Language and National Identity in Asia

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Language and National
Identity in Asia

edited by
ANDREW SIMPSON

1
 3
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 Contents

List of Maps vii

Notes on Contributors viii

1 Language and National Identity in Asia: a Thematic Introduction 1

Andrew Simpson

Pa r t I S o u t h A s i a 31
2 Bangladesh 33
Hanne-Ruth Thompson
3 India 55
R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan
4 Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas 84
Rhoderick Chalmers
5 Pakistan 100
Christopher Shackle
6 Sri Lanka 116
K. N. O. Dharmadasa

Pa r t I I E a s t A s i a 139
7 China 141
Ping Chen
8 Hong Kong 168
Andrew Simpson
9 Japan 186
Nanette Gottlieb
10 North and South Korea 200
Ross King
11 Taiwan 235
Andrew Simpson
vi Contents

Pa r t I I I S o u t h e a s t A s i a 261
12 Burma/Myanmar 263
Justin Watkins
13 Cambodia 288
Steve Heder
14 Indonesia 312
Andrew Simpson
15 Malaysia and Brunei 337
Asmah Haji Omar
16 The Philippines 360
Andrew Gonzalez, FSC
17 Singapore 374
Andrew Simpson
18 Thailand and Laos 391
Andrew Simpson and Noi Thammasathien
19 Vietnam 415
Lê Minh-Hă`ng and Stephen O’Harrow

References 443
Index 461
 List of Maps

South Asia 32
Bangladesh 34
India 59
Nepal and the Eastern Himalaya 85
Pakistan 101
Sri Lanka 117
East Asia 140
China 142
Hong Kong 169
Japan 187
North and South Korea 201
Taiwan 236
Southeast Asia 262
Burma/Myanmar 264
Cambodia 289
Indonesia 313
Malaysia 338
The Philippines 361
Singapore 375
Thailand and Laos 392
Vietnam 416

All maps drawn by Graeme Sandeman, FBCart.S, University of St Andrews.

 Notes on Contributors

R. Amritavalli is professor and member of the Schools of English Language Education and
Language Sciences at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad.
Her research interests include syntax (in particular the synchronic and diachronic aspects of
Kannada, a Dravidian language), and language acquisition in natural and instructed settings. She
has contributed to a volume on language education in multilingual contexts published by
UNESCO (New Delhi), and her articles exploring the implications of current linguistic theoriza-
tion for language learning and teaching have appeared in the Journal of Pragmatics and ELT Journal.
This is a theme that is also developed in her book Language as a Dynamic Text (1999).
Rhoderick Chalmers received a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS),
London, in 2002, for his thesis entitled ‘We Nepalis: language, literature and the formation of a
Nepali public sphere in India, 1914–1940’. He currently works as a researcher for the International
Crisis Group, with a primary interest in Nepal’s contemporary politics.
Ping Chen is Reader in Chinese and Linguistics in the School of Languages and Comparative
Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research interests include
functional syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics. He is the
author of Studies in Modern Linguistics (1991, Chongqing Press), Modern Chinese: History and
Sociolinguistics (1999, Cambridge University Press), Language Planning and Language Policy: East
Asian Perspectives (2001, Curzon Press, with Nanette Gottlieb), and many articles in linguistics
journals such as Language in Society, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Studies in
Language, Lingua, Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, and Zhongguo Yuwen [Chinese Language].
K.N.O. Dharmadasa retired in 2004 as Professor of Sinhala and Dean of the Faculty of Arts in
the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. He is presently the Editor-in-Chief of the Sinhala
Encyclopaedia. His major area of interest is language and nationalism.
Andrew Gonzalez, FSC completed his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California,
Berkeley in 1970. Since that time and right up until his passing away in 2006 he engaged himself
vigorously both in the Weld of linguistics and the development of higher education in the
Philippines. Publishing widely in the area of sociolinguistics and language education, Andrew
Gonzales also took on many roles of leadership, becoming President of the De La Salle
University, Manila in 1979, working for the creation of the Philippine Center for Social Sciences,
completed and inaugurated in 1983, and serving on various government committees relating to
education and culture since 1986. In recognition of his outstanding learning, energy, and
administrative ability, he was made an OYcier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques by the Govern-
ment of the Republic of France in 1986.
Nanette Gottlieb is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Queensland. She has
written and edited seven books, among them Linguistic Stereotyping and Minorities in Japan (2006,
RoutledgeCurzon), Language and Society in Japan (2005, Cambridge University Press), Kanji
Politics: Language Policy and Japanese Script (1995, Kegan Paul International), Language Planning
 Notes on Contributors ix

and Language Policy: East Asian Perspectives (2001, Curzon, with Ping Chen) and Japanese
Cybercultures (2003, Routledge, with Mark McLelland). She has also published articles on aspects
of language in Japanese society in a wide range of academic journals.
Steve Heder is a Lecturer in politics in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences of the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has been involved in Southeast Asia
since the late 1960s, working there as a journalist, intelligence analyst, human rights activist,
UN peacekeeper, historian, and, most recently, UN genocide researcher. His research languages
are Khmer, Thai, Lao, Chinese, and French.
K. A. Jayaseelan was formerly professor and chair of the School of Language Sciences at the
Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad, and is still associated
with that institution after retirement. His chief research interests are in the area of syntax. He has
published several articles dealing with theoretical issues and the syntax of Dravidian languages
(especially Malayalam); a collection of his early papers was published as Parametric Studies in
Malayalam Syntax (1999). He is currently a member of the editorial boards of Linguistic Analysis and
Syntax.
Ross King teaches Korean language and linguistics in the Department of Asian Studies at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His research focuses on Korean historical
grammar and philology, Korean dialectology (especially the language of the ethnic Korean
minority in the former USSR), and most recently on issues of language, politics, and ideology
in modern Korea.
LŒ Minh-Ha‘'ng obtained her Wrst degree in language pedagogy from Hanoi Language Teachers
College (1979), her certiWcate in TESL from Canberra University (1988), and her M.A. in
American Studies from the University of Hawaii (1993), where she is currently a doctoral
candidate and lecturer in the Vietnamese Language & Literature programme.
Stephen O’Harrow took his M.A. in Chinese and Vietnamese from SOAS (1965) and his
doctorate in Oriental Philology from the Sorbonne (1972). Since 1968, he has been teaching
Vietnamese language and literature at the University of Hawaii, where he was Director of the
Center for Southeast Asian Studies from 1997 until 2003. He was a founder and President of
GUAVA (1994–2003), the United States national professional association in his Weld, and has
headed the Vietnamese programme at Hawaii since 1987.
Asmah Haji Omar, who obtained a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies
(1969) in General Linguistics, held the professorial chair of Malay Linguistics at the University
of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, until she retired in 2000. From then on, she went to set up the
Institute of Malay Civilisation, at the Universiti Penddidikan Sultan Idris, Tanjung Malim,
Perak, and was the Wrst holder of the prestigious Za’ba Chair of Malay Civilisation. She has
been a member of the Language Council of Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia since its
inception in 1972 and a key Wgure in the language standardization programmes of the three
countries. As Academic Assistant to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malaya 1969–1972,
she was in charge of the programme of the implementation of the national language policy at
the university, which until then was using English as medium in all its activities. She has
published extensively on language policy and planning, and language development, mostly
based on her Wrst-hand knowledge of the processes taking place in Malaysia.
x Notes on Contributors

Christopher Shackle, FBA is Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia at SOAS,

University of London. He has wide ranging interests in South Asian literature and religion
as well as in languages, where his studies have long been centred on the Punjabi area and have
resulted in numerous publications, including a reference grammar of Siraiki and several articles
and books on the language of the Sikh scriptures.
Andrew Simpson is currently Professor of Linguistics in the Departments of Linguistics and
East Asian Languages and Cultures in the University of Southern California (USC), Los
Angeles. Prior to joining USC in 2007, he was a member of the Department of Linguistics in
SOAS, University of London. A major part of Andrew Simpson’s research focuses on the cross-
linguistic comparison of languages in East, Southeast, and South Asia from the point of view of
language change and formal grammar. His other main area of linguistic interest is in com-
parative Asian sociolinguistics.
Noi Thammasathien graduated from the faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication in
Thammasart University, Bangkok, and has since worked extensively as a journalist reporting on
current aVairs in Thailand, initially with national Thai newspapers and for the past decade with
the BBC. She has also worked as a translator and teacher of Thai in SOAS, University of
London.
Hanne-Ruth Thompson is a specialist on Bengali grammar. She spent four years living and
working in Bangladesh and has published a colloquial dictionary Essential Everyday Bengali
(Bangla Academy, Dhaka, 1999). She divides her time between teaching Bengali at the School
of Oriental and African Studies in London and her research work on grammatical structures
which is leading to a comprehensive new Bengali grammar to be published by Routledge.
Justin Watkins learned Chinese and Russian at Leeds University before learning Burmese and
doing doctoral research in phonetics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in
the University of London, where he is now senior Lecturer in Burmese/Myanmar. Besides
teaching Burmese, he contributes to courses in phonetics and Southeast Asian studies. His
research focuses on the linguistics of Burmese and other languages spoken in Burma/
Myanmar and mainland Southeast Asia. He is currently preparing dictionaries for Wa and
Khumi Chin and is the author of The Phonetics of Wa (2002) and editor of Studies in Burmese
Linguistics (2005), both published by PaciWc Linguistics.
 1
Language and National Identity
in Asia: a Thematic Introduction
Andrew Simpson

1.1 Introduction
Studies of nationalism and the emergence and maintenance of nations regularly
concur that language, and in particular the existence of broadly shared language, is
very often a primary and critical component in the successful moulding of a popula-
tion as a nation. As a symbolic marker and index of individual and group identity,
language has the potential to function as an important boundary device, separating
distinct sub-populations oV from neighbouring others with diVerent, possibly unin-
telligible language habits, and binding the former together with shared feelings of
identity and group self-interest. Spread amongst a signiWcantly wide population of
speakers via the use of various mass media, a common language can assist in the
construction of a geographically widespread, imagined community of speakers and
the building of nation-like polities, providing linguistic links are also reinforced
with other shared cultural properties. The promotion of a standardized, common
language throughout a territory and its inhabitants also has the ability to even out
socio-economic inequities present in a society and encourage the uniWcation of a
population through the provision of equal (or at least improved) opportunities for
advancement and future prosperity. Following on from Barbour and Carmichael’s
(2000) revealing, multi-authored study of Language and Nationalism in Europe, the
present, similarly structured volume takes as its focus the theme of language as a
force in the construction and maintenance of nations within Asia, and endeavours
to probe and chart the linguistic tensions at play in the development of states in the
Asian region.
In terms of the physical scope and geographical coverage of the volume, the full
western and northern extents of Asia have not been included in the book’s contents
and attention is instead Wrmly centred on the heavily populous spread of countries
from Pakistan in South Asia through to Japan and Korea in Northeast Asia. Western
Asia, more commonly referred to as the Middle East, is often approached as a special
2 A. Simpson

socio-political area by itself and can be argued to be treated more appropriately in a

separate volume considering the Arabic world, Islam, and Judaism. Similarly, various
states of northern Asia have been left aside here in the belief that the ex-Soviet Union
republics of Central Asia are better grouped in a study considering Russia and
Mongolia and the historic associations that these territories have with each other.
The vast residue of Asia, encompassing those areas most commonly evoked in lay
speech with the term Asian, is organizationally grouped in the volume much in the
way that the study of the continent is conducted within university departments, being
divided into three major blocks: (a) South Asia – the Indian subcontinent, consisting in
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan, linked up by ancient
civilization and more recent colonial history; (b) East Asia, constituted by China,
Japan and Korea, with many linguistic and cultural properties in common, the result
of areal inXuence and borrowing during earlier periods dominated by imperial China;
and (c) Southeast Asia, a vibrant and varied collection of multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic
states emerging from the clash of diVerent peoples and cultures coming into contact
over many centuries.
Concerning the notion of ‘national identity’ and the units of population relative to
which issues of belonging and loyalty are considered here, the term ‘nation’ is
frequently used to pick out and refer to at least two potentially diVerent types of entity.
In much of the literature discussing nationalism, nations are suggested to be a relatively
recent phenomenon, arising from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onwards as
the result of processes of industrialization, modernization, and the spread of democ-
racy. The successful, co-operative function of populations in industrial, modern
societies is argued to have necessitated a diVerent form of internal organization from
that present in earlier times, and to have caused the development of nations with a
number of core, common properties. As instantiated by the Wrst nations to emerge in
Europe and the Americas, a nation is archetypically described as being a population/
people which (a) is comprised of a single ethnic group with a common ancestry and
shared history, (b) currently manifests a shared culture, including (often, though not
always) a single religion, and (most frequently) a single language, (c) is contained
within clear territorial borders, (d) is organized by a uniform, centralized bureaucracy,
and (e) beneWts from democracy, citizenship, and equal rights in the determination of
the future of the nation. In addition to such outwardly observable objective properties,
a further key ingredient of nations is argued to be a distinct subjective awareness
amongst the people of a nation that they indeed comprise such an entity, and
furthermore have aVection for and loyalty towards such a grouping (Kellas 1998).
Prototypical examples of emerged, modern nations are the nineteenth-century con-
solidation of Germany and Italy, the internal reorganization of England, France, and
Holland as industrialized nations, and the twentieth-century development of nations in
the eastern part of Europe (e.g. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics).
A second, commonly heard use of the word ‘nation’ is to apply this term more
broadly to all politically independent states, whether or not such territories also
 Introduction 3

exhibit the other features ascribed above to nations, such as having an ethnically
homogeneous population with a common culture, language, and history. This sec-
ond, less restrictive use of the term nation occurs in the title of the organization ‘the
United Nations’, is common in everyday journalistic and other non-technical writing,
and has resulted in a reWnement of the use of the term nation in various discussions of
nationalism. Nations in the Wrst, narrower sense are sometimes referred to as ‘ethnic
nations’, whereas simple independent states have been called ‘oYcial nations’ or
‘territorial nations’ (Kellas 1998, Guibernau 1996). An ethnic nation may also have
the status of being an oYcial nation, if it has won territorial independence, but there
may be many oYcial nations which are not classed as ethnic nations due to being
ethnically mixed. The reference point for the present volume, in its targeted interest in
‘national’ identity, is the situation of loyalties and identity in and towards the oYcial
nations of Asia, such as they exist today, and the focus of attention is on how language
is and has been relevant for the cultivation of nationalistic feelings of belonging to
such states, either in a positive, enabling way, or negatively, inhibiting the growth of an
encompassing national identity.
In comparison with the paced emergence of many nations within Europe, the
creation of modern nations in Asia has often been accelerated and followed two rather
diVerent paths of development. In one set of cases, involving Japan, China, Siam
(Thailand), and Korea (prior to its occupation by Japan), nationalism and the rapid
attempted development of modern states was a reaction to perceived threats from
outside, and speciWcally the advancement of Western colonial powers into Asia. In
such instances, states that already existed and were dominated by a single, major
ethnic group judged that modernization was the key to strengthen and protect their
territories against the intrusion of foreign hostile Others, and that nationalism oVered
itself as a useful means to help achieve this modernization. Internal reorganization
and reform of the state and its administrative infrastructure commonly followed with
a centralization of authority and the simultaneous promotion of national culture and
language, in a process directly taking its lead from the nationalist development of
states within Europe. In a great many other parts of Asia, however, modern, inde-
pendent states were formed from frequently composite populations not as a preventa-
tive measure to ward oV outside threats but instead as the result of the colonial process,
and the withdrawal of an occupying power which had itself determined the borders of
the state and the make-up of its population, in various cases resulting in an extensive
mixture of ethno-linguistic groups within a single state (e.g. Indonesia and the Philip-
pines). Rather than attempting to radically adjust and reconstruct the territorial
divisions set up by colonial occupation, those who campaigned for self-determination
and independence from foreign rule for the most part accepted the shape of the states
they came to possess on departure of the preceding colonial rulers, and often inherited
states which were already structured by modern bureaucracies and a centralized
administration. Nationalist movements in such cases therefore resulted in the fairly
rapid conversion of ethnically shared spaces into modern oYcial nations, rather than
4 A. Simpson

stemming from the more gradual transformation of genuinely ethnic nations into
independent states.
As a consequence of the way that many states in Asia came into existence through
this latter route to nationhood, concerted projects of nation-building were frequently
only initiated following independence. Prior to achieving independent statehood, the
principal energies of indigenous nationalists had been directed towards the goals of
achieving democracy, increased governmental representation, and eventual independ-
ence rather than nation-building itself. Having Wnally won independence, and taken
charge of modern, bureaucratically organized states, the pressing need for attempts to
build together the new citizens of these states into integrated nations became
extremely obvious and a primary focus of leaders concerned about the potential
fragmentation of ethnically mixed territories. Such nation-building projects are in
many cases very much still ongoing processes, and the characterization ‘states in
search of nations’ has often been oVered as appropriate for certain of the newly
independent countries in Asia which have not emerged from a Wrm prior grounding as
ethnic nations. The task of trying to stimulate a sense of cohesion among newly
‘national’ populations and encourage feelings of belonging and loyalty towards a
co-inhabited territory has subsequently required much attention to the development
of national identity in emerging states and the encouragement of a consciousness
among citizens of collectively forming a single population with various common
‘national’ properties and a single shared future to invest in. The theme of national
identity, its possible deWnition, creation, growth, and protection has, accordingly,
assumed a major importance in dialogue and strategic planning carried out at
governmental level in many states within Asia during the course of the twentieth
century and continues to hold an important place in political and intellectual discus-
sion both in potentially fragile multi-ethnic states and in countries with a single
dominant ethnic group, where traditional ideas of national identity may now be
changing under the threat of new forces of globalization.
In the attempted construction and maintenance of national identities, language has
regularly been assumed to have a highly signiWcant role to play, and while the
knowledge and use of a common language throughout a particular territory may
serve to unite its population in a shared national identity, the occurrence of multiple
languages in formal and informal domains within a single state has often been
perceived as standing in the way of unity and the development of a desired national
consciousness. Consequently, following language-related aspects of nationalist ideol-
ogy shaped in the West, the view came to be adopted by many in positions of power in
Asia following, or anticipating, independence, or seeking modernization to avoid
external threats, that the success of their emerging nations would be well served by
the promotion of national language and a single oYcial lingua franca that could be
used throughout the state, in all domains of life. The phenomenon of the selection
and sponsoring of national languages and the eVects of such policies on other
languages spoken within a single state has therefore had a widespread prominence
 Introduction 5

in Asia much as in the West and remains a topic of considerable importance in many
states with ethno-linguistically mixed populations. The chapters of this volume set out
to describe the diVerent interactions of language and national and other competing
forms of identity that have occurred in Asia, from Pakistan to Japan, as the result of
the formation of Asia into modern nations. The chapters consider the extent to which
language may or may not be involved in bonding (or separating) people within nation-
states in Asia, both in the past and in the present, and what the relevant ethno-
linguistic, political, and historical conditions are in each state that may allow for and
constrain such relations. In the remainder of the present chapter, an overview of the
speciWc kinds of issues facing language development in Asia and its relation to national
identity is now set out, along with a preview of the variety of approaches that have
been adopted and the kinds of reactions and eVects these have provoked, ranging
from violent conXict and secession in certain instances, through passive indiVerence
and disinterest to considerable nationalistic ‘success’ in others.

1.2 Building Materials, Decisions, and Outcomes

1.2.1 Population Types and Homogeneity
The national language-planning policies of states within Asia have naturally been
guided by consideration of the type of population contained in the territory of a state
and the degree of ethno-linguistic homogeneity it exhibits. Attempts at nation-
building are commonly described as being considerably assisted by the presence of a
homogeneous population; however, many states in Asia are not homogeneous and a
range of variation exists in the ethnic composition of national populations, in part due
to the way that many states arose from colonized territories, but also due to patterns
of internal migration and military expansion within Asia, leading to the absorption of
a range of ethnic groups in the territory controlled by a single dominant group. At one
end of the ‘homogeneity parameter/scale’, there are states such as Japan, Korea, and
Bangladesh where one ethnic group accounts for almost all the population of the state
(around 99 per cent), but there are also a number of new Asian nations with extremely
mixed populations and a broad occurrence of diVerent ethno-linguistic groups, such
as the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India. In between these two extremes,
there are many countries in which a sizeable majority of the population is constituted
by one particular ethnic group, but a further signiWcant proportion of the population
is made up by minority groups which may be many in number but relatively small (as
for example in Thailand, Laos, and Burma/Myanmar), or contain a group that is
numerically large but still a minority when compared to the size of the dominant
ethnic group (as in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Bhutan where, respectively, Tamils,
Chinese, and Nepalese constitute signiWcant minorities). A further complication
concerning the distribution of ethno-linguistic groups relative to national borders,
considerably relevant for the establishment and growth of national identity, is that
6 A. Simpson

there are various instances in Asia where large populations of a single ethnic group are
split by an international border and separated in two distinct polities. This is the case
with millions of Bengalis, now distributed in large numbers both in Bangladesh and
the Indian state of West Bengal; with Lao people, present both in Laos and in
Thailand, with the majority of speakers actually in the latter country; and with Tamils,
signiWcantly present in Sri Lanka, but maintaining links to a much larger Tamil
population in the south of India. An especially striking case of a split population in
Asia is that of the Korean ethnic nation, now divided in two politically divergent states.
Hence even with largely homogeneous populations such as those in Bangladesh and
on the Korean peninsula there are important issues relating to the scope and
boundaries of the nation which have eVects on the successful development of
populations as modern nations.

1.2.2 National Language Policies

In terms of language policy adopted and pursued at the national level, countries
within Asia have either followed a predominantly monolingual approach, in which a
single language is designated as the oYcial, representative language of the nation and
subsequently (often) mandated for use within formal domains, or have attempted to
function with a multilingual national system, promoting more than one language as
the national/oYcial languages of the state. The former type of single national
language model has rather naturally been followed in countries with highly homo-
geneous populations, such as Japan, Korea, and Bangladesh, but has also been pursued
in many multi-ethnic states, inspired by the goal of building nations with integrated
populations newly connected up through the knowledge and frequent use of a single
lingua franca, and through exposure to new ‘national’ culture embodied in and
transmitted by means of such a language. A single national language has been selected
and promoted in multi-ethnic states with a range of diVerent population dynamics,
and with diVerent degrees of success. The single language model is Wrst of all found in
countries such as Thailand and Burma/Myanmar where a majority ethnic group lives
alongside a large number of other, smaller ethnic groups, and the language of the
dominant majority is promoted as the oYcial language of the state. Secondly, it occurs
in states such as Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan, where a signiWcant minority group
is present in addition to a more numerous majority (which selects its language as the
oYcial national form). Thirdly, it is also found in certain states where the selected
national language is actually not the mother tongue of any single ethnic group
comprising more than 50 per cent of the population, as for example is the case in
Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
In contrast with the more widespread decision to specify that a single language is to
be the national language and targeted as a form that will (come to) bind the nation
and its population together, other multi-ethnic states have opted for models in which
more than one language is recognized in oYcial ways, in attempts to give formal
 Introduction 7

linguistic representation to a range of ethnic groups within a state. This is essentially

the situation in India, which recognizes over twenty diVerent languages as the
national languages of the country – those listed in the Eighth Schedule of the
Constitution (chapter 3) – and allows for the extensive use of these languages in
education and administration when selected by individual states.1 It is also part of the
general policy of cultural pluralism which has been adopted in Singapore, where there
has been vigorous, extensive promotion of (Mandarin) Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and
English as fully equal languages of the state, and attempts at nation-building have been
focused on the image of a multi-cultural, economically successful population with
broadly shared ‘Asian’ values, rather than on the potential expansion of any single
ethnic identity to encompass others in the state (chapter 17).
In assessing the single vs. multiple national/oYcial language approaches of diVerent
states, it is furthermore useful to bear in mind that there may be diVerent degrees to
which a language designated as ‘national’ is ultimately imposed in administration,
education, and other formal domains in a state, and there are various countries which
actually supplement the use of a single indigenous national language with a second,
non-indigenous oYcial language such as (now most commonly) English. The linguis-
tic interference in the development of national languages in much of Asia from the
presence of a colonial language entrenched in government bureaucracy, legal systems,
and education is something which has not been experienced in a parallel way in the
emergence of national languages in western Europe, and continues to be an impor-
tant challenge to the full acceptance of national languages in a number of modern
states.

1.2.3 Issues in the Selection of a National Language

Where the leaders of a state have made the decision that a single language should be
designated for use as a national language, the selection of this language is not always
straightforward and in multi-ethnic populations often raises issues concerning the
justiWcation of the choice. In India at independence in 1947 (and prior to the
established oYcial multilingualism that is now characteristic of the country), Gandhi
perceived the need for a single Indian national language to bind its population as one
nation. Hindi was then presented as the language that should be chosen for this
purpose as it was said to be spoken by 40 per cent of the population and to have
signiWcantly more speakers than any other language in the subcontinent. However,
this was (and is) a potentially misleading simpliWcation of language patterns in
northern India, where there is a vast dialect continuum stretching from modern day
Pakistan through to Bangladesh and Assam, and no clear-cut boundaries between
diVerent languages in their spoken form. ‘Hindi’ as justiWed as the natural choice for

1
In addition to the languages of the Eighth Schedule, which have been referred to as the national
languages of India since Nehru initiated such a practice, two languages are designated as oYcial languages
of the country – Hindi and English – for use in national-level administration.
8 A. Simpson

a national language in fact included many language varieties that locally went by other
names, such as Rajasthani, Maithili, Braj, and Awadhi, but diVerences between these
varieties and standard Hindi were classed as being merely dialectal variation rather
than indicative of independent language status. As noted by Amritavalli and Jayaseelan
in chapter 3, these ‘varieties’ of Hindi are however actually as diVerent from standard
Hindi as the separate languages Urdu or Punjabi are, raising important questions
about the language–dialect division and how this may sometimes be manipulated for
political reasons. Where people are informed by those in authority that their language
variety is in fact simply a dialect of some other language, and this subsequently comes
to be believed due to trust in those with higher levels of education and knowledge, the
result can be the creation of super-linguistic identities which can then be invoked for
broader identity-building purposes.
In contrast to the clumping together of diVerent varieties of language under a
single language label ‘Hindi’, the distinction of Hindi and Urdu as two diVerent
languages is well known as an example of one language form being assigned two
diVerent labels as the result of non-linguistic polarization in the populations speaking
these varieties, in the case of Hindi–Urdu this polarization being along religious lines.
Though Hindi and Urdu are indeed mutually intelligible (though making use of
diVerent scripts and having certain vocabulary diVerences), Hindi is claimed as the
language of Hindus and Urdu as the language spoken by Muslims. In this case it is
critically religious identity which is signalled by the diVerent names assigned by
speakers to essentially the same language. It is also for primarily reasons of religious
identity that Urdu was selected as the national language of Pakistan, following the
separation of this area from India and the creation of a predominantly Muslim state.
Though comparatively few of the inhabitants of the area of Pakistan could actually
speak Urdu when Pakistan was established as a state in 1947, Urdu was selected over
other languages present in Pakistan which were spoken by many more millions (e.g.
Sindhi, Punjabi) in order to project a speciWc Islamic national identity, Urdu being
associated with Muslims in South Asia, and also being spoken by many of the
inXuential Mohajir immigrants who arrived in Pakistan in 1947 (chapter 5).
Within Southeast Asia, various multi-ethnic states have been faced with clear
challenges when attempting to institute a single national language, and arrived at
solutions with diVering degrees of success. In the Philippines, the absence of any
indigenous language with a nationwide strong majority of speakers meant that the
selection of the language of any of the larger ethnic groups as national language was
almost bound to trigger a negative reaction from others, and this indeed occurred.
When the language of the most numerous ethnic group, Tagalog, was determined
as the primary base of the new national language, this initiated decades of
complaints that such a choice conferred unfair socio-economic advantages on native
speakers of Tagalog while disadvantaging other groups. The symbolic renaming of
Tagalog as Pilipino and later Filipino in its role as national language did nothing to
convince the population that Pilipino/Filipino was anything other than Tagalog
 Introduction 9

and felt to be an inequitable imposition on a majority of citizens in the country (chapter

16). Elsewhere in multi-ethnic Southeast Asia, however, better-received and more
successful choices of national language have been made on independence from a colonial
power. In Indonesia, the most numerous and politically dominant ethnic group, the
speakers of Javanese, resisted any temptation to try to promote Javanese as a new
national language for all of Indonesia, realizing that it is a language that is considerably
diYcult to learn as the result of much complexity in the grammatical and lexical
encoding of social distance and politeness in the language. Instead of Javanese or the
language of any other proportionately large and influential ethnic group in the Indo-
nesian archipelago, nationalists in Indonesia decided to adopt a form of Malay already in
use as a trading lingua franca and develop this as a new national language. Such a
decision proved to be very successful and ‘Bahasa Indonesia’ has come to be widely
learned and accepted as a useful nationwide form of communication now associated
with much prestige and felt to be ethnically-neutral among the population (chapter 14).
In other instances, very clear political forces have led to the stipulation or selection
of a particular language as a nation’s representative language. In Taiwan, following
liberation of the island from Wfty years of Japanese colonial rule, the arriving Kuo Min
Tang (KMT) leadership of the Chinese nationalist army declared that Mandarin
Chinese would be the national language learned and used in all schools and govern-
mental institutions, even though Mandarin was hardly known by the inhabitants of
Taiwan, who instead mostly spoke other, quite diVerent forms of Chinese such as
Hokkien and Hakka. The reason for the imposition of Mandarin Chinese on a
population who found it largely unintelligible was that the KMT government on
Taiwan claimed to be the government of all of China (even though it had been obliged
to evacuate completely to Taiwan after defeat by Chinese communist forces on the
mainland), and the promoted national language of China had been decided to be
Mandarin Chinese (based on a form of Chinese widely known in the north of China).
The future political goals of a powerful minority leadership thus forced an unknown
tongue on a whole population as its national language and for many years caused
widespread negative feelings towards the language as a regular symbolic reminder of
the often harsh rule of the nationalist regime (chapter 11).
The widening of mass participation within politics through the spread of democ-
racy and voting rights was responsible for a further instance of national language
selection in Asia, which has had highly negative eVects, the selection of Sinhala as
national/oYcial language of Sri Lanka in 1956. As the full population of Sri Lanka
came to have the right to vote following independence in 1948, this resulted in
pressure being exerted on political parties to pay close heed to popular issues and
led to the exploitation of a particular mass ethnocentric sentiment among the
Sinhalese in the elections of 1956. Following calls from Sinhalese nationalists for the
installation of Sinhala as the sole oYcial/national language of Sri Lanka, promoting it
to a position dominating Tamil (spoken by the second major linguistic grouping on
Sri Lanka), the promise that Sinhala would be given such a status within twenty-four
10 A. Simpson

hours of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party obtaining power directly helped the latter win a
massive victory at the polls. The post-election implementation of Sinhala as the
country’s single national/oYcial language subsequently had a disastrous eVect on
Sinhalese–Tamil relations, and created a deteriorating domestic situation of animosity
and conXict that eventually escalated into civil war and still has reached no lasting,
peaceful solution (chapter 6).

1.2.4 Standardization Issues

Following resolution of the selection of a particular language form as a state’s
intended national language, in many instances processes of development and stand-
ardization of the language have become necessary, raising a range of important issues.
Frequently where the pre-independence use of a colonial language has dominated
most formal functions within a state, there is a critical need to develop an expanded
vocabulary for the newly promoted indigenous national language, so that this will
allow for the language to be used in all domains of national life. How this increase in
vocabulary is then eVected may have repercussions on perceptions of the independ-
ent, national status of the language. One route that can be followed is for linguists to
search for fully indigenous words that can serve the diverse needs of the language in
the modern world, via a number of strategies, for example, through the redeWnition of
words that have fallen into disuse, via compounding of the existing stock of native
words/roots, and through the wider deployment of words previously restricted to
occurrence in dialect varieties of the language being developed. Alternatively, new
words may be coined through the use of a second language source, as has been
common in many modern languages of South and Southeast Asia where Sanskrit,
Pali, Persian, and Arabic have frequently been made use of in the creation of new
terminology. This latter mode of building new vocabulary may however threaten to
impinge on the ‘national’ nature of the language if the second language used as a
source of new words is felt to be too much of a foreign component which reduces the
authentic, native character of the national language. In the case of classical languages
such as Sanskrit, or languages with well-respected and welcome religious connota-
tions such as Arabic (in predominantly Islamic nations) or Pali (in Buddhist countries),
this has generally not led to any negative perception in the creation of new words, and
words formed from such prestigious languages have often been considered to be of
high literary style and consequently well-valued. However, where loanwords relating
to items of science and technology and contemporary culture are adopted from
modern ‘outsider’ languages such as English, quite diVerent reactions may be trig-
gered and generate the feeling that this borrowing introduces genuinely foreign items
into a nation’s language, aVecting its desired status as an original symbolic system
representing the people of the nation.
The intrinsic ‘purity’ of a national language may become a fresh concern also
among long-established, widespread languages during periods of high nationalism
 Introduction 11

and lead to calls for a rejection of foreign borrowings and a puriWcation of the
language. A large scale programme removing many thousands of (mostly) Chinese
and Japanese loanwords and coinages occurred in North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s
during the construction of its nativized Cultured Language, and was also accompan-
ied by a rejection of Chinese characters as part of the written representation of
Korean, despite the fact that Chinese characters had been used to represent Korean
since the language was Wrst ever written down well over a thousand years ago (chapter
10). Similarly in Sri Lanka in the 1940s, the Sinhalese nationalist Hela movement
argued that even age-old Sanskrit words should be stripped from Sinhala, along with
any other more recent borrowings, to return the language to its original pure,
untainted state, as the noble vehicle of Sinhalese culture, Sinhala being held (by the
Hela movement) to be a superior and unique language descended from no other
known tongue (chapter 6).
A second broad issue in the standardization of a national language is that such a
process of modernization, allowing all citizens of a state spoken and written access to
a national language, may meet with unanticipated resistance when this results in the
attempted modiWcation of traditional forms of a language. In the early twentieth
century when Japanese was being shaped as a national language there were sugges-
tions that the shape of Chinese characters in its writing system should be altered, so as
to make these less diYcult for people to acquire. However, such proposals were
Wercely resisted by members of the upper classes proWcient in Chinese characters, who
argued that to tamper with the accepted, long-standing way of writing Japanese would
be to weaken Japanese tradition, and with it the national spirit, and it was only after
the Second World War that the simpliWcation of characters could Wnally be eVected
(chapter 9).
A third issue raised by language standardization which also relates to writing
systems is the question of whether a language that has not undergone any standard-
ization, and which possibly may resist full standardization for certain reasons, can in
fact function as a sustained, successful symbol of identity for large populations of
speakers in the modern world. This issue raises itself in particular with regard to the
viability of varieties of Chinese such as Minnanhua/Hokkien (also referred to as
‘Taiwanese’) and Cantonese as linguistic codes of identity potentially equal to other
genuinely national languages. Although Hong Kong is not a sovereign territory and
Taiwan has a complex political status, being claimed by the People’s Republic of China
as part of China but neither accepting this claim nor alternatively declaring independ-
ence, both territories have established quite individual identities due to the special
circumstances of their development, being formally separated from mainland China
during most of the twentieth century. In Taiwan during the second half of the
twentieth century, the Minnanhua dialect of Chinese spoken on the island by the
majority of its inhabitants came to be associated with nationalism and calls for a
declaration of independence from China, and in Hong Kong Cantonese similarly
emerged as a strong symbol of the identity of the colony’s modern and successful
12 A. Simpson

population, which oriented itself both towards Asia and the West, and showed much
independence in its approach to business, trade, and contemporary culture (chapter
8). With both ‘Taiwanese’ and Cantonese, and all non-Mandarin forms of Chinese,
however, a serious problem faces their potential use and expansion as the symbolic,
representative, and oYcial language of a major population. To date there is no
satisfactory, widely accepted way of writing either language variety, and despite
signiWcant eVorts to develop both Romanized and character-based written forms for
Taiwanese and Cantonese, regular written ‘Chinese’ in both Hong Kong and Taiwan
essentially remains a representation of Mandarin Chinese. DiYculties of standardiza-
tion in the area of writing may therefore seem to impose an important inherent
restriction on the way that certain languages are able to develop a potentially higher-
level oYcial status and represent the identity of a population of speakers in both
formal and informal domains.
Finally, with regard to standardization issues, we can note here the speciWc issue of
a situation where processes of standardization have led a single language in two
diVerent directions. Following the division of Korea into two oYcial parts in 1948,
controlled by regimes with signiWcantly diVerent political orientations, Korean under-
went two separate processes of standardization, resulting in the formation of Cul-
tured Language in the North, based heavily on the dialect of Pyongyang and
incorporating many northern dialect words as replacements for Sino-Korean expres-
sions, and a Southern standard based on the dialect of Seoul, maintaining a very
substantial number of Sino-Korean words. Although there is still a certain amount of
disagreement as to how far North Korean and South Korean have already undergone
divergence, the existence of two independent standardized forms of the language
clearly raises the question of whether a formally diverging language can be felt to
encode a single national identity, and how long the impression of connectedness
between speakers in North and South can be maintained if separate standardization
seriously aVects mutual intelligibility.

1.2.5 Promotion and Suppression

In addition to selection and standardization, the successful use of language in nation-
building requires the broad promotion of national language and its spread throughout
the population of a country. This is often naturally achieved through introduction of a
selected national language into a state-wide educational system for at least part of
students’ regular curriculum, through the improvement of general literacy and
reading ability among the adult population, and via the dissemination of a range of
media employing the national language such as radio and television programmes,
newspapers, and other written materials. Following the winning of independence
from foreign colonial powers, a number of states in Asia identiWed a major immediate
political goal to be the eradication of adult illiteracy so that nationalist or in some
cases communist/socialist propaganda could be more eVectively communicated to
 Introduction 13

the public at large. In North Korea and North Vietnam, such initiatives are considered
to have been extremely successful, and intensive programmes of instruction resulted
in dramatic increases in literacy among lower socio-economic sections of the popu-
lation, as far as can be ascertained. Elsewhere, in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) at the beginning
of the twentieth century and for several decades prior to independence, the introduc-
tion of superior printing technology allowed for a rapid growth in the number of
publications in the majority indigenous language, Sinhala, and caused a signiWcant
improvement in the previously low prestige of the language, establishing its position
as a future cornerstone of Sinhalese nationalism. In Siam (Thailand) in the 1930s,
radio broadcasting in particular was used with great eVect to send a nationalist
message in Standard Thai throughout the country and reinforce the idea among its
citizens of belonging to a uniWed, forward-looking Thai people. In all such instances,
the nationwide propagation of a single language form through various types of media
functions to anchor and Wx a standardized, shared language, and may simultaneously
be used to associate this language with the ideas of nationalism. Where the aspects of
modernization, domestic infrastructure, and organization which facilitate such
nationwide programmes are absent or underdeveloped in a country, the spread of
(national) language as a means of building up a strong national identity have not been
so eVective, as for example in the case of Laos and Cambodia.
The vigorous promotion of a national language may in certain instances be
accompanied by the suppression of other languages and forceful attempts to assimi-
late diverse ethnic groups to the targeted national identity. During the development of
modern Japanese as a national language, use of the Ainu and Okinawan languages was
suppressed within Japan and use of Japanese required in their place (in a complete
change of policy for the Ainu, who in the eighteenth century had actually been
forbidden to speak Japanese – chapter 9), and in the overseas expansion of the Japanese
empire in Korea and Taiwan, the attempted assimilation of local populations as
Japanese nationals resulted in Japanese being the only language permitted in schools,
banks, and government oYces. The governments of various other multi-ethnic states
have also made attempts to assimilate mixed populations to a single, dominant
identity, in many cases that of the majority ethnic group, as for example in Nepal
during the Panchayat regime (1960–90) where those in power emphasized that there
should be ‘one country, one dress, one language’, and tried to enforce a uniform
national culture and language on a very mixed population (chapter 4). Where the use
of a promoted national language is spread through widespread introduction into the
educational system, this may frequently lead to the mandatory discontinuation of
other languages as mediums of instruction in public schools, as has occurred in
Thailand and Bhutan, and private schools oVering tuition in specialized languages
may additionally be subject to closure, a prominent example of this being the gradual
closing down of Chinese schools in Thailand and Indonesia during the course of the
twentieth century. Ironically, though, the deliberate suppression of languages in such
a way may increase the ‘bounce-back’ strength prohibited languages enjoy when their
14 A. Simpson

use is eventually permitted again. Following decades of suppression under Wrst

Japanese colonial rule and then Chinese nationalist (Kuo Min Tang/KMT) control,
‘Taiwanese’ re-emerged as a very strong force in political and public life in Taiwan
from the 1980s onwards, and the end of the Panchayat regime in Nepal saw a massive
resurgence in the championing of minority languages, despite thirty years of heavy
government promotion of Nepalese.

1.2.6 Acceptance, Prestige, and the Pragmatic Value of Indigenous

National Languages and English
What is critically important for the successful widespread adoption of a newly pro-
moted national language among a targeted population is that the language win the
enthused acceptance of the latter and also provide certain concrete advantages to those
who attempt to learn and use it. Languages such as Standard Thai, Indonesian, and
Mandarin Chinese have become associated with the positive values of progress,
modernity, success, education, and higher social status, enhancing their attractiveness
as national languages and considerably stimulating their spread and use in everyday life.
In addition to the general prestige value of a national language, the potential
pragmatic utility of acquiring proWciency in such a language is a major factor in
assisting its spread throughout a population. Where the learning of a language may
lead to economic advantages and improved prospects of employment, there is
regularly a very clear movement towards acquisition of the language, in particular
among rising generations. In many new nations, a working ability in the national
language has been made necessary for securing positions in government oYces and
administration, and as the civil service in a number of countries in Asia functions as
the largest and most important state-wide source of employment for the general
population, this has introduced a highly signiWcant motivation in the learning of
national languages. With the development of successful national economies in much
of Asia, the private sector and market forces have also encouraged a knowledge of
broadly shared language among a nation’s population, in many domestic instances
(i.e. for use in domestic business and the service industry) this naturally being
knowledge of the national language.
A good illustrative example of the clash that can however sometimes occur
between the promotion of an indigenous national language and the forces of prag-
matically driven language planning and behaviour is discussed in chapter 4 relative to
the small mountainous state of Bhutan. Rhoderick Chalmers notes that while there is
a major promotion of Dzongkha as part of the government’s attempt to deWne a
distinct Bhutanese national identity, there is also a pragmatic recognition that Bhu-
tanese citizens are more likely to be successful in dealing with the outside world if
equipped with English, and consequently the medium of all education in the country
is indeed English (and has been so since the 1960s), posing a potentially serious threat
to the spread and continued widespread use of the national language.
 Introduction 15

Quite generally, the pragmatic value of English in Asia has both remained high in
many states that were earlier occupied by British (or American) colonial forces, and
has also been growing at a high rate in other Asian countries due to the global
growth of English as a lingua franca. A pattern that is striking in its repetition in
many ex-British colonies and also the former US-occupied Philippines is the continued
post-independence maintenance of English as a language available for oYcial and
formal functions (including use in education) or alternatively its reintroduction in an
oYcial-like capacity some decades after the achievement of independence. For ex-
ample, in both Pakistan and Malaysia, it was indicated at independence that English
would continue to be allowed for use in oYcial domains for a certain time, and then
be fully replaced by Urdu and Malay respectively, but the complete sidelining of
English has not in fact occurred, and it still remains available as an alternative to the
national language in formal situations in both states (and is much used in this way in
Pakistan). In 1993 Malaysia also took the step of reintroducing English as medium of
education in universities after several decades of Malay dominating this domain. In
India in 1967 and the Philippines in 1987, English was reintroduced as a full oYcial
language of the state after a period of experimentation with the promotion of a single
national language (Hindi and Pilipino/Filipino). In the Philippines, Filipino is still
presented as the single national language of the country, with English being distin-
guished as an oYcial language (Filipino is also given oYcial language status), yet the
nuances of a technical distinction between national and oYcial language may some-
times not be very obvious in everyday life and English retains much of the strong and
inXuential presence it had in formal domains in pre-independence times.
In a number of instances where the use of English has been reintroduced or
increased over the last few decades, it can be noted that this has been in response to
calls from the public or due to consumer demand and has not been a government-led
imposition from the top. In India it was a hostile public reaction in various parts of the
country to the attempted spread of Hindi as the single oYcial language which caused
English to be reinstalled as a co-oYcial language of the state, and in the area of
education, it has most commonly been pragmatically driven public demand that has
Wred the strong regrowth of English. For example, though the post-independence
government of Singapore made education available in the four oYcial languages of
the territory, Tamil, Malay, and Chinese-medium schools were eventually converted
into English-medium schools due to an almost complete lack of enrolment of students
in the former (chapter 17). As reported in chapter 3, currently in India the demand for
private schooling in English is no longer the preserve of the urban middle class as in
earlier times, but has now become a phenomenon spread through less prosperous
rural areas of the country too, and a similar consumer-led spread of a demand for the
learning of English can be identiWed in many other countries in Asia, not only those
with a history of English as a colonial language, but also other states with diVerent
linguistic backgrounds which are now looking forward to increased integration in
international markets, such as Vietnam and Thailand.
16 A. Simpson

This upward development of English in Asia raises the question of how the learning
of English impacts on the linguistic identity of speakers and whether the increased
use of English may perhaps pose a challenge to the success of a national language in
binding a population together. At one extreme of a spectrum of rather diVerent
situations, Nanette Gottlieb observes in chapter 9 that the learning of English in
Japan generally appears to have minimal eVect on the maintenance of a distinctively
Japanese view of the world and does not introduce signiWcantly diVerent ways of
thinking. English is simply learned as a linguistic system in the same way that other
computational skills might be acquired. At another extreme, however, one Wnds that
there are elite groups in many countries who may function almost fully in English and
are perceived as being considerably detached from other members of their ethnic
groups and may not be not proWcient in the national language of their country. The
existence of such an English-educated semi-estranged elite is noted in the chapters on
Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, and Singapore (with regard to the English-educated
Chinese), and periodically extends to include even the leaders of a nation, as, for
example, in chapter 5 where Christopher Shackle notes that most leaders of Pakistan
have had to have their speeches translated into the national language Urdu, and are
otherwise more comfortable communicating in English. In between these two
extremes, English may intrude and modify an existing ethnic or national identity in
diVerent ways. Studies in Hong Kong of native speakers of Cantonese with an
advanced competence in English have shown that there is a considerable reluctance
to speak English in groups of Chinese where there is no non-Chinese/Cantonese
person present, as this is felt to conXict with a more basic, shared Hong Kong
Cantonese identity (Pennington and Yue 1994). Though knowledge and use of English
may therefore bring an additional component of Western culture, in such cases it is
still far from reaching any kind of dominance of a more fundamental ethnic identity,
and this situation is most probably characteristic of the majority population in many
countries in Asia where English is widely known.

