Multilingual Education and India

Dear multilingual education friends, Earlier this months the People's Linguistic Survey of India   (PLSI) conference took place. 900 delegates from all over the world gathered in Baroda to celebrate the progress on survey. A quote from the Lit-Ityadi report Anyone familiar with George Grierson's historic work, the Linguistic Survey of India , compiled nearly 100 years ago, will immediately note the similarities. What is different however, about the PLSI, is the notion of networking, now made by possible by modern methods of communication, that enables adivasi people from Orissa to dance shoulder to shoulder with Bhili tribesmen from Gujarat. This sense of solidarity was felt, not only between the Indian delegates, but also internationally as we heard from indigenous people from Papua New Guinea and various parts of Africa. A quote from the Times of India report This is...

Dear MLE friends, It is not often that top politicians write elaborately about issues related to multilingualism. Lee Kuan Yew the former prime minister of Singapore published recently " My lifelong challenge: Singapore's bilingual journey ". He has been strong advocate of maintaining Chinese and other mother tongues within the schools in Singapore while still making English the mainstream language. Some quotes from a Asia One newspaper review: My Lifelong Challenge is the story of Mr Lee Kuan Yew's 50-year struggle to transform Singapore from a polyglot former British colony into a united nation where everyone, while knowing English, knows at least one other language, his own mother tongue. The founding prime minister of Singapore tells why he did away with vernacular schools in spite of violent political resistance, why he closed Nanyang University, why he la...

Dear multilingual education friends, The MLE India webblog is celebrating its first birthday! A good excuse for giving it a easier URL www.mle-india.net and a facelift: have look at the new lay-out. The site i s more than just a list of the postings on the MLE mailing list. It also has the following pages: MLE Related Projects : An overview of multilingual education related project...