reforms, policies and practices in Kandy schools instantiate language-based models of ethnicity. In reaction, Tamil-speaking girls aspire to a cosmopolitan notion of Kandy that is less about being integrated into broader society than drawing on the symbolic resources of the city for social mobility. It also analyzes how the efficacy of the reforms is imperiled by interactional practices in Sinhala-majority public spaces that reinforce ethnic divisions and power inequalities. Davis demonstrates the difficulties of using language policy to ameliorate conflict if it does not also address how that conflict is produced and reproduced in everyday talk.

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190947484.001.0001/oso-9780190947484