1.2.7 Superiority, Pressure, Minorities, and Language Loss

In the stimulation of a national identity through the promotion of a national
language, a certain deliberate emphasis on the prestige value of the national language
will regularly assist its adoption and use amongst a population of potential speakers.
Where such highlighting of the positive properties of a language is driven to extremes,
however, this may lead to what has been called ‘linguistic’ or ‘language nationalism’
and the idea that a nation’s language is actually superior to those of other groups.
Commonly thought to have its origins in the writings of Fichte and Herder and the
nineteenth-century development of nationalism in German-speaking areas of western
Europe, and also perhaps in the linguistic attitudes of certain leaders of the French
revolution, the clearest instance of language nationalism described in the present
volume is in chapter 10’s focus on state-promoted attitudes towards the Korean
 Introduction 17

language in North Korea. There it is noted how important government-sponsored

publications on language and linguistics regularly stress the clear superiority of a wide
range of properties of the Korean language, from stylistics right through to particular
aspects of morphosyntax and the lexicon, and how reference to the superior nature of
Korean has also been a recurrent feature of the public speeches and writings of North
Korea’s two powerful post-war leaders, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-il. Chapter 6 on Sri
Lanka points to a similar nationalist-linguistic fervour in assertions of the unique
properties of Sinhala, as made by the Hela movement during its push for a revival of a
fully pure form of Sinhala.
In South Korea, strong nationalist passions of a linguistic type are directed most
obviously towards the Korean alphabetic system of writing script known as hankul,
and Ross King underlines how ‘script nationalism’ is heavily present in the form of ‘an
almost cult-like respect and even worship-like reverence’ for hankul and the Wfteenth-
century inventor and promulgator of Korean writing, King Sejong.
Quite generally, national and also sub-national script forms in Asia are often a focus
of high feelings and have the potential to generate much emotion. In addition to
functioning as clear boundary symbols between populations with diVerent identities,
as for example with Hindi and Urdu, where the most obvious diVerence between the
two ‘languages’ is the script used to represent them, or the ‘tactical’ use of Gurumu-
khi script by Punjabi-speaking Sikhs in attempts to establish a distinct identity that
would help with calls for independence (see chapter 3), there is frequently clear pride
in the invention and ownership of a distinct writing system (with Thai reverence for
King Ramkhamhaeng’s creation of the Thai script being another example similar to
the Korean veneration of King Sejong and hankul, though less intense), and script
forms have in some instances been invested with almost sacred qualities to be Wercely
protected as embodiments of a nation’s identity, as in Japan during early twentieth-
century attempts to modernize the language.
Interestingly, both clearly positive and negative attitudes towards script forms can be
identiWed, with such diVerent attitudes sometimes being directed towards essentially
the same representational system, underlying the rather arbitrary and Xuctuating
power that script forms may possess as symbolic systems. Two cases can be noted as
examples here. In Vietnam, quoc ngu originated as a system of Romanization for the
Viet language created by Western missionaries and was then made use of by French
colonial administration. Because of its associations with the French, quoc ngu was seen
as a symbol of attempted foreign domination and negatively valued during the early
stages of Viet nationalism. Later, however, its ease of learning (compared to previous
complicated character-based forms of representation) made it a useful tool for the
propagation of nationalist ideas, and over time the writing system became positively
valued in nationalist ideas and is now a clear symbol of the fully independent Viet
nation (chapter 19). A second pertinent example is the markedly diVerent attitudes
towards Chinese characters present in Japan and China during the development of
nationalism in the Wrst half of the twentieth century. As already noted, a strongly
18 A. Simpson

positive attitude towards the traditional system of Chinese characters was held by those
in control of power in Japan during the interwar years, and this succeeded in blocking
any suggestions of possible modernization of the writing system. In China, however, as
described by Ping Chen in chapter 7, an extremely negative attitude towards the use of
characters as a writing system was maintained by signiWcant numbers of the country’s
intellectual elite and those in charge of engineering language planning and policy, and
there were frequent, vociferous calls for the complete abandonment of characters and
their replacement with some form of Romanized spelling. One particularly colourful
and damning characterization of China’s traditional writing system noted by Chen and
illustrative of some of the force of negative feelings present at the time was voiced by
the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Qu Qiubai, who protested
critically and with high emotion in 1931 that: ‘Chinese characters are like the Wlthiest,
most abominable, most wicked, medieval night soil cesspit’ (chapter 7, section 7.3.2).
As Chen observes, in the minds of many nationalists in China in the 1920s and 1930s,
the pragmatic imperative of making available a form of writing that could be widely
acquired by common people signiWcantly outranked the potential value of characters as
symbols of a pan-Chinese national identity and so led to calls for a new alphabetic
writing system to replace the use of characters.
At the other end of the scale from language nationalism and positive feelings of
linguistic superiority, the spread of standardized national languages across the popu-
lation of a state regularly causes speakers of non-standardized languages to increas-
ingly perceive their own mother tongues in negative ways, leading in many instances
to patterns of language shift and language loss. Such a downward development is
particularly common amongst smaller minority groups, and is accelerated by popu-
lation movements which dilute the density of a minority in a certain area, when
pressure on land for settlement brings speakers of larger languages into regions
originally occupied by minorities. From the point of view of establishing a single
national identity within a state, the continued existence of ethnic minority groups
may be seen as representing pockets of non-uniformity in a targeted homogeneous
nation. Nevertheless, in a number of countries in Asia such as Indonesia, China, India,
and Vietnam, there have been periodic attempts to recognize minority ethnic groups
and provide certain legal, linguistic, or other assistance supporting the maintenance of
their languages, primarily with reference to the use of language in education. In India,
for example, the constitution declares that all minorities are entitled to ‘establish and
administer educational institutions of their choice’ (chapter 3, section 3.4.2), and
similar overt expressions of protective concern have been made in various other
countries. The degree to which such government decrees then translate into real
on-the-ground help is however a very open question, and it is often diYcult to obtain
clear information about the actual ethno-linguistic state of minorities with regard to
the maintenance of their languages. With the general expansion of national popula-
tions across Asia and increased contact with majority groups, however, the signs are
that smaller minority groups in economically challenged situations are increasingly
 Introduction 19

switching to the use of larger languages and not managing to maintain their original
ethno-linguistic identities as in earlier times.

1.3 Long-term Issues and Results

1.3.1 Successes
If one tries to identify what might be considered relatively successful or eVective
instances of the role of language in nation-building and maintenance in Asia, either as
the result of deliberate eVorts or through the inheritance and continued strength of a
broadly shared language, a number of cases stand out as clearly strong and eVective
national languages. In the northeast of Asia, Japan and Korea are examples of nations
with a very high degree of ethnic homogeneity where language has signiWcantly
helped in the reinforcement of perceptions of cohesion. With the development and
propagation of a standardized form of Japanese in the early twentieth century,
communication throughout Japan came to be possible in a single language after
centuries of compartmentalization of the country and the lack of a broadly shared
lingua franca. During the nationalist period, the ‘Japanese language’ was then pre-
sented as embodying the spiritual essence of the Japanese nation with a philosophy
referred to as kotodama (chapter 9, section 9.2.3), and successfully used to emphasize
the idea of a homogeneous and harmonious, unique people separated oV from the
rest of the world through a language that was almost impenetrable and supremely
diYcult for non-Japanese people to learn. Similarly in Korea during the twentieth
century, the national language has functioned as a major symbol of national identity
and has inspired passionate outbursts of linguistic nationalism, and despite the fact
that the nation is now divided into two states with radically diVerent socio-political
systems, the belief in a common Korean people connected by use of a single basic
Korean language continues to be widely held, though recently also challenged by fears
of North–South divergence in the language. Elsewhere in East Asia, the development
and spread of a national form of language has been important and generally successful
in the vast territory of China and its attempts at the building of a modern nation.
Faced with a massive population of ethnically Chinese people speaking diVerent,
mutually unintelligible varieties of ‘Chinese’, a common form of Chinese ‘Mandarin/
putonghua’ has now been very eVectively disseminated throughout the country, and
though not triggering the level of nationalist fervour sometimes enjoyed by Korean,
patterns of language shift and choice in a range of domains seem to suggest increas-
ingly positive attitudes towards the national common language (chapter 7).
In Southeast Asia with its much higher degree of ethnic heterogeneity in national
populations, two countries where national languages have been well spread and
embedded into a wide range of domains and generally fulWl a strengthening role
without being simultaneously over-repressive are Thailand and Indonesia. The former
has beneWted from having more of a homogeneous population than the latter but also
20 A. Simpson

put signiWcant eVort into the promotion of Standard Thai as the country’s national
language, and has succeeded in generating largely positive attitudes towards the
language. Indonesia with its considerably varied ethno-linguistic population and
mostly tolerant outlook on linguistic diversity has managed to win a broadly parallel
level of acceptance for Bahasa Indonesia through a rather more staggered and less
overtly nationalistic route, allowing and even encouraging the continued mainten-
ance of other languages alongside the national language, while promoting the
nationwide usefulness and prestige of the latter. A third example of a country in
Southeast Asia which has engineered a clearly eVective national language policy,
though of a quite diVerent type, is the small modern state of Singapore. Having
decided to pursue a pluralist approach to national/oYcial language so as not to over-
favour any particular section of its mixed population, the government of Singapore
has engaged itself vigorously in the provision of equal linguistic opportunities for
four major languages and those who might choose to speak these languages since
achieving full independence in 1965, a Wne balancing act and high risk enterprise,
requiring constant attention and continual readjustments, but ultimately being very
successful thus far.
Turning to South Asia, India and Bangladesh are the two countries which can most
easily be characterized in positive terms with regard to the way that language and state-
directed language policy have aVected the building and maintenance of a nation,
though in quite diVerent ways. In the continent-like state of India, with its large
number of languages and ethno-religious groups, a major achievement of the govern-
ment has been to adopt policies that manage to reduce the potential for language-
related conXict to occur, and having retreated from an early problematic attempt to
spread Hindi as the sole nationwide oYcial language of the country, there has been
signiWcant emphasis on allowing regional languages to function as oYcial languages
within territories reorganized as optimally homogeneous ‘linguistic states’ (chapter 3).
Such a primarily defensive policy recognizing the strong multi-ethnic nature of the
country has helped minimize the likelihood for fragmentation of the nation to stem
from language problems, and has therefore contributed in a signiWcant way to the
maintenance of India as a single, national unit. Contrasting with this broadly multi-
lingual situation of containment in India, Bangladesh can be said to be the sole example
of a state in South Asia where a single language enjoys a widely popular status as
national language among a large population (without this having also caused major
internal problems, as in the case of Sinhala in Sri Lanka). The important role that
Bangla (Bengali) has as a symbol of the nation and the aVection in which the language is
held by much of the population is a result of both the high degree of ethnic homo-
geneity in Bangladesh and the prestige associated with Bangla due to the central role it
played in the separation of Bangladesh from (West) Pakistan and the struggle for an
independent Bangla-speaking state (chapter 2). Combined with the fact that Bangla has
a long and well-respected literary history, Bangladesh is a good example of a country in
which there is a close natural correspondence between nation, national language, and
 Introduction 21

state, the only major complicating factor in such a picture being the existence of a very
sizeable Bangla-speaking population in neighbouring India, similar to the existence in
Europe of large German-speaking populations in countries adjacent to Germany.

1.3.2 Negative Effects of National Language Policies

Considering how language may have Wgured negatively in the construction of national
identity, either giving rise to conXict and problems that may not have previously been
present, or simply failing to establish a hoped-for bonding among a new ‘national’
population, a number of diVerent situations can be noted, the most striking of which
relate to language and the post-independence development of states in South Asia.
Within South Asia, the two countries where speciWc, attempted national language
policies have had the most dramatic long-term consequences and associations with
conXict are Sri Lanka and Bangladesh (in the latter’s early relationship with Pakistan).
In Sri Lanka, the imposition of Sinhala as the single oYcial language of the country in
1956 triggered a rapid deterioration in relations between the minority Tamil popula-
tion and the majority Sinhalese who were seen as symbolically excluding the Tamils
from a united and equally shared future in the nation through the formal promotion
of Sinhala over Tamil, as well as threatening their economic future via new require-
ments that only Sinhala be used in central government administration. Combined
with the introduction of important language-speciWc restrictions on university en-
trance which seemed to favour Sinhala speakers, and the formal recognition of
Buddhism (practised by most of the Sinhalese) as having a privileged position in Sri
Lanka (as opposed to Hinduism or Islam, practised by Tamil-speakers), such govern-
ment-initiated measures led to a gradual worsening of ethnic relations in the 1960s
and to the initiation of violent conXict, which then escalated out of control into a
disastrous situation of civil war that has still not reached a fully peaceful conclusion.
Further north in the Indian subcontinent, in the newly established independent
state of Pakistan early language policy decisions also had very serious eVects upon
national unity. Having been created as a homeland for Muslims in South Asia in 1947,
Pakistan originally consisted in two geographically separate entities with quite diVer-
ent populations – the very mixed West Pakistan (modern day Pakistan) where a
variety of languages were spoken, and the relatively uniform East Pakistan (formerly
East Bengal, now Bangladesh), where Bangla/Bengali was spoken by most of the
population. For largely symbolic reasons, forces in West Pakistan insisted that Urdu
(which was in fact known by only a small minority of the population in West Pakistan,
but which had a traditional association with Muslims in South Asia) be made into the
national language of all Pakistan and used throughout both West and East Pakistan in
oYcial business. Initial suggestions that Bangla be used as the national language on
account of the large proportion of native speakers present in Pakistan (44 million out
of a total population of 69 million) were rejected, as were more modest calls for
Bangla to be made a co-oYcial language of the nation along with Urdu and English.
22 A. Simpson

Such a clear and fairly aggressive dismissal of the possibility of Bangla receiving oYcial
recognition as an important language component of the new nation led to consider-
able agitation in East Pakistan and disillusionment with the union with West Pakistan.
When several protestors were killed by police during a demonstration calling for
Bangla to be accepted as an oYcial/national language of Pakistan, this agitation
heightened further and became widespread, engendering a language movement
which subsequently grew into a more general liberation movement calling for
independence from West Pakistan. Fuelled by other perceptions of unfair treatment
of East Pakistan by those holding power in West Pakistan, Bengali nationalists Wnally
declared East Pakistan to be independent as the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, and
achieved formal separation from West Pakistan in 1971 following a bitter nine-month
civil war.
In both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, language issues have consequently been at the
very centre of serious civil unrest and have signiWcantly evolved into wider movements
of dissatisfaction and resistance. Furthermore, once the lack of attention to initial
language-related problems has led on to broader secessionist-type movements, the
momentum of the latter is diYcult to halt with simple changes in language policy. In
Sri Lanka and also Pakistan, there was actually a procrastinated recognition of Tamil
and Bangla, respectively, as oYcial languages of the state (Tamil in 1978, Bangla in
1954/56). However, such apparent rectiWcation of the initial linguistic cause of
discontent came too late in both instances to repair the damage done to ethnic
relations and avoid the further widening of major fault-lines within the nation.
More recently in the 1990s, a consideration of Nepal reveals the instructive example
of a state where a language policy which had outwardly long been presented as
successful in helping build a united nation retrospectively shows very clear signs of
having been quite unsuccessful. From 1960 to 1990, the authoritarian Panchayat
regime forcefully imposed ‘Nepali’ as national language on the very mixed population
of Nepal as part of a drive to mould a uniform national culture from the large number
of ethno-linguistic groups present within its borders. Projecting the image of a
country strongly united in a shared national idea with language at the centre,
characterized by the common slogan ‘one language, one country’, it seemed to
many both inside and outside Nepal that the nationalist programme of measures
imposed by the regime had won the broad acceptance of the people. When the
Panchayat regime fell from power in 1990, however, a strikingly widespread and
strong rejection of the government’s monolingual nationalism became apparent in a
major upsurge of new ethnic organizations and claims for minority language rights,
with the result that the description of Nepal in the new constitution of 1990 was
obliged to explicitly recognize the country as being multi-ethnic and multilingual and
retreat from the previous oYcial image of being a population fully uniWed by the
willing adoption of a single ‘Nepali’ language and culture. Three decades of attempts
to coerce a national culture centred on a single national language therefore ultimately
failed to win the signiWcant allegiance it openly claimed to enjoy.
 Introduction 23

Prior to its stabilization as a state functioning with many languages in diVerent

oYcial domains, India for a time also unsuccessfully pursued the idea of trying to bind
its population together via the spread of a single national language, Hindi. InXuenced
by earlier examples of monolingual nation-building and nationalism in the West, it
was suggested at independence that the state-wide use of a single indigenous language
in oYcial government functions might help create a positive, clear cohesiveness in the
new nation of India. However, while such a project garnered support in the Hindi-
speaking belt of the north of the country, it was Wercely criticized in various other
areas and particularly so in the Dravidian south of India. As the date for the oYcial
implementation of Hindi as the nation’s sole oYcial language grew closer, violent
demonstrations occurred in the south of the country with much loss of life and
widespread damaging of government property. Such violence Wnally convinced the
government to abandon its attempt to instate Hindi alone as the nation’s oYcial
representative language, and in its place the compromise position of allowing English
to rank with Hindi as an available co-oYcial language of the state was adopted,
signiWcantly weakening the potential symbolic force of Hindi as a pan-Indian national
language (chapter 3).
Finally, Pakistan in its purely domestic dealings (i.e. not relating to the separated,
now independent territory of Bangladesh) can be mentioned as a further instance of a
largely unsuccessful national language policy in South Asia. The selection of Urdu as
Pakistan’s national language primarily for symbolic reasons, due to its association
with South Asian Muslims, had the concrete result of conferring an important
advantage on the Urdu-speaking minority present in the country (most of whom
were very recent immigrants from India), allowing the latter easier access to better
government-related employment, and disadvantaging the majority of the population
who spoke a range of other languages. The lack of a subsequent robust spreading and
acquisition of competence in Urdu evenly throughout the nation, together with the
problem that English rather than Urdu continues to be dominant among many of the
elites in the country, has produced a situation in which Urdu maintains a considerably
weak position as national language, and government linguistic policy has not only
failed to bring about a strengthening of the nation but even contributed to language-
related ethnic problems and dissatisfaction (chapter 5).
Elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia instances of failed national language pro-
grammes may be less pronounced in many ways and without the dramatic conse-
quences of secession and civil conXict. In East Asia, China, Japan, and Korea, with
their diVerent paths of development as nations, their more homogeneous popula-
tions, and the absence of Western colonial occupation as a complicating factor, have
generally been successful in creating positive attitudes towards a standardized na-
tional language, as noted in section 1.3.1. Within Southeast Asia, alongside examples
of comparatively eVective national language projects and planning, cases of a rather
more negative character are primarily instances where national languages have simply
failed to be taken up and enthusiastically adopted by a population, rather than causing
24 A. Simpson

serious divisions and violent conXict in a nation. Two examples of such a situation are
Laos and the Philippines, which share a broadly similar proWle in relation to the
development of national language. In both multi-ethnic countries the selection of the
language of the most numerous ethnic group as the national language has Wrst of all
generated negative (or simply disinterested uninterested) feelings towards the
language amongst other groups, which themselves make up a very sizeable propor-
tion of the total population. The failure of the government to then vigorously spread
the selected national language throughout the country, combined with the general
lack of shared national identity brought about by other symbolic means has in both
cases led to a rather apathetic attitude towards Lao and Filipino as national languages
among signiWcant portions of the populations of Laos and the Philippines, and in the
latter country this has been confounded further by the widespread presence of English
as a competitor language of prestige. The potential for language to serve as an
integrative tool in the building of a national identity has consequently not been
taken advantage of to any eVective degree in these countries and in fact has generally
been an impediment to the creation of a united national consciousness.

1.4 Further Issues Relating to Language and the Construction

of National Identity
1.4.1 Competing Identities: Religious and Regional Loyalties
Potentially complicating the successful development of national identity via linguistic
means are the loyalties that individuals may feel to other groups and areas of their
lives, such as religion and sub-national locale. Concerning the former, it has regularly
been noted that religion is a particularly strong element of identity formation in
South Asia, to the extent of having been the direct cause of the post-independence
separation of India and Pakistan, creating in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ‘a
virtually unique case of a multilingual Asian country whose frontiers were explicitly
deWned by the religious identity of the majority of its inhabitants’ (Shackle, chapter 5).
Where a nation predominantly consists in adherents of a single religion, as in the case
of Pakistan, this clearly poses no challenge to the strength of national identity, and the
alignment of religious and national identity may be emphasized and symbolically
linked. However, where there exist diVering religious loyalties within a single state,
these may possibly hamper and override attempts to construct a broader national
identity on the basis of other linking forces available such as the promotion of a shared
national language. For example, the strong association of Standard Thai with Ther-
avada Buddhism has been a reason for many Muslims in the south of Thailand to hold
negative attitudes towards the national language and instead maintain a form of Malay
with its preferred associations with Islam practised close by in Malaysia. In contrast to
this, however, there are also certain instances where national language may seem to
be a more important factor in identity than religion. As noted above in section 1.3.2
 Introduction 25

and in chapter 2, language problems arising between Islamic West and East Pakistan
resulted in an independence movement being born in East Pakistan, which eventually
brought about the secession of the latter as Bangladesh. In such a case, the common
religious identity of West and East Pakistan proved insuYcient to hold the nation
together, and in East Pakistan language became the prime, championed symbol of
Bengali nationalism. A second instance of the uniting force of language in relation to
religion that can be noted is the clear change in emphasis on deWning symbols of
identity among the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. Whereas (Buddhist) religion had been the
major symbol of Sinhalese ethnic identity promoted in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Sinhala language took on this role during the mid-twentieth
century and signiWcantly united Buddhist and Christian Sinhalese as a group in
competition with the Tamils of Sri Lanka.
The existence of sub-national regional identities linked to language may also be a
force that can hinder the use of national language to stimulate and develop national
identity. Although it is sometimes observed that it may be possible for individuals to
maintain multiple, non-conXicting identities which can be evoked at diVerent times,
hence that the existence of a regional identity need not exclude the growth and
adoption of a higher-level national identity, it is also clear that the degree of regular
reinforcement of regional and national identities may be unequal and so may allow for
an imbalance in the relative strength of associated loyalties. Where a regional (or
other form of ethnic or religious) identity is more regularly strengthened than feelings
of belonging to a national unit, this may signiWcantly result in regional loyalties being
valued higher than those to the nation in situations where the two may in fact
conXict, and potentially also cause national identity to be only rather weakly held
and present in other situations where there is no direct conXict of interests with
regional identity.
A consideration of the range of states in Asia from Pakistan to Japan reveals diVerent
degrees of overt governmental concern relating to the existence of language-linked
regional identities, and while the occurrence of regional language and identity
may have been deliberately downplayed at the oYcial level in certain countries in
the past (Thailand, for example, chapter 18), many of the more populous states in
Asia have in fact encouraged and facilitated the maintenance of regional languages. In
India the internal reorganization of much of its territory into ‘linguistic states’ (chapter
3) has been a deliberate attempt to consolidate populations of speakers of regional
languages and concentrate these in administrative units, helping promote the strength
of languages such as Gujarati, Tamil, and Bengali. In China, the widely accepted
notion of ‘pluralistic integrity’ (duoyuan yiti, chapter 7) maintains that China is a nation
composed of two levels, the national and the sub-national level of ethnic group, each
having its own identity legitimately supported by knowledge and use of a particular
language. The maintenance of a language other than Chinese as a symbol of an
individual’s sub-national identity is therefore not seen to conXict with that person’s
loyalty to the nation and his/her national identity, which should be supported via a
26 A. Simpson

competence in (Mandarin) Chinese. In a similar way, Indonesia in recent decades has

indicated a clear willingness to allow regional languages to Xourish and characterized
these as useful resources for the nation rather than as forces creating a threat to
national identity. In diVerent countries there may consequently be diVerent outcomes
with regard to the strength of regional linguistic identity vs. national identity. In the
Philippines, where promotion of symbols of a Philippine national identity, including
the national language, has been generally weak, regional identity and regional lan-
guage are commonly considered to enjoy a higher degree of loyalty and to be more
important to individuals in their daily lives than national identity and the national
language, Filipino. There may also be certain natural variation within a single country
in the strength of regional identities and languages, depending on the attitudes and
aVection held towards these in comparison with national language and the broader
identity it supports. In China, for example, chapter 7 reports an ongoing erosion of the
Min and Wu regional varieties of Chinese and an increase among the young in the use
of Mandarin Chinese in domains that used to be the common reserve of local dialect.
This seems to signal a fairly classic prestige-driven move towards a national linguistic
identity which is now more attractive than local identity and its representative form of
language associated with the speech of the older generation and the less sophisticated.
In contrast to this, however, in Canton province it is reported that the proportion of
Cantonese spoken relative to Mandarin is signiWcantly higher, reXecting a very buoy-
ant, conWdent, and individualistic Cantonese identity that is much less oriented
towards alignment with a national linguistic norm emanating from the north of
China. Given the concern some commentators have that China may face increasing
challenges to its internal cohesion as regional economic inequalities become more
pronounced with time, these Xuctuating linguistic indications of regional identity and
national integration will be useful to pay attention to.

1.4.2 Globalization, Multilingual Education, and Media Expansion

Closing this general introduction to themes discussed in the upcoming chapters of the
volume, three Wnal recent trends and challenges aVecting the use of language to
develop national identity will be outlined here and noted as ongoing issues that may
have an increased relevance during the opening decades of the twenty-Wrst century
when Asian economies and technology continue to develop and lifestyles adjust
accordingly.
The Wrst of these is the impact of globalization on patterns of language use,
traditional culture, and national identity. One major consequence of the rapid increase
in international business, communication, and travel in recent years has been an
accelerated spread of English in many parts of Asia, with various important eVects,
including a potential lowering of the high prestige that might otherwise automatically
be accorded to a national language. Processes of globalization and the spread of
components of modern Western culture have also resulted in the loss of traditional
 Introduction 27

culture in various places in Asia. In Thailand, for example, there is regular public
discussion of the concern that adherence to traditional Thai ways and national culture
is being weakened by the growing attention that is given to imported, modern forms
of entertainment and the globalized lifestyles portrayed in cinema and television,
particularly among the rising young generation in towns and cities. Elsewhere, in
Singapore, the government has repeatedly expressed worries that the learning of
English, which it sees as necessary for technological advancement of the country
and its competition in world markets, brings with it potentially dangerous aspects of
Western liberal thinking which may be harmful to the continuation of multicultural
harmony in Singapore, and has encouraged Singaporeans to be vigilant in the
maintenance of traditional Asian cultural values as a safeguard against decay. Semi-
defensive reactions to globalization may be detected as emanating naturally from
within populations too, as well as being present in high-level academic and govern-
ment discussion; for example, chapter 18 observes the beginnings of an interesting,
spontaneous regrowth of interest in local language and culture in parts of Thailand,
which is both aided by a new emphasis on ‘local wisdom’ and stimulated by negative
reactions to Western inXuences following the Asian Wnancial crisis of 1997. It will be
interesting to note how pressures of globalization and the defensive reactions this
occasions will continue to interact and compete over the next decades, inXuencing
and directing the nature of Asian national identities. Earlier, in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the strong revival of Sinhalese language, culture, and
religion which ultimately led to Sinhalese nationalism can be noted to have been a
direct reaction to the prior loss of traditional culture and lifestyles caused by the
arrival of the British and their economic transformation of Sri Lankan society (chapter
6). When the initial attractions of change instigated by outside forces lose their
anticipated beneWts, this can quite naturally cause a resurgence in tradition and a
reaYrmation of the local and familiar. A strengthening of national identities in Asia
based on local language and culture might therefore also not be an unlikely by-
product of increased globalization in certain instances.
A second issue relates to the linguistic consequences of pursuing high levels of bi-/
multilingual competence in education. With the simultaneous promotion of both a
national language and English as mediums of instruction in schools and universities in
states such as Singapore, India, and the Philippines, a heavy learning burden is being
imposed on rising generations, and early expectations that bilingual education should
lead to students attaining a high level of proWciency in two widely useful languages are
often not being met, the results instead being characterized as producing a low level of
academic attainment in either one or both languages used in the classroom. To
consider the example of the situation in the Philippines, as a result of the introduction
of bilingual education in 1974, schools have been constrained to teach certain subjects
through Filipino and others through English, both of which are likely to be diVerent
from students’ mother tongues in non-Tagalog-speaking areas, hence in the larger
part of the nation. This results in second language learning becoming a major and
28 A. Simpson

critically important task for students, essential for a proper understanding of the range
of subjects learned in school from an early age onwards. In various cases, it is reported
that standards of English (in particular) are considerably below what had been initially
anticipated and there is a widespread perception that the system of bilingual education
is to blame for this. Similar reports of poorer than expected standards of language
attainment in education have also been made in situations where one of two lan-
guages used as a medium of instruction is actually a mother tongue of those present
in the classroom, as in Singapore and Hong Kong, and have drawn much attention
from concerned government members and public alike (chapters 17 and 8). Such
patterns of apparent underachievement relative to expectation are challenges to the
belief that the attainment of high levels of bilingual competence is possible for broad
populations of speakers, and have led to calls for a change in approach to bilingual
education. The existence and prevalence of English-based code-mixing in forms such
as ‘Singlish’ and ‘Taglish’ in Singapore, the Philippines, and other states has addition-
ally been heavily criticized in certain quarters as an indication that standards of
English are in decline or have not been properly attained by many progressing
through the educational system. This subsequently leads to the diYcult question,
not yet widely resolved, of deciding which language might be sacriWced from the
classroom and downgraded from the status of medium of instruction to simple
subject in order to simplify students’ learning task – English or perhaps the national
language of a state? Economy-related pragmatic reasons may in many instances make
individuals reluctant to give up the pursuit of a hoped-for competence in English
which can oVer access to better opportunities of employment, and so in future may
add considerable pressure on the continued presence of other national languages as
mediums of instruction in education. As the use of national languages in schools and
universities has been a primary mechanism employed by governments for the spread
of a common, binding language among multi-ethnic populations, the further rise of
English and the diYculties now becoming apparent in achieving high levels of
bilingual competence may therefore at some point conspire to undermine the
continued high-level transmission of various Asian national languages.
The third and Wnal recent issue to be mentioned here concerns certain changes in
patterns of media broadcasting that have been noticed as beginning to occur in
various parts of Asia, and the way this may aVect exposure and attitudes particularly
to non-national languages. In the early years of radio and television broadcasting in
most countries of the world, it has been common that the comparatively small
number of radio and television channels that have been made available have been
state-run and sometimes also censored and directed by government bodies. In recent
years, with the development of non-government-owned commercial television and
radio, and a signiWcant expansion in the number of channels of entertainment
available to viewers and listeners, control of the content and style of programming
has frequently moved away from governments and come to be directed instead by
commercial forces and the marketing of products to viewers/listeners as potential
 Introduction 29

consumers. In chapter 3 it is noted that such a change is having a signiWcant eVect on

the type of language now heard regularly on television and radio in India, and that
freedom from government control over the media has led to a surge in the use of
regional and local languages, with many programmes now being either made in or
dubbed into these languages. Such a change, which it is likely may be repeated in
other countries with expanding consumer-led broadcasting services, may well serve to
increase the prestige value of many non-national languages and decrease the amount
of regular exposure to programming in the promoted national language of a country,
bringing a potentially new pressure to bear on the reinforcement and successful
maintenance of national languages in multi-ethnic states. It is already widely known
how signiWcant a role the media and entertainment industry can play in the spread and
acceptance of language. In India, for example, it is thought that the growth in
familiarity with Hindi in recent decades has in many parts of the country not been
so much the result of state-sponsored programmes of promotion and education but
has arisen more spontaneously through the success and popularity of Bollywood Wlms
and television produced in Hindi. Elsewhere, in Southeast Asia, chapter 18 notes the
example of media-related language habits in Laos, where the ease of tuning in to Thai
television, with its perceived higher quality of programmes, has led to a decrease in
attention to Lao state-run programming in the national language and a distinctly
increased knowledge of Thai. A third simple illustration of the inXuence of the media
on language behaviour in Asia relates to Korean: in many parts of East Asia it has been
observed that a striking new popularity of Korean television soap operas generated
over the last few years has caused a clear upsurge in interest in the learning of Korean
among speakers of other languages and a signiWcant augmentation of the prestige
enjoyed by the Korean language outside Korea itself. The privatized, commercialized
media therefore now has an increasing potential to stimulate new patterns of lan-
guage growth that do not necessarily correspond with government-led initiatives to
embed the regularized use of a national language. Whether a change in language
attended to in the media may pose anything of a serious and sustained challenge to
the strength and attractions of a national language as oVered by its pragmatic
usefulness, economic value, and general prestige remains to be seen, and the distract-
ing eVects of regional language featuring in (or even dominating) local broadcasting
are likely to have greater force in multi-ethnic states such as India, the Philippines, and
Indonesia than countries with more homogeneous populations. Nevertheless, it will
be useful to monitor in a general way how changes in media technology conspire with
forces of commercialization to aVect the paths of national and non-national languages
and their competition for attention, taking an important aspect of inXuence over
language consumption further away from the control of national governments.
With such an eye on just a few developments now coming into view and already
well present on the horizon in certain cases, it is time to close this preview of
general themes discussed in the volume. In the chapters that follow, the reader
will Wnd more detailed description and reXection on the wide range of pressures
30 A. Simpson

constraining language and its role in the building and maintenance of nations in Asia,
and how diVerent sociolinguistic, historical, political, and ethnic conWgurations have
resulted in a clear spectrum of variation in language-related national identity in the
Asian region. Beginning with multi-ethnic South Asia and the challenges faced in
shaping post-colonial national identity, continuing on to East Asia with its diVerent
traditions, population types, and experience of the twentieth century, and Wnally
considering Southeast Asia with its great ethno-linguistic complexity and cultural
variation, there is much to relate and a great wealth of information bearing on the
issue of language and national consciousness. Though obvious practical restrictions
on the size of such a volume have meant that authors have needed to be selective in
the topics presented and discussed, it is hoped that the chapters together with their
bibliographical references will stimulate readers to delve further into this fascinating
area of study and that the attempt at providing a synthesis of information on language
as a force in nation-building in Asia within a single volume will prove to be a useful
resource for all those hoping to broaden their knowledge of the socio-political eVects
of language in Asia, past and present.
 PART I
South Asia
South Asia
 2
Bangladesh
Hanne-Ruth Thompson

2.1 Introduction
The link between language and national identity and the signiWcance of linguistic
realities in the emergence of a new state could hardly be more poignant than in the
case of Bangladesh, which attained independence in 1971. In asking the question ‘What
actually makes us the people we are?’, we naturally think of our beliefs, our languages,
and the places we call home, but are all of these of equal signiWcance, and what happens
when they are in conXict with one another? The story of Bangladesh is embedded in a
network of ever-changing tensions, shifting threads, and an overlap of religious allegi-
ances, geographical and economic factors, and language. The portrayal of how this
country fought for the right to stand on its own feet, the emotions of people Wnally able
to reclaim a song or a poem as part of their own heritage, the accounts of short-
sightedness, stupidity, and brutal force on the part of governments, and the indomitable
spirit of a small country with great people power make for a fascinating and at times
troubling example of the human search for identity and belonging. And at the very
centre of the struggle for independence and identity in Bangladesh following the
partitioning of India has very clearly been language and a determined refusal to accept
the imposition of a foreign language as a new symbol of national identity in place of a
familiar and well-loved local mother tongue, showing just how critically important
language issues can be in the deWnition of new nation-states.
In its physical make-up, Bangladesh is essentially a country of rivers, situated around
the conXux of the Padma (Ganges), Jamuna, and Meghna rivers which Xow down from
the Himalayas and into the Bay of Bengal. With an area of 56,000 square miles (slightly
larger than Greece) and a population of 144 million people (Wfteen times the population
of Greece) it is currently the most densely populated country in the world, and, unusually
for Asia, has a remarkably homogeneous population, 98 per cent being ethnically Bengali
(85 per cent Muslim, 15 per cent Hindu). Bangladesh is also one of the poorest countries
in the world, with much of the population being rural and active in subsistence farming,
and having to contend with regular occurrences of severe Xooding during the summer
monsoon period, when violent storms and torrential rain often result in as much as a
third of the country being submerged under water.
34 H-R. Thompson

This chapter focuses on language and identity issues which have visited the chal-
lenged territory of Bangladesh primarily over the last sixty years, since it Wrst became a
part of Pakistan in 1947 (East Pakistan), and then fought with West Pakistan over
language and other dominance issues to become an independent nation in 1971. In
order to contextualize both the post-Partition discord with West Pakistan and modern
day issues of language in Bangladesh, section 2.2 provides general background infor-
mation on the language Bangla/Bengali, and its development and importance in the
region of South Asia. This is followed by a consideration of the twentieth-century
separation of Hindu and Muslim Bengali identities and the growth of the latter in the
area of Bangladesh. Section 2.3 then describes the important language-related struggle
for independence with West Pakistan and how present day Bangladesh arose as a new
nation. Finally, section 2.4 reXects on language and identity issues in contemporary
Bangladesh, returning to the relation of Bangla speakers in Bangladesh to those in
neighbouring West Bengal in India (a further 80 million in number), as well as the issue
of non-Bengali minorities in Bangladesh and their relationship to the state.1

Bangladesh

1
The author would like to express her gratitude to Dr Ghulam Murshid for his invaluable suggestions
and help in the preparation of this chapter.
 Bangladesh 35

2.2 Bangla, Bengal, and Islam

2.2.1 Bengal, its Language and Development prior to the Twentieth Century
The oYcial language of modern day Bangladesh is referred to as ‘Bangla’ by its
speakers, and is also frequently called ‘Bengali’ outside South Asia in non-linguistic
circles. The language has a long history and literature of a thousand years, and is a
direct Indo-Aryan descendant of Sanskrit, developing in a broad north Indian
region known as Bengal, which corresponds to present day Bangladesh, the state of
West Bengal in India, and also parts of other states in India. Having come into
existence at least as early as the sixth century, Bengal grew into a signiWcant regional
polity between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, and the language spoken there
emerged as a genuinely independent language from the tenth century onwards,
though still retaining much of the vocabulary of its Sanskrit origins. Following the
thirteenth-century invasion of Bengal (and other parts of India) by Muslim Turks
whose court language was Persian, many Arabic and Persian words were absorbed
into the speech of the people of Bengal, and Bengal as a region developed further in
commercial importance. It was only in the seventeenth century, however, that the
names bangali, bangala and bongo actually came into use for the language as well as
the people of this area, and standardization of the language did not take place until the
late nineteenth century. When this did occur, from the myriad of dialects spread
across the huge area of Bengal, it was the speech of the prosperous and inXuential elite
present in Kolkata (Calcutta) and the surrounding area of West Bengal which was
taken as a model for standardization of the language of Bengal, and modern, educated
Bangla as spoken in both India and Bangladesh is still very much rooted in the
nineteenth-century dialect of the Kolkata upper classes.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries also saw a huge growth in literature in
Bangla, and a signiWcant portion of India’s most celebrated works of poetry were created
in Bangla during a major literary renaissance led by Wgures such as Michael Madhusu-
dan Datta (1834–73) and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–98), the founders of
modern Bangla literature. Somewhat later on, the poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–
1941) took Bangla poetry in a new direction, eVected an immense inXuence on the
style and diction of the language, and made Bangla into the foremost literary language
of the Indian subcontinent. Tagore was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, dramatist,
essayist, linguist, and educator as well as a musician and a painter. The sheer volume
of his work remains a staggering achievement, and he continues to occupy an almost
God-like status among Indian poets due to the profound understanding of human
nature displayed in all his writings. Tagore became the Wrst non-European ever to win
the Nobel Prize for Literature and was largely responsible for Bangla literature achiev-
ing considerable international prestige and Bangla being accredited a unique standing
among the languages of India.
36 H-R. Thompson

Politically, the arrival of the British in Bengal in the seventeenth century resulted in
the area retaining and increasing its importance within India, as the British established
themselves Wrst in Kolkata in West Bengal and then expanded their sphere of inXuence
and power throughout the whole of the subcontinent during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. With Kolkata as the capital of the British Indian Raj, and Bengal
as a major centre of commerce in India, the Bangla-speaking northeast of India thus
entered the twentieth century in a salient position in South Asia, along with a regional
language associated with high prestige and a long and increasingly prominent literary
tradition.

2.2.2 Islam and Identity in Pre-independence Twentieth-century Bengal

At the start of the twentieth century, the eastern part of Bengal saw the gradual onset
and growth of a newly emphasized identity centred speciWcally on Islam and the
relation of Muslims in Bengal to Urdu-speaking followers of Islam in other parts of
India. This new feeling of belonging and perhaps owing a primary allegiance to a
wider brotherhood of Muslims which grew among many Bengali Muslims was
triggered in signiWcant part by political developments of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, when the prospect of winning independence from the
British Wrst came onto the horizon, and then looked ever more likely to occur at
some point in the future. Initially, Hindus, Muslims, and other religious groups
openly co-operated in their eVorts to campaign for independence, forming the All
India National Congress in 1885 and using this as a vehicle to jointly push for self-
determination. However, as the possibility of an independent India became increas-
ingly realistic, political competition between Hindu and Muslim leaders soon estab-
lished itself. This Wrst gave rise to the break away All India Muslim Congress in 1905,
formed by Muslims worried about apparent Hindu domination of the All India
National Congress, and then grew strongly in the late 1930s, following elections in
1935 when a serious defeat of potential Muslim representatives clearly underlined the
strength of Hindus in the All India National Congress.
Within Bengal itself, Hindus and Muslims were concentrated in diVerent parts of
the province, with the west of Bengal being largely Hindu, and the east being
predominantly Muslim. Due to this correspondence of geographical region with
religious adherence, and the fact that Bengal was such a hugely populous area, British
rulers in 1905 actually separated the province into two administrative parts, eVectively
establishing a Hindu West and a Muslim East Bengal. Though the decision to divide
Bengal was later reversed due to Hindu pressure and Bengal regained its former status
in 1912, the physical concentration of Muslims in the east and Hindus in the west
remained a strong characteristic of the province and was a critical factor in the
subsequent growth of a Muslim identity amongst Bengalis in the east. Between the
geographically distanced Hindu and Muslim populations, there was not much regular,
day-to-day contact to cement a common ethnic Bengali identity that might be
 Bangladesh 37

independent of religion, especially among the generally static rural populations.

Furthermore, among the more sophisticated urban dwellers of Kolkata (in Hindu
West Bengal), evidence can also be found of a surprising ignorance about the
Muslim side of Bengal’s population and its signiWcant size. In the metropolis of
Kolkata there were vastly more Hindus than Muslims and many of the urban Muslims
present there were actually Urdu speakers. As a result of this, from the middle of the
nineteenth century through into the twentieth century, the term ‘Bengali’ came to be
used by inhabitants of the city to refer speciWcally to Hindus rather than speakers of
Bangla in general, and so (perhaps unconsciously and out of ignorance) excluded
Muslim Bengalis from the conceptualization of Bengali identity. Where recognition of
Bengali Muslims was indeed made, it is rather startling to Wnd that the huge extent of
this population (over half of the Bengali population in total) was apparently not well-
known, as illustrated well in the words of a famous (Hindu) Bengali linguist Suniti
Kumar Chatterji describing the characteristics of Bengali people: ‘There is also
another strain of Bengalis, the Muslims. Just what numbers there are is a historical
matter, but there are not that many.’2 Though such ignorance might be attributed to a
self-contained attitude of city dwellers with little interest in countryside matters, it is
nevertheless still a testimony to the lack of integration of Muslim Bengalis in the
Hindu west of Bengal and the existence of largely separate religious blocs within the
province.
With the rise of a pan-Indian Islamic movement and identity, Bengali Muslims were
subsequently faced with the challenging question of where their loyalties should now
primarily lie – with fellow Bengalis, speakers of the same language from the same
historical area, or with more distant, frequently Urdu-speaking, co-adherents of Islam
scattered throughout India? Connected with this came the question of whether there
was any contradiction and incompatibility with holding both a Bengali identity and
a Muslim identity, or whether one perhaps had to be sacriWced for the other. The
following extract is from an introduction to the issue of Bengali Muslim identity in an
essay entitled Politics of Religious Identity by the Dhaka-based barrister Salma Sobhan.
Gunga-Jamuna is the name given to a particular type of silverware in Bengal. One side of
the object is gold-washed, giving a lustre to the silver and providing a pleasing contrast.
The name derives from the two mighty rivers of Bengal, the Ganges and the Jamuna.
Where these two converge it is said that the diVerent conXuences have identiWably
diVerent colours, hence the name of the gold-washed silver. The Muslim Bengali psyche,
too, can be likened to this phenomenon, for within it Islam and Bengali customs converge
and Xow together like the intermingled streams of the Ganges and the Jamuna. While
these two streams contribute to the richness of the culture, they are also the source of an
ambivalence which can, in its worst manifestations, be likened to a sort of schizophrenia.3

2
(1947) quoted from a Bangla journal called Nationality, Culture and Literature.
3
Quoted from: <http://sacw.insaf.net/i_aii/salma.html>.
38 H-R. Thompson

Certainly not all of the countryside millions of East Bengali farmers, millers, carpen-
ters, butchers, and weavers experienced this identity crisis to the same extent. They
had been both Muslims and Bengalis for centuries and did not see a conXict in being
both. However, at the other end of society, the Muslim aristocracy and potential
leaders of the Muslim population were feeling adrift and in need of conWrmation of
their identity. At the end of the nineteenth century this group had lost most of its
power with the British introduction of a new land settlement policy and were at an
economic disadvantage not only in comparison to Bengali Hindus, but also to non-
Bengali Muslims. With the spread of calls for unity among Indian Muslims, they were
now encouraged to take a closer look at their relations with fellow Bangla-speakers of
both Hindu and Muslim creeds on the one hand and their Urdu-speaking Islamic
brothers on the other in order to Wnd a place for themselves. In this search for a
deWnition of who they might be and what role they should play in an emerging
independent South Asia, the Muslim elite of East Bengal increasingly found that it was
the Islamic component of their identity and their links to other Indian Muslims which
held the clearer oVer of an improved and secure post-colonial future, raising questions
and doubts about the value of the Bengali side of their heritage. To many it seemed
that they were being gradually pushed into having to choose between their faith on
the one hand and their cultural allegiances on the other.
On the broader, pan-Indian political stage, the long, slow, and mainly non-violent
struggle to free India from British rule had been initiated by Mahatma Gandhi
when he returned to India from South Africa in 1915 and was strongly supported
without hesitation by both Hindu and Muslim populations. The latter, however,
subsequently became worried about prospects of a Hindu-dominated free India,
and conXict between Hindu and Muslim sides came to be increasingly common.
In spite of attempts at peacemaking made by Gandhi, a clear perception emerged
among Muslims that many Hindus in the freedom movement were intent on
marginalizing the future participation of Muslims in a post-independence India,
and that some alternate guarantee of Muslim rights was therefore necessary. This
led to suggestions from the Muslim League that Indian Muslims should in fact
be granted a separate state to live in following independence, where they could
develop an Islamic society free from potential Hindu domination. Although funda-
mentalist Muslims argued that the linking of religion and politics was against the
spirit of the Muslim faith, the movement for an independent Islamic state gained
much popularity among Indian Muslims concerned about their future, and in 1940,
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, publicly endorsed the ‘Pakistan
Resolution’ that called for the creation of an independent Islamic state in regions
of India where Muslims were a majority. In practical terms this identiWed parts of
the northwest and northeast of India as areas that might become linked in a new
state for Muslims, and set up the expectation that East Bengal with its large
Muslim population might some day Wnd itself independent of the rest of Bengal
and India.
 Bangladesh 39

In the growing anticipation that such an event might well be realized, members
of the Bengali Muslim intelligentsia began to foresee a need to deWne a Bengali
linguistic identity for Muslims which would signiWcantly set them oV from Hindu
speakers of Bangla. Various Muslim writers claimed that in a future independent
state of Pakistan comprising East Bengal and parts of northwest India the character
of the Bangla language should be very diVerent from Hindu Bangla, and almost a
separate language. It was argued that as Irish English literature is diVerent from
mainstream English literature, so the Bangla language and literature of the future
eastern part of Pakistan should have its own distinctive characteristics. Before
Pakistan was itself established, members of the Bengali Muslim writing elite
therefore promoted a new national ‘East Pakistani Renaissance Society’ and set
up a journal entitled the ‘East Pakistan Literature News’. The aim of this group of
writers was to give the Bangla language an appropriately Muslim shape by intro-
ducing Arabic and Farsi words, deleting all traces of Hindu vocabulary and suggest-
ing that Bangla should be written in Arabic script. Up until that point in time,
schools run by Mullahs had not taught in Bangla, as it was seen to be contaminated
by Hindu ideas and terminology. However, with the prospect of an independent
Muslim state and with the undeniable reality that more than half the population of
this state would be Bangla-speaking, the idea of remodelling the language to Wt an
Islamic vision seemed feasible and important to some. Muslim religious leaders felt
that for the identity of the new nation, it was essential to establish the supremacy of
religion over language and to show that sharing the same religion was a consider-
ably stronger bond than speaking the same language. Consequently, the redirection
of Bangla towards a more IslamiWed form in East Bengal was supported as a highly
useful way of distancing Bengali Muslims from the millions of Hindu speakers of
Bangla, and orienting them more towards the envisaged new homeland for all
Indian Muslims.
In June 1947, the establishment of this Muslim state was Wnally oYcially ap-
proved, and Britain declared that it would grant full dominion status to two
independent successor states – India and Pakistan. SigniWcantly, the single political
entity of Pakistan was set to consist of two geographically distant parts, the
contiguous Muslim-majority districts of western British India and the Muslim part
of Bengal, creating a new Muslim nation separated by more than 1,000 miles of
Indian territory. Despite the obvious questions over how such a two-part state
would succeed in both administrative and economic ways, and the traumas follow-
ing partition with massive movements of Hindu/Muslim populations relocating in
diVerent directions, the creation of the state of Pakistan was generally accompanied
by a feeling of great triumph and euphoria. After years of intercommunal conXict
and Wghting between Hindus and Muslims in British India, a separation from Hindu
India and the long-awaited reality of a Muslim homeland seemed like the ideal
solution to all previous problems.
40 H-R. Thompson

2.3 The Emergence of Bangladesh

2.3.1 The Language Movement
Full of hope, the population of East Bengal thus became part of the new state of
Pakistan, the province later becoming known as East Pakistan. Barely Wve years after
receiving independence, however, the eastern half of the new territory of Pakistan had
already reached a major crisis point and was locked in serious and escalating conXict
with West Pakistan over issues involving language and national identity. The alterca-
tion which occurred and the perceived unfairness, intransigence, and general attitude
of superiority exhibited by the leadership in West Pakistan so enraged many Bengalis
that it created the beginnings of a serious Bengali nationalism which would eventually
lead to the break-up of the new nation and result in the creation of Bangladesh from
East Pakistan.
At the core of the East–West conXict were language issues relating to the selection
and imposition of a state/national language which came in two waves of dissatisfac-
tion and anger, the Wrst of them very soon after independence from India in early
1948. These were signiWcantly accompanied by a large number of smaller economic
grievances and perceptions of injustice which added to the feeling among Bengalis of
being unfairly treated by the central government of Pakistan.
The linguistic situation in the newly-formed two-part state of Pakistan was consid-
erably complex, especially so in West Pakistan where a range of diVerent languages
were spoken (see Shackle, this volume, chapter 5). The relative distribution of these
languages among the population of Pakistan is presented in table 2.1, indicating the
percentages of native speakers of each of the seven most prominent languages in the
country.
Approaching the issue of what should be the state language of Pakistan, on 23
February 1948 a Bengali opposition member, Dhirendra Nath Dutta, moved a reso-
lution in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly for making Bangla the state language on
the basis that:
Out of sixty-nine million people in Pakistan forty-four million speak Bangla. The state
language of the state should be the language which is used by the majority of the people.4

