Towards a national language policy celebrating Thailand's diversity
Published: 03/02/2016 at 01:00 AM
Writer: JOHN DRAPER & PEERASIT KAMNUANSILPA
Newspaper section: SPECIAL TO THE NATION
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/Towards-a-national-language-policy-celebrating-Tha-30280558.html
International Mother Language Day was just celebrated on February 21, with Mahidol University's trailblazing pilot programme, the ""Mahidol Model""of dual and multi-language teaching leading the charge. The Mahidol Model was first piloted in the deep South in 2009 with the Thai Malay, to improve the efficiency of teaching and enable equitable access to higher education, as well as for peace-building. It is now spreading to Thailand's mountain peoples and Northern Khmer, supported by Unesco and Unicef, to promote inclusion and reduce the risk of children dropping out.
At present, the Office of the Royal Society is continuing its work developing the draft Thai National Language Policy, and the military-backed government is canny enough to continue funding this initiative. However, a national advocacy coalition is required to bring together disparate mother-tongue-based projects involving ethnic communities throughout Thailand. These are presently supported and funded by organisations like the Foundation for Applied Languages and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, in the case of mountain peoples like the Karen, and the European Union in the case of the Thai Lao of the Northeast.
Thailand previously made a commitment to the international community to formally recognise its 62 ethnic communities in the form of its 2011 submission to the UN committee responsible for overseeing the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. This commitment was based on the Thailand country report adopting the framework and definition of ethnic minorities from the 2004-2005 Mahidol University Ethnolinguistic Mapping Project, which provides an accurate database classifying and delivering demographic data for the country's ethnic communities.
The need for multilingual education is urgent as only some 20 million people from a total of 67 million actually use Thai as their mother tongue. Thai children on the periphery go through school not understanding their lessons, including basic mathematics and health, resulting in their being a whole academic year behind their peers in Bangkok. More telling is that 30 per cent of Thai 15-year-olds are functionally illiterate, according to last year's World Bank study. Especially true in the deep South, the lack of an inclusive education system which respects and nurtures the mother tongue feeds a cycle of violence where particularly boys feel they have no stake in either the education system or the nation and become radicalised.
This problem of language and social exclusion, as studied by a Unicef-backed 2013-2015 language education and social cohesion initiative covering Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia, to some degree affects most of Thailand's ethnic minorities. In fact, the Thai Lao children of the Northeast score only just above Thai Malay children in standardised national tests of Thai, English, and Mathematics. Their inability to write Thai well significantly affects their chances of accessing higher education and contributing to a well-educated workforce.
Unesco makes multiple recommendations regarding mother tongue languages in its latest Global Education Monitoring Report. Firstly, children should be taught in a language that they understand. While most Northeastern Thais (Thai-Lao) can understand Thai, many of Thailand's tens of thousands of mountain peoples do not understand Thai well, nor do many rural Thai Malays. Moreover, teaching in a language that is not the mother tongue frequently restricts a child's learning, especially when complicated by the poverty that affects just over 8 per cent of Thailand's children. However, the practice of banning first languages and using corporal punishment to beat the mother tongue out of children ended last century, so first languages should instead be seen as an asset for the poor.
Next, research indicates that science is particularly difficult to understand in a second language, and without years of learning in the mother tongue, performance suffers in subjects such as maths, biology, chemistry and physics. In many countries in the world, such subjects open the door for Muslim minorities to become nurses, pharmacists, and doctors, thus increasing inclusion and reducing the risk of radicalisation. However, as most students in the deep South fail these subjects in standardised exams such as the O-Net, boys in particular are instead driven to study religious subjects in Arabic-speaking countries, which are neither accredited nor contribute signifi-cantly to Thailand's economy.
Furthermore, in multi-ethnic societies, enforcing a national language through the school system has frequently been a cause of grievances connected to wider issues of social and cultural inequality. Again, in the case of the deep South, recognition for, and use of, Pattani Malay as a working language has been at the foundation of many radical groups'political agendas for decades, since even before Hajji Sulong's demands to the Thawan Thamrong government in 1947 calling for both Malay and Siamese to be official languages and for Malay to be the medium of instruction in primary schools. For the most radical groups, the worst that could happen would be for the Thai government to actually implement duallanguage teaching, as it would remove one of their most potent rallying cries.
Moreover, education policies should recognise the importance of mother tongue learning. This means the draft national language policy should be of some import, ie it should be more than a cabinet resolution. A meaningful national language policy should list all the languages to be supported and must come with institutional support, meaning funding for regional and provincial universities to help with syllabuses and teacher-proof textbooks and workbooks. This pragmatism is necessary to handle the fact that linguistic diversity creates educational challenges in terms of resource allocation.
In the pre-colonial era, the Siamese language was first among equals. The exigencies of defending the country against Western powers demanded a mentality which supported a single nation, united by a single language, under an absolute monarch. Thailand's alliance with the Axis powers, especially Japan, cemented this new stance in place under military rule. Despite these accidents of history, the way forward is clear, with its many educational, social and political advantages. Elsewhere, the constitution forms the heart of the national language policy, and Thailand still has time to incorporate one in it.
JOHN DRAPER is a Khon Kaen-based analyst and lecturer at the College of Local Administration, Khon Kaen University.
PEERASIT KAMNUANSILPA, Phd, is founder and former dean of the College of Local Administration, Khon Kaen University.