Bilingual Education in Central Asia
- PDF / 150,223 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 663.307 pts Page_size
- 47 Downloads / 235 Views
BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN CENTRAL ASIA
INTRODUCTION
Education in contemporary Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan occurs in a complex multilingual context amid competing identity discourses.1 Languages spoken in the region2 include: the titular languages: Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen and Uzbek,3 and many others.4 Initial Soviet encouragement of instruction in all languages evolved into sociopolitical dominance of Russianmedium schooling leading to demands for increased status of titular and other languages in schooling in the last decade of Soviet power. Table 1 illustrates Central Asia’s ethnic diversity just before the 1
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were all constituent republics of the USSR before 1991. For more geopolitical and historical background of Central Asia, see E. Allworth (ed.): 1994, Central Asia: 130 years of Russian dominance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2 These include other languages of Central and Inner Asia, such as Balochi, Dungan, Karakalpak, Kurdish, Pamiri languages, Uighur, Volga Tatar, Yaghnobi, languages of relatively recent voluntary immigrants to the region, such as, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian; languages of involuntary immigrants to the region: Crimean Tatar, German, Korean, Meshketian Turkish, making Central Asia arguable the most ethnically and sociolinguistically complex region of the former Soviet Union. Kazakh, Karakalpak, Kyrgyz, Meshketian Turkish, Tatar, Turkmen, Uighur and Uzbek are Turkic languages; Balochi, Kurdish, Pamiri languages, Tajik and Yaghnobi are Iranian languages; Dungan is a dialect of Chinese. Spoken languages often form dialect continuua with vernacular dialects showing features of the neighbouring languages. For more, see B. Comrie: 1981, The languages of the Soviet Union, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, and A. Bennigsen and S. E. Wimbush: 1986, Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. 3 So called since in the national delimitation of the 1920s the region was divided into republics that were intended to have one majority nationality for whom the republic was named. 4 Repeated script reforms have complicated language and literacy development in Central Asia. In the 1920s it was decided for all languages written by Soviet Muslims to shift from Arabic to Latin script. In the 1930s, it was decided to shift from Latin to Cyrillic script. In the 1990s, a return to Arabic script was debated, but taken up nowhere; while Uzbek in Uzbekistan is once again written in Latin script. Thus Uzbek in contemporary Central Asia is written in Latin script in Uzbekistan in primary and secondary school, but in Cyrillic most frequently in higher education and in the press, and in neighboring republics. While arguments have been made in favour of reformed scripts in terms of learnability, every time the script has changed, some are left functionally illiterate by the change. For a thorough review of script changes in the region see Fierma
Data Loading...