Table 2.1 Proportion of native speakers of most prominent languages in Pakistan

Bangla Punjabi Sindhi Poshtu Urdu Baluchi English

57% 29% 5.5% 3.5% 3.5% 1% 0.05%

4
Government of Pakistan, Constitutional Assembly of Pakistan Proceedings, Second Session, 25
February (Karachi 1948) pp 15–16.
 Bangladesh 41

Perhaps not too surprisingly, this proposition was rejected, as Bangla was hardly
known among the inhabitants of West Pakistan. The new leadership of the country,
many of whom were Urdu-speaking immigrants from other parts of India, insisted
that Urdu should be the national language of Pakistan, supplemented by English (for
practical reasons), due to the historic association of Urdu with Muslims in India and
the fact that Pakistan had speciWcally been established as a state for South Asian
Muslims. A second, much moderated request was then made for Bangla to be made a
co-oYcial language alongside Urdu and English, in view of the considerable linguistic
uniformity of the eastern part of Pakistan and the overwhelming use of Bangla there.
This much more reasonable proposal was also staunchly opposed by Liaqat Ali Khan,
the Prime Minister of Pakistan and other non-Bengali members in the Assembly.
Khan’s stance was unequivocal:
Pakistan has been created because of the demand of 100 million Muslims in this
subcontinent and the language of a hundred million Muslims is Urdu. Pakistan is a
Muslim state and it must have as its lingua franca the language of the Muslim nations.5

The Bengali response to this was equally emotive. Even though the vast majority of
Bengali Muslims had strongly welcomed the idea of a Muslim state, disillusionment
now quickly set in with Khan’s dictatorial response.
In considering what was at stake in the political wrangling over Pakistan’s oYcial
language(s), it will be helpful to clarify what pragmatic advantages could be expected
to be associated with a ‘state language’, and how this might have aVected those in East
Pakistan. This area had for many centuries been a province in which Bangla had been
used in all domains of life, and in 1948 all oral communication, school education,
provincial government matters and any province-internal matters were dealt with in
the language. For Bangla to be made a state language would have meant that
representatives from East Pakistan would have been able to speak in Bangla in the
national Constituent Assembly, all oYcial documents would have been written in
Bangla as well as Urdu and English, and government-issued items such as coins,
stamps, money orders, and passports would have been available in Bangla, consider-
ably assisting all aspects of administrative life for the large population of East Pakistan.
With the introduction of Urdu and English as the sole oYcial languages of Pakistan,
people in the province experienced signiWcant diYculties understanding and coping
with government documentation, and those interested in positions in the civil service
had to be able to apply for these jobs in Urdu, putting monolingual Bengalis at a
distinct disadvantage.
By the end of February 1948, the controversy had spilled over onto the streets, and
the East Pakistan Student League, founded in the Wrst week of January by Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman, came to be in the forefront of the agitation. On 11 March, in a

5
Government of Pakistan, Constitutional Assembly of Pakistan Proceedings, Second Session, 25
February (Karachi 1948), pp 15–16.
42 H-R. Thompson

demonstration in Dhaka demanding Bangla as an oYcial state language, students

were Wrst baton-charged by police and then a large number of them were arrested.
Following this only a few days later, on 21 March, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder
of Pakistan and its Wrst Governor-General, travelled to Dhaka from West Pakistan and
declared at a university convocation that each province would have the right to choose
their own provincial language. However, concerning the issue of Pakistan’s national
language, the following very direct statement was communicated:
But let me tell you very clearly that the state language of Pakistan will be Urdu and no
other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without
one state language no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. Look at
the history of other countries. Therefore, so far as the state language is concerned,
Pakistan’s language shall be Urdu.6
It is poignant to note that this declaration was made in English as Jinnah, a Gujarati,
could not speak a word of Bangla and was not particularly Xuent in Urdu either. In
terms of his eVect on the audience present and those who later heard the content of
the speech repeated, uncompromising words such as these made the Bengali leaders
wonder whether being ‘tied up solidly’ to Pakistan was really what they wanted. The
stubborn refusal to countenance Bangla as a national language of Pakistan on a par
with Urdu also triggered the formation of a reactive movement championing Bangla
as the rightful equal of Urdu and eminently appropriate to serve as a national
language. Though this started oV in a modest way centred in Dhaka University,
with a handful of professors encouraging students to join them in the movement,
over the following years awareness of the national language issue broke out of the
bounds of educational institutions and Bengali political parties, and spread rapidly
through the general populace of East Pakistan.
The second major wave of the Language Movement came a few years later in the
early 1950s. Economically, the eastern half of Pakistan was being treated badly, it
appeared to many, and political decisions were taken by the Central government with
little regard for the interests of East Pakistan. On a cultural level, repressive measures
were also being imposed with the aim of enforcing Muslim unity. SpeciWcally within
the realm of language, there was a conscious attempt to ‘sanitize’ the Bangla language
and literature by removing anything that appeared un-Islamic. Rabindranath Tagore,
much loved by all Bengalis and not an overtly religious man, was negatively portrayed
as a Hindu and the reading of his poetry was declared harmful to Muslims. Public
performances and radio broadcasts of Tagore’s songs also came to be forbidden.
Other prominent writers who were clearly Muslim suVered similar forms of censor-
ship, and the government ordered the editing of works by poets such as Nazrul Islam
and the elimination of all Hindu expressions identiWed there. To many Bengalis, this
kind of interference with their heritage was nothing short of mind control and caused
growing feelings of unrest and anger, as well as a deWant pride in their Bengaliness.
6
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Speeches of Governor-General of Pakistan 1947–8 (Karachi 1948), p 89.
 Bangladesh 43

In a public meeting in the East Pakistan provincial capital Dhaka in January 1951,
the Pakistani Prime Minister Nazimuddin once again repeated unashamedly to a
Bengali audience that Urdu alone would be the state language of Pakistan, causing a
renewal of protests from the students of Dhaka University, who accused the Prime
Minister and the Provincial Ministers of being stooges of West Pakistan. Shortly
following this, in a secret meeting called by the Awami League, the new nationalist
party of East Pakistan formed in 1949, it was agreed that pursuit of the important
language issue could no longer be left to the university students alone, and in order to
mobilize full political and student support, it was decided that the leadership of the
Language Movement should be taken over by the Awami League itself.
On 3 February 1952, the Awami League’s Committee of Action organized a
meeting in Dhaka to publicly protest against the move ‘to dominate the majority
province of East Bengal linguistically and culturally’, and during the course of the
meeting it was decided to call for a general strike on 21 February, the day that the East
Pakistan Assembly was due to meet for an important budgetary session. On 20
February, one day before the proposed strike, the government reacted by issuing a
ban on all non-governmental meetings so as to try to ensure a trouble-free day for its
discussion of the budget. However, this attempt by the government to control the
situation came much too late and on 21 February thousands of people gathered at
Dhaka University in preparation for a protest outside the Provincial Assembly where
the budgetary session was under way. In order to disperse the mass of protestors, the
police were then sent to the scene, and resorted to violence to break up the
demonstration. In the chaotic melee that ensued, Wve people, four of them students
of Dhaka University, were tragically shot dead. Quite surprisingly this disastrous
happening did not cause the government to break oV its budget meeting, which
simply carried on through the day as if nothing of serious consequence had occurred.
However, news of the protestors’ deaths in Dhaka spread like wildWre around the rest
of the country and life everywhere quickly came to a standstill. As the situation rapidly
deteriorated, the government realized the severity of the situation and called in the
military to attempt to bring things under control.
The police shooting of the Dhaka protestors was the Wrst time in Bengali history
that people had actually lost their lives in the cause of a language, and the impact of
the killing was tremendous. The Wve victims were immediately declared national
heroes who had died the death of martyrs, and feelings of anger ran high throughout
all of East Pakistan. Government attempts to suppress further agitation with a heavy
public police presence only incited people more, and even many years after these
events the outrage that was felt over them lingers on. The following is an extract from
an article by Mohammad Omar Farooq, written in 2003, entitled Setting the Record
Straight, and shows the high emotion felt about the deaths in 1952:
There probably is no other group of people or nation that has had to struggle this way and
even give life for its right to their mother tongue. This is a distinguished honour of our
44 H-R. Thompson

nation, something that has been earned by the sacriWce and blood of many valiant people.
It is part of our history and heritage that is too precious to allow distortion by anyone. If
some Muslims do not know or recognize the contributions during the earliest period of
the movement by people like Dhirendra Nath Dutta, or if under their inXuence they try
to ignore, erase or distort the contributions of anyone other than Muslims, it would be
callous and unacceptable. Similarly, if anyone wants to distort the history of the Language
Movement by ignoring or denying the pioneering contributions of those Bengali Muslims
who were among the Wrst and foremost to stand up against the unjust decision of
Pakistani rulers regarding Bangla, it would be equally callous and unacceptable.7

Only a few days after the deaths occurred, students of the Medical College erected
overnight a Shahid Minar (‘Tower of Witness’) in the place where one of the students
was shot to commemorate those who had died. This monument later became a
national symbol for Bengali independence and 21 February is still celebrated every
year as National Language Day/Language Martyr’s Day. Rather signiWcantly,
21 February has also more widely been declared International Mother Language
Day by UNESCO, in recognition of the sacriWce of life for language that was made
by the Bengali activists in 1952. Within Pakistan itself, it is important to point out that
the Language Movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s was absolutely critical for
the future of East Pakistan in sowing the seeds of a secular Bengali nationalism which
subsequently led on to a successful Wght for independence for the province in the early
1970s. RaWqul Islam sums up the contribution of the Language Movement to the
future struggle for an independent Bangladesh with a Bengali sense of the dramatic:
The Language Movement added a new dimension to politics in Pakistan. It left a deep
impression on the minds of the younger generation of Bengalis and imbued them with the
spirit of Bengali nationalism. The passion of Bengali nationalism which was aroused by
the Language Movement will kindle in the hearts of the Bengalis forever. Perhaps very
few people realised then that with the bloodshed in 1952, the new-born state of Pakistan
had in fact started to bleed to death.8

Shahid Minar, apart from honouring the dead, has to this day the special role of
uniting people of diVerent religions as Bengalis. When in February 2005, more than
half a century after these events, verses from the Qur’an were recited over a loud-
speaker system by the monument, an article in the Daily Star newspaper quoted an
Awami League spokesman as saying:
It was totally against the spirit of Ekushey [21 February]. The Shahid Minar is a place of
national spirit. There are other places to practise religious activities, but that was the
Shahid Minar. We would like to say that it is a place of all religious faiths. No religious
activities should be conducted at this place.9

7
Quoted from <http://www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/main.htm> (accessed July 2005).
8
Quoted from <http://www.virtualbangladesh.com/history/overview.html> (accessed June 2005).
9
Quoted from <http://thedailystar.net/2005/02/22/d50222011210.htm> (accessed July 2005).
 Bangladesh 45

The signiWcance of 1952 and the eVect it had on uniting Bengalis as a people
in opposition to the distant Pakistani leadership in Islamabad was therefore pivotal
and a milestone in the development of Bangladesh as a nation and independent
country, creating the all-important initial sparks and impetus behind a new Bengali
nationalism.

2.3.2 The Struggle for Independence

In March 1954 the Pakistan government Wnally recognized Bangla as a state language,
and the Wrst Pakistan Constitution in 1956 declared both Urdu and Bangla the state
languages of Pakistan. However, this did not prove to be the end of problems
associated with national languages in Pakistan. A military coup in 1958 resulted in
an abrupt abrogation of the 1956 Constitution and a distinct blow to the constitutional
guarantees that had been allotted to Bangla. The new ruler, General Ayub Khan, also
decided to engage himself with linguistic matters in the country and proposed to
introduce Roman script for all Pakistani languages as well as to set up an Education
Commission to investigate the general status of language in Pakistan. When the
National Educational Commission of Pakistan eventually submitted its report to the
government in August 1959, it recommended the setting up of two new boards, one
for Urdu and the other for Bangla, to assist in the ‘development’ of the national
languages. The main concern of this Commission was indicated as the goal of
bringing Urdu and Bengali linguistically closer to each other so as to create a
‘common language’ for Pakistan.
To an outsider, the idea that two substantially diVerent languages could potentially
be manipulated in this way might sound extremely unrealistic or even preposterous,
but perhaps the rather chequered history and mixed background of Urdu contributed
to the concept of languages as malleable entities. Not surprisingly, neither Bengalis
nor native speakers of Urdu liked the idea, however, and there were strong protests
against Khan’s high-handed planning. The latter’s rather condescending views on
Bengalis are expressed in his autobiography:
East Bengalis . . . probably belong to the very original Indian races. It would be no
exaggeration to say that up to the creation of Pakistan, they had not known any real
freedom or sovereignty [ . . . ] As such they have all the inhibitions of downtrodden races
and have not yet found it possible to adjust psychologically to the requirements of
newborn freedom. (Khan 1967: 187)

More positively, due to the Language Movement and the dramatic events of 21
February 1952, ordinary Bengalis in the 1950s had begun to develop an intense
consciousness of their language, and this surfaced deWantly in a wave of pro-Bangla
euphoria. There were new homages to Rabindranath, poetry events, articles, and
books advocating the Bengali heritage. Newborn children were given Bangla names
instead of standard (non-Bangla) Islamic names, as had previously been the practice.
Road and shop signs came to be proudly written in Bangla, again in place of the
46 H-R. Thompson

previous practice of using fairly standardized Islamic names, people began signing
their names in Bangla script instead of with Romanized approximations (as had been
the common, earlier practice), and fashions and social customs all became visibly
much more Bengali. The East Bengalis were, though not in Ayub Khan’s sense, very
rapidly adjusting to the ‘newborn freedom’ they felt was rightfully theirs, and basking
in a celebration of their language and ethnicity in a clear reaction against pressures
towards pan-Pakistani linguistic conformity and the exertion of authority from West
Pakistan.
Just over a decade on from this, Bengali nationalism had grown considerably, and
its representative party the Awami League contested the Wrst All-Pakistan General
Election in December 1970, under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Very
impressively, the Awami League won all but two of the East Pakistani seats, giving it
the greatest overall number of seats of any party in the country’s National Assembly.
The democratic consequence of this landslide victory should have been to invite the
Awami League to form the Central Pakistan government and transfer power from the
army to civilian rule. However, the military rulers of Pakistan decided to blatantly
disregard the voting choices of the people and, instead of honouring the outcome of
the election, handed East Pakistan over to the military. Following widespread civil
disobedience in East Pakistan in protest against the military’s actions, and brutal
military repression of those considered responsible for the protests, the Bengali
nationalists under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman then boldly declared East Pakistan an
independent state, the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. Though Rahman was taken
into custody and military intervention by West Pakistani forces resulted in a nine-
month-long civil war being fought in East Pakistan, critical military support from
India for the Bengali nationalist movement Wnally led to the capitulation of the
Pakistani army, and on 16 December, the People’s Republic of Bangladesh was
recognized as an independent state.
The constitution of the new country, adopted on 4 November 1972, has the
following pledge:
. . . that the high ideals of nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism, which
inspired our heroic people to dedicate themselves to, and our brave martyrs to sacriWce
their lives in, the national liberation struggle, shall be the fundamental principles of the
Constitution.

It later continues:
The unity and solidarity of the Bengali nation, which deriving its identity from its
language and culture, attained a sovereign and independent Bangladesh through a united
and determined struggle in the war of independence, shall be the basis of Bengali
nationalism.10

10
Government of Bangladesh, The Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, 1972 (Dhaka, 1975),
pp 1–4.
 Bangladesh 47

After the hard lessons learnt during the Pakistan years and the devastating experiences
of the war, the new country of Bangladesh was thus decidedly a secular state, and one
which explicitly acknowledged (and still currently acknowledges) language as one of
the prime determinants of its national identity. What had begun as a Language
Movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, propelled by the Pakistani leadership’s
unwillingness to recognise Bangla as a national language, therefore led on to a
widespread Bengali nationalism, which Wnally achieved full independence for East
Bengal/Pakistan, showing very clearly how instrumental language and identity issues
can be in the initiation of struggles towards political self-determination.

2.4 Bangladesh Today: Linguistic Realities in Context

2.4.1 Bangla in Twenty-first-century Bangladesh
Though Bangladesh experienced a range of post-independence internal diYculties
and extended periods of martial law, from 1990 onwards Bangladesh Wnally stabilized
with a succession of democratically elected governments, and now has a Wrm political
foundation for future development. Considering the linguistic situation in Bangladesh
today, its most distinctive feature in comparison with many other Asian nations is the
degree to which its national language, Bangla, is dominant throughout the country
and regularly spoken in all domains of life by as much as 98 per cent of the population,
who are ethnically Bengali. Though there are indeed dialect forms of Bangla in
diVerent parts of Bangladesh, there is an extremely widespread knowledge of the
standard form of Bangla which is broadcast on television and via radio and used in the
modern press, and, with the possible exception of the Sylheti dialect in the far east of
the country and certain other remote dialect communities, the degree of fundamental
linguistic deviation from this standard is in the general case not more signiWcant than
dialect variation among speakers of English in Great Britain (who can all at least
understand standardized forms of English used in the media, just as rural Bangladeshis
can generally understand modern media Bangla). Within the limits of standard Bangla
there is, however, considerable variety in style and register, and due to the historical
development of the language, a large amount of Sanskrit-based vocabulary which
occurs in literature or oYcial language but which is not used in everyday speech. In
addition to this, the fact that standardized media Bangla is essentially inherited from
the nineteenth-century Bangla of Kolkata in West Bengal (see section 2.2.1) adds a
further slight complexity to the range of forms that Bangladeshis are in contact with,
but for most speakers this seems to result in the impression of a great richness of the
language rather than causing any serious diYculties in understanding.
In addition to being very widely known and used, the national language of
Bangladesh also enjoys great prestige and serves as a highly successful symbol of
national identity, linking and reinforcing a common bond among its huge population
in a generally very positive way. Bangladeshis appear to be extremely proud of and
48 H-R. Thompson

emotionally attached to their language, and it is very striking to outsiders how even
ordinary, moderately educated people regularly show a deep interest in language
matters and particularly the versatility of their own language, Bangla. This may well
be due, in part, to the value accrued to Bangla during the struggle for independence
when it occurred as a critical focal symbol at the centre of the nationalist movement
but certainly also goes back further to a genuine love for the language resulting from a
long and highly celebrated literary history, re-energized in the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century renaissance and taken to new heights in the inspired works of
writers such as Tagore.
Bangladesh in the twenty-Wrst century is, like most other countries in the world,
also a place where languages other than the national tongue are both spoken and
learned. The remainder of this section now brieXy considers how other minority
languages Wt into the general picture of Bangladesh, what the status of English is in
the country, and also how language issues continue to connect Bangladesh with West
Bengal in India.

2.4.2 Bangla and English

In the present world climate of globalization with its imperatives of accessibility,
immediacy, and technological advancement, the international knowledge and use of
English has been growing at a startling rate, in particular in parts of the developing
world. It is therefore natural to wonder how far English may have advanced into the
lives and language of those in Bangladesh.
In terms of vocabulary, there are indeed a great number of English words which
have come to be part of regular Bangla vocabulary as direct loanwords. From simple
words such as chair, table, gas, and hotel which describe foreign things to technical
terms like pneumonia, X-ray, and computer, English has certainly made its mark on
Bangla. English is also taught in primary schools from an early age and educated, or
semi-educated, Bangladeshis sprinkle their Bangla liberally with English words. How-
ever, this is often nothing more than a veneer and a fashionable pose – and fashions
notoriously change. In the early 1990s there was actually a move towards eliminating
English words from Bangla and reinstating their Bangla equivalents, particularly in
education and in the public domain. Commonly used English words like post oYce or
operation were replaced with Bangla words, and university professors showed them-
selves keen to develop precise Bangla terminology in their various Welds. A few years
later attitudes relaxed again, and English loanwords once more seemed welcome and
in vogue. These Xuctuations can be seen as waves of fashion which do not succeed in
reaching the deeper layers of people’s linguistic identity, which in Bangladesh seems to
be very Wrmly rooted in Bangla.
Though it is extremely diYcult to make a deWnitive statement about the role of
English in Bangladeshi life, due to variation across class and urban–rural divides, the
following are Wve observations which nevertheless indicate something of the degree to
 Bangladesh 49

which English has a presence in the country and may be compared with the national
language:
1 Very few Bengalis, even after years of school education, learn to speak English
Xuently, unless they spend considerable time abroad.
2 Outside of Dhaka it is almost impossible for a non-Bangla-speaking foreigner to
communicate. Outside of Dhaka all signposts are in Bangla, except on the few
major roads that exist.
3 Primary school education in Bangladesh is predominantly rote learning. Chil-
dren learn to recite English poetry without understanding a word of it.
4 Being able to speak English is a highly rated ability. People have a rosy and rather
unrealistic picture of life in the UK and the USA.
5 Almost all Bengalis think that Bangla is the most beautiful language in the world.
These impressions give us a variegated picture which shows that English is a highly
prized but still decidedly foreign element in Bangladeshi life. Bangla as a language is
perfectly capable of incorporating English words, even quite a lot of English words,
into its vocabulary without losing or changing its identity.

2.4.3 Other Languages – Other Identities

In spite of having an extremely high percentage of native speakers of a single language
(Bangla), Bangladesh is not entirely a monolingual country. There are tribal people
who have their own languages entirely and there are also certain regional communi-
ties who might like to see their dialect of Bangla promoted to the status of a separate
language. People are, and should be, proud of their language and it is of course
desirable that a government should recognize and respect its minorities. Amena
Mohsin in an article entitled ‘Language, Identity and the State in Bangladesh’ makes
an impassioned plea for the tribal groups of Bangladesh and accuses the Bangladesh
government of ‘deeply hegemonic and chauvinistic language policies’ (Mohsin 2003:
82). Voices like these should be heard and taken seriously. However, is it appropriate
to think of Bangladesh as a multilingual country? The distribution of non-Bengali
minorities in Bangladesh is well described in Mohsin’s article. I reproduce just a short
extract here.

The non-Bengali communities of Bangladesh can be divided into two main groups, based
on their geographical habitats: the Plains groups and the Hill groups. The Plains groups
live along the borders of the north-west, north, and north-east portions of the country.
For instance, non-Bengali communities such as the Koch, Munda, Oraon, Paharia,
Rajbongshi and Saontal have traditionally lived in parts of Bogra, Dinajpur, Kushtia,
Pabna, Rajshahi and Rangpur districts in the north. The greater Sylhet District in the
north is the traditional home of the Khasi, Manipuri, Pathor and Tipra communi-
ties. . . . The non-Bengali Hill people live in the southeastern part of the country known
50 H-R. Thompson

as the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The Chakmas, Marmas and Tripuras are valley-dwelling
people, while the Banjogees, Chak, Khamis, Lushai, Mro, Riang and Tanchangya live on
the ridges of the Hills. (Mohsin 2003: 85)

This list of mesmerizing names alone indicates that non-Bengalis in Bangladesh are
not one minority group, but a number of quite diVerent communities. According to
not very reliable statistics, quoted in Mohsin’s article, there are twenty-nine separate
tribal groups, and all of them taken together constitute just over 1 per cent of the total
population, a very small percentage split up into tiny fractions. This does not include
the people of Sylhet, whose dialect is suYciently diVerent from standard Bangla to
cause various communication problems and who increasingly see themselves as
having a separate identity. This is an issue which can perhaps be left to Wnd its own
solution. Sylhetis are a self-assured, vociferous group of people who also have a strong
presence outside of Bangladesh. Almost 90 per cent of Bangladeshis in the UK are
from Sylhet. Their families in Bangladesh naturally develop a perspective which is
outward-looking and the issue of Sylheti independence is being debated as much
outside as inside Bangladesh.
However, the small, non-Bengali, tribal communities in Bangladesh pose a diVerent
problem. Mohsin, after much criticism of oppressive government policies, makes the
following suggestions in her article:
Non-Bengalis should be given the opportunity to pursue an education in their mother
tongue through, at a minimum, the primary level. The government should make
adequate funds available for both printing books in non-Bengali languages and providing
training to non-Bengali teachers. The country’s academic curriculum ought to be decen-
tralised and democratized. [ . . . ] The curriculum must reXect the diVerent cultures,
histories and experiences that make up Bangladesh’s diverse minority communities.
(Mohsin 2003: 102)

Elsewhere in her article she calls for dedicated radio and television channels which
would broadcast in other languages. All of these are highly praiseworthy ideas and
suggestions but their implementation is not easy, and would require much co-
operation and help from within the tribal groups themselves, along with extensive
research of the minority languages before grammars, dictionaries, and eVective
teaching materials could be produced and then put into use. Whether the government
would in principle be open to and also Wnancially support the initiation of such
developmental programmes for minority languages is another question. In recent
years there has occurred a certain amount of friction and also conXict between tribal
groups and the government in land disputes in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, as noted in
Mohsin (2003). Despite such conXict, however, it seems unlikely that the government
would actively discourage or fail to support initiatives such as mother tongue teaching
in primary schools if these were begun in earnest by local communities. If such
arrangements currently do not exist, it is more likely to be a lack of resources or of
suitable teachers than any governmental attempt to suppress languages other than
 Bangladesh 51

Bangla in the country. There are still many villages all over Bangladesh without access
to electricity, and much of the rural population is engaged in an everyday struggle for
suYcient food, clean water, and adequate sanitation. With such pressing, basic
diYculties, it is perhaps not surprising that minority language education has not
(yet) been prioritized by the Bangladeshi government.

2.4.4 Bangladesh and West Bengal

In section 2.2 it was noted that the historic region of Bengal was split into two when
India gained independence from the British, giving rise to a predominantly Hindu
province of West Bengal within India, and the mostly Muslim province of East Bengal
(later East Pakistan) in the new state of Pakistan. A single linguistic group was
consequently divided between two separate countries, with East Bengal/Pakistan
subsequently becoming a fully independent state, Bangladesh.
If one now considers how these two signiWcant areas and populations of Bangla
speakers (80 million in West Bengal, 144 million in Bangladesh) interact with each
other, it can be said that the relationship between Bangladesh and West Bengal is in
fact one of great inequality. From a linguistic and geographical point of view there is
hardly any diVerence between the two territories. Crossing the border from Bangla-
desh into India involves a lot of elaborate bureaucracy, but as soon as the journey
resumes on the road through West Bengal, the landscape displays the same green and
tranquil characteristics as in Bangladesh. People look the same, wear the same
clothes, use the same gestures and, of course, speak the same language. If one ignores
the historical reasons underlying the separation of Bengal, it is diYcult for outsiders to
understand why there should be this decisive division between the two parts of
Bengal, as they appear to have so much in common. However, any Bangla speaker
met abroad will make it clear within the Wrst few minutes of communication where he
comes from. Bangladeshis present themselves with enthusiasm as from a young,
proud, up-and-coming nation, West Bengalis with an easy sense of age-old superiority
as being from India, the real thing. Bengalis from Bangladesh and West Bengal will
communicate and even form friendships when they are far from home, but on their
home ground they see themselves as competitors (Bangladeshis) or as superiors (West
Bengalis). A parallel situation that springs to mind here as a plausible comparison
from the West is the relationship between the Federal Republic of Germany and the
German Democratic Republic during the years of the latter’s existence, where the
opposing political systems and great economic inequality between the two Ger-
manies created a tense and patronizing relationship and came to outweigh the bond
of a common language.
The political consciousness both in Bangladesh and in West Bengal similarly
undermines any feeling of linguistic oneness, and this can be seen on all levels of
public life, with the attitude to Rabindranath Tagore being available as a useful
example once more. Instead of providing a unifying inXuence, Tagore stands as a
52 H-R. Thompson

prized possession to be claimed by both sides. Though born in West Bengal, Tagore
spent quite some time living in what is now Bangladesh and this leads to the rather
absurd question (considering that he died in 1941 before the establishment of Ban-
gladesh) of whether Tagore was really a Bangladeshi rather than a West Bengali poet.
In the area of religion, Tagore came from an aristocratic Brahmo family and his own
religious convictions were far from simplistically Hindu. With such a mixed back-
ground, West Bengalis end up claiming him as a Hindu and Indian poet, while
Bangladeshis argue that he was a secular Bengali poet from Bangladesh.
On a more mundane level, it can be noted that many wealthy Bangladeshis travel to
Kolkata for hospital treatment or send their children to Indian boarding schools. They
consider Kolkata a somewhat upmarket Dhaka and visit it for the latest fashions, Wlms
and also alcohol, which is not available in Bangladesh. Universities stock up on books
from Indian booksellers, and Kolkata journals are widely and critically read in
Bangladesh. However, intellectual and academic exchanges are rare and cautious,
hampered by prejudices on both sides. Much though outsiders might feel that it
would be natural for West Bengal and Bangladesh to have a closer formal linking and
even constitute a single Bengali territory as in earlier times, they are likely to continue
to remain separate territorial entities with clearly diVerent characteristics.

2.5 Conclusions
Having considered a range of language-related concerns aVecting the population of
eastern Bengal past and present, we can now brieXy summarize what is particularly
salient with regard to the issues of language and national identity in the territory of
Bangladesh. Quite generally, questions of identity arise when our natural habitat in
the widest sense of the word is somehow altered, threatened, or denied, and whenever
individuals or groups of people are faced with having to make life-changing choices,
this automatically raises questions of self-deWnition. If identity is understood as
awareness of self in spatial proximity and contrast to others, then the process of
demarcation of a whole group of people can have far-reaching consequences. A Wrst,
important observation concerning (what is now) Bangladesh is that its people sig-
niWcantly underwent this process twice during the twentieth century in cataclysmic
ways, and in both instances language was an important ingredient in the identity
change of the nation.
In the Wrst redeWnition of the identity of those living in East Bengal, there was an
important realignment from an original shared language constituency with fellow
Bangla speakers in Bengal to a new, primarily religious grouping with geographically
distant co-adherents of Islam in Pakistan, who spoke a variety of diVerent languages.
In this instance, the imperative of joining other co-religionists clearly appeared to be
stronger than retaining membership of a single linguistic grouping, and the national
identity of the East Bengalis seemed to prioritize religion over language. Not long
after the dramatic repositioning of the East Bengalis under the pan-Islamic umbrella
 Bangladesh 53

of Pakistan, however, national language issues became of growing, critical importance

to the Bangla-speaking population of Pakistan, and sparked a reactive movement
indignant at the dismissal of Bangla as a potential national language of Pakistan.
Fuelled by the perception of other areas of unfair treatment, the Language Movement
evolved directly into a full-blown nationalist movement and resulted in the second
major redeWnition of the people of East Bengal as the independent state of Bangla-
desh. In this second signiWcant identity change, the desire to stand alone as a Bengali
nation responsible for its own progress and free to develop its own Bangla-centred
culture as it wished seems to have outweighed the potential beneWts of belonging to a
wider nation of Muslims in Pakistan. The creation of independent Bangladesh is
consequently a good example both of a nation insisting on the right to enjoy its own
culture, even if this should lead to the severing of other bonds based on the sharing of
a religion, and of a country where the national language has played a catalytic and
central role in focusing the energies of a people in their struggle for independence.
Two further aspects of the linguistic situation in Bangladesh also deserve high-
lighting for the way they interact with broader national identity issues. From a
comparative perspective, Bangladesh stands out as being a country which has a very
large population that is also strikingly homogeneous in its ethnic composition. This
shared ethnicity of most of Bangladesh’s population may well be an important reason
why Bangla is so successful as a national language, and so well loved by the majority of
the country, not functioning simply as a practical means of communication but
creating a genuine emotional bond among the population. This shared, positive
valuation of the language has, however, additionally been assisted in a very important
way by the symbolic association of Bangla with the country’s struggle for independ-
ence. It is therefore unlikely that one can attribute all of the success of Bangla as a
national language to the simple homogeneity of the country’s population.
Secondly, it is worth underlining the fact that Bangladesh exists as a nation
alongside a sizeable (80 million strong) neighbouring population of Bangla speakers
in Indian West Bengal. It is often said that an important function of a successful
national language is that it should separate and distinguish its speakers from other
populations and nationalities. In the case of Bangladesh, such a separatist function of
the national language does not seem to be well fulWlled, as the use of Bangla as a
mother tongue is clearly not restricted to just this country. Nevertheless, Bangla does
seem to function extremely well as a national symbol for those in Bangladesh. Perhaps
this is again due to the special role that Bangla has had only for Bangladeshis in the
Wght for their independence from Pakistan. The situation here can also be usefully
compared to the successful development of Swahili as a national language in Tanza-
nia, despite the presence of many millions of Swahili speakers in the neighbouring
country of Kenya (and other parts of East and Central Africa). In a way not dissimilar
to the case of Bangla, part of the success of Swahili as a national language in Tanzania
has been commonly attributed to its close association with a liberation movement
which won independence for the country.
54 H-R. Thompson

Finally, it can be stressed that Bangladeshis are a people openly and genuinely proud
of their country and seem to be happy to be in the state they are in, identiWed as
Bangladeshis, a new nation unto itself. In the last few years, particularly with the
advent of the internet, the sense of pride in being Bangladeshi (not Bengali) can be
widely observed. Websites on the Bangladesh independence struggle with suitably
solemn music and images are at the extreme end of this, but there are other
endeavours such as a website dedicated to Bangladeshi novels which expressly sets
these novels apart from Indian novels in Bangla. A sense of struggle for equality and
feeling of distinctive, national pride comes across in phrases such as ‘very much
appreciated nationwide and even in West Bengal’ or ‘she has been producing regularly
to enrich Bangladeshi literature’ and so on.11 And there are other public mechanisms
aimed at projecting positive cultural images of the nation both to Bangladeshis
themselves and to the outside world, such as the prestigious Bangla Academy in
Dhaka, which exists with the clear purpose of promoting Bangladeshi literary,
linguistic, and cultural eVorts. Interestingly, we can see here the scales tipping towards
the political again. Now that the language has held its undisputed position for more
than thirty years of independence, it is being used once again as a means towards
promoting political status.
11
Quoted from <http://www.bangladeshinovels.com>.
 3
India
R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

3.1 Introduction
India raises the important question of whether a mosaic of languages and shared
cultures can be melded into a nation. If language is a dominant symbol of identity, the
concept of nationhood presupposes the existence of a national language, and distinct
linguistic groups represent sub-nationalisms which may be a threat to the cohesion of
a nation. In India, such a way of thinking about the relation of language to nationhood
received considerable attention at the height of its political struggle for independence
from British rule; an eVort was made during that period to identify and promote
a national language, and for a period of about Wfteen years subsequent to independ-
ence, the question of a national language occupied much of the space of public
debate in India, reaching a crescendo in the 1960s. The resolution of that crisis in
favour of the indeWnite continuation of a ‘foreign’ language, English, as an ‘associate
oYcial language’ in the country indicated that the idea of India as a nation is not
primarily associated with any one language, or even primarily with ‘Indian’ languages.
The notion of identity is a multilayered, frequently purposive, construct in which
language plays one part. Being a popular, social construct, language identity is
moreover guided by popular perceptions about language. These perceptions may in
turn be inXuenced by visible but linguistically insigniWcant aspects of language such as
the existence of a script, or the choice of a script for a language, by the favoured
historical sources of a language group’s vocabulary and literary style, their literary
models and conWguration of literary history, as well as the immediate social advan-
tages that accrue to the users of a language. As will be discussed during the course of
this chapter, all of these factors have played important roles in the development of
social, group identity in the subcontinent of India, particularly over the last one
hundred years.
Language identity is particularly problematic because in its primary, oral occur-
rence, language is commonly a continuum of dialects that connects neighbouring
individuals, locales, and generations in a chain of intelligibility, and the division of a
language continuum into discrete languages may often not conform to any obvious
56 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

natural criteria, any more than political boundaries may. Ordinary people, further-
more, seem to have a deep intuitive realization of the essential arbitrariness of
language labels. This explains their readiness to allow language to be appropriated
by other major components of identity formation such as religion, or class. In such a
process, the ‘same’ language (marked by mutual intelligibility, and the absence of
syntactic diVerences) may be given diVerent labels depending on who speaks it, and,
conversely, linguistically interesting diVerences may be dubbed mere diVerences in
speech ‘styles’, leading to the clumping together of such varieties under a single
language label to serve a larger ethnic identity. In India, the Hindi–Urdu divide,
considered in section 3.3.1, is an example of the Wrst kind of socio-political separation
of a single variety of speech into two oYcial languages, and the conXation of the
languages of diVerent speech communities in the north of India under a single Hindi
‘umbrella’ is a clear occurrence of the second kind of manipulation of languages,
described in section 3.4.2. The labelling of languages in such cases therefore turns out
to be determined by non-linguistic factors but has important consequences for the
way that group membership is ultimately perceived and politically made use of.
Folk theories about language also play their part in the perception of linguistic
identities. An older view of language, still manifest in concerns for linguistic purity held
in certain quarters, allowed for various languages to be subsumed under the single
rubric of a ‘parent’ language, to which allegiance was still owed. The living diversity
among languages related in this way was regarded as imperfections and deviations from
the parent language. An example of such a view in the past in India was the common
perception of the medieval prakrits, the popularly spoken dialects from which the
modern Indo-Aryan languages later emerged, as ‘deviant’ forms of Sanskrit. They
tended for a long time not to be recognized as separate languages. Under such a view,
there is simply a hierarchy of diVerent speech styles, rather than a range of genuinely
diVerent languages (Krishna 1991:23). In contemporary India, the persistence of such
folk theories and attitudes facilitates the conXation of many divergent and mutually
unintelligible languages under the title of a single language. These issues and others
relating to the complex problem of language division and ethnic and national identity
will now be considered in more detail. Following an introduction to the linguistic
diversity found in India in section 3.1.1, sections 3.2–3.4 examine various aspects of
oYcial language policy and the establishment of linguistic states in India. Section 3.5
then presents an overview of signiWcant language movements which have occurred
during the last Wfty years, and section 3.6 considers the issue of language in education.
Finally, section 3.7 reXects on the changing face of multilingualism in India.

3.1.1 A History of Diversity

We shall begin with a brief sketch of the linguistic diversity of India, which, if language
is important for nationality, argues for a nation conWgured more as a loose federation
than as a centralized state.
 India 57

The largest group of languages spoken in India today are the Indo-Aryan lan-
guages. This subgroup of Indo-European resulted from the early southward migra-
tion of ‘Aryan’ tribes into the territory of India, around 1500 bc. The language of the
original Aryans was proto-Sanskrit, and over time gave rise to many of the languages
currently spoken in the north and central parts of India, including Assamese, Bangla
(Bengali), Gujarati, Hindi-Urdu, Kashmiri, Konkani, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, and
Sindhi. Even before the arrival of the Aryans, however, there was already a popula-
tion of speakers of a diVerent language type present on the subcontinent, now
identiWed as ‘Dravidian’. Who the Dravidians really were is still a matter of conjec-
ture. Among many claims, one is that the Dravidians entered India from the north-
west of the country two millennia before the Aryans arrived, that is, about 3500 bc.
It has been claimed that they were ‘Palaeo-Mediterranean migrants’ (Basham 1979: 2),
and that in their racial composition, ‘the Mediterranean Caucasoid component
predominates’ (Sjoberg 1990: 48). There have also been various claims, some more
fanciful than others, about the genetic relationship of Dravidian languages with
languages outside India (see Krishnamurti 2003: § 1.8 for a review). What seems
to be certain is that at the time of the arrival of the Aryans, the Dravidians were the
inhabitants of many parts of India, including the northwest. The pressure of the
Aryans subsequently pushed and eventually conWned the Dravidians mostly to
southern India, but left behind pockets of land in which Dravidians and their
languages survived, such as Brahui in present-day Pakistan, and Kurux in the
Himalayan foothills. Today, the Dravidian languages comprise the second largest
language family in India, and include Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu as the
major languages of the group.
Besides Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, there are languages in India now classiWed as
Tibeto-Burman, such as Meithei (Manipuri), Lushai (Mizo), and the Naga languages
of the tribal belt of the northeast of India, as well as Austro-Asiatic languages, for
example the Munda languages of the forest and hill tribes of central and eastern India.
The latter (Austro-Asiatic) group of languages, though currently small in comparison
to the present size of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, may well have been the
type of language spoken by the very earliest inhabitants of India, according to various
anthropologists.
Languages from four large language families are consequently represented in India.
As for the actual number of languages that are spoken in India today, Wgures vary here
according to the criteria chosen. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, to
which we come back presently, originally mentioned fourteen languages (it now
mentions twenty-two), considered the ‘major’ languages of India; according to the
1991 census, their speakers account for 96.29 per cent of the population. These
languages, which are also often called ‘regional’ languages (a term now seen as
problematic; the census uses the neutral term ‘scheduled languages’) were: Assamese,
Bangla (Bengali), Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Urdu
(all Indo-Aryan); Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu (all Dravidian). To this list
58 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

have been added Sindhi, Konkani, Nepali (Indo-Aryan), Manipuri (Tibeto-Burman),

and more recently, Bodo, Dogri, Santali, and Maithili.
The counting of language varieties as distinct languages has suVered from over-
estimation as well as underestimation. Where the guardians of the linguistic rights of
minorities have criticized the exclusion of languages with relatively fewer speakers and
the grouping together of ‘dialects’ under a major language, others have sought to
dispel the impression of a country Wlled with countless tribes all speaking diVerent
languages. Sumi Krishna quotes Nehru as ‘one of those who was very impatient with
the widely prevalent impression that India teems with languages’. Writing in 1946
before the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947, Nehru
identiWed just Wfteen modern Indian languages:
The oft-repeated story of India having Wve hundred or more languages is a Wction of the
mind of the philologist and the Census Commissioner who note down every variation in
dialect and every petty hill tongue . . . as a separate language, although sometimes it is
spoken only by a few hundred or a few thousand persons. (Nehru (1946), in Krishna
1991:12)

Indeed, the 1961 census recorded 1,652 ‘mother tongues’ in India. However,
more than a quarter of these had only four or Wve speakers each. Around 200
mother tongues had populations of 10,000 speakers or more, and this has subse-
quently become a criterion for recording a language in the census. The 1991 census
of India records 114 such languages, out of an estimated total of 400 (Vijayanunni
1999).
Most popular attention, and a sizeable section of scholarly debate, is restricted to
the ‘major’ languages, which in coverage is practically almost synonymous with the
set of ‘literary’ languages. An interesting parallel that has recently begun to be made
in this regard is between India and Europe. Both King (1994) and Malhotra (1998)
point out that India is approximately the size of western Europe and has a number of
oYcially recognized languages that is similar to the number of major languages
spoken within the area of western Europe:
To those only casually acquainted with her, modern India must seem a veritable jungle of
languages, and authoritative sources reinforce this impression. The massive Linguistic
Survey of India listed 179 languages, the 1921 census of India showed 188, and the
distinguished Indian linguist, S. K. Chatterjee rounded the Wgure oV to 180. If one looks
more closely, however, these apparently overwhelming numbers shrink to manageable
proportions. . . . The four major languages of the Dravidian language family. . . along with
the eight major languages of the Indo-European family. . . accounted for 93% of the 1981
population of India. From this perspective India’s linguistic diversity seems not particu-
larly remarkable for a continent-sized nation; Europe west of Russia, roughly comparable
in size and population, includes more than twenty diVerent nations using more than
twenty major languages. (King 1994: 4–5)
 India 59

3.1.2 India as a Linguistic Area

The languages of the Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic
language families present in India as the result of successive migrations have not
remained unaVected by their transfer to India, and bear interesting witness to the
societal interactions of their speakers over several millennia. These genetically unre-
lated languages appear to have developed shared traits over time, which are absent
from their familial ancestors. Because of this Sprachbund phenomenon, Murray B.
Emeneau (1956) has characterized the Indian subcontinent as a ‘linguistic area’, where
there has occurred an ‘Indianization of the immigrant Indo-Aryan’ as a result of
structural borrowing through extensive bilingualism.1 Taking such a view further,
Krishnamurti (2003) observes that Dravidian and Indo-Aryan do not seem to have
aVected each other in the same way, and that while Dravidian shows extensive lexical
borrowing from Indo-Aryan (principally from Sanskrit), the Indo-Aryan languages
show signs of large-scale syntactic and structural borrowing from Dravidian. From
this it is assumed that Middle and New Indo-Aryan were built on a Dravidian
substratum, and that it may be possible to infer that the invading Aryans were
KER
ALA

India
1
Masica (1976) further develops the idea of India as a linguistic area. See Krishnamurti (2003: 38–42) for
an overview of areal studies.
60 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

much fewer in number than the Dravidians they subdued, this causing the larger
syntactic impact of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan. Object before verb word order, the
occurrence of dative experiencer subjects, and conjunctive participles are just a few of
the traits commonly cited as Dravidian inXuences on Indo-Aryan (cf. Krishnamurti
2003: 38–42).

3.2 Language Policy: the Constitutional Provisions

Does a nation need to have a single national language, or is a multilingual nation a
viable state? Can a ‘foreign’ language ever be one’s own? The sections of the
Constitution of India which are related to language reXect, albeit imperfectly, the
debates on these issues from around the 1920s up to 1947, the year of Indian
independence. They envisage shaping Hindi to Wt a pan-Indian role, and displacing
English from its position in administration and government. The proposal of such a
change subsequently roused acrimonious debate in the non-Hindi regions of India,
and threats of secession from the southern state of Tamilnadu. While the nationwide
‘imposition’ of Hindi is now no longer an issue (discussed more fully in sections 3.3.2
and 3.5.1), an appendix of a list of languages in the Constitution, known as the Eighth
Schedule, has come to assume great importance among academics and language
activists, and become a particular target of criticism, as will be further explained
below.

3.2.1 The Constitutional Provisions and the Eighth Schedule

Articles 343–351 of the Constitution of India, drafted in 1948 and adopted in 1950,
under Part XVII (titled ‘OYcial Language’), are devoted to language. The major
change envisaged by the original drafting of the Constitution was simply a shift from
English to Hindi at the national level. Article 343 stated that the oYcial language of
the Union was to be ‘Hindi in Devanagari script’. The Constitution also provided for a
continuation of English along with Hindi ‘for a period of Wfteen years’ (that is, Wfteen
years from the date on which the Constitution was eventually adopted, 26 January
1950), with an additional provision for its continuance thereafter by act of Parliament.
Such a provision ultimately proved to be a very wise inclusion; following considerable
opposition to the enforced spread of Hindi as a nationwide oYcial language, in 1963
the OYcial Languages Act provided for the indeWnite continuance of English, and in
1967 an amendment to the Act gave English a special status as Associate OYcial
Language (section 3.5.1).
The linguistic situation for individual, regional states of the union according to the
Constitution is that they were (and still are) all given the freedom to adopt any one or
more of the languages in use in the particular state for their oYcial purposes, or
alternatively Hindi, or even to make use of English as the medium of administration
as in pre-independence times throughout India. One important associated eVect of the
 India 61

liberty for states to select their own oYcial languages has been the deliberate re-
formation of ‘linguistic states’ in certain instances in India, and attempts by central
government, in a number of cases prompted by agitation from language movements,
to realign state boundaries with already occurring geographical language blocs. This is
discussed in more detail in section 3.4.
In addition to its decrees and directives on language at the national and state level,
the Constitution also contains an appendix list of (originally) fourteen languages
known as the Eighth Schedule. Such a fairly simple appendix might hardly appear
signiWcant enough to merit the attention it has since received in the form of three
constitutional amendments and widespread criticism. However, given that it contains
the only explicit mention of ‘the other languages of India’ in the Constitution, the
Eighth Schedule now embodies the sole constitutional acknowledgement of certain
linguistic groups as Indian, and a recognition of major Indian languages other than
Hindi. Rather than being seen as a positive acknowledgement of the multilingual
nature of India, the Constitution and the Eighth Schedule have instead been lam-
basted for politicizing the language issue by creating a hierarchy of languages, with
Hindi at the top, the ‘scheduled languages’ below Hindi, and the hundred-odd
languages recorded in the census (along with still others, left out of the count because
they have fewer than ten thousand speakers each) at the very bottom. The inclusion of
languages in the schedule has in some instances been seen as arbitrary, and the
exclusion of languages from it as discriminatory.2 Certainly inclusion in the Eighth
Schedule appears to be a favourite, regular demand of linguistic pressure-groups, and
the list of languages in the Schedule has grown since its original formulation. For
example, Sindhi was included in the list of scheduled languages by a constitutional
amendment in 1967, twenty years after Independence, and the inclusion of Konkani,
Nepali (Gurkhali), and Manipuri occurred in 1993.3 In 2003, in the Wfty-fourth year of
the Republic of India, Bodo, Dogri, Maithili, and Santhali were added to the list. Yet in
spite of the clear attraction that the Schedule seems to have for those language groups
not part of it, it is actually not so clear that inclusion in the Eighth Schedule confers
real advantages to a language, or that exclusion entails disadvantage (Krishnamurti
1995: 16; Koul 1995: 111). The Eighth Schedule therefore remains an area of contro-
versy and is likely to continue to remain so for some years to come.

