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“Is Jaffna Tamil the Best?” Producing “Legitimate” Language in a Multilingual Sri Lankan School
Author(s) -
Davis Christina P.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2012.01148.x
Subject(s) - tamil , ideology , multilingual education , sociology , metadiscourse , national curriculum , period (music) , pedagogy , curriculum , gender studies , multilingualism , political science , linguistics , politics , art , law , philosophy , aesthetics
Drawing on research in the Tamil‐medium stream of a multilingual Buddhist National school in Kandy, Sri Lanka, this article explores how teachers engage with, negotiate, and contest sociolinguistic hierarchies. Since the colonial period, Jaffna Tamils have maintained a hierarchy over other Tamil‐speaking groups (Up‐country Tamils and Muslims) in education, with Jaffna Tamil legitimized in the national curriculum. However, as a result of demographic and institutional shifts related to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1983, these hierarchies are shifting. In the first part of the article, I explore teachers' explicit discussions and debates about language that occurred in my presence. In the second part, I show are these ideologies are enacted in difference contexts of practice, including subject‐area classrooms, language classrooms, and oratorical performances. I argue that incongruities within and between teachers' metadiscourses and practices reveal subtle dynamics in the configuration of social hierarchies. [multilingual education, social inequality, language ideologies, metadiscourse, Tamil]