Imagining Mother Tongue: Language, Education, and Identity in South Asia
Overview
The concept of mother tongue gained salience in India in the mid-nineteenth century and has been central to language and education policy, scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, and lay conceptions of language. While some works treat mother tongue as something a person possesses as an objective feature of the world, scholars have recently analyzed it as an ideologically mediated concept that is variable, multiple, and politically and morally driven. This course will draw on literature in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and history to explore the socio-cultural and historical significant of mother tongue across diverse cultures and societies in South Asia.
This course will be conducted in person from July 26-August 1, 2023. It is aimed for undergraduate s tudents in the humanities and social sciences. The course is divided into five classes, which will be three hours each. The course will begin by discussing how the concept of mother tongue has been historically defined in different regions of South Asia in both the colonial and postcolonial periods. Students will define and discuss terms related to mother tongue in English, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Sinhala, and other languages. The course will then consider how people ascribe value to their mother tongues across different domains of social life, from schools to workplaces, homes, and the street. It will also delve into the relevance of concepts of mother tongue to ethnic, religious, regional, and national affiliations. Overall, this course seeks to use mother tongue as a lens in which to examine South Asia as a dynamic, multilingual region.
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