3.3 Language Policy: the Pre-Independence Debate

3.3.1 Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani
The 1948 constitutional declaration that Hindi was being selected as the oYcial
language of independent India was the result of several decades of debate about the

2
See the papers in Gupta et al. (1995).
3
Sindhi in India is ‘an urban language without a geographic base’ (Krishna 1991: 213). After Partition, Hindu
Sindhis migrated from Sind in Pakistan to towns in the Indian states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and
62 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

future, post-independence character of the country and how this might best be shaped
by guidance from the political leadership. In order to appreciate the broad signiWcance
of the decision to promote Hindi as the intended successor to English and as a
potential national language, it is really necessary to understand the pre-twentieth-
century development of the language and its close relation to two other language
forms which have added much complexity to the linguistic situation, both past and
present – Urdu and Hindustani.
Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani are the labels commonly given to three varieties of
language that are largely mutually intelligible, but which in the political arena are now
associated with diVerent religious, social, and political identities and have certain
typical distinguishing characteristics. To put it very simply, Hindi is written with the
Devanagari script (sometimes also called the Nagari script), consistently develops its
vocabulary from Sanskrit sources, and is associated with the Hindu population of
India. Urdu is written with a Persianized form of Arabic script, makes substantial use
of Perso-Arabic words, and is associated with the Muslim population of India (and
Pakistan – see Shackle, this volume, chapter 5). We must note that the situation on
the ground is much more complex, with Hindi as well as Urdu speakers often literate
in either script, depending on their educational background. In their formal spoken
and written forms, Hindi and Urdu share a common grammar and much basic
vocabulary. When Hindi and Urdu are spoken informally by most of the population,
the diVerences present and clearly discernible in formal language tend to disappear to
a very signiWcant extent, and the two varieties become both mutually intelligible and
often diYcult to tell apart. This frequently used, colloquial form of Hindi and Urdu
used in everyday conversation by the majority of speakers has in the past regularly
been referred to with the term ‘Hindustani’. It is also the form of language standardly
used in Bollywood Wlms, which are widely enjoyed by speakers of both Hindi and
Urdu.
Considered from a historical point of view, the Hindustani-Hindi-Urdu complex
developed out of a common broadly-spoken lingua franca that came to be used
through much of north and central India from the late twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries during the dynasties of Muslim rulers that pre-dated the Mughal rule.
During this time, Persian was in force as the oYcial language of administration and
writing but was supplemented by a mixture of the speech of the Delhi area (‘Khari
Boli’, which had Sanskrit as its ultimate ancestor) together with many Persian
loanwords as a very general means of oral communication among diVerent parts of
the Muslim-controlled territories. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this
form of speech was patronized by the rulers of various southern kingdoms and
resulted in the growth of an early literature in a language known as Dakhini or

Madhya Pradesh. The recognition of their language seems to have been important for the cultural identity of a
dispersed population; similarly, a ‘sense of insecurity’ among Indian Nepalis is said to have necessitated
constitutional recognition of their language (Munshi 1995: 108).
 India 63

southern Hindi-Urdu. In the mid-eighteenth century, it came to replace Persian as the

preferred language of poetry for most Muslim writers not only in the south but also in
the north, and under the British was eventually spread as the language of colonial
administration. It is signiWcant to note that for most of its pre-nineteenth-century
history, this growing lingua franca of north and central India was not named in any
strict or fully consistent way, being referred to with a variety of labels including
‘raikhta’ (‘a rough mixture’) in its less formal form, ‘Hindi’ (‘Indian language’),
Hindustani (‘language of those from the country of the Hindus’), and also ‘Urdu’ or
‘Ordu’, which stems from a Persianized Turkish word for a military camp that is also
the source of the word ‘horde’ in English. Though initially written down in Perso-
Arabic script, the growth and spread of the language into diVerent domains led to it
being also represented with Nagari script. For several centuries the names Hindi and
Urdu were treated as synonymous; the well-known Urdu poet and ghazal writer
Mirza Ghalib used the Persian script, but called the language he was writing in Hindi.
As the nineteenth century unfolded, there arose a gradual separation of two diVerent
forms of the original lingua franca, Urdu written in Perso-Arabic and associated largely
with Muslims, and Hindu-supported Hindi written in Nagari with an increasingly
Sanskritized vocabulary (King 1994). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, and
through the Wrst half of the twentieth century, it became more and more likely that full
independence from Britain could be achieved at some point in the future. To begin
with, this resulted in co-operation between Hindu and Muslim political parties and a
shared awareness that it would not be appropriate for English to continue as the oYcial
language of the country following independence. However, serious political rivalry
between Hindu and Muslim factions soon developed, and linguistically this led to
divergent opinions on the selection of an Indian language to replace English in its
oYcial functions. As noted in Shackle and Snell (1990: 13):
. . . the two extremes of the political spectrum came to be dominated more and more by
the Hindu demand for Hindi as the national language, matched by the Muslim demand
for the separate retention of Urdu, each community seeing in its language the quintes-
sence of its cultural identity.

This resulted in a clear, politically-inspired opposition of Hindi and Urdu emerging, in

which ‘the beginning of the 20th century saw these two forms of Hindi locked in a
bitter struggle’ (Dwivedi 1981: 7). Stepping into this conXict and attempting to resolve
it peacefully came Gandhi. In a concerted attempt to reverse the trend of the increasing
separation of Hindi and Urdu, Gandhi argued that the future national language of India
should in fact be Hindustani, the commonly-shared core of Hindi and Urdu that was
spoken in the north of India by both Hindus and Muslims and written in either the
Nagari or the Persian script. With the advocation of such a compromise candidate,
Gandhi also sought to end the tradition that had been present in India for many
centuries of using an elite language in administration and education (Sanskrit having
given way to Persian and then English in the higher areas of these domains).
64 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

During the years of the struggle for independence, the proponents of Hindi
maintained an uneasy truce with the idea of Hindustani, which for them became
increasingly identiWed with the Persianized Urdu the opposition Muslim League
worked to propagate. However, when the creation of Pakistan became a certainty
in mid-1947, resulting in a new separate homeland for Muslims, they no longer saw a
need for a policy of accommodation, and the proponents of Hindi written in
Devanagari script subsequently prevailed over those of Hindustani, which in fact
had never really secured a widespread, staunchly enthusiastic base of support (Shackle
and Snell 1990).4
The adoption of Hindi rather than Hindustani as the oYcial language hardened the
language divide between Hindi and Urdu (later mentioned as two separate languages
in the Eighth Schedule), and paved the way for a Sanskritized Hindi as the oYcial
language. This Hindi contrasts, as mentioned above, with colloquial Hindi, the
dialogue of Wlms produced in Bombay, and with the spoken language of political
address in India and Pakistan, which even today is fully intelligible on both sides of the
border. The entrenched use of diVerent scripts for Hindi and Urdu also sadly impairs
the understanding of written materials among speakers of essentially the same
language, and a contemporary writer in Urdu (for example) who is fully understood
if he reads out his work, may have to be read in English translation by those who lack
knowledge of the Urdu script.

3.3.2 Hindi as a National Language?

The idea of establishing a single national language for a country has often been
critiqued as deriving from a Western monolingual model for nationhood.5 However,
Gandhi clearly accepted the argument from ‘our past history’ for ‘the necessity of a
lingua franca to strengthen the Central Government of the country’ (Gandhi 1965: 22).
Before independence, in addition to territory under direct British rule, there were 601
nominally independent princely states that owed allegiance to the Empire. The
princely states constituted nearly 40 per cent of the subcontinent, and ranged in
size from a few hundred square miles to nation-sized states like Hyderabad and
Kashmir.6 Gandhi was keenly aware of the fragility of the new concept of a free
Indian nation and maintained that:

4
Note here the explicit identiWcation of a script form with the language (mandated use of the
Devanagari script is mentioned in the Constitution). So strong was the insistence on Devanagari script
that fervent advocates of Hindi had to be dissuaded from insisting on Hindi symbols even for numerals by
the argument that Arabic numerals were ultimately of Indian origin. In relation to the importance of script
and written forms, it can also be noted that a major reason why Hindustani failed to seem generally viable
as a replacement for English is that there was never any realistic solution to the question of which single
script form should be selected for its use as an oYcial language, Devanagari or Perso-Arabic.
5
Cf. Krishna (1991: 51), the references in Singh (1995: 43), and Brass (1974: 14V.). SchiVman (1996)
attributes all the ills of India’s language policy to the adoption of a Soviet model.
6
The erstwhile kingdom of Hyderabad was larger than England and Wales put together, and Kashmir
Wve times as big as Switzerland (Pandey 1969: 2).
 India 65

We must break through the provincial crust if we are to reach the core of all-India
nationalism. Is India one country and one nation or many countries and many nations?
(Gandhi 1965: 54)

The Gandhian idea of a national language was not a merely symbolic gesture such as
the later inclusion of Sanskrit in the Eighth Schedule.7 His concern was for a language
(or several languages) of education and administration that had its base in the people.
The Gandhian view (later to be articulated as the ‘three-language formula’ and
discussed in section 3.6.2) actually envisaged a hierarchical multilingualism for
India. However, Gandhi’s fear that in the absence of an overarching ‘Indian’ language
the Indian state would not be able to hold together seems to have been mistaken in
two critical ways. As independent India developed, the new nation did not in fact
generate the necessary nationalistic fervour for the shaping of a pan-Indian form of
Hindi as a truly national language. Nor has linguistic plurality in India proved to be
the primary cause of secessionist demands in the country. Indeed, it has been
argued that the recognition of plurality and the status accorded to the major Indian
languages by the formation of linguistic states has helped to strengthen the nation
considerably (Chandra et al 1999: 102). This re-constitution of territory within
India’s borders along linguistic lines will now be discussed in section 3.4, while the
issue of Hindi as a national replacement language for English is returned to some-
what later in section 3.5.

3.4 Linguistic States

3.4.1 The Linguistic Reorganization of States
It is a striking fact about India that whereas there is no language with a name
corresponding to the name of the country, there are names of languages correspond-
ing to states within India–Bangla for West Bengal, Gujarati for Gujarat, Kannada for
Karnataka. Yet India was not fully organized into such ‘linguistic states’ before
independence, or even immediately after it. The reorganization of state boundaries
along the lines of language was carried out between 1956 and 1966,8 the process
beginning with the formation of a Telugu-speaking state of Andhra Pradesh. Of the
fourteen languages originally mentioned in the Eighth Schedule, Sanskrit and Kash-
miri are the only languages that are not oYcial languages of a state (the oYcial
language of Jammu and Kashmir is not Kashmiri but Urdu, although Urdu is actually

7
Although almost 50,000 people claim Sanskrit as mother tongue in the 1991 census, its inclusion in
the Constitution was for historical and cultural reasons.
8
Twelve languages formed the basis for the formation of ‘linguistic states’: eight such states were
formed in 1956 (Assam, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Kashmir, Kerala, Orissa and Tamil-
nadu), two in 1960 (Gujarat and Maharashtra), and two in 1966 (Punjab and Haryana). Not all states could
be formed on a linguistic basis alone, however, e.g. the states of the northeast, where concerns of ethnicity
were primarily important in forming state boundaries.
66 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

a minority language in that state, and now Dogri as well). Some union territories and
northeastern states have exercised their option of retaining English as their oYcial
language.
In pre-independence times, the four British provinces of Bengal, Bombay, the
Central Provinces, and Madras9 had each encompassed speakers of more than one
language. Thus Madras had a majority of Telugu and Tamil speakers, and Bombay
included Gujarati and Marathi speakers. Gandhi supported the reorganization of
states on a linguistic basis, although he was not as insistent on this point as he was
on a national language. Both Gandhi and Nehru were clear that Indian languages
should be the media of instruction in education, and the language of administration
and law at the regional level. A decade before independence, Nehru wrote:
Our great provincial languages are no dialects or vernaculars as the ignorant sometimes
call them. They are ancient languages with a rich inheritance, each spoken by many
millions of persons . . . Our system of education and public work must therefore be based
on the provincial languages.10

By 1947, Gandhi saw the development of regional languages as essential for, and,
given the controversy about Hindi or Hindustani and the Nagari or Perso-Arabic
script, prior to the evolution of a national language (Gandhi 1965: 115).
However, after independence, Nehru was ‘reluctant to alter the provincial bound-
aries left behind by the British, because he realized what a Pandora’s Box that would
open’ (Tully and Masani 1988: 20). There were bound to be – and there indeed were –
disputes about which districts more appropriately belonged to which state on grounds
of language, as language boundaries naturally coalesce at their edges in bilingual and
multilingual populations. Although the government consequently chose not to pri-
oritize the issue, the cause did gain much popular momentum, with the demand for a
separate Andhra state for Telugu-speaking people being the Wrst and a very typical
example.
In October 1952, Potti Sriramulu, a Gandhian, went on a fast for the separation of
Telugu-speaking areas from the province of Madras. Although this planned separation
had been accepted in principle by both Telugu and Tamil speakers, the problem was
that neither side had been willing to give up their claim to the city of Madras. Potti
Sriramulu’s death, after Wfty-eight days of fasting, resulted in the occurrence of
widespread riots which forced the centre’s hand, and in October of the following
year India’s Wrst linguistic state, Andhra Pradesh, was formed. A Tamil-speaking state,
later called Tamilnadu, was simultaneously created. Subsequent to this, a States
Reorganization Commission was set up, and following its recommendations two

9
Of the seven provinces of British India, these four remained in Indian territory. The Punjab was
partitioned, and the North-Western Provinces and the North-West Frontier Province went to Pakistan.
10
Quoted in Kumaramangalam (1965: 14). Khubchandani (1995: 31) notes that in the colonial era, the
Indian languages were called ‘vernaculars’, the word language being reserved for English and the classical
languages Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit. See also Anantamurty (2000: 46).
 India 67

years later, the States Reorganization Act was passed by Parliament in November
1956, providing for fourteen states and six centrally administered territories.
The Telugu-speaking part of the territory of the Nizam of Hyderabad, known as
Telengana, was transferred to Andhra Pradesh,11 a Malayalam-speaking state of
Kerala was created by merging the Malabar districts of the Madras Presidency with
Travancore-Cochin, and Kannada-speaking areas of the states of Bombay, Hyderabad,
Coorg, and Madras were added to Mysore (later known as Karnataka).
The States Reorganization Commission, however, opposed the splitting of Bombay
and Punjab. We will discuss the Punjab separately in section 3.5.2. Concerning
Bombay, there was an initial attempt to preserve this as a bilingual Marathi-Gujarati
state, and the States Reorganization Commission added further Marathi- and Gujarati-
speaking areas that were parts of neighbouring states as extensions to it. However,
a demand for bifurcation of the state came from groups of Marathi speakers. Such
a proposal being immediately opposed by the Gujarati businessmen of Bombay,
the attempt was then made to retain Bombay city as a separate, centrally administered
territory, but this proved to be unacceptable to the Maharashtrians. Finally it was
agreed, in 1960, to bifurcate the state of Bombay into two states, Maharashtra and
Gujarat, with the city of Bombay included in Maharashtra, and Ahmedabad made the
capital of Gujarat. Cases such as Bombay therefore illustrate just how much delicate
balancing of diVerent populations has sometimes been necessary to arrive at an
acceptable reorganization of the nation’s states following independence.

3.4.2 Language Minorities and Homogenization

There is a general opinion that the adoption of an Indian language as the oYcial
language of a state, made possible by the linguistic reorganization of territory in India,
provided an impetus to education in the mother tongue, as well as to the development
of the language itself. In the case of Konkani, it was the formation of a state of Goa,
where it became the oYcial language, that actually led to its initial recognition as a
language. Konkani had previously been argued to be just a dialect of Marathi, and its
lack of a script of its own was commonly put forward in support of this argument
(Konkani had a tradition of being written in the Marathi script or the Kannada script,
i.e. in the script of the major language of the region where it was spoken). Now
Konkani is listed as one of the languages of the Eighth Schedule.
Two additional points need to be made here. Six Indian states now have Hindi as
their oYcial language: Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan,
and Uttar Pradesh. The Hindi movement in the north has been argued to be an

11
However, years after this uniWcation was eVected, a demand was made on at least two occasions by
certain groups for the separation of Telengana from the relatively more prosperous Andhra region of the
state; see Chandra et al. (1999: 303–7). There are also demands from parts of Maharashtra and Karnataka
for separate statehood, arising from a perception of neglect. India currently has twenty-eight states and
seven union territories.
68 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

assimilatory movement that has dismissed diVerences in language varieties as mere

dialectal variation in an eVort to further its claims and prominent position by increasing
its demographic base.12 It is also claimed to have appropriated for itself the rich
literature of languages such as Braj Bhasha, Maithili, and Awadhi.13 One particularly
compelling argument against at least part of the giant ‘Hindi umbrella’ is that language
varieties such as Rajasthani, Maithili, Braj, or Awadhi are at least as diVerent from the
Hindi spoken around Delhi as Urdu or Punjabi are, both of which are classed as
independent languages. However, in the absence of other, extralinguistic religious or
political considerations, the former have not inspired successful language movements,
and have continued to be regarded simply as varieties of Hindi (with the exception now
of Maithili, which was included in the Eighth Schedule in 2003).14
A second point to be kept in mind is that the linguistic states are not fully
homogeneous or monolingual territories, but multilingual to varying degrees, with
linguistic minorities represented in them from the major Indian languages as well as
from the unscheduled languages. In Chandra et al. (1999: 103) it is pointed out that:
‘Nearly 18 per cent of India’s population do not speak the oYcial language of the
states where they live as their mother tongue.’ A concern of the Constitution has
been to ensure the linguistic rights of these minorities, and one of its articles
stipulates that: ‘All minorities, whether based on religion or language, shall have
the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.’ A
Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities is furthermore charged to oversee the
implementation of these safeguards. However, there is currently a serious question
whether the provisions for linguistic minorities are really being satisfactorily
implemented, especially in respect of the non-scheduled languages (Chandra et al.
1999: 104).
Relating to the internal linguistic organization of states and multilingualism, it
can also be noted that the constitutional provision for states to have more than one
oYcial language has in fact been taken up and made use of in certain cases where
there are signiWcant minorities present: Andhra Pradesh has speciWed Urdu as an
oYcial state language in addition to Telugu, and Nepali is similarly recognized in
West Bengal and Sikkim. However the claims of some minorities to have their
language recognized as an associate oYcial language of the state have elsewhere
been resisted by state governments (see Chandra et al. 1999: 103–5 for discussion of
this issue).

12
The 1991 census groups forty-eight mother tongues under Hindi. The proportion of Hindi speakers
recorded in the overall national population varies signiWcantly between censuses according to the way that
mother tongues are grouped relative to Hindi. The 1961 census indicated that Hindi speakers made up 30.4
per cent of the population, whereas in 1981 the Wgure was put at 39.9 per cent (Khubchandani 1995: 35).
13
An alternative, less ‘accusatory’ view of the processes of language standardization and assimilation
which have incorporated other varieties of language into the rubric of Hindi is to assume that these are
simply the inevitable results of increased communication and education in the north of India.
14
See Brass (1974) for an account of the Maithili language movement.
 India 69

3.5 Language Movements

As mentioned earlier, the language policy of the nation as set out in the Constitution
met with clear resistance at its outset and subsequently had to be modiWed. In the pre-
independence period, there appeared to be a consensus among the leadership on the
need to make the most widely spoken language of the country the national language;
the debate was then only about whether this language should actually be Hindi or its
more colloquial relative Hindustani. However, after independence, this consensus
seemed to break down. People questioned whether there should be only one oYcial
or national language for the country, and even whether English should be replaced at
all for purposes of the daily business of running the government. The most enthusiastic
for the replacement of English by Hindi were, perhaps naturally, the Hindi speakers
themselves. Interestingly, the resistance to such a change did not come from all of
the non-Hindi-speaking population, but from a speciWc subsection of this – to a
certain extent from Bengal, and most of all from the southern states of the nation.
Even more narrowly, it came from one particular subgroup of Dravidian language
speakers, the Tamils, who had exhibited anti-Hindi sentiment even in pre-independence
days. In section 3.5.1 below, we outline the anti-Hindi movement in the south, trying
to put the Tamil resistance to Hindi in perspective by looking also at certain other
social movements of the time in that part of the country. In section 3.5.2, we then turn
to look at a language movement which occurred in the Punjab, which was not anti-
Hindi, but a confrontation between Hindi and Punjabi that had its roots in Sikh
nationalism.

3.5.1 The Anti-Hindi Movement in Southern India

In the Wrst decades of the twentieth century, an anti-Brahmin movement was coales-
cing among the lower castes of the Tamil-speaking areas. Their protest was against
what they perceived as Brahmin hegemony in education and government jobs, and
their own caste-based social inferiority. In 1920, the Justice Party was formed, whose
political platform was that social justice should be the main priority for India, not
independence from the British (members of the Justice Party were consequently seen
as pro-British by the nationalists). A parallel movement was the anti-caste, anti-
religion Self-Respect Movement led by E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, which was viru-
lently anti-Brahmin. This movement identiWed Brahmins with Sanskrit and the Aryan
race; it opposed these, proudly, with Tamil and the Dravidian race.
Converging with the above came a newly inspired Tamil language movement. In
the nineteenth century, various European missionary-linguists (Bishop Robert Cald-
well being the most prominent among them15) had identiWed the languages of the

15
Caldwell was the Wrst to use the term ‘Dravidian’ to refer to the languages of the south; and his
monumental work A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856) laid
the foundation of the linguistic study of these languages.
70 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

south of India as not belonging to the same family as the Sanskrit-derived languages of
the north. At around the same time (in 1880) came the accidental discovery of a cache
of ancient Tamil manuscripts by U. Ve. Caminataiyer, which brought to light a pre-
Aryan Tamil culture and literature that dated from at least the Wrst millennium bc.
The combined eVect of these developments – which showed Tamil in a very Xattering
light as ‘separate’ or unique, and ancient – was the initiation of a strong language
movement among Tamils. Part of this, the ‘pure Tamil’ movement, asked people to
eschew Sanskrit words which had crept into the language,16 and extreme forms of
pride in their language were generated among Tamil speakers, with concerted
attempts to glorify ‘Tamilttaay’ (Mother Tamil) (see SchiVman 1996, Ramaswamy
1999). The ground was thus prepared for a violent opposition to any ‘north Indian’,
Sanskrit-based language which was seen as extending its cultural hegemony in the
Tamil area.
Meanwhile, the Congress party under the leadership of Gandhi was committed to
the promotion of Hindi (or Hindustani) as the national language. In 1937, under a
brief experiment on the part of the British Raj with provincial-level self-government,
the Congress formed a government in the province of Madras in the south. The
following year, C. Rajagopalachari, a veteran Congress leader and then the chief
minister, ordered the compulsory study of Hindi in the schools of the Presidency. This
led to state-wide protests, and by late 1939, nearly 1,200 agitators were in prison. The
government was consequently forced to withdraw the order in February 1940.
In the interim before independence, the Dravidian movement gathered pace. E. V.
Ramasami Naicker founded the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) in 1944. A splinter group
headed by a disciple of Naicker, C. N. Annadurai, was later to form the Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in 1949. The professed agenda of these parties was the
formation of a separate Dravidian nation (‘Dravida Nadu,’ i.e. Dravida Country),
which would comprise all the Dravidian-language-speaking areas of southern India.
The non-Tamils among the Dravidian-language-speakers were however rather luke-
warm towards this idea.
In 1947, when the country became independent, and the Congress formed govern-
ments in the states and at the centre, the state promotion of Hindi started once again.
In 1955, the OYcial Language Commission made its generally positive recommenda-
tions concerning the implementation of Hindi in oYcial business, despite the fact that
the two members of the Commission from West Bengal and Tamilnadu wrote clearly
dissenting notes.17 Following the Commission’s recommendations, several steps were
16
The most prominent leader of the ‘pure Tamil’ movement, Maraimalai Adigal, derived his Tamil
name from a translation of his original Sanskrit-based name ‘Swami Vedachalam’ into pure Tamil words.
Many other people also started transliterating their Sanskrit-based names in accordance with Tamil
phonology and orthography, hence (for example) the Tamil name ‘Caminataier’ was originally ‘Swami-
natha Iyer’.
17
Note that one of these, Prof. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee had actually been in charge of the Bengal
chapter of the organization sponsored by the Congress party for the propagation of Hindi before
independence, the ‘Hindi Prachar Sabha’.
 India 71

then taken by the government for the progressive use of Hindi in government, such as
the compulsory training of all central government staV in Hindi, and the setting up of
a Central Hindi Directorate. This created strong apprehensions in the South; in 1958,
C. Rajagopalachari18 stated that ‘Hindi is as much foreign to the non-Hindi speaking
people as English is to the protagonists of Hindi.’ At the same time, the supporters of
Hindi launched a movement for the immediate replacement of English by Hindi, and
resorted to agitational methods such as the defacement of all English signboards.
Nehru tried to contain the situation. In a statement in the Parliament in August
1959, he gave an assurance to the south: ‘I would have English as an alternative
language as long as people require it, and I would leave the decision . . . to the non-
Hindi-knowing people.’ Nehru’s assurance was then given legal validity (or so it was
thought) by the passing of an OYcial Languages Act in 1963, which stated that English
‘may. . . continue to be used in addition to Hindi’ even after 1965. However, the
apprehensions of the south were unfortunately not fully allayed by the somewhat
ambiguous language of this assurance. Because of this, after Nehru’s death in 1964,
and as the date for the planned change over to Hindi drew nearer (26 January 1965),
the southern states and Madras state in particular were rocked by violent agitations.
The government’s attempts to suppress the agitation made matters worse: several
young men, including four students, burnt themselves to death as an extreme form of
protest, and more than sixty people lost their lives as a result of police shooting. There
was also wide-spread damage to government property.
The Congress Wnally decided to accede to the main demands of the agitators. In
1967, after some delays caused by factors such as an Indo-Pakistan war, the then prime
minister Indira Gandhi succeeded in passing an amendment of the 1963 OYcial
Languages Act, which made English an Associate OYcial Language and guaranteed
that it would continue as such, until such time as the non-Hindi states asked for its
removal. Through this development, ‘a virtual indeWnite policy of bilingualism was
adopted’ (Chandra et al. 1999: 96).
This ended the anti-Hindi agitation. But in the meanwhile, the agitation had greatly
strengthened the Dravidian parties. The Dravidian movement broadened its political
base in the early sixties, and in doing so, shifted its focus from a pro-Tamil (and anti-
Brahmin) stance to one which was anti-Hindi and pro-English. In the words of
Ramaswamy (1999: 6), the anti-Hindi agitation was therefore able to:
(knit) together diverse, even incompatible, social and political interests . . . Their common
cause against Hindi had thrown together religious revivalists . . . with avowed atheists;
men who supported the Indian cause . . . with those who wanted to secede from India;
university professors . . . with uneducated street poets, populist pamphleteers, and college
students.

18
The former chief minister of Madras who had ordered the introduction of Hindi in schools of the
state. He had also been (before independence) the President of the ‘Hindi Prachar Sabha’.
72 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

In the state elections of 1967, the Congress party was routed at the polls, and the
DMK rode to electoral victory. One direct consequence of such a victory for the
Dravidian movement was that in January 1968, the new government completely
removed Hindi from the school curriculum of the state of Tamilnadu. It can be
added that in Tamilnadu, the Congress Party has never returned to power since, and
Hindi is still not taught in state schools.

3.5.2 Punjabi, Hindi, and Sikh Separatism

Before Indian independence, the Punjab was a multilingual province with three
prominent languages: Lahnda (now merged into Punjabi, in Pakistan), spoken in
the western, Muslim-majority districts; Punjabi, spoken in the central districts by
Hindus and Sikhs; and Hindi, spoken in the Hindu-majority east. In 1947 at the time of
Partition, the Punjab was divided between India and Pakistan, creating a state with a
mixed Sikh and Hindu population on the Indian side.
The Sikh leadership in the Punjab had actually hoped for an independent and
sovereign Sikh nation at the time when the Punjab was being originally partitioned in
1947. This was not granted to them, however, and so, shortly after Indian independ-
ence, they put forward a demand for a separate state within India. Being well aware
that the newly-formed Indian state was wary of further religious secessionism
following the partition of India and Pakistan, while nevertheless being open to
linguistic claims for statehood, the Sikh leadership emphasized linguistic demands
for a Punjabi-speaking state to the States Reorganization Commission in 1953. The
Commission at that time rejected the demand, partly on pure linguistic grounds
(stating that Punjabi was not suYciently distinct from Hindi as a language, either
grammatically or in terms of geographical distribution), and partly because it seemed
clear that the use of language to justify a separate state was just a ploy, given that there
was no matching demand from Punjabi-speaking Hindus. A separation of the terri-
tory into a Punjabi-speaking state of Punjab and a Hindi-speaking state of Haryana
was however achieved in 1966 after a series of agitations and interim arrangements.
Crucially, during this period the Sikh leadership succeeded in projecting their demand
more convincingly in linguistic terms. This was possible, to a certain extent, because
of changes in the way that religious identities were matched to linguistic labels by the
inhabitants of the area, and due to the way that government census agents accepted
speakers’ declarations concerning the languages that they (thought they) spoke.
In Brass (1974, and references therein) it is argued that the initial linguistic
separation of Punjabi from Hindi as distinct language forms was a direct result of
the hardening of Sikh and Hindu religious identities during the closing years of the
nineteenth century, a period which additionally saw the division of Hindustani along
religious lines (into polarized Hindi and Urdu forms). Brass also makes the broader
argument that the emergence of separate languages from the wide variety of dialects
subsumed under the Hindi umbrella in the north of India has only been possible
 India 73

where popular and political support could be mobilized on religious grounds, namely
in the two cases of Urdu and Punjabi, spoken by Muslims and Sikhs respectively, and
language varieties like Maithili (and, we may add, Rajasthani) which are spoken by
Hindu populations. These have not been able to achieve recognition as distinct
languages on linguistic grounds alone. The earliest census operations of 1881 and
1891 played an unwitting part in such a manipulation of linguistic identities. The
census oYcers were confronted in the Punjab, as in the rest of north India, with a
variety of dialects that shaded oV imperceptibly into one another, and by respondents
who themselves had no clear conception of what to call their language. In their ‘desire
for uniformity and precision in an area of variability and uncertainty’ (Brass 1974:
292), the census oYcers intervened to deWne, group and classify the returns,19
opening up the possibility for other ‘organised eVorts to inXuence the results’.
These eVorts were initially directed at urging Muslims to declare Urdu and Hindus
Hindi as their mother tongue, and are reXected from the 1911 census onwards as
correlations between the declared mother tongues and religions. This strategy cut
into the strength of not only the ‘neutral’ language Hindustani, but Punjabi as well,
for Muslim and Hindu speakers of Punjabi began to ‘disown’ their language in favour
of declaring Urdu or Hindi as the mother tongue. A process was thus set in motion
that identiWed the Punjabi language principally with the Sikh community.
This identiWcation emerges very clearly in Brass’s comparison of the later census
Wgures for the years 1921 and 1961. In 1921, only about a quarter of the Hindu
population of the Punjab declared themselves to be Hindi speakers, the others
claiming Punjabi, Hindustani, or some other mother tongue. By 1961, however,
almost ninety per cent of the Hindu population of the Punjab were claiming to be
Hindi speakers. In the intervening years, the language/religion conXict had intensiWed
to the extent that in 1941, the census authorities deemed the language Wgures too
unreliable to merit tabulation at all, and in 1951, the issue was avoided by grouping
together the languages of the Punjab under the single rubric ‘Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi,
and Pahadi’. Finally, in the 1961 census, oYcials were instructed to simply record the
mother tongue as the respondent named it, without any attempt at veriWcation. Thus
the 1961 Wgures accurately reXect not the linguistic facts but preferred language
loyalties.
The identiWcation of the Punjabi language with the Sikh community was at this
time also consciously being promoted by the Sikh leadership by designating the
Gurumukhi script, in which the Sikh scriptures are written, as the Punjabi script.
Since the language had earlier been written in any one of three scripts, the Nagari, the
Persian-Arabic, or the Gurumukhi, with Hindu Punjabi speakers favouring the

19
A similar idealization occurred in the case of religion. Though many asked about their religion
replied that they were ‘Hindu-Sikhs’ or ‘Sikh-Hindus’, which reXected the reality that the Sikh community
and religion were an integral part of Hinduism up until the 1900s, such a self-categorization was
disallowed by the census oYcers, and respondents were asked to specify whether they were Hindu or
Sikh.
74 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

Nagari, this identiWcation of the language with a script reinforced the narrowing of its
domain, and made its proWle as a distinct language spoken by a particular group
potentially much clearer.
The combination of a more direct match between the Sikh population and Punjabi
due to the methodology of the census reporting in 1961, and the closer association of
a distinct, dedicated Punjabi script accepted by most of those who reported them-
selves as Punjabi speakers boosted the credibility of the Sikh leadership’s second
attempt to secure a new Punjabi-speaking state, and this was then approved and
Wnally eVected in 1966.
The formation of the state of Punjab did not, however, resolve the fundamental
problem of the Sikh leadership’s preoccupation with a religious state in which they
would have political power. The political party of the Sikhs, the Akali Dal, was unable
to win elections in the new state of Punjab, and in the 1980s it acquiesced in the
growing extremism of the Khalistan movement, a separatist, terrorist outgrowth
whose activities resulted in the deaths of nearly 12,000 people (more than 60 per
cent of whom were themselves Sikhs) before Wnally being contained from mid-1991
onwards by the strong stance of the Narasimha Rao government.

3.6 Language in Education

3.6.1 Language Policy in British India
At an early point in history, language learning was regarded as all learning. This was true
of classical languages generally, not only Sanskrit but also Greek and Latin. (Krishna
1991: 104)

In ancient India, a child in southern India, after a brief instruction in the mother
tongue aimed at basic literacy, would have gone on to study Sanskrit, both the
language and its literature. Since Sanskrit was written and read in the script of
the regional language, initial literacy instruction in the mother tongue very natural-
ly led on to the learning of the real ‘language of culture’ (i.e. Sanskrit). This pattern
continued on in the south of India until British times. In medieval times in
northern India, in places under Muslim rule, both Muslim and Hindu children
received instruction in Arabic and Persian, and a Hindu child often learned three
languages – Sanskrit, the mother tongue, and Persian-Arabic (Chaudhari 2001).
These patterns changed with the coming of the British; the new education they
introduced had English as the medium of instruction and also as the main subject
of study.20
Even before Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1857, English had entered
the educational system in India with a Minute on Education tabled by Macaulay

20
See the papers in Daswani (2001) for more detailed discussions of language in education in India.
 India 75

in 1835.21 Macaulay intervened decisively in a debate about how government

funds for education were best to be made use of. One section of British and Indian
opinion had argued for classical education: Sanskrit for the Hindus, Arabic for the
Muslims. This was, however, vigorously opposed by Indian reformists such as
Ram Mohan Roy, who wrote to Lord Amherst (the Governor General) in 1823
arguing against the establishment of a ‘Sangscrit school under Hindoo pundits’,
which would only:
. . . impart such knowledge as is already current in India. This seminary. . . can only be
expected to load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinc-
tions of little or no practicable use to the possessors or to society. The pupils will there
acquire what was known two thousand years ago, with the addition of vain and empty
subtleties since produced by speculative men . . . (quoted from Burde 1988: 146–7)

The option of education in the ‘Indian vernacular languages’ appears not to have been
seriously considered, although it was mooted in Bombay.
Macaulay, who famously stated in the same Minute that ‘[a] single shelf of a good
European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, was in full
agreement with the reformists among the ‘natives’. Also, more practically, he argued
that education in English would create a much-needed reservoir of oYcials for the
Empire:
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and
the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English
in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. (Macaulay 1979 [1935])

Consequently, English schools were established by the government of the East India
Company, and later, by the government of the British queen. Needless to say, English
was the language of university education when in 1857 the Wrst three universities of
Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta were established.

3.6.2 Language Policy since Independence: the Three-Language Formula

For Gandhi, the English language became ‘the symbol of exploitation – Wrst, by the
British in India; and then, . . . by the Indian intelligentsia itself ’ (Chatterjee 1973: 56).
As late as 1948 he wrote:
Our love of the English language in preference to our own mother tongue has caused a
deep chasm between the educated and politically-minded classes and the masses. The
languages of India have suVered impoverishment. (Gandhi 1965: 5)

The Gandhian view of what should happen in free India, as regards language in social
interaction – and hence, in education – envisaged a hierarchical multilingualism: using

21
English schools had begun to be established by missionaries from at least the 1760s (Agnihotri and
Khanna 1995).
76 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

the regional languages (referred to by Gandhi as the provincial languages), Hindi, and
English, respectively for regional, national, and international purposes.
It was the Gandhian view that was articulated as the ‘three-language formula’,
proposed in 1957 by the Central Advisory Board of Education as an aid to national
integration, and adopted in 1961 by a conference of state Chief Ministers. The intent
of the formula was that every child should learn its mother tongue, and in addition
English and Hindi. A child whose mother tongue was Hindi should learn (as its third
language) a major Indian language other than Hindi – preferably, a south Indian
language – and a child whose mother tongue was not the regional language – i.e. a
child belonging to one of the linguistic minorities in a state – was expected to learn
the regional language as well as its mother tongue, Hindi, and English (hence four
languages). The National Policy Resolution in 1968 indicated that mother tongue
instruction would occur during primary education, and the three-language formula at
the secondary stage (Khullar 1995: 113).
Noble and ambitious as the intentions of the three-language formula are, there have
been noticeable shortcomings in the implementation of the policy. Under India’s
federal constitution, education is within the purview of the state government. We
have seen that the state of Tamilnadu, after the Dravidian parties came to power,
refused to teach Hindi in the state-funded schools; Tamilnadu in eVect has a ‘two-
language formula’. The Hindi states have also defeated the spirit of the three-language
formula by teaching Sanskrit or Urdu as the third language, instead of a contemporary
south Indian language.
The greatest shortcoming in the implementation of the three-language formula,
though, has been in regard to the treatment of linguistic minorities. As we saw in
section 3.4.2, the Constitution contains a number of safeguards for the protection of
the linguistic minorities. In pursuance of these safeguards, policy decisions have been
taken which require that instruction through the mother tongue should be provided
by the state if there are not fewer than forty pupils speaking a particular language
within a school, or ten such pupils in a single class (Khullar 1995: 117). However, this is
not always done, and there has been a common tendency instead to ‘impose’ the
major regional language (which is the state language) on the linguistic minorities.
This is especially true if the language in question is one of the ‘tribal’ languages of
India (spoken by groups oYcially recognized as ‘Scheduled Tribes’ and consisting
mostly in peoples descended from the original inhabitants of India), which often have
very few speakers.22 In some cases the tribals themselves seem to prefer instruction
in the major regional language of the area. In Khubchandani (1994) it is noted
that the tendency to maintain their language identity is limited to tribal populations
that are not surrounded by dominant regional languages (as in the northeast), and

22
However, there are also tribal languages that number their speakers in millions: e.g. Bhili (5.5
million), Santali (5.2 million), Gondi (2.1 million), Kurukh or Oraon (1.4 million), and Bodo (1.2 million),
according to the 1991 census.
 India 77

Krishnamurti (1995: 17) observes that ‘The attitudes of tribal elites in many states are
against education in the mother tongue.’23
A 1985 Ministry of Education document acknowledges the reality that ‘Central
Government is unable to ensure the faithful implementation of the three-language
formula’ (Ramamurti 1990: 81), and Agnihotri and Khanna (1994: 68) tell us that the
formula has in fact ‘been mocked at in all parts of the country’. The essential problem,
it appears to us, is that the formula has a worthy agenda of national integration but
pays little attention to usefulness. Time and time again, it has been noticed that
students tend to prefer languages which promote their employment potential and
mobility, and on both these points, the language that scores is deWnitely English.
The regional languages have been at a disadvantage in these respects vis-à-vis both
English and Hindi (Kumaramangalam 1965). Critically, the Constitution did not
mandate the replacement of English by an Indian language at the regional level within
a given time, in the way that it did for Hindi at the centre, and Hindi made better
progress in education than the other Indian languages because it promised access to
central government jobs. Regional languages, by way of contrast, are of no use in this
respect, and of doubtful use for getting jobs with state governments as well. The result
of this has been the growth of English in the non-Hindi-speaking parts of the country,
as an alternative to Hindi as the oYcial or link language, and a comparative disinterest
in the formal, classroom study of the regional/state languages.
In connection with the above, it can be recalled that in the days of the anti-Hindi
movement in the south of India, a move of the central government that created
tension in the south was the decision to make Hindi an alternative medium in public
service examinations. This was seen as giving an unfair advantage to Hindi speakers,
who could sit the examinations in their mother tongue (see Chandra et al. 1999: 94).
Here and in other similar instances it can be noticed again and again how important
access to employment in the central government services was perceived to be during
the Wrst decades after independence and how language policies which aVected such
access had the potential to cause serious discontent and lead to social unrest.
Concerns of this type may now seem quaint to the youth of today who look to
private enterprise and globalized markets for their livelihood. However, in post-
independence India, struggling to maintain neutrality in a world divided by the
Cold War, the central government was the largest and most prestigious employer of
the educated class and hence of tremendous importance for the expanding middle
classes.

3.6.3 English in Education

In 1946 Gandhi wrote that: ‘The market value of English will Wnd its natural level,
once the British empire over India goes’ (Gandhi 1965: 102). The great irony is that the
23
Mehrotra (1999) discusses the ‘death’ of tribal languages due to this attitude. See also Krishna (1991:
196V.) for similar attitudes of migrants in a Mumbai slum, Dharavi.
78 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

‘market value’ of English has in fact remained stable, and even increased, after
independence.
In the urban centres of India, there is a great rush for private schools providing
‘English-medium’ education (with all teaching being done through English) right
from the primary stage, especially among Wrst-generation learners.24 English has long
been perceived to be the language of a select elite, used in domains of power and
prestige, and the language of schooling is now the visible symbol of the divide
between education for the ‘masses’ and education for the ‘classes’, with English-
medium instruction accruing considerable high prestige.25
The advantages of receiving English-medium schooling become immediately
apparent in higher education, in colleges and universities, where English predomin-
ates. OYcial policy now regards English as essential for access to technical and
scientiWc information and knowledge, and necessary for the nation for its modern-
ization and economic development. Earlier, between 1964 and 1966, the Education
Commission had actually called for a change over to the use of regional languages as
the languages of instruction in university education, with this being implemented
over a ten-year time frame. However, the Ministry’s document ‘Programme of
Action’ (1992: 178–9) acknowledges both that ‘university teachers having received
education through English Wnd it diYcult to teach through the Indian languages’,
and that ‘Indian language-medium courses are generally not popular amongst
the students because of lack of professional comparability and poor employment
potential.’
As we shall note in the next subsection, the rate of growth of English bilingual-
ism – i.e. of the number of people who are bilingual in English and their mother
tongue – is outstripping other types of bilingualism. There has also been an attempt
to deWne a new attitude towards English in the changed circumstances of the
globalizing world. Thus N. S. Prabhu, an eminent language-teaching theorist, writes:
‘We need to look on the English language not just as a legacy of our colonial past,
nor just as a national need for economic survival in the present-day world, but as
the medium of a knowledge-paradigm which has reached out to all of us.’ (Prabhu
1994: 56–7)

24
The PROBE report (Public Report on Basic Education in India) suggests that the demand is more
widespread: ‘Private schooling is often thought to be conWned to urban areas, but this is not the case. In
many of the PROBE villages, private schools are a Xourishing business . . . English-medium instruction is a
big selling point of private schools. Among the 41 private schools surveyed, 17 were ‘English-medium’
schools . . . ’ (pp. 102, 104). The PROBE survey covered 234 villages in the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh,
Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Himachal Pradesh; the Wrst four are among the poorest in India, and
considered the Hindi heartland.
25
With the surge in English-medium education, however, not all private schools are of the same
quality, and there are signiWcant diVerences in the quality of instruction and infrastructure, see George
(1982), Panikkar (1998), Bellarmine (1999).
 India 79

3.7 Societal Multilingualism

The pervasive multilingualism of India, and the potential irrelevance of simple
categories such as ‘mother tongue’, have been pointed out many times and by
many people. U. R. Ananthamurty (2000: 38) makes the interesting observation that
‘in India, the more literate one is, the fewer languages one knows’. The common
people take multilingualism for granted.
The 1991 census of India provides some Wgures about societal multilingualism
(Vijayanunni 1999).26 The overall picture is of growth: the national average for
bilingualism has steadily climbed from 9.7 per cent (1961) through 13.04 per cent
(1971) and 13.34 per cent (1981), to 19.44 per cent in 1991. An interesting observation
is that there are signiWcant diVerences between language groups within India with
respect to ‘their willingness or compulsion to learn other languages and the extent of
interaction with other communities through language’ (Vijayanunni 1999). Three out
of four Konkani speakers, two out of three Sindhi speakers, and one out of three
Nepali, Urdu, or Punjabi speakers are bilingual. These language groups have a
proportion of bilinguals well above the national average. At the other end of the
spectrum, Hindi, Bengali, and Oriya are the only three languages with bilingual
percentages below the all-India Wgure. Among the four main south Indian languages,
more speakers of Malayalam are bilingual than those of Kannada, Telugu, or Tamil, in
that order.
Some reasons for this variation are quite apparent. Languages like Konkani and
Sindhi are numerically small (recall that Konkani has only recently been granted
‘scheduled’ status); their speakers are minorities distributed across states with other
scheduled languages as oYcial languages (cf. Khubchandani 1994: 13V. for numerical
and geographic details). Such languages, although they are scheduled languages, in
essence share the predicament of the unscheduled ones: their speakers Wnd that they
have to be bilingual to survive and compete economically (usually in the regional
language which is the language of their outgroup). SigniWcantly, Konkanis and Sindhis
also turn out to be the most trilingual populations. Societies that can learn two
languages can also learn more than two languages, it would seem. Correspondingly,
‘big’ languages such as Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali are below the national average for
trilingualism (7.26 per cent); here recall that Hindi and Bengali are also below the
average for bilingualism, and that Tamil has the fewest bilinguals among the four
major south Indian languages. Among the larger language groups there is clearly less
pressure to know other languages, as in many parts of the world.
Turning to the question of what Indian bilinguals are bilingual in, some language
groups show a pattern of bilingualism which is in conformity with what is envisaged

26
But see also Khubchandani (1994), who discusses the limitations as well as the importance of census
data.
80 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

for non-Hindi-speakers by the three-language formula: Wrst, bilinguality in Hindi; and

second, trilinguality in English. This is conWrmed for Sindhi (and Marathi and
Gujarati): two thirds of Sindhi bilinguals claim Hindi as the second language;
about a Wfth claim English as a third language. This pattern is, however, reversed in
southern India. Malayalam has 28.85 per cent bilinguals and three out of four bilingual
Malayalis claim English as their second language. Tamil has a lower proportion of
bilinguals (18.74 per cent), but again many are English bilinguals – two out of every
three.
Interestingly, the low presence of Hindi in southern bilingualism cannot be attrib-
uted to lack of geographical proximity alone: Vijayanunni (1999) points out that more
Malayalis know Hindi than do Oriyas, although Hindi is a geographically neighbour-
ing language for Oriyas, and the total populations of Oriyas and Malayalis are
comparable. A possible inference is that more speakers of Malayalam who are
distributed outside their own state feel the need for Hindi as a link language. Overall,
English is clearly ahead of Hindi in the bilingual scenario in India. Hindi is returned as
a second or third language by 70 million of the 807 million speakers of scheduled
languages (which works out to 8.67 per cent). English is returned by 90 million
people, or 11.15 per cent of the speakers of scheduled languages; 8 per cent report
it as a second, and 3.15 per cent as a third language. This continues a trend noted by
Khubchandani (1994: 19) of the consolidation of English during the decade 1961–71,
when English bilinguals increased from 26 to 35 per cent of the bilingual population;
Hindi-Urdu gained only 1 per cent in the same period. The current Wgure stands at
57.3 per cent English bilinguals as a percentage of all bilinguals.

3.8 Conclusions
India now seems to have settled down to a stabilized pattern of long-term oYcial
bilingualism, with the central government functioning in Hindi and English, and the
state governments using the majority language of the state and English. From a
situation at independence when a one (oYcial) language, Hindi-only policy was
pursued by the government, India has developed into a nation which is represented
by many languages. Nehru’s assurance that all scheduled languages were national
languages27 was the beginning of an accommodative, multilingual policy. The Eighth
Schedule, which originally listed only languages of the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian
families with a literary history and large speaker bases, now accommodates a lan-
guage of the Tibeto-Burman family, as well as two tribal languages. If we now brieXy
look back at India in the post-independence period and today, several aspects of the
interplay of language and identity can be usefully highlighted as important and
interesting for comparison with other countries.

