Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

274 Language Diversity in the ClassroomWales, for example, the ‘Welsh Not’ was a stick or sign hung aroundan offending child’s neck. It would remain there until transferred tothe next victim who lapsed into Welsh and, at the end of the day, thelast stigmatized youngster might be beaten. In Scotland, a similar device(the maide-crochaidhe) was used and, in Ireland under the British, a ‘tallystick’ notched to indicate every time a child spoke Irish acted asa record of misdemeanors (Edwards, 1989). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2004)has confirmed that Gĩkũyũ speakers in Kenya suffered in the same way,and Stoller (1977) wrote of such punishments for Spanish-speakingchildren in the USA. The practice may have been widespread, indeed,although some caution is needed in accepting all the accounts; seeEdwards (in preparation).Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is well known as a writer who abandoned writingin English as a sociopolitical statement. Many other ‘colonial’ writershave struggled with hard language choices, too. In the foreword to hisfamous novel, Kanthapura, Raja Rao discussed the problems of conveyingone’s ‘spirit’ in a foreign language. He admitted that English was nota completely alien language intellectually it was in many waysthe primary language for educated Indians (as Sanskrit and Persianwere before) but he argues that it was not the language of ‘emotion’.He continues:We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our ownlanguage and in English. We cannot write like the English. We shouldnot. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at thelarge world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has tobe a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive andcolourful as the Irish or the American. (Rao, 1938: vii)English has moved much further and deeper into the Indian consciousnesssince Rao expressed those sentiments (see Ashcroft et al., 2006). Theimplicit question he raises, then, has even greater importance: to whatextent can a population maintain a strong and independent psychosocialidentity if its original language has been largely displaced or, at least,displaced in important domains by another? Many would argue that a‘full’ or ‘authentic’ identity requires the maintenance of that first variety,but where does that leave the Indians, the Irish and others? And what ofother groups who share languages, the Brazilians and the Portuguese,the Austrians and the Germans, even the Australians and the Canadians?Is it not possible for a population to take a ‘foreign language’ and make ittheir own in style, in pronunciation, in idiom (see Edwards, 1985)?