27
See Kumaramangalam (1965: 54) and Mallikarjun (1995: 61).
 India 81

When India Wrst attained independence in 1947, it was faced with the task of how to
govern and integrate an ethnically and linguistically very mixed population (currently
the second largest population in any country in the world, following China) in a new,
democratic state free of the controls of colonial rule. SigniWcantly, although India had
existed as a nation in the cultural imagination of its people, it had not been a single
political entity before 1947. Inspired by the example of other populations building
nationhood, the country’s leadership saw the spread of a shared, oYcial language as
one plausible way to attempt to connect up the population, and so set about the
promotion of Hindi as a new link language for the nation. However, very quickly such
a strategy showed itself to be both unpopular and potentially dangerous, with
particularly strong resistance to the perceived imposition of a northern Hindi identity
coming from the Dravidian South of the country. The government therefore modiWed
its national language policy to allow for the use of English as an identity-neutral
oYcial language in government aVairs alongside Hindi. Though such a move might
be seen as the abandonment of the goal of establishing a new over-arching linguistic
identity for India built on an Indian language, more positively it can be recognized as
the realistic assessment that a single-language solution was, and arguably still is, not
appropriate for India, given the ethno-linguistic diversity of the country and the well-
established existence of many diVerent, large language groups.
It should be pointed out that in fact the makers of the Indian constitution had
already made some space for linguistic plurality at a diVerent level, when it allowed
each state the possibility of selecting its own oYcial language for administration and
education rather than attempting to impose Hindi or English throughout the country.
The government therefore facilitated the maintenance and growth of diVerent re-
gional linguistic identities within the new nation through its allowance of a range of
state languages, and even assisted further in such a process with the linguistic
reorganization of states into more coherent linguistic entities between 1956 and
1966. Finally, so as to promote some kind of trans-regional, national identity and
integration without suppressing local identities, the decision was taken to adopt the
three-language formula in education and encourage the learning of two other, major
non-local languages in addition to the dominant state language. Though the initially
anticipated goals of the three-language formula have not always been fully realized
(e.g. those in the north have often not come to learn a language from the south), the
spirit of the three-language formula continues to signal a government-supported
openness to multilingualism and healthy acceptance of the linguistic diversity of the
country.
Quite generally, then, it can be said that India presents a largely positive lesson in
the management of language-related identity issues in the context of a massive, multi-
ethnic population and a wide range of religious and social variation. Though it has not
been possible to forge any strong national identity based on a single language alone,
by and large the country has been able to escape from major, extended language-
related problems due to a willingness to adapt and recognize the considerable
82 R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

variation that exists in its population, and much tolerance is shown towards language
groups of all sizes. Pluralism and the measured balancing of diverse interests in
linguistic matters have therefore helped India grow as one country over the past
half-century, and are likely to continue to be necessary for its future development as it
confronts new challenges of modernization in the twenty-Wrst century, as a nation of
many languages.
Thinking about this future, we now close the chapter with a short spotlight on
certain ongoing trends in Hindi, English, and the major regional Indian languages,
which may well turn out to be relevant for the development of language in India over
the coming decade. Considering Hindi Wrst, on the ground, Hindi bilingualism is now
clearly growing, even in the south, though at a slower pace than English bilingualism.
This current growth of the language appears to be largely due to the popularity of
Hindi Wlm and television, and the Hindi that is becoming popular is not the Sanskri-
tized Hindi of the government, but the language spoken in the streets of various
Hindi-speaking regions.28 In advertisements and talk shows on the TV, there is
pervasive code-switching between Hindi and English, and the Hindi on advertisement
hoardings is often written in Roman script, even in Delhi. This may well suggest a
future, greater spread of Hindi around the country in a way that was not achievable by
explicit government policy following independence. Meanwhile, the pressures of
globalization have given a strong impetus to English, even in the so-called Hindi
heartland, opposition to English is receding. Yet a persistent concern in the shaping of
the nation is the possible alienation of members of the English-educated elite from the
Indian languages and their speakers. Whereas in colonial India, English was used self-
consciously as a second language by leaders and intellectuals who considered their
own languages their main communicational instrument, it is now feared that the
‘post-independence national elites . . . have become distant from the regional lan-
guages and cultures, with English having become virtually their Wrst language’
(Sheth 1995: 200), raising the possibility of a socio-political schism between a ‘national
elite’ and ‘regional elites’ being reinforced by a language divide. Last of all, it can be
noted that a general trend to some extent observable since independence but becom-
ing clearly more visible now is the increasing prominence of the major regional
languages of India in certain domains of everyday life.29 Domestically, as private TV
channels come to occupy more of the media space, this has provided a new impetus to
the use of the regional languages, and audiences are now regularly wooed with
programmes made in or dubbed into these languages.30 Internationally, the major
28
See Ghosh (2001) for a brief discussion of how the language of the Hindi Wlm mirrors the variety and
range of spoken Hindi.
29
As yet, not extending far into the domains of higher education and public administration.
30
Concerning cinema, the south Indian languages – especially Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam – also
have Xourishing Wlm industries, and their stars have their own signiWcant fan following. Two such stars –
M. G. Ramachandran (MGR) of Tamil Wlms, and N. T. Ramarao (NTR) of Telugu Wlms – turned their
popularity into political capital, set up their own parties, and actually became chief ministers of their
states.
 India 83

regional Indian languages are asserting a wider presence by the facilitation of con-
nections among speakers of the Indian diaspora. In addition to the large Indian
diaspora formed during the post-independence era in the UK and USA, more recently
there has been signiWcant settlement in the Persian Gulf, and earlier during the
colonial era, populations of Gujarati speakers were created in South Africa, Hindi
speakers in Fiji and Mauritius, and Tamil speakers in Indonesia and Singapore. With
the ease and sophistication of modern communication, the sharing of language and
media products among these communities is resulting in a higher visibility and
perceived prestige value of the languages, and a strengthening of language loyalty
and associated identity. With all this activity, the next decade in India is likely to see an
interesting competition for linguistic space occurring among the above linguistic
forces if they all continue to grow in vitality as at present – not only global,
international English, and a more popular, expanding, colloquial Hindi, but also the
major regional languages, potentially rising as the preferred codes of a more conWdent
and increasingly aZuent population of middle class consumers, as India’s economy
continues to develop strongly.
 4
Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas
Rhoderick Chalmers

4.1 Introduction
Questions of language and national identity have coloured the history of Nepal and the
eastern Himalayan region for decades. But since the 1980s they have emerged
at the forefront of political movements – sometimes violent – which have underscored
the ethnic, religious, and social fault lines of the area. The relationship between
language and identity is complex even at the level of smaller ethnic groups; when
combined with the questions of nation and nationalism it has proved fraught with
danger. In the mid-1980s Darjeeling’s separatist Gorkhaland movement played on
language as the unifying strand of Indian Nepali society while insisting on a clear
separation from the state of Nepal. Nepali Wnally gained recognition as a national
language of India in 1992, the culmination of almost a century of campaigning. By this
time Nepal’s own ‘people’s movement’ had brought an end to the monarchist
Panchayat regime, opening a Pandora’s box of ethnic and linguistic claims. The
collapse of the central autocratic system brought with it a loss of faith in the simple
‘one language, one country’ nationalism that had been promoted for decades. Ethnic
grievances and spurned calls for linguistic rights have since been seized on by Maoist
insurgents as further aids to recruitment in an intensifying war. In Bhutan, mean-
while, the 1980s saw the Dzongkha language deployed as one element of a rigid state
nationalism. By the start of the 1990s the teaching of Nepali had been banned and
much of Bhutan’s Nepali-speaking population displaced to refugee camps.
This chapter provides an overview of issues of language and national identity in
these regions. Following a brief introduction to the languages of the area it examines
the history of language and politics in Nepal, Darjeeling, Sikkim, and Bhutan
and the various ways in which language has become entwined with national identities.
At the outset it is important to note that we should hesitate before using terms such as
‘nation’ and ‘national’ unthinkingly. These are neither universals nor do they neces-
sarily have exact equivalents in languages other than English. In Nepali, for example,
a sense of shared identity would be ascribed to a jati, a term which can stretch from
a single ethnic group to the entire human race, encompassing regional or national
 Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas 85

identities in between. Nor do nation-states have a long pedigree in the region as a form
of polity. ‘National’ groups are neither homogeneous nor do they tend to be contained
neatly within the boundaries of a single state. Indeed, this is a region of multiple
identities: within Nepal there are Hindu Nepalis, Buddhist Nepalis, plains Nepalis,
Nepalis of any number of distinct ethnic groups; beyond the boundaries of Nepal
itself we Wnd Sikkimese Nepalis, Indian Nepalis, Assamese Nepalis, Bhutanese Nepalis,
and so on. This chapter aims to unravel some of these complexities and highlight the
key issues and current trends that underlie the increasingly sensitive debates around
language and identity that are taking place throughout the region. Most space is
devoted to discussion of Nepal, whose population is many times greater than that of
Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan combined.

4.2 The Area

The Himalayan region has a turbulent history. For centuries it was an area of
Xuctuating political control, with petty principalities struggling to extend their
inXuence while sandwiched between the great powers of north India and China. It
was only following the late eighteenth-century uniWcation of Nepal and its bruising

C H I N A

(TIBET)

SIKKIM

Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas

86 R. Chalmers

war with the British East India Company in 1814–16 that states were contained
within strict boundaries. Before its military clash with the British, the small state of
Gorkha had in the space of a few decades politically united a swathe of territory
along the Himalayas from the river Sutlej in the west to the Tista in the east.
The 1816 settlement saw Nepal’s territory reduced and its borders demarcated. It
was contained within the Mahakali to the Mechi rivers, a stretch of some 885 km,
and it occupies much the same territory today. Geographically the country can be
divided into three bands: the high mountains that form its northern frontier, the
central hills, and the southern plains (Tarai) that stretch along its open border with
India.
Immediately to the east lie Sikkim and Darjeeling. Sikkim, a small state bordering
Tibet which British India treated as a protectorate, acceded to the Indian Union in
1975. Darjeeling and its immediate area had been gifted to the British by Sikkim in
1835; this area was extended in 1865 by the incorporation of Bhutanese territory
annexed by the British after a punitive campaign. Despite separatist struggles, Darjee-
ling remains a district of the Indian state of West Bengal. Bhutan lies to the east of
Darjeeling and Sikkim and remains a sovereign state, albeit highly dependent on India
and obliged by treaty to manage its foreign aVairs in collaboration with New Delhi.
Although much smaller in area, Bhutan’s geography is similar to that of Nepal, also
encompassing high mountains, hills and some low-lying plains on the border with
India. Despite limited recent moves towards democratization Bhutan remains a
hereditary monarchy, the current king Jigme Singye Wangchuck being the fourth
member of a dynasty established in 1907.
Nepal is not only the largest of the areas under discussion but by far the most
populous. According to the 2001 census its population had reached some 24 million
and population growth remains high. Indian census Wgures of the same year indicate
that Sikkim’s population had only just crossed the half-million mark while Darjeeling
district as a whole counted some 1.6 million inhabitants. The enumeration of Bhutan’s
citizens is not so simple. The topic itself is politically sensitive and in the absence of
recent census statistics best estimates indicate a total of between 600,000 and 1 million
(see section 4.7). The population of all of these areas is very diverse and this is reXected
in the remarkably high linguistic diversity outlined in the following section. The
people of the Himalayan region encompass Hindus and Buddhists, animists and
Muslims, highland pastoralists and lowland agriculturalists. Despite one signiWcant
division between speakers of Indo-Aryan languages (generally caste Hindus) and
Tibeto-Burman languages (generally distinct upland ethnic groups with shamanist
or Buddhist traditions), the relationship between the diVerent caste, ethnic, linguistic,
and national groups of the Himalaya is far too complex to admit simple categoriza-
tion. Historical patterns of language and religious shift have been compounded by
migration and intermarriage to produce a much more mixed population than census
statistics imply.
 Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas 87

4.3 The Languages

Linguistic diversity is one of the most striking features of Nepal and the eastern
Himalayan region. This area lies at the meeting point of two great language families,
the Indo-European and Tibeto-Burman, as well as including small communities of
speakers of Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic languages. While the larger languages are
well established and deWned, with several enjoying long literary traditions and others
in the process of standardization, there are dozens of smaller languages that have
yet to be well described and documented. Many of these are endangered and some
have become extinct in the recent past. Given the diYculty of separating languages
and dialects (categories which admit to no absolute deWnition) it is understandable
that estimates of the total number of distinct languages spoken in the region vary
considerably. Within Nepal, however, where the tradition of descriptive linguistics
now stretches back well over four decades, most experts agree on a Wgure of
somewhat over one hundred languages. Among these, Indo-Aryan languages claim
the most speakers but the Tibeto-Burman group includes a far larger number of
distinct languages.
The dominant language in the region as a whole is Nepali, the national language of
Nepal and mother tongue of around half of its population. In both Sikkim and the hill
areas of Darjeeling, Nepali has long been the prime lingua franca, and also functions
as an oYcial language. Bhutan is home to a range of Tibeto-Burman varieties, some of
them very close to standard Tibetan, and the last two decades have witnessed a
determined government campaign to strengthen Dzongkha as the oYcial language.
It is worth noting that there are areal features shared across language families and the
great religious traditions, especially as expressed in Sanskrit and Tibetan, that have
had an impact on vocabulary and other features of language use. Across this region,
English also plays an increasingly important role as a second language and educational
medium.1

4.4 Language Shift, Migration, and the Roots

of Language Politics
Nepal and the eastern Himalayan region have been shaped by signiWcant language
and population shifts. A long-established pattern of eastward migration – primarily
for economic reasons – has been accompanied by the displacement of minority
languages. In general the shift has been to Nepali, and this shift is most pronounced
in the erstwhile migrant populations which now dominate Sikkim and Darjeeling.
In Bhutan, the presence of large numbers of Nepali speakers has, however, been one
of the main reasons behind moves to strengthen Dzongkha as the national language.

1
For good surveys of language in Nepal and the Himalayas, see the following: van Driem (2001), Hutt
(1988), Kansakar and Turin (2003).
88 R. Chalmers

The spread of the Nepali language – in limited functions as an oYcial language but
more signiWcantly as a lingua franca – has been a continuing trend since at least the
eighteenth century, and from before the uniWcation of Nepal. External factors such as
the large-scale recruitment of ethnically diverse Nepalis into the British Indian Army
provided added impetus to the adoption of a shared language. By the late nineteenth
century a vibrant Nepali publishing industry had been established in Banaras and as
the twentieth century progressed formal education within India and Nepal greatly
increased the use of the language. Under the autocratic Panchayat regime (1960–90)
the promotion of the Nepali language became an integral part of the uniform national
culture which the state sought to impose on its subjects, epitomized by the slogan
‘one country, one dress, one language’.
Yet Nepal was characterized by nationism rather than nationalism: it was the state
that was in search of a nation rather than vice versa. As several recent historians have
noted, the conquests of King Prithvinarayan Shah of Gorkha in the late eighteenth
century uniWed the country politically but not socially or culturally. This is not to say
that Nepalis did not share identities wider than the purely local: ties of religion,
region, or ethnic community were all present to diVering extents across the geo-
graphical territory of the country. But even the early rulers of the united kingdom did
not think in ‘national’ terms and their diverse subjects probably did not enjoy any
broad sense of cultural community that could be labelled as incipient national
sentiment.2
In retrospect, then, the eruption of ethnic politics and linguistic movements follow-
ing the introduction of multi-party democracy to Nepal in 1990 is hardly surprising.
In the process of reassessing the foundations of the state, language has come to occupy
a central, if often symbolic, position. The struggle for minority linguistic rights has
become emblematic of a wider intellectual and political eVort to redeWne Nepal as a
culturally pluralistic state. For the ethnic associations which mushroomed in the
immediate aftermath of the democracy movement recognition of linguistic diversity
has become a totemic issue. Although many members of Nepal’s ethnic groups have
adopted Nepali as their primary language, demands for mother tongue teaching and
the use of minority languages in oYcial contexts have formed a central plank of ethnic
politics.
Ironically, it was only beyond Nepal’s borders that a proto-nationalist consciousness
developed around the shared use of Nepali. Waves of emigrants had populated
Darjeeling (in British India), established themselves as the majority group in the
protectorate of Sikkim, settled in large numbers in the south of Bhutan and built up
sizeable communities in the western Himalayas, northeast India, and urban centres
such as Banaras and Calcutta. These communities – especially the hundreds of
thousands of Nepalis who made Darjeeling their home – were ethnically mixed and
initially included many non-Nepali speakers. Yet the Nepali language rapidly eclipsed

2
For a history of nationalism in Nepal, see Onta (1996), and also Burghart (1984).
 Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas 89

other mother tongues and formed the base of a composite culture Xexible enough to
include people of divergent linguistic, religious, and ethnic origins yet resilient enough
to retain its own distinctiveness. Nepalis in India struggled for decades to have their
adopted language recognized at regional and national levels. In Bhutan, on the other
hand, language issues have contributed to a bitter divide over national identity as state
eVorts to impose an oYcial culture of Dzongkha language and national dress have led
to the marginalization and stigmatization of many communities, especially Bhutanese
Nepalis.

4.5 Nepal: from Pre-Nationalism to Post-Nationalism?

In Nepal today, language Wnds itself at the heart of a battle for the soul of the state.
After centuries of rule by a small and exclusive elite, the post-1990 democratic period
has brought to the fore calls for a more inclusive national culture. The supporters of a
pluralistic conception of national identity have had to confront a legacy of top-down,
prescriptive state nationalism. In doing so they have often characterized the Nepali
language as symbolic of state oppression, pointing to its widespread adoption as the
outcome of a deliberate policy of cultural domination. In place of its erstwhile
position as one of the oYcial symbols of national unity, ethnic activists have been
successful in associating Nepali with high-caste Hindu hegemony. Their revisionist
reading of history holds that Nepal’s uniWcation was actually a process of conquest
and subjugation of independent indigenous minorities.

4.5.1 Nepali as National Language

The question of how Nepali gained its supremacy as a national language is politically
charged. Proponents of Panchayat-style nationalism argued that its pre-eminence was
both natural and essential if Nepal wished to retain its sovereignty and national pride.
Opponents of this viewpoint hold that successive regimes have knowingly promoted
Nepali in an eVort to undermine diversity. Both of these positions, however, require
critical attention. The rise to prominence of Nepali was neither wholly accidental
nor wholly planned, and it was also propelled by factors beyond the control of Nepal’s
leaders.
The state that was created by Prithvinarayan Shah’s expansionist campaign was
deWned more by strategic goals and military culture than by any sense of inherent or
incipient nationhood. Prithvinarayan’s personal ambitions were in harmony with the
wider logic of creating a uniWed territory large enough to resist incorporation into
the ever-expanding domains of the East India Company. Certainly suspicions of the
British fuelled further conquests after Prithvinarayan’s death in 1775. But the military
campaigns generated their own momentum, not least because the payment to oYcers
was in the form of land grants, which added an extra economic imperative to territorial
expansion. The Shahs’ campaigns and administration did not, however, reXect deep
90 R. Chalmers

concerns about language or culture. Their language was used as the de facto means of
communication and administration but was accorded no special symbolic value.
In 1846 there was a dramatic shift of power as the dynamic young oYcer Jang
Bahadur seized the prime ministership and instituted a century of rule by his family.
The Shah monarchy was relegated to a titular role while real power lay with
the hereditary Rana prime ministers. Jang Bahadur redeWned the concept of the
state with his introduction of an overarching legal code (the Muluki Ain, 1854).
Here the Hinduization of Nepal was formalized with the ranking of all ethnic
groups – whatever their actual religious practices – within a unitary Hindu caste
hierarchy. Yet the Nepali language was still accorded no particular position and its
usage was based on custom rather than any oYcial status as a national language.
Administrative structures throughout the Rana period were minimal and the primary
aims of the Rana rulers were extractive: they were far more interested in personally
appropriating all economic surplus than in imposing any particular linguistic and
cultural vision of national identity.
In fact, when support for the Nepali language Wrst started to be linked to a wider
social consciousness it was viewed as a threat by the Ranas. The pioneering Nepali
language activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were inspired
by emerging nationalist sentiment in India. Their view of language development
was modernizing, linked to education and publishing, and as such a challenge to
the ossiWed Rana regime which sought to ensure that its population remained
illiterate and ignorant. While most Nepali language activities took place outside
Nepal (see section 4.6) their eVect was eventually impossible to ignore in Kathmandu.
The government agreed to the establishment of a language council in 1914 and started
to publish a limited number of textbooks. But the language was still described as
‘Gorkha’ and the progressive eVorts led by an emerging, formally educated middle
class continued to meet with stiV state resistance. In 1930 the Gorkha Language
Publishing Committee Wnally changed its name to Nepali, marking a small step
towards a more formal linkage between language and state.
Indian independence in 1947 presaged the end of the British-backed Rana regime
and it Wnally surrendered full power in 1951. A new democratic era was promised and
initial signs were that linguistic pluralism might prevail. Radio Nepal was founded in
1951 and from the outset it broadcast news in Newar (the Tibeto-Burman language of
the Kathmandu area) and Hindi (the national language of India and lingua franca of
the Tarai) as well as Nepali. But the promised elections were delayed time and time
again and a more centralist vision of the state took root. In 1956 the National
Education Planning Commission recommended the nationwide imposition of Nepali
medium instruction in an attempt to displace other languages, and the 1959 Consti-
tution enshrined Nepali as the sole oYcial language.3 Hints at democratic pluralism
survived – in the parliament elected in 1959 the Nepali Congress government

3
Article 70 reads ‘The national language of Nepal shall be Nepali in the Devanagari script.’
 Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas 91

supported the use of Hindi alongside Nepali – but the democratic experiment as a
whole was to be short-lived. In December 1960 King Mahendra dissolved parliament,
arrested political leaders, and instituted three decades of royal rule. During this period
a state-sanctioned oYcial nationalism took shape and was forcefully propagated
through all means at the state’s disposal, in particular the expanding school system,
state radio, and print media. This brought clear economic incentives for adopting
Nepali – for example, access to government employment – and added a coercive edge
to the existing patterns of Nepali lingua franca usage. Census statistics show a
consistent fall in the speakers of other languages as the shift to Nepali gained pace.

4.5.2 Putting the Case for Other Languages

The idea that a single language should dominate all others across the state had no
historical precedent in the region and prompted concerted opposition from an early
stage. The medieval Newar kings of the Kathmandu valley had happily turned to
Sanskrit and Maithili for literary and oYcial purposes; later they used Nepali in
inscriptions well before the Gorkha conquests stripped them of their kingdoms.
The Shah kings had also adopted Farsi as the language of regional diplomacy and
Farsi terminology still infuses legal and governmental Nepali registers to this day. In
general, attitudes towards language use were pragmatic and determined by circum-
stance. But by the end of the Rana regime educated speakers of languages other than
Nepali were aware that their mother tongues were slipping into second class status.4
The new freedom of the 1950s enabled other language communities to organize and
put language rights on the political agenda.
Immediately on the fall of the Rana regime, regional and ethnic tensions within
Nepal began to be vented. The Nepali Congress, the largest party, was faced with a
rebellion by its ethnic Limbu and Rai leaders in eastern districts, while the Tarai
Congress formed in 1951 focused the separatist sentiments of the more India-oriented
plains people.5 From the outset the Tarai Congress called for recognition of Hindi
as a state language. By 1954 Newar language teaching had been instituted and
1956 saw the foundation of a number of ethnic and caste movements, including the
umbrella Backward Classes Organization and a Magar ethnic association.6 However,
the National Education Planning Commission’s recommendations were quickly
implemented, with Nepali imposed in all secondary schools from 1956 and in primary

4
In some cases there had been deliberate repression, notably of Newar in the early twentieth century.
Again this was linked to wider political fears: the growth of reformist Theravada Buddhism among
Newars was seen as a potentially serious threat to the Rana regime. Publishing in Newar was banned until
1946.
5
One of B. P. Koirala’s most diYcult tasks as home minister in the Wrst post-Rana government was to
reassert control of the east of the country where the Congress Mukti Sena commander Bal Bahadur
Chemjong had led a rebel movement which declared an independent state (Koirala 2001: 143–4).
6
This included the Gurung Kalyan Sangha, Tharu Kalyankari Sabha, Kirat League, and Dalit Sangha.
92 R. Chalmers

schools from 1957. This language policy became embroiled in widespread controversy.
In January 1957 the Pallo Kirat Limbuwan Representative Group of east Nepal
submitted a petition to the government including demands for Limbu radio broadcasts
and a proposal for a school in which Limbu would be taught alongside Nepali.
By September of that year a Nepali Promotion Congress had been formed to counter
pro-Hindi activism and violent street clashes were reported.7 The Tarai Congress’s
‘Save Hindi’ campaign received support from the leaders of mainstream parties
including the Nepali Congress, Communist Party of Nepal, United Democratic
Party, and Praja Parishad. Meanwhile in the capital the Patan District Committee of
the Nepal National Students’ Federation was demanding that Newar be used in local
schools.
The government found itself on the back foot, surprised by the intensity of feeling
against a monolingual nationalism. In January 1958 a new government directive
reversed the requirement for the immediate introduction of Nepali in all primary
schools. In the general elections of February 1959 the Tarai Congress failed to garner
support, with every one of its candidates losing their deposit in the Wrst-past-the-post
system. Once King Mahendra had seized full power he introduced a series of
measures to reverse the small gains made by language activists in the 1950s. In 1961
a new National Education Commission recommended that Nepali be the medium
of instruction for all grades, a measure promptly enforced by the 1962 Education
Act. In this year the new national constitution, establishing the Panchayat system of
government, reaYrmed Nepali’s status as sole state language and required that
applicants for citizenship by naturalization be able to write and speak Nepali. Further
measures followed. The 1964 Nepal Company Act required all companies to keep
records in either Nepali or English and the following year the government decreed
that all signboards in the country must be in Nepali. Radio Nepal’s ten-minute news
broadcasts in Newar and Hindi were also terminated, prompting some protests from
Newar organizations.
The success of the Panchayat’s repressive measures convinced many that its
ideology had won full acceptance and that ethnic, regional, or linguistic movements
would not rise again. But the Panchayat system itself was not secure. Although
political parties were banned they continued to organize underground and rally
opposition to the regime. By the end of the 1970s, student protests forced the
government to announce a referendum on the system of government. At this
juncture the Nepal Bhasa Mankah Khalah, a signiWcant Newar language organization
that is still active, was founded. Language had not disappeared from the political
agenda and nor had the Panchayat vision of uniform national identity won the day.
While the government scraped a victory in the referendum, the 1980s witnessed

7
On 19 November 1957 Save Hindi Committee and Nepali Pracharini Sabha demonstrations clashed in
Biratnagar leaving at least 25 injured. For a description of key events in the Hindi campaign see Gaige
(1975).
 Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas 93

a steady rise in organization along ethnic lines with the birth of associations such as
the Forum for the Rights of All Nationalities and the Oppressed People’s Upliftment
Forum. On the eve of the return of democracy the Nepal Bhasa Mankah Khalah held
its convention in Kathmandu (28–29 July 1989). It approved a ten-point resolution
demanding, inter alia, equal constitutional status for minority languages, rights to
mother tongue education, and representation of all languages in the media. The
stage was set for an upsurge of ethnic and language issues at the heart of national
political debate.8

4.5.3 After 1990: Ethnopolitics and Language Activism

The fall of the Panchayat system opened the political Xoodgates. Apart from the
triumphant return of the major parties, dozens of smaller parties and campaigning
groups were formed. These included many ethnic organizations, almost all of which
made language a central symbolic issue among their demands. The Nepal National
People’s Liberation Front, representing hill ethnic groups, was the Wrst political party
founded after the success of the ‘people’s movement’ and it was followed by the
inXuential Nepal Federation of Nationalities (NEFEN), which remains the undisputed
umbrella group for ethnic associations. Some groups were more extreme (such as
Khagendra Jang Gurung’s National Janajati Party and Hit Bahadur Thapa Magar’s
Magarant Liberation Front), while there was a mushrooming of cultural and literary
organizations (such as the Council for Tharu Literature) that were not expressly
political but which nevertheless mobilized linguistic groups in the public sphere. The
new 1990 constitution made notable concessions to a pluralist view of the state,
describing Nepal as multi-ethnic and multilingual. It also declared that while Nepali
was to remain as the state language (rastrabhasa) other languages would enjoy the
status of ‘national languages’ (rastriya bhasa).
The new constitution did, however, ban ethnically based political parties. The Mongol
National Organization and the National Janajati Party were refused registration by the
Election Commission and the Limbuwan Liberation Front opted to boycott the 1991
general election. Nevertheless, some parties slipped through the net and Welded candi-
dates on an ethnic or regional platform. Gore Bahadur Khapangi’s Nepal National
People’s Liberation Front put up Wfty candidates but won no seats; the Tarai-based
Nepal Sadbhavana Party (the ideological successor to the Tarai Congress of the 1950s)
won six seats. The Nepali Congress, which emerged the clear winner, promised a
reformist agenda which would address some of the demands of language and ethnic
groups. However the Congress’s actual record during its three years in oYce set the
pattern for a failure by successive elected governments to deal with the fundamental
questions raised by language activism.

8
See Sonntag (1995).
94 R. Chalmers

The principal demands of language activists can be grouped into six main categor-
ies: (i) at a symbolic level, recognition of the equality of all languages; (ii) mother
tongue teaching in schools and other state educational support for language study and
research; (iii) some usage of languages other than Nepali in government, either at
local levels or as alternative national languages; (iv) employment opportunities in
government not to be dependent on Nepali language competence; (v) radio broad-
casts and other media development in minority languages; (vi) more accurate census
reporting and professional surveys of language usage.
The 1991–4 Congress government realised that calls for linguistic rights could not
be ignored entirely. With the start of the UN’s Decade of Indigenous People approach-
ing in 1993, ethnic politics was challenging traditional views of the state. January 1993
saw the introduction of Maithili language broadcasts on Radio Nepal and in May a
National Languages Policy Recommendation Commission was set up, with a broad
mandate to investigate the role of Nepal’s many languages and recommend ways in
which the government could support their development. In 1994, as the Commission
published its report, a further nine languages were added to Radio Nepal broadcasts.
But members of the Commission were already worried that the government was not
genuinely interested in their work: they had received only a minimal budget and
administrative support and in the event the vast majority of their recommendations
were simply ignored. A few concrete steps did include the establishment of a
Department of Linguistics in the national university but topics such as mother tongue
teaching were only paid lip service. Meanwhile both major political parties were also
swayed by a high-caste Hindu conservative backlash. In 1993 the Congress govern-
ment made Sanskrit a compulsory subject in secondary schools; in 1995 its successor,
a communist minority administration, introduced Sanskrit news broadcasts.

4.5.4 Language and the Continuing Divisions over National Identity

The surge of post-1990 optimism that had fuelled language activism was turning into
frustration and anger. The spirit of the pluralist constitution and the promise held out
by democratic governance seemed to have been betrayed by the entrenched mono-
lingual and monocultural conservatism of governing circles. The change of regime
had not, after all, led to a change of mindset on national identity nor to a shake-up of
the ruling elite. In August 1997 the battle lines were drawn as Kathmandu’s city
council decided to introduce Newar as a parallel language of local government. In
November a Tarai front was opened with Dhanusha District Development Commit-
tee and Rajbiraj Municipality similarly deciding to use Maithili in local administration.
The government response was swift. Local administrations were warned that such
policies – even though they retained Nepali as the primary oYcial language – were
considered unlawful. The Supreme Court supported this line in an interim ruling and
in June 1999 handed down its Wnal verdict that the use of languages other than Nepali
in government oYces was unconstitutional and illegal.
 Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas 95

In most regards, the divisions between the two opposing sides on this issue have only
deepened in the following years. The Supreme Court ruling focused all ethnic activists
on language as a primary cause to campaign for and led to the formation of a Joint
Language Rights Action Committee. In March 2000 NEFEN brought together seventy-
Wve organizations in a National Conference on Linguistic Rights which adopted a
declaration whose major demands remain, unsurprisingly, unmet. Slow progress on
some technical fronts – for example, there has been more work on documenting
minority languages and producing mother-tongue teaching textbooks – cannot obscure
the fact that the wider debate over national identity is yet to reach a conclusion. In
practice, language activists appreciate that many of their demands are primarily sym-
bolic: Nepali cannot be replaced as a national language and it is indeed the main
medium for most ethnic discourse. The widespread adoption of Nepali has enabled a
uniWed national political life and, ironically, helped create the conditions that enable
challenges to its supremacy to be aired eVectively. But attitudes to language, and in
particular to linguistic pluralism, reXect core beliefs about the nation itself.
Multiparty democracy has been suspended since October 2002 and an intensifying
Maoist insurgency threatens the state. But even as questions of national identity
assume ever more signiWcance the chances of them being constructively debated
recede. For a brief period of three decades Nepal’s Panchayat presented the image
of a country united by a strong, shared nationalist sentiment symbolized by the sole
national language. The democracy movement has ushered in what could be termed a
post-nationalist era where certainties have given way to unresolved wrangling over
the true nature of Nepal as a state and, still potentially, as a nation.9

4.6 Darjeeling and Sikkim: Linguistic Unity and the Struggle

for Recognition
Darjeeling and Sikkim are, perhaps surprisingly, more Nepali-speaking than Nepal
itself. This is despite the fact that their large Nepal-origin populations came over-
whelmingly from non-Nepali-speaking backgrounds. The rapid shift to Nepali, and
subsequent campaigns for its oYcial recognition within India, illustrate the eVects of
political and economic factors on language and identity. More recently, moves to gain
special status for ethnic groups have demonstrated the instrumental incentives of
reservations rather than ethno-linguistic sentiment. It is only in Sikkim that minority
languages have been actively nurtured, oVering a model that language activists in
Nepal and Bhutan view with some envy.
When the British East India Company persuaded Sikkim to grant it Darjeeling as a
gift, the area’s population was minimal. However, it had been under Nepal’s control
between 1789 and 1815 and the Gorkha army had established forts in strategic
locations. In any case it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that
9
For further discussion, see Hoftun, Raeper and Whelpton (1999).
96 R. Chalmers

Darjeeling’s population exploded with the birth of the tea industry. This labour-
intensive business drew in tens of thousands of labourers, most of them from
Nepal. By the time of the Wrst census in 1872 the district had 94,712 inhabitants and
this Wgure went on to triple over the next Wve decades. The social, ethnic, and caste
composition of the majority Nepal-origin population diVered signiWcantly from that
of Nepal as a whole. Ancestral Nepali-speakers – primarily the high and low caste
Hindus of the hills – formed only one Wfth of the Nepali population as a whole.
Furthermore, the economic dominance of the higher castes was not replicated in the
migrant community and increasing educational opportunities from the late nine-
teenth century onwards gave countless members of minority ethnic groups a chance
to leapfrog their way into the ranks of a nascent middle class. It was primarily this
middle class that, as in many other language movements, drove eVorts to gain status
for Nepali.
The adoption of Nepali as a lingua franca among Nepalis of diverse origins was a
natural process given added momentum by the migrants’ sense of being a very small
minority in a very large country. The feelings of solidarity generated by shared
vulnerability were enhanced by the relatively Xat caste and class structure of the
early settlers’ communities. Most were unskilled economic migrants and most were
not traditionally Hindu, more willing to intermarry between groups and less rigid at
observing the caste diVerences enforced by law within Nepal. Still, there were vast
cultural diVerences between the Nepal-origin groups: some were predominantly
Buddhist, some shamanist, some had traditions of polygamy, some of polyandry. In
short, there was no way that the Nepali community as a whole could conform to a
unitary ethnic identity. But the role of the Nepali language, as the one tangible
cultural feature that all came to share, rapidly became a crucial symbol of the Nepalis’
distinct identity. Language rights were sought for their own sake and then became
a rallying point for wider political demands as Nepali-speakers developed a sophisti-
cated sense of a supra-ethnic, but sub-national, identity.
Campaigns for Nepali language recognition in India date from the start of the
twentieth century. By 1911 Nepali had been approved as a second language for
matriculation in the United Provinces by the University of Allahabad. In 1918 Calcutta
University granted it status as a vernacular for composition in matriculation, inter-
mediate, and BA examinations. Coupled with the targeting of higher education
institutions were eVorts to introduce Nepali as a medium of school education and
to develop the textbooks necessary for this. Gradually these eVorts saw success, and in
1935 Nepali was approved for teaching and examination in all primary schools in
Darjeeling district with a majority of Nepali students. In 1949 it became the medium
of instruction up to middle and high school level in the predominantly Nepali-
speaking areas of Darjeeling.
Beyond regional recognition, however, campaigners had long dreamed of winning
national status. But a major obstacle to this was the perception, voiced publicly by
Indian prime minister Morarji Desai in 1977, that Nepali was a foreign language and
 Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas 97

belonged solely to the state of Nepal. The fashioning of a distinct Indian Nepali
identity was thus not only an internal necessity but became an important element of
Indian Nepalis’ public image. Links between Nepalis in India and their ancestral
homeland had, despite geographical proximity, weakened signiWcantly soon after
the Wrst waves of migration. By the twentieth century most migration to Darjeeling
and Sikkim had come to a halt and their populations developed their own cultural and
social structures. But opinions were sharply divided on how best to pursue the quest
for recognition.
Darjeeling’s violent Gorkhaland movement for a separate state peaked between
1986 and 1988. The main grievances of the rebels were economic and administrative
but language played an important mobilizing role. Decades of eVort to secure oYcial/
national language status for Nepali within India had been continually rebuVed and the
Gorkhaland leaders were determined that no one in Delhi should doubt the patriot-
ism of Indian Nepalis. To eVect a clear symbolic separation between the neighbouring
states, India and Nepal, the ‘Nepali’ language in Nepal was, like its speakers, dubbed
‘Gorkha’. For this there was indeed historical precedent but the urgent motivation
was entirely contemporary – a means of demonstrating that India’s Nepalis had
separated all links with their country of origin and had no aYnity with its national
identity. The Gorkhaland movement ended in compromise, with the formation of a
Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council of limited powers and still within the state of West
Bengal. Meanwhile Darjeeling’s new rulers were set to clash with the rest of the
Indian Nepali community, whose campaign for national recognition of Nepali was
gaining a decisive momentum. The Chief Minister and member of parliament for
neighbouring Sikkim spearheaded the Wnal push, and in August 1992 Nepali was
added to the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution as one of eighteen oYcial
national languages (see also Amritavalli and Jayaseelan, this volume, chapter 3).
The dominance of the Nepali language in Darjeeling and Sikkim has not precluded
the retention of other identities. Indeed, Sikkim has led the way in seeking to preserve
and promote minority languages. In 1977 it declared its three oYcial state languages
to be Nepali, Bhutia, and Lepcha and to these were added Limbu (in 1981) and then
Newar, Rai, Gurung, Magar, Sherpa, and Tamang (in 1995). The teaching of Limbu
and Lepcha in Sikkimese schools has probably played an important role in their
revitalization, but the addition of the six further languages in 1995 was for pure
symbolic value. In Sikkim, as in Darjeeling, almost no Nepali-speakers retain any
knowledge of their ancestral mother tongues beyond a few words, often kinship
terms, which are used to supplement standard Nepali vocabulary. The major impetus
for asserting ethnic identity in India has been the system of state reservations which
entitles certain ‘backward’ groups to quotas in government jobs and other beneWts
such as educational scholarships. The scramble among Nepal-origin ethnic groups to
claim such status has led to a certain resurgence in ethnic identity and politics but has
threatened neither the position of Nepali nor the foundations of Indian Nepali
identity.
98 R. Chalmers

4.7 Bhutan: Language and the Ethnicization of

National Identity
In Bhutan, the government has attempted to invest Dzongkha with something of the
same status possessed by Nepali in Nepal, but this has encountered much greater
obstacles. The obstacles include the fact that Dzongkha remains a minority language
even within Bhutan, lacks a developed modern literature, and is identiWed by many
with culturally conservative and isolationist elements within the country. The ‘Dzong-
khaization’ drive, which is inextricably linked with Bhutan’s conception of itself as a
Buddhist kingdom possessing a unique and distinctive cultural identity, runs in
parallel with programmes and policies inspired by forward-looking pragmatism. As
a result, while the status of Bhutan’s other languages has been downgraded in favour
of the national language Dzongkha, since the 1960s the medium of all school
education in Bhutan has in fact been English. The question of Dzongkha’s position
and role in Bhutan has therefore become somewhat controversial, with ‘traditional-
ists’ and ‘modernizers’ lined up on either side of the argument.
Although the language of Bhutan’s rulers for centuries, Dzongkha was not oYcially
declared the country’s national language until 1961. At this stage most Bhutanese
education was actually being conducted in Hindi with the help of Indian teachers and
textbooks. Despite the nominal status accorded to Dzongkha, both Tshangla (in the
east) and Nepali (in the south) remained major rival lingua francas in Bhutan, while
English was chosen to replace Hindi in schools. The drive to develop Dzongkha dates
more from the 1980s, a period in which a series of government measures attempted to
impose a rigid, approved national identity on Bhutan’s diverse population. A highly
restrictive citizenship law enacted in 1985 was accompanied by orders to all citizens to
adopt traditional national dress and a national code of etiquette. In 1989 the teaching
of Nepali as a subject in Bhutanese schools was subsequently banned, and the
following years witnessed the departure of up to 90,000 ethnic Nepalis to refugee
camps in Nepal. Most refugees claim they were forcibly evicted from their homes in
Bhutan, while the Bhutanese government insists that the majority were not Bhutan-
ese citizens in the Wrst place and left voluntarily.10
In Bhutan language has thus played a decisive and divisive role in the attempt of the
state to dictate a national identity on its own terms. However, Bhutan’s continuing
linguistic diversity and the state’s own modernizing emphasis on English education
and economic development suggest that Dzongkha will actually not play as central a
role in the future development of national identity in the country as its proponents
currently envisage.

10
See Hutt (2003) for extensive discussion of the Xight of refugees from Bhutan and its connections to
nation-building.
 Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas 99

4.8 Conclusion
The diVerent conWgurations of language and national identity in the adjacent areas
covered by this chapter illustrate the signiWcance of political and economic factors as
much as linguistic trends. They also represent diVering approaches by the various states.
Nepal’s decades of oYcial nationalism have left a mixed legacy, with its strong mono-
cultural emphasis unable to stamp out linguistic diversity and now prompting a strong
backlash by minority groups. The Indian Himalayas, on the other hand, were not subject
to such a straightforward government language policy. As a result, the language-identity
conWgurations in Darjeeling and Sikkim reXect more closely their communities’ own
attempts to forge linguistic identities that protected aspects of their culture but also
ensured economic survival and educational opportunities. In Bhutan the state has recently
attempted to follow a line similar to Nepal’s earlier state nationalism but allied to an even
more strictly exclusive view of the nation and criteria for membership within it.
Our consideration of language issues here raises a fundamental question about
communities in the Himalayas: are national identities in this region truly viable or
plausible? In the case of Nepal and Bhutan the answer may be positive but the
relationship with language is far from central. For Nepal, many now argue that
national identity will be strengthened the more it is allowed to be Xexible and not
tied to a single linguistic or cultural model. In Bhutan, Dzongkha lacks the advantages
that Nepali had in terms of its long-standing use as a lingua franca, and whatever the
level of support the state provides for Dzongkha, its continued status as a minority
language within Bhutan and the monopoly of English as educational medium suggest
that it can only play a tangential, symbolic role in a national identity for the country.
In Darjeeling and Sikkim the question is one of of local, regional, and state identities
within a much larger federal country, India. Darjeeling’s separatists never sought
complete secession from India and Sikkim’s people are largely resigned to the fact that
their former status as an independent Himalayan kingdom is now a historical
curiosity. Here language has only ever formed one element of local identities which
have to struggle for their continued recognition in competition with some of the
world’s largest languages, such as Hindi and Bengali. Ironically, however, it is here that
the strongest linguistic solidarity has been built around shared use of Nepali.
The patterns of language use and identiWcation outlined in this chapter are subject
to constant, and increasingly rapid, shift. The ever expanding role of English, espe-
cially as an educational medium and the perceived language of status and economic
opportunity, will colour future developments. In this it will be aided to some extent by
the further spread of electronic media and other technological developments. But
activists working to revitalize endangered languages have also realised that these tools
can be turned to their advantage. Identities in this region have never been singular and
they are likely to remain complex in future. Even as trends of language shift hint at the
formation of larger, more unitary, national communities, linguistic diversity acts as a
rallying point for supporters of political and cultural pluralism.
 5
Pakistan
Christopher Shackle

5.1 Introduction
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a virtually unique case of a multilingual Asian
country whose frontiers were explicitly deWned by the religious identity of the
majority of its inhabitants. The partition of the British Indian empire in 1947 into
the separate countries of India and Pakistan was the result of a successful separatist
campaign to achieve an independent homeland for the Muslims of South Asia. Since
the Muslim majority areas of South Asia were not geographically contiguous, Pakistan
was initially created as a country of two separate halves (West and East Pakistan) on
either side of a hostile India. A mass exchange of populations between Pakistan and
India along religious lines further conWrmed the Muslim identity of Pakistan while
simultaneously changing previous patterns of linguistic identity. Following two in-
conclusive wars with India fought over the disputed territory of Kashmir in 1947–48
and 1965, Pakistan was itself divided in 1971, when a third war resulted in the former
East Pakistan becoming the independent country of Bangladesh. The focus of this
chapter is on present-day Pakistan, the former West Pakistan.

5.2 Pakistan and its Languages

Pakistan is home to some half dozen languages of serious signiWcance for the deWnition
of national and local identities. As in many other multilingual Asian countries,
however, understanding the contemporary map of languages on the ground requires
prior reference to cultural history as well as to linguistic geography. The linguistic
situation in Pakistan is a complex product of a variety of historical and cultural factors
which have helped to shape both patterns of language use and the conceptions of
ethnicity which are associated with these. These factors, indeed, help to explain why
such apparently straightforward and objective matters as linguistic mapping or the
enumeration of numbers of speakers of diVerent languages are themselves often highly
controversial exercises. Something of this necessary background is accordingly given as
 Pakistan 101

Pakistan

a necessary preliminary to the enumeration and description of the main languages

spoken in Pakistan.

5.2.1 Geography and History

The river Indus Xows down roughly north to south throughout the length of Pakistan.
It Wrst cuts through the Karakoram range in the sparsely populated mountainous
regions of the far north. Emerging from the foothills, its course is eventually augmen-
ted by its Wve great tributaries, called panj ab or ‘Wve waters’ in Persian, which give their
name to the gently descending and very fertile plains of the Punjab1 which constitute
the populous heart of Pakistan. South of the Punjab comes the lower Indus plain,
which is called Sindh after Sindh, the indigenous name of the Indus. To the west of the
Indus delta on the coast of the Arabian Sea lies Karachi, Pakistan’s major port and its
largest city.
The east of the country is marked by the long frontier with India, which runs north
through the great Indian desert, across the Punjab plains, where the international
1
English spellings of Pakistani place names vary unsystematically. The forms nowadays current in
Pakistani oYcial usage are employed here, thus ‘Punjab’ (with ‘u’ as in southern British English ‘up’)
versus the academic ‘Panjab’, but ‘Sindh’ and ‘Balochistan’ versus the older ‘Sind’ and ‘Baluchistan’.
102 C. Shackle

frontier runs close to the historic city of Lahore, up into the foothills and mountains
where the cease-Wre line which crosses the contested territory of Kashmir has yet to be
ratiWed. The western frontiers run through the historic borderlands separating the
subcontinent from the mountains and plateaus of western Asia. Below the Hindu
Kush range lie the barren hills of the North-West Frontier, pierced by the Khyber and
other strategic passes which lead down into the plains from Afghanistan. In the
southwestern corner lies the vast but largely barren territory of Balochistan, which
borders on both Afghanistan and Iran.
It is, however, the west–east axis which has dominated the history of the region.
Pakistan is situated in an historic borderland region, the Wrst area to be conquered and
settled by the successive movements of peoples and imperial invasions which have
shaped the development of the cultures and societies of northern India. It had already
been permeated by Indo-European speakers by the time of the Wrst recorded conquest
of the region, conducted by the Achaemenid emperor Darius in the sixth century bc.
The subsequent invasion by Alexander the Great in 322 bc replaced Persian with
Greek rule, and saw Buddhism become the major religion of the area, until its
replacement by Islam.
The Wrst incursion of the new religion came with the Arab conquest of Sindh from
the south in ad 711. But the major Muslim conquests were launched by the armies of
the Sultans from Afghanistan. A Muslim kingdom with Lahore as its capital Xourished
from soon after ad 1000. This led to the conquest of Delhi in 1195, and thence to the
establishment for some seven centuries of Muslim rule over most of the subcontinent,
which was progressively to result in the peaceful conversion of the majority of the
local inhabitants in what is now Pakistan. It was again from Afghanistan that the Wrst
Mughal emperor Babur launched his successful conquest in 1526. Situated strategic-
ally on the Grand Trunk Road which traverses the Punjab between the Mughal
capitals of Kabul and Agra, Lahore was always one of the major cities of the empire
until Mughal authority collapsed in the face of further invasions by Muslim warlords
from Afghanistan in the eighteenth century.
Unlike all these previous conquerors, the British expanded their rule in India from
the east, starting with their conquest of Bengal in 1757. The modern territories of
Pakistan, situated in the northwest of the subcontinent, were accordingly the last to
be incorporated in the British Indian empire. In the south, Sindh was conquered by an
army from Bombay in 1843. This was rapidly followed by the Wnal conquest of Punjab
after two wars with the Sikh kingdom which had replaced the Mughals. A period
of further consolidation in the later nineteenth century led to the Wnal demarcation of
the western frontiers with Iran and Afghanistan. The perceived threat of invasion by
Russia gave the Punjab great strategic importance in British eyes. Army headquarters
were sited in the garrison town of Rawalpindi on the Grand Trunk Road in north-
western Punjab, which became one of the principal recruiting grounds of Indian
troops. During British rule, the agricultural economies of both Punjab and Sindh were
greatly expanded by investment in massive irrigation canal schemes opening up huge
 Pakistan 103

areas to the cultivation of wheat, cotton, and other crops, and Karachi was consider-
ably developed as a port for their export.
In spite of these great changes, the main centres both of British imperial authority
and of the nationalist challenges to that authority were situated in the distant cities of
Calcutta or Bombay and in northern India. While it was there that the demand for
a Muslim homeland was strongest, the achievement of Pakistan as an independent
state for South Asian Muslims had particularly violent local consequences. The
partition of India in 1947 creating Pakistan split the area of Punjab, where an almost
total ethnic cleansing expelled the local Hindu and Sikh populations and regrouped
the Muslims of the undivided province in the western districts assigned to Pakistan. A
similar process followed with the large-scale departure of the non-Muslim population
of Sindh, and its replacement by a large inXux of Muslim refugees from the Urdu-
speaking areas of India.

5.2.2 Historic Language Patterns

South Asia has historically been characterized by the divisions created by great linguistic
diversity and shifting political boundaries, and by the countervailing unifying inXuences
of widely diVused spoken lingua francas and of the learned standard languages of the
cultural elites. The classic instance of the last type is the role played by Sanskrit, as
cultivated by the Brahmins who were the upholders of classical Indian civilization.
The use of Sanskrit as the major standard language of South Asia was largely
replaced from the time of the medieval Muslim conquests, not by Arabic, the sacred
language of Islam, but by Persian, which was used throughout the eastern Islamic
world as the oYcial language of the courts, even when the rulers themselves were, like
the Mughals, speakers of Turkish. Written in an adapted form of the Arabic script and
incorporating very large numbers of Arabic loanwords in their original spellings,
Persian became the major language of administration and record throughout the
region until the British period. Although quite closely related to the languages of
northern India and intrinsically much easier than Sanskrit, Persian functioned as a
written standard language to which access was carefully controlled by a small literate
elite intent on preserving its privileged status.
The more general needs of communication between the invaders and their new
subjects were met by the evolution of a lingua franca which combined grammatical
and lexical elements from the local dialects of the Lahore–Delhi region with an
extensive use of Persian vocabulary. Originally evolved in the army bazaars, this
early form of the language later known as Urdu (Shackle 2000)2 became widely
spoken in the cities which have always been the principal setting of the cultural
institutions of Islam. Written in an adapted form of the Perso-Arabic script and
increasingly Persianized in vocabulary, Urdu came in its turn partially to replace

2
Urdu is a Persian word of Turkish origin (cf. English ‘horde’) meaning ‘army’.
104 C. Shackle

Persian, especially as a language of poetry, in the courts which arose after the collapse
of the Mughal empire.
In the 1830s the British replaced Persian with English as the formal standard
language of India. For lower levels of administration and education, however, British
oYcials in northern India had decided that Urdu was the most appropriate medium,
and this policy was extended to the Punjab after its conquest. As a result of the
considerable expansion of education and the diVusion of the print media encouraged
by the colonial state, both English and, on a far wider scale, Urdu gained currency as
standard languages throughout the region. Only Sindh was divergent from this
pattern, since its separate conquest and subsequent separate administration resulted
in Sindhi, rather than Urdu, being developed as the local administrative language.

5.2.3 The Language Map of Pakistan

Several factors inhibit the construction of reasonably accurate language maps in South
Asia. In the Wrst place, few absolute linguistic frontiers exist to break the chains
of closely related local dialects which extend across the vast areas occupied by the
major language groups. Additionally, the historic cultural diglossia just described
has tended to inhibit the clear diVerentiation of the spoken tongues, making the
notoriously diYcult separate labelling of languages and dialects often a particularly
awkward exercise. In spite of its crude reliance upon data collected through the
colonial administration, the old Linguistic Survey of India (Grierson 1903–28) is still
often referred to as an ultimate authority in this area. Neat language boundaries have,
however, been disturbed throughout the twentieth century by the large-scale
movements of population between countries and regions which have been variously
driven by political conXict, by the economic attractions of land made newly available
for cultivation, or by the opportunities provided by rapidly growing cities and towns.
At the same time, language issues have become increasingly sensitive during the
modern period, partly as a consequence of the substantial increase in literacy begun
during the colonial period,3 partly too by the political expectations aroused, if not
always met, by the achievement of independence.
In India, the decennial censuses with their elaborate tables listing the numbers and
distribution of speakers of diVerent languages have since colonial times provided the
key statistical evidence for the advancement or rebuttal of political claims based upon
language. In Pakistan, by contrast, governments have been reluctant to furnish such
evidence. Numbers of mother tongue speakers were listed in the Wrst censuses of 1951
and 1961, but thereafter language data are only available for 1981, when data relating
to a diVerently deWned list of eight languages were collected on the diVerent basis of a
household count (Geijbels and Addleton 1986: 55–80). Not only are comparisons
therefore problematic, but the massive subsequent growth in the population and
3
Pakistani literacy rates, at 45 per cent overall (72 per cent for urban males versus 21 per cent for rural
females), are low by modern, but very high by pre-modern standards.
 Pakistan 105

changes in its distribution mean that only very broad Wgures can be arrived at for
numbers of speakers of languages in the various provinces of Pakistan, whose total
population in the 1998 census was 130.5 million, a Wgure greatly increased from 84.2
million in 1981 and 42.9 million in 1961.4
On some counts, over Wfty languages are spoken locally in Pakistan. This Wgure
includes many spoken by small numbers of speakers in the Northern Areas. Often of
great linguistic interest, either for their independent development, or as language
isolates like Burushaski which is spoken in the very far north, these languages have
been the subject of both specialist studies and excellent general surveys (Fussman
1972; O’Leary 1992). Proportionately much less attention has been paid to the major
languages which cover the bulk of the country, especially since descriptive linguistics
has been a largely neglected discipline in Pakistan (Rahman 1999: 5–34), making it
impossible to draw accurate linguistic boundaries. The map in this chapter therefore
indicates the general location of the eight languages recognized in the 1981 census
in relation to the provinces and other areas of Pakistan. All but one of these are Indo-
European languages, belonging either to the Iranian family (Windfuhr 2004) whose
most prominent member is Persian, or to the Indo-Aryan family which extends
eastward across the whole of northern India to Bangladesh. The frontier between
Iranian and Indo-Aryan runs west of the Indus.
In the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), with a total population of 20.6
million, the major language is Pashto, spoken by the Pashtuns.5 United by the Werce
code of hospitality and revenge called pashtunwali, the Pashtuns are one of the
most powerfully deWned tribal societies in the modern world, and they are also the
dominant presence across the frontier in the adjacent regions of Afghanistan, whose
prolonged civil wars have driven many to emigrate to Pakistan. The main represen-
tative of the eastern branch of Iranian, Pashto is very diVerent from Persian and has
a low level of mutual intelligibility with the Indo-Aryan languages.
To the southwest, Balochistan is by far the biggest but also the emptiest of the four
provinces, with a population of only 6.5 million. The Baloch tribes, whose language
Balochi is quite closely related to Persian, give it its name but Balochi is only a minority
language here. The centre of the province is home to Brahui, a strangely isolated
member of the Dravidian language family otherwise largely located in peninsular
India, which is nowadays mostly spoken bilingually with Balochi (Elfenbein 1998). In

4
All 1998 Wgures here are from the oYcial Statistical Pocket Book of Pakistan 2002. A mechanical
application of the 1981 percentages calculated on the basis of spoken household languages to the
population total for 1998 would give the following numbers of speakers per language in descending
order: Punjabi (63m.), Pashto (17m.), Sindhi (15m.), Siraiki (13m.), Urdu (10m.), Balochi (4m.), Hindko
(3m.), Brahui (1m.), and others (3m.).
5
One letter of the Pashto alphabet is pronounced in the northern dialects as kh where the southern
dialects have sh, so the English spellings ‘Pakhto’ and ‘Pakhtun’ are equally current, along with the usual
phonetic variants (see note 1), e.g. ‘Pushtu’, ‘Pushtun’, ‘Pakhtoon’, etc. ‘Pathan’ is the outsiders’ label used
in most Indo-Aryan languages to describe the people.
106 C. Shackle

the northern districts, the dominant language is Pashto, while the southeastern areas
are largely Indo-Aryan speaking.
Within the Indo-Aryan family (Masica 1991; Cardona and Jain 2003), Sindhi has
preserved many individual features, especially in contrast to languages of the central
Indo-Aryan group like Urdu. Already challenged earlier in the twentieth century, the
historical isolation of Sindh was Wnally and completely overturned when the creation
of Pakistan in 1947 led to the immigration of Urdu-speaking Muslims from the cities
and towns of India. Known as Mohajirs (from Urdu muhajir ‘refugee’), these immi-
grants established a major presence in the cities of Sindh, especially in Karachi,
then the national capital, which grew enormously in size. With a total population
of 30 million in 1998, Sindh is consequently the province with the sharpest linguistic
divisions. Although Sindhi remains the principal language of the rural areas, it has
since the early years of Pakistan been the language of only a small proportion of the
population of the multi-ethnic metropolis of Karachi, of whose 9.3 million inhabitants
a majority are Urdu-speaking Mohajirs. This helps to account for the very signiWcant
position Urdu has as an urban language in Pakistan.6
Over sixty per cent of the Pakistani population is located in Punjab, which had a
1998 population of 72.6 million plus another 800,000 in the federal capital, Islamabad.
Containing Lahore with 5 million inhabitants and most of the country’s other largest
cities, this province dominates Pakistan. Because the majority of refugees who arrived
here in 1947 had come from the eastern districts of the Punjab assigned to India, there
was much less disruption to the previous linguistic homogeneity than occurred in
Sindh. Within this large region, however, there has always been quite signiWcant
linguistic diVerentiation, which partly undercuts the simple deWnition of Punjabi as
the spoken language of the whole province (Shackle 2003). What might be called
‘Punjabi proper’ is spoken in the prosperous central districts around Lahore, and
across the border in India. Of all the forms of Indo-Aryan languages spoken in
Pakistan, Punjabi as spoken in these areas is linguistically the closest to Urdu.
The dialects of the western districts are more divergent.7 Those spoken in the
southwest districts of Punjab, historically much less fertile and socially controlled by
large landowners, are somewhat closer to Sindhi, and are nowadays often considered
as constituting a separate language which has received the name Siraiki.8 This is also
spoken in the adjacent districts of Sindh, Balochistan, and NWFP. Sharing some
features with Siraiki and others with central Punjabi are the dialects of the less fertile
uplands in the northwest. These too have a variety of local names, including Hindko

6
The 7.6 per cent of households reported as Urdu mother-tongue in the 1981 census accounted for
24.4 per cent of urban households, but only 1.3 per cent of rural households.
7
For their description in the Linguistic Survey of India, Grierson invented the separate language label
‘Lahnda’, the Punjabi word for ‘west’. Their collective internal classiWcation in relation to Punjabi proper
within Indo-Aryan remains somewhat awkward (Masica 1991: 446–63).
8
Once again, this is variously spelt, as e.g. ‘Saraiki’, ‘Seraiki’, or ‘Siraeki’.
 Pakistan 107

which is mostly spoken in the adjacent areas of NWFP, and Mirpuri which is spoken in
Azad Kashmir, technically a non-sovereign state attached to Pakistan.

5.3 National Language Policy

Following a common Asian pattern, Pakistan emerged as a multilingual country
which had inherited the European language of colonial administration, in its case
English. But the essential issue for the deWnition of national language policy was the
additional presence of Urdu as a neither entirely indigenous nor certainly a wholly
extraneous standard language. Substantially developed as an administrative and
educational language during the colonial period, Urdu also had powerful symbolic
value as a marker of South Asian Muslim identity. In spite of these apparent advan-
tages, however, eVorts to secure the unequivocal establishment in practice of Urdu as
the unchallenged national language of Pakistan have yet to achieve a complete
success. This is in spite of the rhetorical support of the cause of Urdu regularly voiced
with greater or lesser force by the many diVerent civilian and military regimes which
have succeeded one another in the chequered course of Pakistan’s political history
( JaVrelot 2002; Jones 2002).

5.3.1 Urdu and Islamic Identity

Urdu came to assume a very special importance for many Indian Muslims during the
late nineteenth century. Following the traumatic consequences for the old Muslim
elite of the suppression of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, an intense period of internal
debate ensued as the Muslim community sought to redeWne itself in the face of the
loss of political power to the British and of the increasingly successful challenges to its
former privileges from the Hindu majority.
Both for reformers and traditionalists, Urdu became the medium for an intense
debate, for which the new publishing industry provided the necessary large-scale
distribution of books, journals, and newspapers. The Urdu language itself simultan-
eously came to be regarded as a deWning symbol of an increasingly embattled Indian
Muslim identity (Brass 1974: 119–274). This conscious Muslim identiWcation with
Urdu was enhanced by the increasing success of the Hindu-led movement for the rival
development of a modern standard Hindi (King 1994), which deliberately substituted
Sanskritic equivalents for the Perso-Arabic script and Perso-Arabic learned vocabulary
(Shackle and Snell 1990).
In the undivided Punjab with its Muslim majority, little impact was made by
demands from the Hindus and Sikhs for the increased recognition of Hindi and
Punjabi respectively. Urdu was not only the oYcial language of the province but
also possessed a strong appeal to most educated Punjabi Muslims, many of whom
came to prominence as Urdu writers. The multiple roles of Urdu in British India as the
vehicle of poetry of wide appeal, of Islamic teaching, and of nationalism were
108 C. Shackle

combined in the work of the greatest Lahore-based Urdu writer, the poet-philosopher
Muhammad Iqbal (1879–1938), who came to be regarded as the spiritual father
of Pakistan. Lahore thus became established as a centre of Urdu publishing and of
Urdu literary culture of the same importance as the historic cities of northern India,
which were home to the Urdu-speaking Muslim elite and middle class who so
strongly supported the establishment of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, and who
emigrated in such large numbers to Karachi after its creation. This identiWcation of
Urdu with the cause of Islam has been a powerful constant factor in subsequent
developments.

5.3.2 Urdu and Bengali

The practicalities of administrative requirements dictated that the oYcial language of
Pakistan, like India, should in the beginning continue to be English. Although a few
eccentric voices were heard in favour of its replacement by Arabic as the sacred
language of Islam (Matin 1954), it therefore seemed natural to the great majority in
the then West Pakistan that the Islamic identity of the country should be conWrmed
by Urdu being in due course fully recognized as both its national and its oYcial
language, irrespective of the fact that it was not the mother tongue of any signiWcant
group among the native inhabitants of the newly formed country. This position was
strongly supported by its leader Jinnah, although he himself was educated in English
and had a famously poor command of Urdu.
The case was, however, quite diVerent in East Pakistan, which had been created by
the partition along religious lines of Bengal (see Thompson, this volume, chapter 2),
not only the most populous province of British India but also one with an exception-
ally highly developed sense of local cultural identity. Outside a tiny Urdu-speaking
elite, this identity was strongly associated with the Bengali language, spoken by
virtually the entire population of East Pakistan, where it was written by both Muslims
and Hindus in the same distinctive Indic script. Almost immediately, therefore, very
strong opposition was voiced to calls from the national leadership to adopt Urdu as
the national language of Pakistan. Even Jinnah himself was shouted at when he told a
mass meeting in Dhaka in 1948 that ‘the state language of Pakistan is going to be
Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really an enemy of
Pakistan’ ( Jones 2002: 153).
Thereafter no real attempt was made by the leadership in the West to accommo-
date its strongly centralist position either to the more general demands of the East for
parity, or to the accompanying particular demands for the full recognition of Bengali.
When police Wre killed four students in 1952 in disturbances following the reiteration
by another politician of Jinnah’s same, pro-Urdu line, the Wrst martyrs were produced
for the Bengali language movement, and the subsequent concession of notionally
equal status for Bengali in 1954 was inadequate to remove the sense of grievance
which had been implanted (Rahman 1996: 79–102).
 Pakistan 109

The following years saw an increasing hardening of positions. The potential threat
perceived to lie in the numerical majority and the linguistic and cultural cohesion of
the East was Wrst addressed by the amalgamation of the provinces of the West in the
One Unit scheme in 1955, which lasted until 1970. The failures of the country’s Wrst
generation of politicians then led to the Wrst period of military rule under Ayub Khan
(1958–69), inhibiting further discussion of the imposed dual language formula which
notionally gave equal status to Urdu as the language of the West and Bengali as the
language of the East, while in practice favouring the former.
When elections were Wnally held under Ayub Khan’s successor in 1970, the over-
whelming support in the East for its popular leader Mujibur Rahman was thwarted by
the opposition of the army, who feared the break-up of the country. When this
provoked a popular uprising, Pakistani military repression provoked Indian interven-
tion and led in 1971 to the creation of Bangladesh as an independent Muslim state
with Bengali as its national language ( Jones 2002: 146–86, Thompson, this volume,
chapter 2).

5.3.3 Urdu and English

The secession of Bangladesh removed the claims of Bengali to rival Urdu as the
national language of Pakistan. It has proved less easy to see oV the continued
challenge of English as the long established oYcial language of the state. Its full
replacement by Urdu as both national and state language has always been the
aspiration of the strongest proponents of the Urdu cause.
The very unusual circumstances of Pakistan’s creation have, however, always
involved exceptional tensions between the nation and the state that are far from
being fully resolved. From the outset, the early death of Jinnah and the absence of an
established political leadership comparable to that exercised by Congress in India led
to power being substantially invested in the senior bureaucracy. The Indian-born
Mohajirs who earlier predominated soon gave way to increasing numbers of Punjabis
in the senior ranks of the civil service, based after 1959 in the new capital of Islamabad.
This change did not aVect the practical attachment of this class to the continued
oYcial status of English, fully shared by their partners in power, the senior oYcers of
the army whose headquarters were next to Islamabad in Rawalpindi.
The Wrst of those oYcers to assume power was Ayub Khan, whose period in oYce
(1958–69) was to set many of the parameters of subsequent national language policy.
Trained at Sandhurst and pro-Western in outlook, Ayub Khan was a modernizer who
recognized the continued need for English in the country’s development, while also
supporting the use of Urdu across West Pakistan, as then constituted under the One
Unit scheme, as an instrument for the strengthening, in the face of perceived
continual threat from a hostile India, of a national unity constructed around Islamic
sentiment which could allow little room for the play of subordinate linguistic ethno-
nationalisms.
110 C. Shackle

Although the civilian regime of ZulWkar Ali Bhutto (1971–7) was initially more
open to a less unitary language policy, it too quickly came to follow a similar
centralist line. Article 251 of the Constitution of 1973 fudged the language issue
by proclaiming:
(1) The National Language of Pakistan is Urdu, and arrangements shall be made for
its being used for oYcial and other purposes within Wfteen years from the commen-
cing day.
(2) Subject to clause (1) the English language may be used for oYcial purposes until
arrangements are made for its replacement by Urdu.

By this time there had developed an increasingly constrasted perception of English

as the language of power and prestige, closely associated with the privileged elite,
versus Urdu as the language of pro-Islamic national sentiment. So when Bhutto was
overthrown by the coup mounted by General Zia ul Haq, the leader of the country’s
Wrst overtly Islamist regime (1977–88), there was every expectation of a decisive tilt in
national language policy towards Urdu. A good deal was indeed done, including the
setting up in 1979 of the National Language Authority with the remit ‘to consider
ways and means for the promotion of Urdu as the national language of Pakistan and
to make all necessary arrangements in this regard’ (Rahman 1996: 240). But while the
Authority has certainly proved active in such matters as the creation of large numbers
of scientiWc and other neologisms from the copious resources of Arabic and Persian, it
proved much harder to achieve a fundamental shift. In the crucial area of education,
for instance, the prestigious English-medium schools were able to overcome the
moves of the Zia government to promote Urdu as the principal medium of instruction
at all levels (Rahman 1999: 65–102).
The 1973 Constitution’s intention for the replacement of English by 1988 has
consequently remained largely unfulWlled under the succeeding civilian governments
headed by Bhutto’s daughter Benazir or her Islamicist rival Nawaz Sharif, who like
most Pakistani leaders had to have his speeches translated into Urdu for him ( Jones
2002: 43), and there seems little likelihood of a change of direction under General
Musharraf who replaced them. Whatever the emotional appeal of Urdu as the
language of Islam or as the symbol of Pakistani national identity, it is English which
remains the one Pakistani language (Rahman 1990: Baumgardner 1993) whose
mastery continues to be seen as the key to status and success.

5.4 Languages and Ethnicities

Many other Asian and African countries created from former European colonies
have experienced comparable diYculties in the full cultural integration of the met-
ropolitan language and the state institutions associated with it from colonial
times with aspirations to the full expression of a national identity. What makes the
Pakistani case so distinctive is that its national identity was originally conceived
 Pakistan 111

in purely religious terms. It continues to be so deWned in much oYcial rhetoric,

which emphasizes the separateness and distinctiveness of the Pakistani from
the Indian national identity. One consequence of the emphasis placed on the Islamic
deWnition of the nation, especially during the Zia ul Haq period, has been to
make sectarian divisions within the country, especially those between Sunni and
Shia, a more prominent source of violent internal conXict than disputes over
language.

5.4.1 National Identity and Local Ethnicities

Twentieth-century history shows that language is hardly less powerful than religion as
a marker of ethnicity. In Pakistan with its long fear of India, however, the protection of
the nation has been of overriding importance for all regimes, especially for the army
which is the most powerful national institution. The articulation of linguistically
deWned ethnicities within Pakistan therefore continues to be problematic, partly
because of the conceptual diYculty in reaching a suitable deWnition of the relationship
between national identity and local ethnicities. Not least because of the same Urdu
word qaum ‘tribe, people, nation, community’ being applied in both contexts, such an
articulation risks being open to challenge as a threat to the integrity of the nation, as
indeed proved to be the case with the movement which led with Indian assistance to
the creation of Bangladesh.
As in almost any modern multilingual country, however, complex but historically
stable patterns of language use are liable to be challenged by the one-to-one concep-
tions of language and nationalism Wrst evolved in nineteenth-century Europe (Bar-
bour and Carmichael 2000). Thus in Pakistan, the historic diglossia between formal
standard languages and local speech continues in the general modern sociolinguistic
pattern of a hierarchically organized triglossia between English, Urdu, and the local
language. The movements which have variously arisen in diVerent parts of Pakistan to
advocate an enhanced status for the local language seek to disturb this pattern, in
which well understood roles are allocated to given languages in diVerent contexts
across which bilingual or trilingual speakers are able to operate with practised ease
(Shackle 1970; Hallberg 1992; Mansoor 1993).
Even when they are a good way oV the ultimate stage of creating a separate
national or provincial unit, language movements tend to follow a familiar course, in
which the likelihood of conXict both with other groups and with central governments
increases with the progress made towards eVective political demands for the alloca-
tion of scarce resources, for example, through recognition of the language as medium
of education, administration, or broadcasting. Before this full entry into the political
sphere, language movements typically begin with cultural and linguistic activities by
middle class enthusiasts who work for the enhancement of a sense of local ethnicity,
effected through a revaluation of the local cultural and literary heritage and a
redeWnition of local speech as a distinctive language. The following discussion of
112 C. Shackle

issues of language and ethnicity in Pakistan is selectively focused on Sindh and Punjab,
which are situated at diVerent points along this evolutionary spectrum.9

5.4.2 Sindhi and Urdu

Prior to 1947, when Sindh was part of the Bombay Presidency, British language policy
had favoured the oYcial use of Sindhi. A regularized version was produced of the
adaptations of the Arabic script required to record the implosive consonants and other
distinctive Sindhi sounds. Printed in a graphic form very distinctive from the Perso-
Arabic script used for Urdu, Sindhi was used both in schools and colleges and in
government oYces. A considerable literature was also produced by both Muslim and
Hindu writers, who shared a reverence for the classic Risalo, a collection of SuW poetry
written by Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit (1689–1752).
This cultural cohesion was shattered after 1947 by the emigration of most Sindhi
Hindus to India and the massive inXux of Urdu-speaking Mohajirs into Karachi and
other cities, where they came to completely outnumber the Sindhi population now
bereft of its Hindu middle class. The prominent national role of the Mohajirs in the
early years of Pakistan, coupled with the encouragement of Urdu as the national
language, resulted in the substantial diminution of the role formerly accorded to
Sindhi, which lost its oYcial status with the amalgamation of Sindh in the One Unit
scheme.
Himself a wealthy Sindhi landlord, Bhutto drew a signiWcant part of his electoral
appeal in 1970 from the resentments of the Sindhis at their marginalization by the
ruling alliance then in eVect between Mohajirs and Punjabis. A Sindhi Language Bill
promising a substantial restoration of the pre-1947 status of Sindhi was introduced by
the provincial government in 1972, but the language riots aroused by violent Mohajir
opposition resulted in a fudged formula in which the aspirations of both sides have
remained partially frustrated.
While Sindhi continues to be the most developed of all the regional languages of
Pakistan, with far the greatest number of books and newspapers published, it is
confronted by the substantial presence of Urdu at both the national and the provincial
level. The apparent solution of a Sindhi nationalism, as conceived in the ideal of a
‘Sindhu Desh’ articulated by the veteran politican G. M. Syed, which looks to the
complete removal of the ‘exoglossic’ Urdu (Bughio 2001: 21–30) has had some appeal,
but not to a majority. On the other side, too, the marginalization at the national level
of the Mohajirs by a new alliance between Punjabis and Pashtuns meant that the
Mohajirs could no longer claim an exclusively national identity for themselves. The
logical consequence was the redeWnition proposed in the 1980s by the charismatic
leader Altaf Hussain of the Mohajirs as the ‘Wfth nationality’ of Pakistan, along with

9
For conveniently assembled descriptions of all the language movements see Rahman (1996: 103–227).
Typologically, the relatively lesser emphasis on language issues in the western provinces, with their highly
deWned tribal ethnicities, deserves fuller treatment than can be attempted here.
 Pakistan 113

the Sindhis, Punjabis, Baloches, and Pashtuns. These nationalities were all deWned by
their provinces, so this entailed the demand for the Karachi region to become a
separate province to be dominated by the Urdu-speakers. While the strong resistance
of the centre to this demand resulted in Altaf Hussain’s own marginalization, the
legacy of his movement has been to leave Sindh contested by two strongly deWned and
strongly opposed ethnicities principally deWned by language, who are each liable to be
played oV against one another by a centre whose natural policy is often to divide and
rule.

5.4.3 Punjabi and Siraiki

The situation in Punjab is historically very diVerent. Language movements are
typically the creation of groups which see themselves as neglected or oppressed.
However, the cultural dominance of Urdu in Punjab which was established in the
colonial period among its population (section 5.3.1) has been reinforced by the great
success of the Punjabis themselves in dominating most sectors of national life in
Pakistan. This has subsequently encouraged a strong cultural identiWcation with Urdu
as the language symbolizing the national identity, whose preservation the Punjabis
have such a strong commitment to.10 Like most such dominant groups elsewhere,
therefore, there has been relatively little support in Pakistan for the argument that the
Punjabi identity should properly be recognized by an enhanced status for the Punjabi
language.
There is a model for this across the border in India, where the Sikh campaign for
the recognition of Punjabi as their language of identity resulted in the establishment
of a linguistically deWned state in 1966 (Brass 1974: 277–400). The success of the Sikhs
in India has certainly been an inspiration for the Punjabi activists in Pakistan. Since the
1960s theirs has been a signiWcant voice, centred in Lahore but spread across the
province (Shackle 1970). They have operated in the familiar style of such movements,
drawing heavily upon the symbolic capital of the saints and poets of the past,
especially the classic poem Hir by Varis Shah (1766), compiling collections of folklore,
working for the creation of a modern literature, devising neologisms, and pressing for
increased recognition for the language.
For all the enthusiasm of the Punjabi language movement in Pakistan, it has
however yet to result in any signiWcant change of oYcial support or widespread
middle-class support for the established Punjabi-Urdu diglossia. EVorts to establish a
new conception of the importance of the mother tongue have here been hindered
partly by the very closeness of Punjabi to Urdu, especially in educated urban speech
and its written appearance in the shared Perso-Arabic script, in part too by the
perception of the non-Pakistani character of the standard Sikh Punjabi (Shackle
1988) which, although an inspiration to some activists, is made alien to most
10
Cf. the suggestively titled chapter ‘Pakistan or Punjabistan: Crisis of National Identity’ by Yunus
Samad, in Singh and Talbot (1996: 61–86).
114 C. Shackle

Pakistanis by its use of the Gurmukhi script and incorporation of Sanskritic vocabu-
lary.
The eVorts of the Lahore-centred language movement have also been thwarted by
the emergence of a signiWcant rival in the form of the Siraiki language movement
(Shackle 1977), which is based in the southwestern districts of Punjab and is actively
opposed to the enthusiasts for Punjabi. First gaining a signiWcant proWle in the Bhutto
period, the Siraiki movement relies for a signiWcant part of its support on an appeal to
the widespread sense of relative neglect and under-investment in this very large area,
as compared with the prosperity of the densely populated Lahore region. Achieving
its Wrst great success in spreading a consciousness of a common language amongst
speakers of previously diVerently named local dialects,11 the Siraiki movement is thus
a classic illustration of the association between most modern language movements
and a sense of oppression.
The Siraiki activists have pursued the usual strategies in enhancing an awareness of
the language and its cultural heritage, symbolized by the dialectally rich SuW poetry of
the great local saint-poet Khwaja Ghulam Farid (1845–1901). Linguistically, in seeking
a maximum diVerentiation from Punjabi, much has been made of diVerent construc-
tions of overlapping literary pasts and linguistic classiWcations. Particular emphasis has
been laid on the phonetic distinctions from Punjabi which Siraiki shares with Sindhi,
notably the implosive consonants which are its most prominent shibboleth. Great
importance is attached to the use of the distinctive diacritics which have been evolved
for writing these, since the graphic expression of linguistic identities which is aVorded
by the multiple scripts in use in India must rely in Pakistan on the dots added to the
letters of the Perso-Arabic script which is used for all languages in the country.
Although Siraiki is spoken in adjacent regions of all the other provinces, the
campaign for its recognition has been focused within Punjab, including the demand
for the division of this disproportionately populous province.12 One product of its
opposition to the Punjabi movement’s claims has been a natural alliance with sup-
porters of the continued role of Urdu. This has been manifested over such issues as the
possible replacement of Urdu by the mother tongue as the formal medium of primary
education in the province, which immediately sets proponents of Punjabi and of Siraiki
against one another. Once again, therefore, although the nature of their division
is qualitatively diVerent in Punjab from that prevailing in Sindh between Sindhis
and Mohajirs, the rivalry between locally opposed linguistic ethnicities is suYcient
to allow the central government to encourage a continuance of the status quo.
11
Also widely spoken bilingually with Sindhi in northern Sindh, ‘Siraiki’ is a Sindhi-derived term
meaning ‘northern speech’, hence its confusing earlier use as the name of the northern dialect of Sindhi,
now usually termed Siroli.
12
A third unit of such a division would embrace the northwestern districts where the dialects are
related to the Hindko spoken in NWFP (Shackle 1983). While this dialect group includes the Mirpuri
spoken in Azad Kashmir, political solidarity there signiWcantly overrides linguistic deWnitions in under-
pinning the strong sense of a distinctive Kashmiri identity, cf. N. Ali et al., ‘The 1990s: A Time to Separate
British Punjabi and British Kashmiri Identity’, in Singh and Talbot (1996: 229–56).
 Pakistan 115

5.5 Conclusions
As the foregoing summary account should have suggested, while there are numerous
typological similarities with India, both the distinctive initial deWnition of Pakistan
as an Islamic state and its subsequent independent development have entailed the
emergence of many instructive and interesting diVerences from its larger and better-
known neighbour. The intrinsically more complex situation of Urdu in Pakistan, as
compared with the superWcially similar role of its old rival Hindi in India, is perhaps
the most obvious of these. In a broader comparative context, Pakistan is perhaps
especially interesting as an example of a multilingual Asian country whose failure to
evolve strongly representative institutions seems likely to entail a particularly lengthy
process of working out the linguistic implications of a whole variety of conXicting
deWnitions of national identity and local ethnicity.
 6
Sri Lanka
K. N. O. Dharmadasa

6.1 Introduction
Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) is an island approximately the size of Ireland which Wfty
years ago was thought to be well-suited to become a successful, integrated political
entity developing its own national and cultural identity. The reality which confronts
us today is quite the contrary. A secessionist movement has obtained virtual control of
some areas of the island, the political situation is unstable, and the economy, which
was one of the most stable and upward looking Wfty years ago, is in the doldrums,
with a sizeable part of the annual budgetary allocation being devoted to security
concerns. Instead of national integration as a political entity, there is serious polariza-
tion along ethnic, religious, and political party lines. An examination of the roots of
the present day problems in the island reveal that language, functioning as a marker of
identity and ethnic group interest, has played a major catalytic role in the generation
of barriers to national unity and the peaceful development of post-independence
Sri Lanka. This chapter sets out to describe just how the turbulence present in
much of twentieth-century Sri Lanka can be traced back to issues of language
selection at the national level and the apparent privileging of a single language in a
multilingual situation.
Two speciWc South Asian languages and the interests of their speakers have been
pitted against each other in much of the language-related conXict over the last Wfty
years. A sizeable 74 per cent majority of the 20 million population speaks Sinhala, an
Indo-Aryan language with origins in the north of India, and has a strong, historical,
and emotional attachment to Sri Lanka. A further 25 per cent of the island are
speakers of Tamil, a Dravidian language from southern India with a similar long
presence on Sri Lanka, and ethno-linguistic links to a much larger (48 million)
population of Tamil speakers twenty miles north across the Palk Straits in the Indian
state of Tamilnadu. A third, non-local language which has played an important
complicating role in linguistic confrontation and struggle in the twentieth century
is English, introduced during British colonial rule, and critically dominant as a means
to economic advancement up to and also beyond the attainment of independence
 Sri Lanka 117

in 1948. In 1956, the institution of the majority language Sinhala as the single oYcial
language of Sri Lanka, following populist agitation and election-related pressure on
Sinhalese politicians no longer constrained by the moderating inXuence of British
models, led to the immediate, severe deterioration of Tamil–Sinhalese relations.
With the addition of further linguistic measures perceived as disadvantaging the
Tamil community over the following years, the breakdown in erstwhile cordial
intercommunal relations led to calls for Tamil independence and an escalation of
the new Tamil–Sinhalese confrontation Wrst into sporadic, often deadly violence, and
then eventually into civil war.
Quite generally, the recent Wtful history of Sri Lanka can be seen as a powerful
illustration of the potentially far-reaching, destructive eVects of language nationalism
within multilingual communities. It also clearly highlights the challenges faced by
new multi-ethnic states during decolonization, independence, and the introduction of
democracy and voting rights to a population previously unable to express (much)
direct inXuence on governmental policy. Thirdly, a study of language and identity
relations in Sri Lanka reveals that the striking modern strength of language as a
symbol of ethnic group membership in fact had its origins in an earlier loss of
traditional lifestyle and identity resulting from nineteenth-century commercial devel-
opment of the island by colonial forces promoting English and Western cultural

Sri Lanka
118 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

models. This triggered a revivalist movement Wrst championing (Buddhist) religion as

a symbol of Sinhalese civilization and identity, and then Sinhalese language and
history, with language remaining dominant as the central rallying point for Sinhalese
interests and group cohesion during the twentieth century. These and other import-
ant aspects of language and its relation to identity will now be considered in more
detail, beginning with a general overview of historical developments on Sri Lanka
prior to the arrival of the British at the end of the eighteenth century. The general
structure of the chapter will be to show how the all-important decision to instate
Sinhala as Sri Lanka’s single national language in the 1950s and its drastic conse-
quences can be understood as the culmination of a gradual process of events and
changes in attitude taking place during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and that the outburst of language nationalism following independence indeed had
a long history of preparation.

6.2 Early Settlement Patterns and the Growth of Sinhalese

and Tamil Kingdoms
Sinhalese chronicles and archaeological evidence indicate that the ancestors of the
modern Sinhalese people arrived in Sri Lanka around the sixth century bc, having
most probably originated in the Gujarat area of modern north India. Settling in the
north and east of the island and undergoing a signiWcant conversion to Buddhism in
the third century bc, the Sinhalese developed a highly distinct culture, language,
literature, and architecture, as well as a sophisticated irrigation system which boosted
the growth of agriculture on the island. The Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva periods
(sixth century bc to twelfth century ad) are considered the golden age of Sinhala
civilization. From a comparative perspective, the Sinhala language which emerged
amongst the Sinhalese from about the third century BC onwards has two particularly
important features which should be noted. First of all, being an Indo-Aryan language
in origin, Sinhala is geographically isolated from other related Indo-Aryan lan-
guages further to the north by a wide belt of Dravidian languages spread throughout
southern India, and this linguistic property has contributed in a boundary-marking
way to the creation of feelings of group coherence amongst the Sinhalese, and to
perceptions of being diVerent from their Dravidian neighbours. Secondly, Sinhala
came to be used as the language of oYcial historical records for the Sinhalese, and in
this distinguished itself positively from the practice of all other language groups in
early medieval India, which used only Sanskrit for epigraphical records. Sinhala was
thus accorded high prestige from the earliest times onwards and resulted in a long and
signiWcant body of classical literature.
Although there are no early Tamil records documenting the initial arrival of Tamil
settlers on Sri Lanka, Sinhala chronicles indicate that this occurred from about the
second century BC, with incursions from southern India becoming particularly strong
 Sri Lanka 119

from the Wfth/sixth centuries ad. Eventually, repeated Tamil invasions into the
northern areas of Sri Lanka caused much of the Sinhalese population to relocate
further south and to the southwest, and led to the thirteenth-century establishment of
the Tamil kingdom of JaVna in the north of Sri Lanka, an event facilitated by the
decline of the Sinhala kingdom in the northern plains which had reached the zenith
of its power in the twelfth century. While the Tamil JaVna kingdom generally
recognized the overlordship of the Sinhalese kingdoms in the south, there were
also periods of conXict with the latter, creating and reaYrming among the Sinhalese
a long-term traditional view of the Tamils/south Indians as potential enemies
and threats to Sinhalese life. The weakened Sinhala kingdom shifted locations several
times, Wnally settling in Kotte in the Wfteenth century. The successful Tamil
occupation of the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka in the fourteenth century
and the subsequent movement of many of the Sinhalese into the south and
west therefore gave rise to a broad division of the island into two contiguous
geographical zones mostly dominated by concentrations of either Sinhalese or
Tamil populations, and a clustering of Tamils in the north and east and Sinhalese in
the larger southern and western areas which has largely been maintained through into
the twentieth century.
Prior to the arrivals of the Wrst Europeans – the Portuguese – in the sixteenth
century, life on the island of Sri Lanka subsequently settled into a pattern in which a
signiWcant majority of Buddhist Sinhalese remained in control of the fertile southern
areas of the island and co-existed mostly in competitive peace with a sizeable minority
of speakers of Tamil spread along the coastal areas of the north and east. This latter
Tamil population, it should be added, was actually further polarized in a signiWcant
way along religious grounds, dividing into distinctive Hindu and Muslim subgroups,
with the Muslims being commonly known as the ‘Moors’ and often acting as (and
considered to be) an ethnic group quite independent of the larger Hindu Tamil
community. Into this potentially fragile world of diVerent ethno-linguistic groups
then came the Europeans, Wrst in the form of the Portugese and Dutch in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and later more intrusively the British.

6.3 Sri Lanka under British Rule in the Nineteenth Century

When British forces replaced the Dutch presence on Sri Lanka, in 1815 they were
signiWcantly able to bring the whole of the island under the control of a single, ruling
authority. The development of Sri Lanka as a Crown Colony which followed on from
this, with the introduction of a uniWed island-wide administration and the commercial
development of the island with coVee and tea plantations, brought diVerent lifestyles
to the island and had profound eVects on all levels of Sri Lankan society.
The new colonial government manned by British administrators believed in the
superiority of Western culture and the need to bring the light of ‘civilization’ and
120 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

an improvement of living conditions to the ‘natives’ of Sri Lanka who they governed.
The Wrst British governor proclaimed it was opportune to create a class of people
‘connected with England by education’, and the Anglican missionaries who had
arrived on the island willingly engaged in this education process. Some locals were
Wrst given a preliminary English education in Sri Lanka and then sent to England for
higher education and to be trained as clergymen, subsequently returning as priests in
charge of the religious and educational activities of the provinces and establishing a
complete control of the new educational system by the Christian clergy. The govern-
ment for its part was in fact quite happy to leave all education to the missionaries in
the earlier stages of its rule of Sri Lanka, as it lacked the administrative capacity to set
up an education system itself.
In delivering its teaching, the missionaries thought that the best way to convert
people was to preach in the local vernaculars, Sinhala and Tamil. However, a need was
also felt to disseminate English, both as a medium of education and as the bearer of
Western civilization, and also to respond to the needs of the colonial government who
required signiWcant numbers of administrators competent in English. Consequently
most of the initial missionary schools provided bilingual instruction in English and
one of the vernaculars, with a few English-medium-only schools being opened just for
the wealthier inhabitants of the island. All of these schools had as a primary objective
the creation of a class of natives who were not only proWcient in English but also well
familiarized with Western culture, in the hopes that this would create a strong bond of
union with England. Those who had access to the new missionary-led education were
encouraged both to learn English and also to emulate the lifestyle of the English,
leading to a clear surge in westernization among the higher, educated classes from the
early nineteenth century onwards. Considered from the point of view of the local
higher classes, English education, with or without conversion to Christianity, seemed
to be the surest path to ensure upward mobility, better employment, and high social
prestige in the new socio-economic environment of colonial Sri Lanka.
A major result of this emphasis on English and Western culture was the successful
creation of a new generation of low country aristocracy who had little or no concern
for local culture or local languages. In its preoccupation with Western forms of
civilization, the upper classes on Sri Lanka came to neglect the study of its own,
indigenous culture, and showed strongly negative attitudes towards use of the verna-
culars, knowledge of the latter being viewed simply as a ‘necessary evil’ for commu-
nication with those not competent in English. Generally, then, a major change in social
attitude and linguistic orientation was brought about in the educated classes on
Sri Lanka by the introduction of English-focused education in the nineteenth century,
and the continual presence and importance of an English-educated elite in Sri Lanka
has since frequently aVected the island’s socio-political development in critical ways
right up to and even after twentieth-century independence.
Concerning the broader masses of the population of Sri Lanka, both Sinhalese and
Tamil, these were also deeply aVected by the changed conditions of life which followed
 Sri Lanka 121

the arrival of the British. The early nineteenth century saw a drastic transformation of
Sri Lanka’s economic and social structure when the interior of Sri Lanka was opened
up in a rush to create new coVee plantations. This sudden growth in economic
opportunities and the redistribution of sections of the population which accompanied
it had important eVects on the structure of traditional Sri Lankan society, provoking a
decline of traditional lifestyles, authority networks, and social order. It also resulted in a
clear growth in crime, intemperance, and lawlessness, and led to widespread feelings of
anomie, alienation, and lack of a solid identity. An old, familiar order was in the process
of disintegrating, but a clear new order had not yet fully crystallized, and this caused a
deep anxiety amongst those who were comfortable with inherited tradition and its old,
well-established roles and relationships. A crucial aspect of these transformations was
the deleterious eVect on Buddhism, a central component of traditional Sinhalese life.
The primary source of patronage supporting Buddhism as well as traditional literature
and the arts was removed with the end of the Sinhalese kingship, and then further
aggravated by the curtailment of the power and wealth of the Kandyan aristocracy
after a local rebellion in 1818. Buddhist institutions were therefore suddenly left
without their main source of Wnancial support, threatening their continued prominent
existence within Sinhalese society.
As modernization took eVect in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, there was conse-
quently a new, acute need for a sense of belonging, and a base of identity. The reaction
at the level of the masses was often millenialistic – among many simply a passive hope
for the triumphant return of the old order of kings and traditional, protective
aristocracy. Among the more sophisticated, however, there was a more active and
aggressive reaction to the ongoing disruption of traditional life in Sri Lanka, and a
strong counter-oVensive against Christian expansionism was launched in the latter
part of the nineteenth century by Buddhist monks who championed themselves as the
bearers of authentic Sinhalese identity.
Directly threatened by the removal of the historical means of their support,
Buddhist monks or ‘bhikkus’ were faced with the need to struggle to survive in the
nineteenth century, and this engendered a new spirit of militancy in the rising
generation of bhikkus in marked contrast to the traditional image of the bhikku as
an ascetic recluse. Focused primarily on combating the spreading inXuence of Chris-
tianity but also the intrusion of Western civilization in general, the bhikkus became
mobilizational leaders, organizing societies, printing and distributing pamphlets,
touring and speaking around Sri Lanka, and confronting the missionaries in public
debates drawing audiences of thousands of local people. Such activism succeeded in
generating an unprecedented mass enthusiasm, Wrst and foremost about Buddhism,
but then later about various other aspects of indigenous culture, so that the latter half
of the nineteenth century witnessed a widespread religious and cultural revival. This
in turn resulted in and was further facilitated by fresh Wnancial support from newly
emerging groups of urban Sinhalese entrepreneurs, many of whom originally came
from small rural villages and a traditional way of life with Buddhism. When they
122 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

moved to the urban centres, Buddhism was retained as this emerging group’s badge of
identity as well as its adopted cause for social activism. Such new, highly motivated
patrons of Buddhism set about the building of new temples in towns, the construction
of Buddhist monastic colleges as centres of education and cultural activity, and the
restoration of Buddhist ruins and historical sites, the latter activity importantly
serving to emphasize the glorious past of Buddhism on Sri Lanka in contrast to the
apparent present decline of indigenous culture (Dharmadasa 1992).
The impressive success of the nineteenth-century religious revival was most cer-
tainly due to the tireless eVorts of various leading bhikkus, combined with the Wnancial
backing of a rising class of Sinhalese business-owners. It was also aided in a very
important way by the availability of new channels of mass contact as forms of social
mobilization, and the revivalist activists of nineteenth-century Sri Lanka were able to
utilize several new forms of mass media which had been introduced by the Europeans.
Hence newspapers and periodicals, novels and the theatre, media originally introduced
by the missionaries to spread Christianity and Western civilization, were all turned into
highly eVective instruments of Sinhala-Buddhist propaganda, spreading an awareness
of the community’s illustrious past and present plight to a broad audience of the
masses, and whipping up concern for many aspects of the communal identity. A
simultaneous, revived interest in the classical literature of Sinhala, Pali, and Sanskrit,
which further served to highlight the achievements of the past, also beneWted greatly
from the newly established printing presses making widely available classical works
which had previously only been available in manuscript form.
With all of the above activity focusing the masses’ attention on aspects of indigen-
ous civilization and religion, the Buddhist revival was also notable for incorporating a
nationalist component which emphasized the distinctive identity of the Sinhalese not
only relative to the British, but also to the Tamil community. Such a political side to
Sinhalese Buddhism was in fact not so fully new and reXected a long tradition of
Buddhist involvement in the recording and presentation of the history of the Sinhalese
race. In centres of learning attached to Buddhist temples, bhikkus had since early
times been the primary producers of most literature and the main disseminators of
literacy and knowledge. As the historians of the Sinhalese, they also shaped the
standard view of history and promoted the political ideology of a unity between the
Sinhalese ethnic group, Buddhism, and the island of Sri Lanka. In the chronicles it was
recorded that, following the decline of Buddhism in most of India, Sri Lanka had a
vital role to play in the preservation of Buddhism and defence of the Buddhist faith, in the
way of a holy destiny selecting the Sinhalese for a higher purpose (and in connection
with this, it was further believed that the Buddha had himself made three visits to
Sri Lanka). This naturally led to the twin concepts of ‘Sinhaladvipa’, that Sri Lanka is
the island of the Sinhalese, and ‘Dhammadvipa’, that Sri Lanka is the island of
Buddhist faith. The conjunction of these ideas, that the Sinhalese were destined to be
protectors of Buddhism on Sri Lanka was subsequently fostered over the centuries in
the historical chronicles maintained by the bhikkus, which documented the continual
 Sri Lanka 123

pressure from Tamil–Hindu groups in southern India that threatened the existence of the
Sinhalese on Sri Lanka. Harassment by the Tamils and other enemy races thus became
an essential part of the Sinhalese–Buddhist view of history. In the nineteenth century,
Sinhalese–Buddhist propaganda concentrated heavily on the glory of the national past
and how the Sinhalese had successfully defended Buddhism from attacks by Hindu
Tamils over the ages. The rekindling of memories of glories of the past therefore
reminded people of a ‘retrospective hostility’ to the Tamils, who in popular minds
were portrayed as the aggressive destroyers of ancient seats of Sinhalese–Buddhist
civilization.
Concerning other targets of criticism, there were naturally many invectives against
Western culture in the Buddhist propaganda, with certain speciWc targets being the
British promotion of alcohol and the opening of liquor stores on Sri Lanka (to increase
government revenue), the attempted spread of Christianity, and the habit of meat-
eating (looked down upon by Buddhists). Finally, the Sinhalese–Buddhist revival of
the nineteenth century also levelled criticism at the Moors, who controlled most
of the retail trade in small towns and had large businesses in the cities, crystallizing a
new antagonism that had not existed prior to this time.
As a result of the energetic activity of the Buddhist revivalists in the late nineteenth
century, and propelled by the support from the newly emergent Sinhalese entrepre-
neurs, Buddhism came to be more of an overtly explicit marker of Sinhalese national
identity than it had been in the centuries prior to the arrival of the British, and the
‘back-to-tradition’ drive led by the Buddhist monks struck a sympathetic chord with
many of the masses living in the changing times of the early colonial period. In the
twentieth century, however, the focus of self-assertion amongst the dissatisWed and
aspiring non-elite classes of Sri Lanka was set to shift away from religion as the
primary encoding of ethnic identity and moved instead more squarely towards lan-
guage as a symbol of group cohesion and political activism. Buddhism had certainly
galvanized the Sinhalese into action and created a new pride in Sinhalese history and
civilization. The changing nature of confrontation with the British as democracy and
independence gradually loomed on the horizon then shifted people’s assessment of
what seemed to be practically important for their lives and so necessary to campaign
for, and eventually brought issues of language to centre stage.
Before we consider these developments, however, it deserves mention that there
was an attempt at highlighting and presenting language as a central symbol of
(Sinhalese) national identity even in the nineteenth century, in the work of James
d’Alwis (1823–78), a member of the English-educated Sinhalese Christian elite.
D’Alwis was employed as a translator in the law courts but quickly discovered, to
his dismay, that the heavy English bias of his education had seriously aVected his
proWciency in Sinhala and he found that he was actually unable to translate satisfac-
torily into his ‘mother tongue’. Following this eye-opening and troubling experience,
d’Alwis devoted himself for years to the description of Sinhala, exalting it as a
language of great antiquity, the vehicle of a long-standing culture, and signiWcantly
124 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

as the ‘essence of the Sinhalese identity’. Bemoaning the incorporation of loanwords

from Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Tamil, d’Alwis emphasized that the ‘national
language of the Sinhalese’ should return to the purity embodied in classical Sinhala,
which had an exquisitely perfect structure and was connected to a glorious civiliza-
tion. However, despite much personal eVort in presenting the positive properties of
Sinhala and the relation of the language to Sinhalese cultural and national identity, no
mass movement resulted from d’Alwis’s work. D’Alwis was a cultural leader but not
an organizational leader, and made no serious attempts to mobilize a body of
followers who could spread his ideas further. In addition to this, the nineteenth
century was quite possibly not a time when language could have been a forceful
enough factor to generate mass mobilization, as language choice for the most part did
not aVect people’s daily lives in any signiWcant way (with the exception of the English-
educated elites). Issues of language were consequently less likely to trigger emotional
reactions in the masses than religion, where Buddhism and its associated cultural
production could be shown to be directly threatened by the missionaries’ dissemin-
ation of Christianity and the government’s curtailment of traditional Wnancial support
for Buddhist institutions. Moving forward into the twentieth century, however, a
diVerent dynamic began to assert itself.

6.4 Sri Lanka in the Twentieth Century prior to Independence

A Wrst theme to run intermittently through much of the early decades of the twentieth
century was the need for the vernaculars to expand in their written forms, so that they
could be used in a wider range of ways in entertainment, advertising, the continually
expanding press media, and education. Sri Lanka had a considerably high rate of
literacy for South Asia (e.g. 56.4 per cent of males were assessed to be literate in 1921),
in part due to the monastic education provided by the clergy to many male Sinhalese,
and the increase in popular journalism tapping into this resource hastened the
vernacularization of written Sinhala. This subsequently triggered a vigorous reaction
from the Buddhist literati, who insisted on the preservation and expansion of classical
Sinhala into other domains, suggesting that the newly evolved journalistic, colloquial
written Sinhala was a threat to the traditional form of the language which identiWed
and linked the Sinhalese with their past civilization. As a result of continued pressure, a
compromise form Wnally emerged in more popular writings; the early heavily collo-
quial vernacular retreated to a ‘neo-classical’ mix of colloquial and classical Sinhalese,
with the emphasis more on the latter, and this became the standard form of the media,
while the literati used a more classical form. Consequently, concerns of ‘authenticity’
ruled as the most important criterion for language, and there was no sustained attempt
to install a new, more vernacular written form of Sinhala despite the need for the
language to be used much more broadly.
 Sri Lanka 125

Concerning education and the vernaculars, in addition to the private missionary

schools which taught in English, the government did provide certain public schooling
using the vernaculars as mediums of education. Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857
there had occurred a general shift among the British in South Asia away from
supporting wide-scale, full education in English, as this was seen to contain the
potential to encourage liberalism and rebellion. What came to be provided in place
of this was a considerably abridged form of education in the vernacular, terminating at
the elementary level and simply preparing students for practical life with basic reading
and writing skills. The serious study of subjects such as science, politics, and philoso-
phy was instead conWned to mostly private English-medium education, and those
who were only able to receive vernacular-medium education were cut oV from
proceeding further into university-level study. It was also English which remained
the language necessary for obtaining higher level jobs as doctors, engineers, lawyers,
and civil servants. With only a vernacular education, it was possible to Wnd work as a
teacher, notary, or member of the lower civil service, but not to accede into any of
the more prestigious, better paid kinds of employment. English therefore continued
to be perceived as the language of power and had an important ‘scarcity value’, as
English education was eVectively restricted to the upper levels of society due to its
restricted availability and high cost (and in 1911 only 2 per cent of the population were
actually literate in English). As the twentieth century began, there was consequently
a widespread perception that vernacular-medium education was of little value. A
second political theme which came to be heard with increased public voicing and
discussion of social issues in the twentieth century was for the need to broaden and
develop vernacular education further. It was argued that mother tongue education
should be made universal and that only an expanded mother tongue education would
allow students to develop a proper connection to their respective ethnic culture.
Nearer to the time of independence, there were also formal proposals to reduce the
economic domination of English, and so enhance the commercial value of the
vernaculars, by the promotion of the latter to the status of oYcial languages replacing
English in this role, as will shortly be considered.
What critically led to pressure and progress being possible in public linguistic
matters such as the above, and what was truly a major change and theme of the
Wrst half of the twentieth century, was the signiWcant increase in political power and
inXuence won by the masses as democracy gradually came to Sri Lanka under British
rule. This proceeded in a series of important steps. Following initial, very modest
requests for voting rights and government representation made by the English-
educated elite, the British allowed for the Legislative Council from 1912 onwards to
contain one elected ‘educated’ Sri Lankan, who had to have an ability in English to a
certain level, and also a certain minimal income. Then in 1921 a new constitution
resulted in increased representation for the Sri Lankans, leading to an elected majority
of Sri Lankans in the legislature in 1924. The 1921 constitution signiWcantly recog-
nized that literacy in the vernacular, rather than just in English, together with a
126 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

certain minimum of property, would qualify people to have voting rights. This
resulted in a big increase in the electorate, jumping from 3,000 in 1917 to 190,000
in 1924, and set the stage for a transformation from elite to mass politics. Prior to this,
the Sri Lankan elites had concentrated on courteous political bargaining with the
British; now there was a need for paying equal or more attention to nursing the
local electorate, especially as it was foreseen by the British that even more responsi-
bility would shortly be handed over to the Sri Lankans. The local political leadership
therefore had to focus clearly on establishing its ‘legitimacy’ with voters in Sri Lanka,
and to achieve this had to learn to use the vernacular, especially with the urban
working class, which was now emerging as a major political force.
A further by-product of the increase in political representation introduced in the 1920s
was that this resulted in a downgrading of the emphasis on Buddhism as a key symbol of
identity distinguishing the Sinhalese from others. In the new climate of hope for
increased political rights and eventual independence from the British, there seemed to
be a need for all the Sinhalese to pull together, Buddhist and Christian, and the Sinhalese
journals deliberately downplayed the separating function of Buddhism, instead empha-
sizing that they were working for national unity and campaigning against caste and
religious divisionism. Such a change in direction was furthermore keenly supported by
much of the Sinhalese political leadership, who were English-educated and very often
products of Christian missionary education, resulting in a sizeable section of this elite
being Christian.
Concerning the course of intercommunal relations in the new era of increasing
political representation, these began in a positive way with Sinhalese and Tamil
politicians working together and forming the Ceylon National Congress in 1919.
The English education which many of the elite politicians had received had the
positive side of increasing horizons beyond those of simple ethnic group, and this
led to a common stated goal of creating a Ceylonese society uniting all races on the
island. Strong and consistent aYrmations were therefore made of a Ceylonese
identity, partly also because politicians from all sides realized how important it was
in the eyes of the British to rise above communalism.
A major problem and stumbling block soon arose, however, for Sinhalese–Tamil
political co-operation. Governing the early election of Sinhalese and Tamils was a
British-introduced principle of communal representation which had the function of
safeguarding the minority Tamils and guaranteeing them a public voice in politics.
Many of the new politicians who aspired to get rid of communalism now argued
that the electoral principle of communal representation should be discarded, but the
Tamil politicians saw that this would automatically make them a political minority
and so decided to quit Congress in 1922 and form a separate, Tamil-only political
organization. In this way, the prospect of close co-operation between Sinhalese and
Tamils was seriously challenged and the Sinhalese saw the Tamil breakaway from
the mainstream nationalist movement with mistrust. A time-worn intercommunal
hostility consequently developed into a contemporary political rivalry.
 Sri Lanka 127

Increasing the potential for Sinhalese isolation and worry in the 1920s was also a
perceived threat of the demographic destabilization of Sri Lanka due to British
importation of large numbers of Tamil workers from southern India. During the
years of economic depression in the 1920s, local Sinhalese who went on strike for
higher wages were regularly replaced by cheaper, more compliant labour from south
India, leading to paranoid worries of Sri Lanka being overrun by non-Sinhalese, a
menace regularly played up by nationalist Sinhalese politicians.
Against this background of newly focused communal politics, the vernacular
language came to be a sine qua non in reaching and mobilizing the masses. Although
Congress continued to work in English, the new Sinhalese Mahajana Sabha move-
ment, launched by elite politicians to reach as much of the population who spoke the
vernacular as possible, created a breakthrough and the vernacular came to be accepted
in formal public discussion of purely political issues. This inspired its functional
expansion, and the cause of the vernacular came to be promoted by vernacular-
educated intelligentsia, often in the form of open chagrin about the English language
behaviour of the national elite in the workplace and at home. The elite were reminded
that an individual’s language behaviour could be taken to be a truer reXection of his/
her ethnic allegiance than cultural heritage as determined by birth. It was then urged
by some that (Sinhalese) voters should elect only those who remained competent in
Sinhala while they had been English-educated. The vernacular literati furthermore
realized that if they could change the special value attached to English into a new
positive, higher value for the vernacular, they could increase their own status and
economic position greatly and reverse the disadvantages they suVered from by not
knowing English.
The next signiWcant development to occur was the 1931 granting of a universal
franchise to the people of Sri Lanka, resulting in most of the country’s internal
government being transferred into Sri Lankan hands, and setting the scene for mass
political activity. The political leadership was immediately spurred to campaign for
popular issues, including attempts to expand and elaborate vernacular language
functions relative to English. Thus we Wnd in the legislature with an elected majority
the (attempted) simultaneous promotion of both Sinhala and Tamil and calls for civil
servants to have a high standard of Sinhalese or Tamil, for magistrates and lawyers
to be competent in Sinhala and Tamil, and for both vernaculars to be allowed
for proceedings in the legislature. However, as time went on, factions within the
Sinhalese community began to push for a higher status for Sinhala alone, leading to an
unsuccessful Wrst attempt to install Sinhala as the single oYcial language of Sri Lanka
in 1943. This action represented a clear parting of the ways of the Tamils and the
Sinhalese as far as language group interests were concerned, and was triggered by a
number of socio-economic factors.
First of all, the Sinhalese perceived themselves to be clearly behind the Tamils in
various important areas of the economy. Though the Sinhalese owned plantations,
the Tamils were ahead in import–export business and also, proportionately for their
128 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

number, in the civil service and select professions such as law, medicine, and engin-
eering. It was felt that the Tamils were able to make better headway than the
Sinhalese in the professions because they were ahead of the Sinhalese in English
literacy, opportunities for the learning of English being generally better in the Tamil
areas of the north, due to the existence of a larger number of missionary schools in
this part of Sri Lanka.
In addition to language-related economic reasons causing the Sinhalese to focus on
the promotion of Sinhala alone as a means to improve their situation, there were also
sociological factors which led to a heightened emphasis on Sinhala in political
agitation. In a generally positive way, there was an increased pride in things Sinhalese
in the twentieth century, including the language Sinhala. Whereas up to the nine-
teenth century the Sinhalese were a majority which had low ascribed status, by the
late nineteenth century, with the unearthing of the community’s cultural heritage, the
Sinhalese had symbols that could inspire a heightened status both inwards and
outwards to others. Contrasting with this positive attitude towards the value of past
Sinhalese civilization, however, was the painful awareness that English was commonly
regarded as the prestige language of culture, learning, and science in twentieth-
century Sri Lanka, hence that the former greatness of Sinhala was being outshone
by the domination of a foreign language. This led many to believe that there was a
need for a change, and the replacement of English by Sinhala as the single major
language of Sri Lanka in all domains.
These perceptions of group vitality and weakness were keenly felt by many of the
Sinhalese when the opportunity for mass political participation emerged in the 1930s
and the means for group preservation formally became available through legislative
and administrative processes. Although the British still kept control over Wnance and
law at this time, virtual control over the larger area of internal government passed
to Sri Lankan hands, oVering great possibilities for change, it seemed. The 1930s
and 1940s also saw pressure for change coming from various emerging Sinhalese
organizations which attempted to mobilize public opinion and urged politicians to
introduce new measures protecting and promoting the interests of the Sinhalese
community and favouring the use of Sinhala. Two organizations in particular
attracted considerable attention, the Sinhala Maha Sabha/SMS (the Great Association
of the Sinhalese), and the Hela (pure Sinhala) movement.
The SMS was formed by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike (1899–1959), a Sinhalese aristocrat
who had graduated from Oxford, and resembled other ethnicity-based and mobility-
conscious movements in colonial societies such as the Self-Respect Movement in south
India and the Getting Up Movement in Igboland. It incorporated the Sinhaladvipa
concept of Sinhalese–Buddhist ownership of Sri Lanka, and also promoted the idea
of an ‘Arya-Sinhala’ identity, an aYrmation of the pride of the Sinhalese to be related
to other Aryan nations in the north of India whose attributed prestige had been
considerably elevated by late nineteenth-century European anthropological writings.
In the new atmosphere of opportunity, as voting rights were acquired by the masses,
 Sri Lanka 129

the SMS catered to an obvious need of the day for the Sinhalese community, and was
the Wrst island-wide association giving political expression to speciWcally Sinhalese
ethnic interests.
In contrast to the SMS’s view and presentation of Sinhalese identity as multi-
faceted, the Hela movement was more narrowly characterized by a highly focused
and advanced ideological commitment to the language of the Sinhalese, and was
emphatic in placing language squarely at the emotional and intellectual centre of
ethnic identity. Formed by Munidasa Cumaratunga (1887–1944), a highly educated
scholar with an impressive knowledge of Sinhala, Pali, Sanskrit, and English, the Hela
movement denied the Arya-Sinhala identity with its Indic orientation, in order to
assert and claim an exclusively indigenous ‘Hela’ identity for the Sinhalese, derived
from no other ethnic group and born in Sri Lanka itself – hence with a Fichtean Urvolk
status. The Hela movement therefore sought a fundamental detachment from all
outside traditions and assumptions of Indic origin, and called for the restoration of
the claimed ethnic uniqueness and cultural greatness of the Sinhalese, which they
believed existed in a remote past and from which a decline had occurred only in the
recent past.
The keystone of the Helese identity was the pure Sinhala (Hela) language. In place
of the ‘land, nation, and religion’ ethno-religious trinity held up in the earlier Buddhist
cultural revival, Cumaratunga made assertions of ‘language, nation, and land’, with
language appearing foremost and displacing religion as the most prominent nation-
alist characteristic. For Cumaratunga, Sinhala in its purest, oldest Hela form was the
most important symbol of the separate and exclusive national identity of the Sinhalese
people, and one which deserved the greatest attention of the Sinhalese. In order to
promote such a pure form of the language devoid of foreign borrowings, an extensive
revitalization of Hela was attempted with the production of new literature in Hela,
textbooks for use in schools, grammatical descriptions of the language, and re-edited
versions of classical Hela texts, all aiming at the reintroduction of an enriched form of
Hela into Sinhalese life.
As the result of much dedicated eVort and organization, Cumaratunga managed
to win over a considerable section of the intelligentsia to his views, including the
Sinhalese schoolteachers, a group which had low socio-economic status and an
interest in language matters. The Hela ideology aimed at uplifting the self-esteem
of these and other non-elite intellectuals and was successful to a very clear degree in
achieving this goal. By downplaying Buddhism as a necessary important component
of Sinhalese ethnic identity and promoting language in its place, Cumaratunga was
also able to draw Sinhalese Christians into the Hela-organized group assertive activity.
The Hela movement thus reintegrated the one major section of the Sinhalese
community which had been left out by the Arya Sinhala identity.
Although it never really attained the status of a truly mass movement, in part
because some of the unconventional stances of the group were irksome to the
traditionalists, the Hela movement was a major landmark in the rise of Sinhalese
130 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

language nationalism, winning the admiration of a sizeable section of society due

to the tireless commitment of its members to the cause of the Sinhala language.
The ideology of the movement was highly signiWcant in giving expression to the
growing sense of ethno-linguistic uniqueness felt among much of the Sinhalese
community and a singular, authentic Sinhalese identity not dependent on Indic
origins. In its speciWc emphasis on the language component of ethnic identity the
movement furthermore heavily inXuenced the development of nationalist strivings
in Sri Lanka for many decades that followed. Finally, in terms of corpus planning,
constant pressure from the movement was successful in inhibiting moves to vernacu-
larize written Sinhala and prevent large-scale simpliWcations of the literary language.
In 1943, in the light of a general increase in awareness of language issues, a
resolution was brought to the consideration of the State Council seeking to establish
Sinhala (alone) as the oYcial language of Sri Lanka. The intention of those submitting
and supporting the resolution was that Sinhala would largely replace English in all
formal domains and come to have an extended new use throughout Sri Lanka in
education. The great signiWcance of the proposal was that this was the Wrst time that
there was an attempted functional expansion of Sinhala through the means of
government without the simultaneous equal promotion of Tamil, and the tabling
of the resolution caused an immediate barrage of protests from worried Tamil
members of the State Council.
The oYcial rationale given by Sinhalese politicians for the proposed adoption
of Sinhala as the single oYcial language of Sri Lanka related the situation in Sri
Lanka to that of India, which was also striving for and anticipating the achievement of
independence from the British. In India, Hindi was being promoted as an oYcial state
language with the aim of turning the tables on English, and as the one ‘national
language’ it was intended to be the basis of national unity in a multilingual society,
functioning as a common language which had the potential to establish links among
all the people of the country. A similar, national unifying role was suggested to be a
natural positive development for Sinhala, helping pave the way for greater social,
cultural, and political integration amongst the diVerent communities of Sri Lanka and
stimulating feelings of national cohesion.
Less oYcially, the call for Sinhala as single oYcial language of Sri Lanka was also a
pre-emptive defence move prompted by the ‘minority complex’ of the Sinhalese and
worries about what might happen if Tamil were to be placed on an equal footing with
it. Although the (3 million) Sinhalese were the clear majority on the island of Sri Lanka,
they were regularly concerned by the existence of the much larger 40 million-strong
Tamil population near to Sri Lanka in south India, and regionally felt like an isolated
Indo-Aryan minority potentially under threat from a local Tamil (and Dravidian)
majority. It was worried that if Tamil were to enjoy the same oYcial language status
proposed for Sinhala, on independence it would beneWt from the huge local Tamil
resources available and this might threaten the continued existence of Sinhala and its
people as a distinct ethnic group. Here the essence and vitality of the Sinhalese as an
 Sri Lanka 131

ethnic group were signiWcantly perceived to be directly dependent on the survival and
healthy state of their language Sinhala, and fears about the future of the language
translated into worries about how to sustain the broader ethnic identity of the
Sinhalese. Such real, deep-seated worries of the Sinhalese as a small community living
in the shadow of a mighty neighbour would continue to plague the Sinhalese through-
out the twentieth century and have repeatedly added an extra dimension of potential
diYculty to Tamil–Sinhalese relations. In the 1940s, they were furthermore increased
by declarations from certain Tamil politicians that the Tamils on Sri Lanka had a deep
allegiance to India and even an aspiration for the island to be incorporated into India.
Despite such concerns and despite the temptation to try to improve economic
conditions for the Sinhalese by installing Sinhala as the sole oYcial language of Sri
Lanka, the State Council (in which Sinhalese politicians were the majority) voted to
accept a Tamil proposal to amend the oYcial language resolution and add the word
Tamil in every position that Sinhala occurred, hence changing the resolution into a
proposal to replace English with both Sinhala and Tamil as co-oYcial languages of Sri
Lanka. A major reason why there was no dogged Sinhalese insistence on Sinhala
alone as oYcial language in 1943, and why there was no serious resistance to the
inclusion of Tamil as co-oYcial language in the resolution was that local politicians,
and particularly majority Sinhalese politicians, had to be extremely careful to avoid
all appearances of biased, communal activity in the eyes of the British during the
pre-independence period. It was realized that if complete independence was to be
obtained from the British (and this was expected to occur, given the continued,
gradual transfer of power from the British to local government organizations), then
it was absolutely vital that political leaders on Sri Lanka appear to be liberal,
democratic, and working towards the improvement of ethnic relations rather than
introducing measures that might increase tension and division among the people who
they represented. This eVective reining-in of any major open move towards ethnic
politics among elected local leaders caused by the continued presence of the British
prior to the granting of independence was an extremely important aspect of politics in
the 1930s and 1940s, and did much to counteract pressure from outside government
for more radical political measures (Dharmadasa 1992). In addition to this, it should
also be added that among the State Council and local leadership of Sri Lanka in
1943 there were both Sinhalese and Tamil politicians who genuinely hoped for the
emergence of a single, composite ‘Ceylonese’ national identity on the island and who
therefore did not oppose the co-promotion of both Sinhala and Tamil as joint
component parts of such an identity. The underlying potential for the 1943 oYcial
language resolution to result in serious inter-ethnic confrontation was therefore
fortunately not realized. With the British hand-over of power in 1948, however, and
the occurrence of new general elections in 1956, the forces of ethnic consciousness
and group assertion were primed and set to resurface in a powerful wave of language
nationalism which would have long-term consequences for the peace and stability of
Sri Lanka throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.
132 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

6.5 Independence and the Installation of Sinhala as Single

Official Language
Sri Lanka (still oYcially known as Ceylon) gained independence from colonial rule in
1948, a few months after India. In contrast to India where the transfer of power was
marred by massive ethnic violence, independence in Sri Lanka was gained with no
internal disturbances and the country appeared ‘an oasis of stability, peace and order’
(K. M. De Silva 1981: 489). The statesmanship displayed by the Wrst Prime Minister,
D. S. Senanayake (1884–1951), was a major factor in this regard, as he was able to bring
together leaders of all the communities in his new cabinet, including S. W. R. D.
Bandaranaike, the founder of the Sinhala Maha Sabha, and G.G. Ponnambalam
(1902–77), a Cambridge-educated lawyer who had emerged as the chief spokesman of
the Tamil cause.
Senanayake’s version of Sri Lankan nationalism was oriented towards the estab-
lishment of an equilibrium of ethnic forces within a multiracial polity, and ‘based on a
double compromise: the softening of Sinhala dominance . . . and an emphasis on
secularism’ (K. M. De Silva 1981: 496). The Wrst challenge to this new and elitist
view of all Sri Lankan nationalism came from Bandaranaike who left the United
National Party (UNP) government and formed his own Sri Lanka Freedom Party
(SLFP) in 1951. In sharp contrast to Senanayake’s conservative balancing of ethnic
interests and adherence to secularism, Bandaranaike saw the power potential to be
exploited from espousing the exclusive interests of the Sinhalese and the Buddhists,
two thirds of the total population in 1953. As a political decision, the espousal of
Sinhala–Buddhist interests by the SLFP could be understood as an attempt to change
the signiWcant socio-economic advantages still enjoyed by the English-educated,
largely Christian elite. In this connection, the main target of assertive Sinhala nation-
alism was the continuing dominant status of English, for in spite of the 1943
resolution approved by the country’s legislature, the only real changes to result
from the agreed promotion of Sinhala and Tamil were being eVected in the educa-
tional system and at a very slow pace, and elsewhere English remained dominant in
public life as before. This lack of improvement of the practical value of the vernaculars
led to frustration among many, and particularly among the large numbers of Sinhala-
educated youth who had anticipated better employment opportunities but found that
those educated in English (of which a proportionately higher number were Tamils)
continued to be privileged and in greater demand in the job market. In addition to
this, concern was also voiced by politically active Buddhist monks about the issue of
heavy Christian inXuence in the educational sphere, with the most prestigious schools
in Sri Lanka still being those run by the Christian clergy.
The 1956 general election provided the Wrst real opportunity for the masses of
independent Sri Lanka to make free, unrestrained use of their voting power and
express support for political views and promises of change which were no longer
 Sri Lanka 133

necessarily moderated in the way of pre-independence times. Tapping into this

freedom to exploit the desires and frustrations of the Sinhalese majority, the 1956
election proved to be a watershed in the history of independent Sri Lanka and saw
Bandaranaike and his SLFP riding to power ‘on a massive wave of Sinhala-Buddhist
emotion’ (Wriggins 1960: 12). The year marked two particularly signiWcant historical
events for the Sinhalese, the 2,500th anniversary of the demise of the Buddha and the
legendary/mythical founding of the Sinhala race, and oVered Buddhist activists ‘the
opportunity to appeal over the heads of the government and the political establish-
ment of the day, to the people, for a restoration of the traditional convergence of
nation, religion and ethnicity’ (K. M. De Silva 1986: 175). Concretely, as a major
symbolic gesture of Sinhalese ethnic assertion and one with important economic
consequences, Bandaranaike and the SLFP pledged to the electorate that they would
immediately install Sinhala as the sole oYcial language of the state if voted into
government, promising ‘Sinhala only, within 24 hours’. Compared with Senanayake’s
multiracial liberalism, the Sinhala-focused rhetoric and promises of Bandaranaike and
his followers seemed much more attractive to agitated and frustrated common
Sinhalese, and led to Bandaranaike’s election as new Prime Minister with a huge
majority in parliament. The latter then ensured him the mandate necessary to make
good on his pre-election pledge and a parliamentary vote resulted in Sinhala swiftly
being instated as ‘the One OYcial Language of Ceylon’.
The oYcial language resolution of 1956, promoting Sinhala above Tamil and
English for use in oYcial matters as the representative language of the state, met
with a massive wave of protest from the Tamils whose language interests seemed to be
completely left out. There were demonstrations, sit-ins, fasts, and civil disobedience
campaigns and other forms of political protest which even escalated into violence.
The Tamil community felt alienated and automatically distanced from the state as
represented by the Sinhalese-led government, and perceived that the numerically-
dominant Sinhalese majority was now setting out to exclude it from a fair future
participation in the country’s development. Although there were no immediate,
overnight changes in everyday life as a result of the language resolution, the Tamils
faced the worrying prospect that their socio-economic life would most certainly
deteriorate as the eVects of the resolution applied themselves in the years to come.
The 1956 declaration of Sinhala as the single oYcial language of the country therefore
had a tremendous importance in changing the fundamental mindset of the Tamil
population, signalling to it that it was not set to enjoy equal rights and opportunities
with the Sinhalese majority.
The tensions, fears, and problems generated by the language resolution of 1956
prompted political leaders in subsequent years to try to repair the damage it had
caused to inter-ethnic relations. Two major attempts were made in this regard during
the decade that followed: the Bandaranaike–Chelvanayagam agreement of 1957 and
the Senanayake–Chelvanayagam agreement in 1965–6. Neither of these agreements
proposing the use of Tamil in local administrative activities and the devolution of
134 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

certain administrative functions could be fully implemented, however, due to oppos-

ition from other Sinhalese politicians and their deliberate fanning of communal
animosities to inhibit acceptance of the proposals. In 1959, Bandaranaike himself
was assassinated by a Buddhist monk, and the long delay which ensued in settling the
language problem generated in 1956 led to diYculties spreading to other areas of life
and a gradual escalation of ethnic confrontation.
When Bandaranaike was killed in 1959, his widow took over leadership of the SLFP
government. In the area of language policy, Mrs Bandaranaike quickly showed herself
to be willing to make as little concession to the Tamil minority as possible, and there
were no serious eVorts to restore Tamil conWdence in the Sinhalese-led state in the
period immediately after Bandaranaike’s death. As time passed, and the eVects of the
oYcial language legislation gathered momentum, those educated in the medium of
Tamil furthermore began to feel increasingly deprived, especially in the job market.
The gradual replacing of English with Sinhala in the central administration of the civil
service, a major employer in Sri Lanka, placed those educated in Tamil at a clear
disadvantage and the lead that Tamils earlier had in securing jobs in medicine,
engineering, and government oYces was to change drastically as time went on.
Such a situation was additionally aggravated quite considerably by a decline in the
country’s economy from the mid-1950s onwards and a general increase in its popu-
lation, putting heavy pressure on competition for jobs.
Feelings of being unfairly discriminated against and left out of the development
of the country heightened among the Tamil population through the 1960s, and were
then signiWcantly focused by two new initiatives stemming from the government
in the early 1970s. The Wrst of these was a set of measures designed to increase access
to university education for students coming from remote countryside areas with less
developed educational facilities, most of whom were Sinhalese. A system of quotas
guaranteed a Wxed number of university places for students with such a background,
and resulted in a severe reduction in the number of students from educationally more
privileged backgrounds being able to get into university. As this latter reduction of
places aVected the Tamil population much more than the Sinhalese, Tamils having
previously held a disproportionately large presence in the university system, the
changes were strongly resented by Tamil youth, and interpreted as a further instance
of Sinhalese majority protectionism, even though being presented as measures to
overcome a handicap experienced by the rural population in general (C. R. De Silva
1998). Taking eVect very quickly and causing a drastic drop in the number of Tamil
students admitted to university in comparison with previous years, the new restric-
tions became a crucial factor in the hardening of Tamil opposition to the government
and led to the radicalization of an already disaVected Tamil youth.
The second government move which deeply aVronted the sensibilities of the Tamil
community was the 1972 promulgation of a new constitution which boldly aYrmed
that Buddhism had the ‘foremost place’ among religions in Sri Lanka and that it was
the duty of the state to ‘protect and foster Buddhism’. While adding an assurance that
 Sri Lanka 135

all religions on the island were to have the usual rights envisaged in democratic
societies, the singling out of Buddhism as the foremost state religion further enforced
the image the Tamils had of a Sinhalese majority dominating the oYcial identity of the
state with its language and (now) religion. The constitution also further entrenched
the position of Sinhala as the one oYcial language of Sri Lanka with sections
indicating that only laws drafted and written in Sinhala (and not translations into
Tamil) were fully legally binding, and signiWcantly removed a safeguard written in the
Wrst constitution which was designed to prevent Parliament from enacting discrimin-
atory legislation against minorities. A symbolic harking back to the days of the
Sinhalese kings was furthermore evident in the change of the country’s name from
its colonial appellation ‘Ceylon’ to the title ‘Sri Lanka’ (Auspicious Lanka).
Added to the acute employment diYculties now aZicting parts of the Tamil
population and the growing feelings of being disconnected with the state, the
government measures of the early 1970s triggered a closing of Tamil ranks, and for
the Wrst time all Tamil political parties agreed to take a united stand for the
preservation of Tamil interests, forming the Tamil United Front in 1972. Four years
later this developed further into the initiation of a real secessionist movement on
Sri Lanka with the founding of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). A
resolution passed in 1976 at the founding convention of the TULF declared that:

Successive Sinhalese governments since independence have always encouraged and

fostered the aggressive nationalism of the Sinhalese people and would have their political
power to the detriments of the Tamils. This convention calls upon the Tamil Nation in
general and the Tamil youth in particular to come forward to throw themselves fully into
the sacred right for freedom and not to Xinch until the goal of a severing, socialist state of
Tamil Eelam is reached!

The resolution emphasized the disadvantages arising for the Tamils from the creation
of Sinhala as the only oYcial language, and how this denied the Tamils equality of
opportunity in the spheres of employment, education, and economic life in general.
The 1970s also simultaneously saw aggrieved groups of Tamil youths forming
themselves into groups of armed militants and engaging in attacks on government
property and personnel. This marked an important transition of Tamil disaVection
and indicated its potential to escalate dangerously further. Realizing that something
had to be done to address the growing list of Tamil grievances or risk a deterioration
of the situation, in 1978 a new constitution was adopted which recognized Tamil as a
‘national language’ along with Sinhala (though Sinhala still remained the sole oYcial
language) for use in administration in areas where Tamils were a local majority, and
also developed certain powers to local authorities. When this system of devolution
was put into practice in 1981, it seemed to function well in the Tamil areas and
helped to defuse the build-up of troubled, separatist sentiment among the Tamils.
Unfortunately however, a catastrophe fully negating this potential progress occurred
in 1983, when the ambush and killing of thirteen Sinhala soldiers in the Tamil north
136 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

triggered widespread and deadly anti-Tamil riots. While ethnic riots had also occurred
in earlier years, those in 1983 were more widespread and qualitatively quite diVerent.
Mobs led by certain groups close to the ruling UNP led a systematic attack on
Tamil targets in Sinhala areas, and although the larger mass of the Sinhala people
did not condone the violence, this created a situation in which not the state as such
but the state and Sinhala people were seen as enemies of the Tamils. During the riots
many Tamils living in Sinhala neighbourhoods in Colombo and other Sinhala areas
lost their property and their lives, and others Xed the country to seek refuge in
neighbouring India. Reprisal attacks then followed on, carried out by Tamil militants,
with shocking massacres of Sinhalese villagers, Buddhist monks and worshippers, and
other civilian targets, and in a short period of time inter-ethnic relations on Sri Lanka
spiralled wildly out of control.
In an attempt to curb the secessionist forces that were quickly gathering momen-
tum, the government then introduced a constitutional requirement that all members
of parliament swear their allegiance to a united Sri Lanka. The Tamil political
leadership, however, refused to undertake this, and forfeited their seats in parliament,
leaving the Tamil community without parliamentary representation and causing a
new leadership vacuum. This vacuum subsequently came to be Wlled by the most
powerful and ruthless of the guerrilla groups Wghting government forces in the north
and east of Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE/Tamil Tigers), and
ushered in two full decades of violent confrontation and civil war, punctuated by
intermittent cease-Wres and talks trying to put an end to the conXict. From a situation
where the focus of attention was mainly on language-related problems resulting from
the government’s promotion of Sinhala as the single oYcial language of the state, the
deterioration of Tamil–Sinhalese relations led to a changed and dangerous new
climate in which the acquisition of territory and an independent Tamil homeland
was the key demand made by leaders of the Tamils, and violent means came to be
regularly adopted to pursue the goal of autonomy.
Today, a lasting peace has still not been reached, and though there is a strong desire
among war-weary Tamil and Sinhalese civilians for an end to the violence begun in
the 1980s, the forces set in motion by the events and decisions of the immediate post-
independence period and the Sinhala-only debacle are proving diYcult to control.
During attempts to calm Tamil calls for full separatism, in 1987 the government
formally recognized Tamil as a national oYcial language of Sri Lanka on a par with
Sinhala (with English also oYcially reintroduced as a ‘link’ language), but such a
purely linguistic move did little to change the new territorial goals of the LTTE
leadership, and the battle for independence continued. Currently it would seem
that some kind of federated partitioning of Sri Lanka may ultimately occur, with
the Tamil-majority north, and possibly the east (where there is also a large Muslim
Tamil population who do not identify ethnically with the Hindu Tamils) forming
a Tamil-governed area within Sri Lanka. However, there are many complicating
details still to be addressed and mutual suspicions abound, not least the fear among
 Sri Lanka 137

Sinhalese that the LTTE will return to its goal of establishing an independent Tamil
state once a federation has been put in place. The future is consequently still quite
uncertain, and the unity of the country as a viable multi-ethnic polity remains fragile
and menaced by worries of division.

6.6 Conclusion: Language Promotion as a Catalyst

of Ethnic Strife
The recent socio-political history of the island of Sri Lanka is an important illustration
of just how powerful and disruptive a force language can be in the emergence of new,
multi-ethnic states grappling with the challenges and diYculties of decolonization.
Just when there was a need for the forging of a new all-inclusive national identity on
Sri Lanka following independence from British rule, the potential for language to
serve as a strong, isolating symbol of ethnic identity was instead exploited by
opposition Sinhalese politicians ambitious to win votes and gain power in island-
wide general elections. Language and its manipulation as a political tool was particu-
larly eVective for courting the Sinhalese masses in 1956 as it provided a single means
and rallying point to address a range of concrete and emotive issues aVecting the
Sinhalese. Ever since the disruption of traditional lifestyles in the nineteenth century
during the colonial development of Sri Lanka there had been movements encouraging
the Sinhalese to reassert their ethnic identity and take pride in a long and glorious
past, including the Sinhaladvipa ideology that the Sinhalese as an ethnic group had a
right and duty to rule over and protect Sri Lanka as a safe haven for Buddhism.
Following the twentieth-century emphasis on the linguistic aspect of this identity,
the promotion of Sinhala as the sole oYcial language of the country was understood
to be a way for the Sinhalese to symbolically assert their prominence of position on
the island, and simultaneously protect Sinhala from the threat of Tamil with its much
larger local resources in southern India. Economically, the projected replacement of
English with Sinhala (alone) in oYcial administration also oVered the means to even
up a linguistic disadvantage the Sinhalese had come to suVer in the competition
for employment and so directly improve their opportunities for socio-economic
advancement.
The introduction of the Sinhala-only legislation in 1956 then automatically polar-
ized Sri Lankan society, however, and led to feelings of alienation among the Tamils,
who saw the privileging of Sinhala in oYcial business as being unfair and excluding
them in a signiWcant way from the development of the country and its identity.
Coupled with increased economic pressures aVecting the job market and additional
government measures perceived as promoting only the interests of the Sinhalese,
the breakdown in Tamil–Sinhala relations led on to violence, terrorism, and civil war.
Sri Lanka thus illustrates all too painfully how the rough handling of language issues
by a government largely representing the interests and identity of a single ethnic
138 K. N. O. Dharmadasa

majority in a multi-ethnic state may not simply cause feelings of disaVection, but has
the clear potential to explode into a much broader conXict which can negate all liberal
attempts to foster a multi-ethnic national identity and may even precipitate the
physical break-up of a country. In 1948 Sri Lanka was widely considered to be a
model democracy with a very promising future. Now, Wfty years after the critical
decision to establish a single oYcial state language, and the ensuing, incremental
escalation of ethnic confrontation with its entrenchment of extremist attitudes in
certain quarters, Sri Lanka is bemoaning the fact that it has ‘suVered almost every
element of tragedy that can befall a small country’ (K. M. De Silva 2000: 12), and it is
proving hugely diYcult to return the country to its potential of earlier years.
PART II
East Asia
East Asia
 7
China
Ping Chen

7.1 Introduction
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) currently contains the world’s largest single-
country population, with over 1.3 billion Chinese citizens distributed over an area
approximately three times the size of western Europe. As a modern nation-state,
China is comparatively young, having emerged during a twentieth century Wlled with
tremendous internal turmoil and social change. As a civilization populated and
maintained by a single dominant ethnic group sharing a common culture, however,
China has a vast history with a writing system dating back at least as far as 1700 bc.
This chapter examines issues relating to language and the establishment and support
of national identity in modern, post-imperial China, and how language use is pres-
ently directed in contemporary China. In doing so, the chapter will make important
reference to a distinction between ‘ideological’ versus ‘utilitarian’ views of language in
relation to the development of modern nation-states, and to the value of languages as
markers of the national, regional, and ethnic identity of their speakers.
A signiWcant ideological/utilitarian distinction can be argued to underlie the design
and implementation of diVering types of language planning and language policy in
diVerent countries, and also provides a key to a sound understanding of varying
attitudes toward issues such as multilingualism, language standardization, language
maintenance, and attrition. The ideological view is best represented in the philo-
sophy developed by German scholars such as J. G. Herder (1744–1803), J. G. Fichte
(1762–1814), and W. Humboldt (1767–1835), who saw language as a deWning character-
istic, or essence/Geist, of a nation. Language, according to this view, naturally serves as a
unifying force for nationalist movements attempting to secure statehood, and then
continues to function as a highly important symbol of the identity of nation-states
once established (and can also serve as an identifying symbol of groups of speakers of
other, sub-state sizes). The utilitarian view, on the other hand, sees language as nothing
more than a practical tool, whose value is determined mainly in terms of its eYciency,
perceived or real, in facilitating oral and written communication for its speakers in
their educational, political, social, and economic activities. A native language or dialect,
142 P. Chen

China

from this perspective, may or should undergo substantial reform, or even be abandoned
in favour of another language or dialect, if and when this is deemed to serve the
communicative needs of the people more eVectively.
With such a diVerence in approach to language in mind, the chapter will examine
perceptions of Chinese during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
periods of strong nationalist support for the modernization of China as an independ-
ent, progressive nation-state. It will be shown that during this time, the ideological
view of language was weak and sometimes simply absent from the mainstream
intellectual and political discourse, and that perceptions of the ‘national’ language
on the part of the elite of Chinese society were in fact very negative, in a way that is
both striking and quite uncommon among nationalist movements. The chapter will
then discuss the bi-dialectalism in China which has arisen as a result of the promotion
of a standard form of Chinese in the country, and notes that certain major dialects
now seem to be in clear decline in terms of populations of speakers and domains of
use. Accompanying this is the attrition of regional identity which has local dialect as
its most diVerentiating marker. Finally, the chapter discusses the status of non-Chinese
minority languages and the evolving patterns of bilingualism which exist among the
communities associated with these languages.
 China 143

7.2 A Linguistic Sketch of China

7.2.1 Chinese and its Dialects
The term ‘Chinese’ as a designation for a single language is commonly used to refer to
a grouping of regional dialects spread throughout the area of China which are clearly
related in various ways. In accordance with the latest, and also the most generally
accepted classiWcation, Chinese is composed of nine major dialects. Their names,
approximate population of speakers, and locations in terms of geographical area in
China are summarized in Table 7.1. As can be seen from the Wgures in this table, the
northern dialect known as ‘Mandarin’ in English is spoken by a huge population
covering most of north, northeast, and parts of southwest China, and greatly out-
numbers the total number of speakers of other Chinese dialects (660 million vs. 374
million).
The nine major regional dialects diVer from each other to a considerable extent in
their pronunciation, and to a lesser extent in their lexicon and grammar. Principally as
a result of the former, phonological variation, the dialects are in fact mutually
unintelligible, and the linguistic distance between, for example, Beijing Mandarin
and Cantonese can be likened to that separating English from German. Many of the

Table 7.1 Distribution of the Chinese Language in China

Approximate Number of
Name Speakers (million) Major Areas

Mandarin 660
Beijing Mandarin Beijing
Northeastern Mandarin Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning
Jiao-Liao Mandarin Shandong, Liaoning
Ji-Lu Mandarin Hebei, Shandong
Central Plains Mandarin Henan, Shaanxi, Shandong
Lan-Yin Mandarin Gansu, Ningxia
Southwestern Mandarin Sichuan, Yunan, Guizhou
Jiang-Huai Mandarin Jiangsu, Anhui, Hubei
Jin 45 Shanxi
Wu 70 Shanghai, Southern Jiangsu, Zhejiang
Hui 32 Southern Anhui
Xiang 25 Hunan
Gan 40 Jiangxi
Kejia (Hakka) 40 Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi
Yue (Cantonese) 62 Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong
Min 60 Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan, Taiwan

Based on information from Wurm 1987, Li 1987, and Hou 2002

144 P. Chen

dialects can furthermore be broken down into numerous sub-dialects which them-
selves may be mutually unintelligible, and so it is actually more accurate to refer to
the nine major dialects as ‘dialect groups’. Due to the fact that speech from (and even
within) the various regional dialect groups cannot be mutually understood, it has also
sometimes been suggested (e.g. BloomWeld 1961; P. Chen 1999: 204–5) that Mandarin,
Jin, Wu, Min, etc. could be classiWed as separate Chinese languages rather than just
dialects. However, whether linguistically correct or not, such a separation into distinct
languages does not accord with speakers’ perceptions of the varieties they have as
mother tongues, and within China the term fangyan ‘dialect’ is always used to refer to
varieties such as Cantonese and Hakka, and never replaced with the term yuyan
‘language’. There is, therefore, a widespread belief that the various forms of regional
speech present in China are varieties of a single language, Chinese.1 This perception is
further buttressed by the important fact that speakers of all regional varieties of
Chinese are connected in the use of a single, standardized written form of Chinese,
and by a long commonly-shared literary history.2
Exactly when and how the regional varieties of Chinese took their earliest shape
and evolved throughout history is still not very well known. In spite of many unsettled
issues in the history of Chinese, however, most researchers agree that the existence of
an original standard form of Chinese can be traced back to well over two thousand
years ago. In the era of Confucius (551–479 bc) this was known as yayan ‘elegant
language’, and served as the base of written Chinese and also (it is believed) as a
standard spoken form for those with (mostly oYcial) dealings across dialect bound-
aries. SigniWcantly later on, from the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), the
shared standard was called guanhua ‘mandarin’ or ‘speech of oYcials’, a term which
remained in popular use until the end of the nineteenth century when it was replaced
by the new nationalist-related term guoyu ‘national language’.3 The geographical base
of the de facto administrative standard form of Chinese also switched several times in
history. In the Sui (581–618) and the Tang (618–907) Dynasty, it was based on the local
dialect of present-day Xi’an. In the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) the base

1
Just as, for example, speakers of ‘English’ from Aberdeen in Scotland and Louisiana would feel that
they are speaking the same underlying language, even though they might not be able to understand each
other’s speech.
2
The relation of the regional dialects of Chinese to Old Written Chinese is therefore not unlike the
relation of regional forms of spoken Arabic to written Arabic. Though speakers of Levantine and Gulf
Arabic may not be able to understand each other when they speak their regional dialects, they are linked by
a common written form which is understood by all. The diVerence between modern written Arabic and
Modern Standard Written Chinese is that, while the former is considerably diVerent from any colloquial
spoken Arabic in common use, such as Egyptian Arabic, the latter is basically the written form of putonghua.
3
The term guoyu was actually used before modern times to refer to the native language of the ruling
class, which may not have been Chinese, as in the case of the early emperors of the Qing Dynasty
(1616–1911), who spoke Manchu. Guoyu in the modern sense of national language was borrowed from
Japanese, which combined two Chinese characters (meaning ‘country’ and ‘language’) to refer to the new
concept of national language borrowed from the Europeans during the Meiji Period (1868–1912). From
the late nineteenth century up until the mid-1950s, guoyu was used to refer to a newly codiWed standard
form of Chinese as the national language of China.
 China 145

switched to present-day Kaifeng and Luoyang, and then to Nanjing in the Ming and
early Qing Dynasty. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that Beijing Mandarin
subsequently replaced the Nanjing dialect as the base of this shared, oYcial lingua
franca.
The second half of the nineteenth century also marked the arousal of nationalism in
China, and the beginning of a process of the modernization of China as a nation-state,
to a large extent as a reaction to the successive invasion and military defeats of China
by Western powers since the First Opium War (1840–1842), causing a gradual,
worrying erosion of its sovereignty. The speciWc concept of a national language was
introduced into Chinese discourse from Japan in the late nineteenth century, follow-
ing Japan’s own rapid modernization. Before this period, the concept of standard
language in China was mainly applicable to written Chinese, specifying, among other
things, the proper graphic shape of Chinese characters and their pronunciation.
Concerning the latter, in traditional dictionaries this was indicated in terms of the
phonological categories that Chinese logographic characters belonged to in earlier
periods of historical development, rather than their actual pronunciation in any
contemporary vernacular. The dictionaries were of principal use for writers who
needed to select words with appropriate sounds for rhyming purposes in poem
composition, and facilitated the continued production of high literature in a classical
writing style known as wenyanwen. In addition to works written in wenyanwen, there
was also the occasional use of a written form close to genuine, contemporary speech
mainly in Northern Mandarin, known as baihuawen or ‘vernacular literary literature’.
However, prior to the twentieth century, use of baihuawen was much more restricted
and less common than the formal standard.
The National Language Movement which became increasingly active during the
early twentieth century set out to oYcially establish and promote a standard language
across the whole of China, and to replace the written standard based on Old Chinese
with one that was closer to the contemporary vernacular. Together with the creation
of a phonetic representation of Chinese as an ancillary aid for the learning of
character-based written Chinese, the development of a new standard form of written
and spoken Chinese constitute an important part of the modernization of China as a
nation-state in the twentieth century. In attempting to reach an accepted codiWcation
of the national language, it was hotly debated for more than a decade through into the
1920s whether standard Chinese should be based predominantly on the Beijing dialect
of Mandarin Chinese, or alternatively incorporate phonological features from other
dialects, such as the Nanjing dialect. The former approach eventually prevailed, and
1932 saw the publication of Guoyin Changyong Zihui ‘A glossary of frequently used
characters in national pronunciation’, which set the phonetic values of words in the
new standard spoken Chinese as predominantly those of Beijing Mandarin. Somewhat
later on, in the early 1950s, the Chinese appellation of this standard was changed from
guoyu ‘national language’ to putonghua ‘common language’, being oYcially deWned by
the government as follows (Guowuyuan 1995 [1956]: 765):
146 P. Chen

Putonghua is the standard form of Modern Chinese with the Beijing phonological system
as its norm of pronunciation, and Northern dialects as its base dialect, and looking to
exemplary modern works in baihua ‘vernacular literary language’ for its grammatical
norms.

Putonghua, as described above, and perhaps like many standard languages, is an

abstraction, and is not the native language of any real set of individuals. In
pronunciation, it is mainly based on Beijing Mandarin; in vocabulary and grammar,
it is the spoken form of the vernacular literary language commonly written by
contemporary Chinese writers. This generally excludes speciWc localisms of Beijing
dialect and has also incorporated a large number of words, phrases, and grammat-
ical features from other sources, mainly other Chinese dialects, Old Chinese, and
foreign languages (for details, see P. Chen 1999).4 Putonghua is consequently not
fully equivalent to Beijing Mandarin. Nevertheless, as a form of Mandarin does
comprise the dominant and major component of the base of putonghua (and
putonghua is commonly rendered in English as ‘Mandarin’5), speakers of Mandarin
dialects throughout the north and southwest of China Wnd the acquisition of
putonghua and its written form relatively straightforward, whereas speakers of
other dialects are at a disadvantage both in the learning of putonghua itself and in
the acquisition of literacy in general, as this is now mastery of a standardized
written equivalent of putonghua. Non-Mandarin speakers are accordingly faced with
the task of having to learn to read and write in a linguistic code which is markedly
diVerent from their native, regional form of speech. In order to assist in the
acquisition of general literary skills, speakers of southern, non-Mandarin dialects
are therefore regularly drawn to Wrst learn the spoken standard, and then convert
this knowledge of putonghua into a competence in reading and writing standard
written Chinese. The use that putonghua has here in facilitating literacy skills is, as a
result, considered to be one of the most important motivating factors in the
promotion of putonghua among dialect speakers. How putonghua has been success-
fully spread among the population, and the eVects of this for the regional dialects,
will be returned to later in section 7.4.

4
Although there was the oYcial adoption of lexical items from various dialects in the initial creation of
putonghua, in the current production of vernacular written language writers from non-Mandarin dialect
areas tend to avoid the use of expressions which are still peculiar to their own dialects, so as to ensure a
wide, national readership. Since the mid-1950s, the avoidance of dialectalisms in writing has indeed been
held to be an important aspect of the standardization of the language, in tandem with the promotion of
putonghua as a spoken standard across the country, and can even be noted as a common practice earlier in
the twentieth century when baihuawen came to replace wenyanwen as the base of modern standard written
Chinese. In contemporary Chinese Wction, it is usually very diYcult to tell the dialectal background of
writers, unless they make a conscious eVort to display their regional and dialectal identities in their
writing, which is rarely the case.
5
Hence courses in putonghua oVered in schools and universities in the West are regularly referred to as
teaching Mandarin or Mandarin Chinese.
 China 147

7.2.2 Non-Chinese Languages in China

In addition to the Han Chinese6 population in China, there are Wfty-Wve other
oYcially recognized ethnic groups in the country, generally known as shaoshu minzu
‘ethnic minorities’. According to the 1990 census, the ethnic minorities account for
8 per cent of the total population in China, and are distributed over 60 per cent of the
country. The Zhuang, with a population of 16 million, are the most populous ethnic
group after the Han. Following this, the Manchu, Hui, Miao, Uygur, Yi, and Tujia each
have a population of between 5 and 10 million, and the Mongolian, Tibetan, and
Korean, 1 to 5 million. Table 7.2 lists the major geographical areas where the ethnic
minorities are predominantly settled.

Table 7.2 Major Geographical Areas of Ethnic

Minority Groups in China
Percentage of ethnic minority
Major areas population per province

Tibet 96%
Xinjiang 62%
Qinghai 42%
Guangxi 39%
Guizhou 35%
Yunnan 33%
Ningxia 33%
Inner Mongolia 19%

Ethnic minority communities are granted a certain degree of autonomy in govern-

ment, education, and other aspects of socio-economic life by the Constitution of the
People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is stated in the 1999 Constitution of the PRC that
‘regional autonomy is practised in areas where people of minority nationalities live in
compact communities. In these areas organs of self-government are established for
the exercise of the right of autonomy.’ Currently there are Wve autonomous regions
on the provincial level, namely Tibet, Xinjiang, Guangxi, Ningxia, and Inner Mongo-
lia. On lower tiers of administration, there are 30 autonomous prefectures, 120
autonomous counties, and hundreds of autonomous villages. The government and
legislative bodies in the autonomous areas have the power to pass laws and issue
executive regulations that are adopted for special local circumstances so long as these
do not violate state laws and regulations (cf. Y. Chen 2001).
6
The term ‘Han’ is the name of the largest ethnic group in China. A common cover term for Chinese,
including all its dialects, based on the word Han is hanyu ‘Han language’, and gives rise to the associated
terms hanwen ‘written Chinese’ and hanzi ‘Chinese character/script’. A further, more recent way of
referring to Chinese in general, which is fully neutral in terms of ethnicity but somewhat more restricted
in the way it can be used, is the term zhongwen ‘Chinese language’.
148 P. Chen

Table 7.3 Distribution of Non-Chinese Languages in China

Genetic AYliation (major languages) Major Areas

Sino-Tibetan
Tibeto-Burman (Tibetan, Yi, Bai, Hani, Tujia) Tibet, Yunnan, Sichuan
Kam-Tai (Zhuang, Dong, Boyei, Dai) Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou
Miao-Yao (Miao, Mian, Bunu) Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan
Altaic
Turkic (Uygur, Kazak, Kirgiz) Xinjiang
Mongolian (Mongolian, Dongxiang, Daur) Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu
Manchu-Tungus (Xibe, Ewenki) Xinjiang, Heilongjiang
Austro-Asiatic (Va, Blang, Deang) Yunnan
Austronesian (Gaoshans) Taiwan
Indo-European (Tajik, Russian) Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia
Status undecided (Korean, Jing) Jilin, Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Guangxi

Based on information from Wurm 1987 and Fu & Wang 1987

Language is not an indispensable marker of ethnicity in China. Among the Wfty-Wve

ethnic minority groups, the Manchu and the Hui are native speakers of Chinese, and
do not have their own languages.7 Other ethnic minorities may speak more than one
language. The Yao, for example, speak at least three diVerent languages, Mian, Bunu,
and Lakkia. In total, about seventy non-Chinese languages are spoken by Wfty-three
ethnic minority groups, and these belong to the non-Sinitic branch of Sino-Tibetan,
and other language families including Altaic, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, and Indo-
European, as presented in Table 7.3.
Some minority languages, such as Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uygur have a well-
established literary tradition. Before 1949 when the PRC was founded, twenty-one
minority languages had their own writing systems. After 1949, under the auspices of
the central government, new writing systems in Roman script were devised for some
of the languages that did not have their own standard writing, and certain old scripts
underwent reform or reWnement. A total of Wfty-four writing systems for twenty-
nine minority languages are now in current use, with some languages having more
than one writing system to accommodate dialectal diversity. All the documents of
the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s
Political Consultative Conference are published in Mongolian, Tibetan, Uygur,
Kazak, Korean, Yi, and Zhuang in addition to Chinese, and there are newspapers,
journals, and television and radio services regularly provided in a range of the
minority languages.

7
More precisely, there are less than 100 Manchu people who still speak Manchu, out of a population of
10 million.
 China 149

7.3 Perceptions of Language and Nationalism in

Modern China
7.3.1 The Role of Linguistic Nationalism in Modern China
Three major shifts in political power have occurred in China over the past century. In
1911, the imperial Qing dynasty was overthrown and the Republic of China was
founded the following year. In 1927, the Nationalist government, with its capital
in Nanjing, defeated the Northern Warlords and for the Wrst time after the 1911
Revolution assumed administrative authority over the whole country in the role of a
central government; and in 1949, the Nationalist government was replaced by the
government of the PRC with its capital in Beijing. It is generally agreed by Chinese
historians that nationalism was the primary motivating force behind all three historical
events.
After a series of humiliating military defeats, Wrst at the hands of the British in the
Opium Wars, then by the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5, and Wnally by
the Allied Forces in 1900, China found itself in danger of sharing the same fate as
neighbouring countries such as Korea and Vietnam, which had been turned into
colonies by the Japanese and the French respectively. The full-scale invasion of China
by Japan in the Anti-Japanese War starting from 1937 intensiWed the sense of crisis in
the collective psyche of the Chinese people, and from the mid-nineteenth century
onwards, national independence clearly became the most ardent political aspiration of
the Chinese as a nation.
Modernization of the Chinese language then came to be an important part of the
nationalist movement in China, and synchronous with the development of China as a
modern nation-state. Dialectal diversity was considered to be a serious problem in
oral communication in China before the movement to establish and promote a
national standard began at the turn of the twentieth century, and written Chinese
was also perceived to be highly problematic. As discussed in section 7.2.1, standard
written Chinese at the time, wenyanwen, was based on the norms of Old Chinese,
which were completely divorced from the contemporary spoken language. In add-
ition to this, there was a vernacular literary language, baihuawen, but baihuawen had
only been used for informal and low culture functions such as the writing of popular
novels, scripts for folk stories and plays, and diaries. The standard writing system was
furthermore one which allowed for little variation when employed in its regular
formal functions such as state examination and oYcial documentation, and
demanded considerable time and eVort on the part of learners in the acquisition of
literacy, making it seemingly ill-suited for a modern nation-state with an intended
high literacy rate.
Contrary to the pattern attested in Europe where language has repeatedly played
an important ideological and political role in the formation of nation-states, during
the nationalist period in China the Chinese language seldom, if ever, served as a
150 P. Chen

symbol of national identity. In fact one could even say that the nationalist sentiment
for national independence and social progress in China was as strong as the
sentiment against its language, particularly the written language used in printed
materials. Far from enjoying a sacrosanct aura, the Chinese language was blamed
as one of the fundamental causes of the backwardness of the country. It was
targeted as an object for drastic reform, and some argued it should actually be
abandoned in favour of another language if attempts at reform turned out to be
unsuccessful.
In the mainstream intellectual and political discourse for more than a century
following the Opium Wars, the worrisome plight of China was attributed mainly to a
lack of proper education among the majority of the population, which in turn was
attributed to the perceived low eYciency of the language, in particular the written
language and its complicated character-based script. The acquisition of literacy in
Chinese, it was argued, was a very time-consuming burden that not many people
could undertake. Lu Zhuangzhang, the Wrst native Chinese who designed a phonetic
writing system for his Southern Min dialect, summarized a common view in the
preface to his book published in 1892:
Chinese characters are probably the most diYcult script to learn in the world . . . I believe
that the strength and prosperity of our country depends upon the physical sciences, which
can grow and Xourish only if all people – men and women, young and old – are eager to
learn and be knowledgeable. If people are to be eager to learn, then the script needs to be
phoneticized in such a way that, after they have acquired the alphabet and rules of
spelling, they will know how to read without further instruction. Speech and writing
also need to use the same language, so that what is said by the mouth will be understood
by the mind. (Lu Zhuangzhang 1892: 2–3)

In terms of its call for an alignment of spoken and written forms of Chinese and a
simpliWcation of the script (possibly by a shift to a diVerent, alphabetic representation
of Chinese), Lu expressed a very general feeling among those anxious for reform (for
further discussion, see P. Chen 1999: 165). Subsequently, the establishment and
promotion of a new spoken standard, the reform of the written language, and the
simpliWcation of the traditional writing system occurred as the three major compon-
ents in the modernization of Chinese during the nationalist movement’s drive towards
an independent, modern state of China.
In one sense, then, a very classic pattern of linguistic nationalism may have
appeared to be at work in China’s new ‘awakening’ from the late nineteenth century
onwards. Hobsbawm (2000: 160) remarks that the common path of linguistic nation-
alism sees a dialect develop into ‘a new all-purpose standard ‘‘national’’ literary
language, which will then become oYcial’. However, what makes the case with
Chinese drastically diVerent from the situation with most European languages during
their associated nationalist movements is the perception that the Chinese and Euro-
pean language reformers had with regard to their respective languages.
 China 151

7.3.2 Perceptions of the Chinese Language during the Nationalist Movement

Consider Wrst the following quotation about French by Rivarol in 1784 (from Judge
2000: 73–4):
There has never been a language in which it has been possible to write in a purer and clearer
manner than ours, a language which has been so opposed to ambiguity and all kinds of
obscurity, a language more sober and yet more gentle, more adapted to all kinds of style, a
language more chaste in its expressions, more judicious in its Wgures, a language which,
while loving elegance and ornamentation, is most opposed to aVectation.

In stark contrast to Rivarol’s eulogy of his native language, French, the following are
comments and proposals in relation to Chinese that were made in the early part of the
twentieth century by some of the most prominent intellectual and political Wgures in
China of the time:
If we don’t want China to perish, and if we want it to be a civilized nation in the twentieth
century, the best thing to do would be to abandon Confucianism and Daoism, and the
simplest way toward this end would be to abandon written Chinese, in which the Confucian
doctrines and Daoist fallacies were recorded. After written Chinese is abandoned, . . . we
should adopt Esperanto, an artiWcial language that is concise in grammar, uniform in
pronunciation, and elegant in its word roots. (Qian Xuantong 1935 [1918]: 144)
In the period of transition (before the Chinese language is abandoned), we need to Wrst
abolish the Chinese script. The Chinese language may be maintained for the time being,
but should be written in Roman script. (Chen Duxiu 1935 [1918]: 146)
I completely agree with Mr. Chen Duxiu on his proposal to abolish the Chinese script
while maintaining the Chinese language for the present. I believe China should have a
phonetic writing system in the future. (Hu Shi 1935 [1918]: 146)
There are many impediments to the dissemination of knowledge among the Chinese.
Two of them have been disastrous. The Wrst is having living human beings use the
language of the dead; the second is the continued maintenance in modern life of a script
that is both primitive and clumsy. . . The origin of the Chinese script is extremely
uncivilised, and its graphic shape very bizarre. It is extraordinarily diYcult to learn, and
uneconomical to use. Indeed, it is the clumsy, coarse script of monsters and demons, and
the most inconvenient tool in the world. (Fu Sinian 1935 [1919]: 147)
The Chinese script is certainly an eVective tool of obscurantist policy. . . and the tuber-
culosis of the labouring masses. If we don’t get rid of these insidious germs, we will end up
dead ourselves. (Lu Xun 1934: 160)
Chinese characters are like the Wlthiest, most abominable, most wicked, medieval night
soil cesspit. (Qu Qiubai 1953 [1931]: 690)

Considerable space has been used here to present these views in order to highlight two
points (cf. Gao 2003 for more of similar views). First, all of the above writers were
clearly Wlled with very strong negative feelings towards written Chinese, and in
152 P. Chen

particular the use of traditional Chinese characters. With some of them, the negative
feelings extended to the Chinese language per se. Second, these very negative percep-
tions of the Chinese language, in particular of wenyanwen and the script, were not
the idiosyncratic ravings of a few eccentric professors. All of these writers belonged
to, and indeed constituted, the intellectual elite of Chinese society in the Wrst half of the
twentieth century, wielding tremendous inXuence upon their contemporaries and
following generations. Hu Shi (1891–1962), Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), and Fu Sinian
(1896–1950) were leaders in the May 4th New Culture Movement in 1919, which
marked the beginning of Modern China. Hu Shi and Fu Sinian were also both
presidents of the prestigious Peking University. Lu Xun (1881–1936) was generally
recognized as the most prominent writer and thinker of his time. Chen Duxiu was
the founding General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1921, and Qu
Qiubai (1899–1935) held the same position in 1927. More importantly, language plan-
ning and language policy in the successive governments were mainly in the charge of
these people and their like-minded colleagues. Qian Xuantong (1887–1939) was the
designer of the Wrst scheme of simpliWcation of the Chinese script, which was promul-
gated by the Nationalist government in 1936. The founding chair of the Wrst oYcial
language-planning institution of the People’s Republic of China, the Association of the
Reform of Chinese Script, was Wu Yuzhang (1878–1966), a close ally of Qu Qiubai on
language reform, and Wu and Qu, together with certain Soviet linguists, were the
engineers of the design of an inXuential phonetic writing system for Chinese, Ladinxua
Sin Wenz ‘Latinized New Script’, the precursor to Hanyu Pinyin ‘Chinese Phonetic
Writing’ (which has been the oYcial phonographic scheme of Chinese in the PRC
since the mid-1950s, and is extensively used elsewhere in the world for the representa-
tion of Chinese in various functions). It is largely thanks to the successful eVorts and
failures of these individuals in initiatives in language planning that the Chinese language,
in respect of the spoken and written standard and its writing system, is what it is now.
All of these prominent Wgures in twentieth-century China held sincere and strong
nationalist sentiments, and in their respective ways played important and highly
commendable roles in the nationalist movement working for modernization of the
country. On the other hand, as demonstrated in the above quotations, they held
minimal respect for the Chinese language, and the Herderian ideological view of
language as the treasured essence of a nation and its people was completely absent
among them. To the extent that they did take a keen interest in language, and
participated actively in the reform of the Chinese language, they were putting into
practice a fully utilitarian view of language that had no place for the ideological value
of Chinese in the national identity. Indeed, perhaps at no other point in modern
history has the intellectual and political elite of a major emerging nation seemed to
hold its mother tongue in such apparent abhorrence, and used such strong depreci-
atory language in condemnation of the language. There were, to be sure, certain
dissenting voices defending the Chinese language, but these were generally weak and
few and far between, at least in the Wrst half of the twentieth century, and the views
 China 153

presented above prevailed in the mainstream discourse on language in China from the
late nineteenth century well into the Wrst half of the twentieth century, and to some
extent, have even persisted to the present time.
How should we now explain this rather unique situation in which highly negative
perceptions of the Chinese language, and particularly of written Chinese and the
Chinese script, dominated mainstream thinking and discussion in modern China?
Broadly, it can be suggested that there were three principal factors contributing to
such a situation, the Wrst of these having to do with the historical development of China
and how this may have been diVerent from the development of nations elsewhere.
With regards to Europe, it is well documented that language played an important
ideological and political role in the formation of its nation-states, and particularly in
Central and Eastern Europe, serving to arouse the self-awareness of speakers as
groups distinct from neighbouring peoples speaking other languages. As observed
by B. Anderson (1983: 66), the Herderian concept of the nation being linked to
language as a private property ‘had wide inXuence in 19th century Europe and,
more narrowly, on subsequent theorizing about the nature of nationalism’. ‘National
print-languages’, Anderson also remarks (1983: 71), ‘were of central ideological and
political importance’ in the formation of nationalism in Europe between 1820 and
1920. Linguistic nationalism, embodied in the publication of important works in a
vernacular, standardization of the vernacular, and its promotion to the state of being a
language Wt for all formal and oYcial functions, was an integral part of nation-state
building. Language and nationalist movements in Europe were felt to be very closely
linked in many cases, so that (for example) the birth of Hungarian nationalism was
considered to be an event which occurred in 1772 with the publication of certain
works of literature in the Hungarian language.
Unlike the European nation-states, however, China as a civilization, and as a nation
in a pre-modern sense, had been a historical given for millennia. Before the advent of
modern times it had been a country with a central government, and had used a
common written language since the imperial Qin Dynasty (221–206 bc). The series of
events occurring since the mid-nineteenth century certainly developed a sense of crisis
over the survival of the nation in the face of foreign invasion, but the existence of the
Chinese as a nation, in the traditional and the modern sense, was taken for granted.
Consequently there was no real need for language to serve as a symbol of identity or
a bonding force in the national awareness of the Chinese people.
Secondly there was a political factor. Although prior to the twentieth century China
was ruled for three hundred years by foreign Manchu emperors in the Qing Dynasty,
language was seldom a politicized issue during this time and not part of the tension
that existed between the ruling Manchu and their mostly Han subjects. This was for
the simple reason that the foreign rulers abandoned their own language and adopted
Chinese. During the conquest of China proper by Manchu troops, Han Chinese men
were sometimes executed for refusing to wear their hair in braids of the same special
style as the Manchu, but were never pressurized to learn Manchurian, and continued
154 P. Chen

to speak and write in Chinese just as in previous times. As language consequently

played no signiWcant political role in the three hundred years of rule by a non-Han
dynasty, it could not, and did not, serve as a symbol of identity for the non-Manchu
subjects in the Wrst nationalist movement that led to the overthrow of the dynasty in
1911. Such a situation then remained more or less the same in the following decades
in China as nationalism grew stronger, and language was not focused on as a symbol
of the nation’s identity.
A third factor relates to certain key linguistic features characterizing China before
the National Language Movement. As discussed in section 7.2.1, a large proportion of
the Chinese population spoke mutually unintelligible dialects prior to the spread of
putonghua. To most regional dialectal speakers, the lingua franca that did exist at the
time in a restricted fashion ( guanhua) was actually of low prestige, and often referred
to with a derogatory tone. In the face of both severe dialectal diversity, and the low
status of guanhua, no spoken vernacular was available to serve as a strong and proud
symbol of the Chinese nation.
The striking lack of the use of language as a positive symbol to mobilize citizens
during the nationalist movement in China can therefore be explained as having
multiple, converging causes, and in the absence of positive properties being associated
with Chinese at this time, those responsible for the linguistic development of China as
an emerging, modern nation-state came to focus on the ineYciencies that they
perceived in especially the written form of the language, these being seen as critically
holding the common people back from developing as a modern nation.
If one is, however, to try to be objective and Wnd positive eVects of the Chinese
language on the cohesion of China as a single nation-like unit, even though not
highlighted by observers at the time of nationalist growth, somewhat ironically it is
the traditional writing system of Chinese with its complicated script which is likely to
have served as the strongest connecting bond among the Chinese people, otherwise
largely separated in communication by the existence of mutually unintelligible
dialects. As observed in P. Chen (1999: 128), ‘in spite of the remarkable diVerences
between dialects, the fact that there has been a single written standard makes the
Chinese language less of a disintegrating force than would otherwise be the case’.
Before the establishment and promotion of a spoken standard, which attained some
success only in the second half of the twentieth century, it was in fact the print
language that embodied a common Chinese-ness with regard to the linguistic aspect
of the national identity. Chinese people shared the same written language and script
across time and distance for so long that it became taken for granted, and was, in the
words of Hobsbawm (2000: 57) ‘not so much a group criterion as something that all
people have, like legs’. Though such a point was not appreciated and made use of
during the nationalist development of China, it is nevertheless an important covert
fact about the unifying eVect of Chinese writing for much of the history of the
country and its huge population.
 China 155

7.4 Language Reform, Putonghua, and the Regional Dialects

The Chinese language, ultimately, was not abandoned, but it has now undergone
signiWcant reform with regard to its standard spoken and written forms, and its
writing system.
Reform of the style and conventions of language used in written Chinese was a
complete success. Baihuawen replaced wenyanwen as the base of a new written
standard and eliminated the earlier signiWcant distance between written and spoken
forms of Chinese, increasing access to reading and writing and the potential use of
written Chinese by common people.8 Concerning the actual orthographic represen-
tation of written Chinese, which had caused such heated discussion during the
nationalist movement, attempts to replace Chinese logographic characters with a
phonographic, alphabetic writing system were not successful, despite decades of
eVort on the part of language planners whose theoretical assumptions were based
on strong negative perceptions of the Chinese script. Importantly there was no lack of
political support for such a change, as evidenced by repeated calls from the national
language planning institution and the senior leadership in the 1950s to move in the
direction of phonetization. The cause of the failure was instead a simple linguistic one.
Considerable dialectal diversity, and the existence of over-many homophonous mor-
phemes and words in contemporary Chinese makes the phonetic, alphabetic writing
of Chinese for everyday use an unfeasible option. What did happen to the script,
however, is that it underwent a thorough simpliWcation process in which many of the
complex, traditional characters had their shapes converted into new simpliWed char-
acters requiring fewer strokes. Although this did not reduce the overall, large number
of characters to be learned for written Chinese, it endeavoured to make the characters
easier to memorize and reproduce as a way to facilitate the acquisition of reading and
writing. The traditional script was thus given a new appearance in the utilitarian
interests of improving literacy in the country, just as the classical style of written
Chinese, wenyanwen, was abandoned and replaced by a more colloquial style that was
easier to master.9

8
In certain quarters it was claimed that the syntactic reforms of written Chinese also brought the
written language closer to that of various European languages such as English. Wang Li, an eminent
Chinese linguist, observed in 1954 that, as a result of much development of Chinese in its grammatical
structure, articles in newspapers and magazines could be translated into English and other similar
European languages almost in a word-for-word manner without substantial alteration of the structure
(Wang 1980 [1954]: 31; P. Chen 1999: 86). Objections were occasionally raised to this perceived ‘Euro-
peanization’ of Chinese, but did not have much eVect on changes occurring in Chinese, which continue to
occur in the present.
9
The simpliWcation of Chinese characters in mainland China resulted in a system of writing that has
become visually distinct in many of its common characters from that used in other Chinese communities,
such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese communities in southeast Asia, North America, and
Europe, where traditional characters continue to occur (though these are used to write in a modern style
that is close to spoken Chinese, as in mainland China).
156 P. Chen

The vocabulary of standard spoken and written Chinese was also considerably
expanded during the period of reform and modernization, so that a shared, standard
form of the language would be available for use in speech and in writing in all domains
of life, including those relating to science, education, government, and modern admin-
istration. The particular way that nations undertake this kind of expansion of standard
languages is often interesting to observe and may frequently be informative about
attitudes towards language as a national symbol. ‘Philological nationalism’ and the
insistence on the linguistic purity of a national language’s vocabulary can be noted to
have occurred in many instances where new nations are being constructed, or estab-
lished nations are being defended against foreign cultural inXuences. In the area of
vocabulary and the importation of loanwords, nationalist views considering language an
important symbol of the identity of a nation may apply pressure for the translation of
loanwords into equivalent morphemes and words in the national language rather than
the direct adoption of foreign words and their pronunciation (see, for example, the
protectionist policies against franglais adopted by the French Academy, or Hobsbawm
2000 on German). Resistance to the general introduction of foreign loanwords has
been rather weak in Chinese. The period before and after the Sino-Japanese War
in 1894–5 saw an inXux of loanwords from Japanese into Chinese on an unprecedented
scale, and the process of borrowing words from other languages, particularly European
languages, accelerated strongly after that. However, it has frequently been observed
that there is a strong preference to translate foreign words into Chinese,10 rather
than just adapt foreign pronunciations to the phonology of Chinese. In Wang (1980
[1954]) it is suggested that this kind of semantic translation, rather than phonetic
transliteration, reveals the national self-esteem of the Chinese-speaking people and a
protective instinct towards the national language. If so, this would seem to be an
instance where ideological issues do aVect language policy with regard to Chinese,
and attribute an important nationalist symbolic power to the language. Such a conclu-
sion is actually not justiWed, though, and there are good reasons to believe that the
preference for the semantic translation of loanwords into Chinese has more to do with
the nature of the Chinese writing system than with national self-esteem. In the over-
whelming majority of Chinese words, each logophoric character is also an independent
morpheme, resulting in a common one-character-one-meaning correspondence in the
language. Speakers of Chinese are so used to this correspondence that a string of
characters used to represent the pronunciation of a foreign word with no regard for
the inherent meanings of the characters used to capture this pronunciation does not Wt
well with their reading habits, and hence is widely dispreferred (see P. Chen 1999 for
further discussion).
In tandem with the reform and development of written Chinese, the promotion of
putonghua in mainland China came into full swing in 1955. With the exception of the

10
An exception to this is the case of loanwords from Japanese which are already written in Chinese
characters and hence very easy to make use of without the need for further translation.
 China 157

chaotic decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), it has continually been a major
task of language-planning institutions of the central government, and a series of
executive directives and regulations have been issued by government institutions at
various levels that relate speciWcally to its promotion. Over time, putonghua has
steadily expanded in domains of use, and increasingly speciWc standards have been
set on the proWciency levels of those who are required to speak putonghua in their
work. A directive by the Ministry of Education in 1989 stipulates that, except in ethnic
minority areas, putonghua is to be used as the medium of instruction in classrooms
from kindergartens through primary schools to lower middle schools across the
country. It was further announced by the Ministry of Education in 2003 that all
teachers, television and radio broadcasters, actors and actresses, public servants, and
normal school graduates must pass a test in putonghua proWciency to meet their job
qualiWcations. Attempting to enforce such a directive, it was reported in Shanghai that
public servants who fail to meet a certain proWciency level of putonghua will further-
more lose their jobs.
Generally speaking, the promotion of putonghua as a national language has been
very successful. Within the all important area of education, an overwhelming major-
ity of urban schools in the regional dialect areas have adopted putonghua in all of their
school activities. For example, in the province of Guangdong, where Cantonese
is the dominant local dialect, putonghua is generally used in more than 83 per cent
of primary schools in the capital city of the province, Guangzhou. The percentage of
schools which commonly use putonghua for all purposes is even higher in the areas of
certain other dialects such as the Min and Wu dialects. In rural areas, however, the
situation is somewhat diVerent, and particularly so in poor rural areas, where
qualiWed teachers are more diYcult to Wnd and retain. In rural areas of Guangdong,
for example, it is reported that putonghua is used in only 50 per cent of primary
schools. Given the widespread use of putonghua in teaching, as the medium of
instruction and in other activities in school, a person’s competence in putonghua
correlates quite closely with the length and quality of education that she or he has
received. Those who have received nine years of schooling or more can normally be
expected to understand and speak putonghua reasonably well. The increasingly wide-
spread outreach of television and radio broadcasting by national stations based in
Beijing, which almost exclusively use putonghua, has also greatly facilitated the
popularization of standard spoken Chinese across the country. As discussed in
P. Chen (1999), as much as 90 per cent of the Chinese-speaking population has now
acquired comprehension proWciency in putonghua, and more than half of the popula-
tion can speak it with varying degrees of Xuency.
As a result of the spread of putonghua, a situation of diglossia now obtains in
regional dialect areas in China where members of the population are proWcient in
both putonghua and a local dialect of Chinese. In such areas, putonghua occurs as the
High/H language, normally used in education, mass media, government, public
service, and for all formal purposes. It is generally perceived as the linguistic code
158 P. Chen

of prestige and upward social mobility, representing good education, high culture,
intelligence, and all the other trappings of elitism. Among university professors,
government oYcials, and company managers, it has been observed that use of putong-
hua has come to be the norm, even if such people can also Xuently speak a local dialect.
Local dialects, by way of contrast, function as the Low/L-domain languages, and are
mainly used among family members and friends, and in informal environments. While
dialects, as markers of regional identity, are normally associated with folksiness, famil-
iarity, and friendliness, they may also sometimes be taken as markers of vulgarity, at
least in some parts of the country like Shanghai, according to the observations of certain
sociolinguists.
In policy as well as in practice, bi-dialectalism in putonghua and a local dialect has
been a goal of language planning in China since the mid-1950s. Whereas much eVort
has gone into the promotion of putonghua, generally speaking no harsh measures have
been taken against the use of regional dialects.11 Except in radio and television
broadcasting and Wlm making where the use of dialects is strictly regulated and
restricted to certain types of programmes, for a long period of time it has been
practically up to individuals whether they use putonghua or local dialect in their
everyday activities. Consequently, it is not uncommon to Wnd people, particularly
those beyond middle age, using local dialects on occasions where putonghua is normally
expected, such as in formal oYcial or business functions. Language selection here is
more or less open to personal choice, much in the same way that individuals exhibit
diVerent preferences in food and clothing.
As perhaps might be expected, the increasingly popular use of putonghua has also
been accompanied by attrition of other dialects in terms of population of speakers and
domains of use, particularly among the younger generation. The pace and the extent
of attrition varies with regard to the diVerent regional dialects. Of the three major
southern dialects, Yue, Wu, and Min, Yue (Cantonese) is relatively stable, but the latter
two have shown signs of decline over the past decade. Generally speaking, the
attrition of regional dialects is most evident in two kinds of physical environment.
The Wrst is large cities which have sizeable migrant populations. The second is areas
with a wide spread of diVerent local dialects. The conurbation of Shanghai is a good
example of the former, while the latter is best illustrated by Min-speaking areas such
as Fujian province in the southeast part of China.
Considering the situation in Shanghai Wrst, the dominant local dialect of the city is
a Wu dialect which has been a high-prestige dialect in the wider Wu-speaking areas
over the past century. In spite of its higher sociolinguistic status in comparison with
other Wu dialects, the Shanghai dialect has shrunk considerably in its population of
speakers and domains of use. For example, it has been reported that dozens of verbs
which are peculiar to the Shanghai dialect and do not exist in putonghua are now no

11
This contrasts with the situation in Taiwan and its promotion of guoyu from 1945 through to the late
1980s (see P. Chen 2001a and Simpson, this volume, chapter 11).
 China 159

longer used by native Shanghai university students, and the use of Shanghainese
among younger generations has been conWned to the description of activities involved
in daily life, such as eating, work, and participation in family life. For topics of a more
serious nature, putonghua is used. In addition to this, people of the younger gener-
ation, particularly those who were born in or after the 1990s of parents with good
education, tend to adopt putonghua, rather than the Shanghai dialect, as their Wrst
language, using it at home as well as in school. Similar dialect attrition is also evident
in other Wu-speaking areas. It is reported that in Jinhua, a Wu dialect city in Zhejiang
province, all children from 6 to 14 years old are able to speak putonghua, whereas only
23 per cent of them speak the local Jinhua dialect Xuently, and a signiWcant 52 per cent
cannot speak the local dialect at all.
A related situation of attrition has been observed among the young in Min dialect-
speaking areas. Putonghua is now reportedly the only language used by many children
in kindergartens and primary schools and at a higher level of education, it is found
that a large number of local university students are no longer able to speak the Min
dialect with any Xuency, and do not understand idioms and colloquial expressions in
local dialect.
The occurrence of dialect attrition in the country did not attract attention until
quite recently. During the past few years, the Wrst voices of concern over the decline,
and possible eventual death of certain of the dialects have begun to be heard, and it has
been suggested that measures should be taken to halt this decline. SpeciWcally, it has
been proposed that more airtime should be given to television and radio programmes
in local dialects, and that school children should have some hours of their weekly
schooling taught in the local dialect instead of putonghua. However, in the main it
is a very small number of linguists who have shown concern over the weakening
of dialects in the face of an increasingly dominant putonghua. Ordinary people in the
dialect areas display little interest in such issues, and do not seem to care about the
decline of dialects. In fact, as pointed out recently by a journalist in Shanghai, students
and parents now appear to be much more enthusiastic about enhancing their
proWciency in English than maintaining the local dialect.
In Edwards (1985: 71) it is observed quite generally that ‘bilingualism is often only
a temporary phenomenon, [later] replaced with dominant-language monolingual-
ism’. Nevertheless, it can also be noted that two languages or two dialects can in fact
co-exist for a long period of time if their maintenance is backed by political (and
sometimes also Wnancial) support from the government of a country, and where there
exist important domains of use for each language or dialect, and special values
attached to each. Turning to consider China’s oYcial government policy and position
on the regional dialects and their relation to putonghua, in 1955 the People’s Daily, the
oYcial mouthpiece of the central government in Beijing, editorialized that:
Putonghua serves the whole population and dialects serve the needs of people in their own
regions. Promoting putonghua does not mean that dialects would be abolished. It is only
160 P. Chen

intended to gradually narrow the scope of uses of the dialects, which is in conformity with
objective laws of social progress. Dialects should, and will co-exist with putonghua for a
considerably long period of time. (People’s Daily Editorial, 26 October 1955)

At the same time, two prominent scholars in the national language-planning institu-
tion, Luo Changpei and Lü Shuxiang, maintained that:
The national common language, in the course of its development, will absorb nutrients
from other dialects. The national common language will take from dialects all the
elements which are full of vitality and essential to its development, leaving out those
which have synonymous expressions in the national language. Dialects will have less and
less to contribute to the national common language, and they will gradually dwindle and
eventually die out as a result of the eVect of the national common language. However, this
will be a very long process. The formation of the national common language is not
conditional on the extinction of the dialects. The former simply precedes the latter.
(Luo and Lü 1955: 88).

Obviously, while dialects are allowed to co-exist with putonghua, there has been little
eVort, if any at all, on the part of language-planning institutions to actively support or
promote regional dialects. As just one example of such lack of support, it can be noted
that all applications in the 1990s from non-Beijing Mandarin areas for permission to
launch TV and radio broadcasting services and newspapers in local dialects were
rejected by the central authorities.
On the other hand, folk arts unique to regions of the country, such as local operas,
story telling, comic dialogues, etc. are performed in local dialect, and this is still an
area of language use where local dialects hold on strongly. However, it is unlikely that
folk art forms, in and of themselves, contribute signiWcantly to the maintenance of the
local dialects, as they have long lost their appeal to people of younger generations in
the competition against other forms of entertainment such as cinema, sports, and
television.
The only important remaining factor that may stimulate long-term maintenance of
local dialects in the face of the much more powerful putonghua is the unique, high
value that speakers may attach to their local dialect, their ‘language loyalty’. In this
regard, the regional dialects appear to diVer to certain degrees. For example, Tsou and
You (2003: 260) suggest that Cantonese commands a higher degree of loyalty than the
Wu or the Min dialects do. In most areas which do not feature high loyalty to local
dialects, it is essentially on the basis of pragmatic considerations that individuals
decide which language to make use of. In this respect, putonghua is usually considered
to be of much higher instrumental utility than the regional dialects. Even among
Cantonese speakers, pragmatic motivations often override language loyalty, and Pan
(2000) observes a clear increasing trend over the past decade among native salespeople
in Guangzhou to switch to putonghua in order to attract customers and facilitate
business transactions. Generally speaking, putonghua and the regional dialects in
present-day China are each associated with distinct levels of socio-economic status.
 China 161

Urban, well-educated, young people in regional areas are more likely than other
members of the population to be proWcient in putonghua, and are more likely to use
this in their work and everyday life. On the other hand, rural, poorly educated, and
elderly people are more likely to be mono-dialectal, or poor speakers of putonghua. If
young people Wnd little appeal in a local dialect in the face of another much stronger
language, that dialect will certainly be in jeopardy. It seems that an increasing number
of people of the younger generation in China have decided that the high prestige of
putonghua and its usefulness as the base of standard written Chinese outweigh any
positive feelings of attachment to a regional identity embodied by the local dialect.
With some speakers, such a regional identity is in fact not something to be valued in
the Wrst place. The decline of various major Chinese dialects is consequently already a
reality, and the death of many of the dialects in the not too distant future is something
which would seem to be distinctly likely.

7.5 Ethnic Minority Languages

The relationship between the Chinese nation and the various ethnic groups in China,
in the dominant view, is characterized in terms of the notion duoyuan yiti ‘pluralistic
integrity’, which was proposed by the eminent Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong
in 1989, and has since been extensively accepted by the mainstream academic
community and the government in China. In this view, the Chinese nation is a
structure composed of two levels: on the lower level is a pluralistic base composed
of more than Wfty distinctive ethnic groups, and these groups together constitute an
integral whole on the upper level. It is maintained that the Chinese nation has been in
existence since ancient times, but its identity awareness has awakened and developed
only in modern times during the course of confrontation with Western powers in
China beginning in the nineteenth century (Fei 1999: 3). Accordingly, citizens of China
may have two basic group-oriented identities, one as a member of the Chinese nation,
and a second as a member of a particular ethnic group. For the Han, the Chinese
language is a marker of both of their identities, but for the ethnic minorities, their
ethnic language, if they have one, is Wrst and foremost a marker of their ethnic
identity.
When the PRC was Wrst established, the oYcial policy of the new state towards
ethnic minorities within its borders was that all ethnic minorities should have the
freedom to make use of their own languages and scripts, but should also be encour-
aged and helped to acquire Chinese. In the Wrst decade after 1949, an accommodative
approach was subsequently adopted toward the use of indigenous ethnic languages in
government, education, and other social, cultural, and economic activities in areas
where ethnic minorities had a signiWcant presence. Under the auspices of the central
government in Beijing, new writing systems were designed for some minority
languages which did not have a standard script and old writing systems underwent
162 P. Chen

reform so that ethnic minority children could receive primary and secondary educa-
tion in their own language. This policy was, however, disrupted during the period
of 1958–77, when a more heavily assimilative approach toward the minority languages
prevailed. It was advocated at this time that it would be more useful for ethnic
minorities to learn Chinese than their minority languages, and Chinese should
consequently be adopted as the medium of instruction in schools in the minority
regions. With the end of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s, and a redirection
of government thinking, since 1977 the central government has once again basically
switched back to its pre-1957 accommodative approach towards the minority lan-
guages. More recently, issues relating to the use of languages in ethnic minority areas
have been highlighted in certain laws, policy statements, and executive regulations
issued by the central government (M. Zhou 2003). The 1999 Constitution of the PRC
reaYrms the freedom of ethnic groups on language issues in a range of articles
partially quoted below. It should be noted that in the common English translation of
these and other related oYcial documents, the word ‘nationality’ often occurs
where ‘ethnic group/minority’ might be expected to occur. This relates directly to
the idea of ‘pluralistic integrity’ referred to above, and the view that the Chinese
nation may be comprised of a set of many (lower level) nationalities. It also results, in
part, from the fact that in Chinese there is no speciWc word for ‘nation’ that is distinct
from ‘ethnic group’, and the word minzu is used to refer to groupings of both types.
Because of this, the translation of minzu as ‘nationality’ when actually referring to
sub-national ethnic groups is both common and not seen to conXict with the notion
of China as a higher order nation/minzu encompassing various ‘ethnic’ minzu/
nationalities.12
Article 4: . . . The people of all nationalities (ethnic groups) have the freedom to use and
develop their own spoken and written languages, and to preserve or reform their own
ways and customs.
Article 121: In performing their functions, the organs of self-government of the national
autonomous areas, in accordance with the autonomy regulations of the respective areas,
employ the spoken and written language or languages in common use in the locality.
Article 134: Citizens of all nationalities have the right to use the spoken or written
languages of their own nationalities in court proceedings. The people’s courts and
people’s procurators should provide translation for any party to the court proceedings
who is not familiar with the spoken and written languages in common use in the locality.

12
This ambiguity (or wider coverage) of the Chinese word minzu is, to some extent, similar to the
situation with the English word nation about a century ago. The word nation originated in Latin and was
borrowed into English from French. The present concept of ‘nation’, used in its political sense, is a
relatively recent phenomenon in English. As observed in Hobsbawm (2000: 18) ‘the New English Dictionary
pointed out in 1908 that the old meaning of the word envisaged mainly the ethnic unit, but recent usage
rather stressed the notion of political unity and independence.’ The concept of minzu in Chinese diVers
from that of nation in English in that it is hard to tell which of the two senses of minzu is more common in
modern Chinese, ‘nation’ or ‘ethnic group’.
 China 163

More concrete measures have been initiated in several other laws and executive
regulations that followed the 1999 constitution, such as the PRC Law on the National
Common Language and Script, and the Law on Regional Autonomy for Minority
Ethnic Groups in the PRC, both passed at the national level in 2001. Autonomous
regions, prefectures, and counties have also passed local laws and regulations speciW-
cally relating to the use of languages and scripts along the same lines as the consti-
tution and other state laws, and these now facilitate the implementation of the oYcial
policy on language use in ethnic minority communities.
At the same time, it has to be noted that it has always been oYcial policy to
promote putonghua nationwide, and ethnic minority communities are not exempted
from this. Competence in Chinese in addition to local minority languages has been
actively encouraged among minority people, and so has competence in minority
languages on the part of the Han working in minority areas. Bilingualism in a
minority language and Chinese is in fact a major goal of language planning in
minority areas. According to the relevant regulations, eVorts should be made to
ensure as much as possible that both minority languages and Chinese are used in
education, government, mass media, and other major socio-economic activities in
ethnic minority communities, and minority languages can be considered as the
principal languages in areas with a predominantly ethnic minority population. Schools
consisting mainly of minority students should use textbooks in minority languages
and adopt minority languages in the classroom, and Chinese should be taught starting
from the upper years of primary school or from lower middle school.
If we now consider how general linguistic pressures have aVected the speech
patterns of China’s ethnic minorities, these can be classed as falling into three
major groups with regard to the bilingualism of their speakers in both a minority
language and Chinese, mainly depending on whether the groups have had a long
history of close contact with Chinese, and whether they have an established literary
history (Dob 1992, Y. Zhou 1992).
The Wrst group is composed of ethnic minorities such as the Tibetans, the Uygurs,
and the Kazaks. These peoples each have an established literary tradition in their own
ethnic language, and have a spoken form which is generally accepted as a standard
language and extensively used in their own community for various socio-economic,
educational, and administrative purposes. The languages of these minorities have
furthermore all served as important markers of the ethnic identity of the groups
which speak them. Historically they have generally not had much close contact with
the Han Chinese in their everyday life. As a result of these factors, the number of
bilingual speakers of a minority language and Chinese in these communities is
relatively low.
Ethnic minorities in the second group include the Mongolians, the Zhuang, the Yi,
and the Miao. Many of these minorities have lived in mixed communities with Han
Chinese. Some, such as the Mongolians, may have a long literary tradition in their
own language, but many of the other minorities in this group do not. The use of
164 P. Chen

traditional Zhuang and Yi writing, for example, was considerably limited, and com-
monly conWned to informal purposes such as the recording of folk literature and book
keeping, etc. For high-level, formal purposes, the Zhuang and the Yi mostly used
Chinese. In these minority groups, the proportion of bilingual speakers is now quite
high. More than half of the Miao and the Yi, for instance, speak Chinese in addition to
their ethnic language (Li 1987), and about 22 per cent of the Miao people and 14 per
cent of the Mongolian have actually switched to Chinese altogether, fully losing their
competence in Miao/Mongolian.
In the third group there are relatively small ethnic minorities like the Qiang, Bai,
Dongxiang, Mulam, and Maonan. These either do not have their own writing system,
or have no established literary tradition. They have been in regular, close contact with
the Han, and most of them are bilingual in their ethnic language and Chinese, with a
high percentage of them having adopted Chinese or some other larger minority
language as their Wrst language. A considerable number of China’s ethnic minorities
belong to this third, more assimilated group.
Quite generally, it can be noted that in almost all the ethnic minority communities
in the country, the number of bilingual speakers of a minority language and Chinese
has been growing rapidly over the past decades, and in some regions there is a
growing shift from minority languages towards Chinese among the people of the
younger generation.
Further illustration of the degree of variation that exists in bilingualism in ethnic
minority communities can be given from a brief comparison of three sizeable
minority areas in diVerent parts of the PRC. First of all, in the far north of China,
in Inner Mongolia, it is found that Mongolian and Chinese are used side by side as two
equal languages on more than 95 per cent of occasions in government, public service,
and businesses, and 90 per cent of printed materials are produced in both languages.
In education, students are free to choose between Mongolian-language, Chinese-
language, and bilingual schools, and an increasingly high proportion of the Mongo-
lians in the region can now speak and read Chinese as well as Mongolian.
In the northwest of China, the vast area of Xinjiang (three times the size of France)
is characterized by much higher linguistic diversity. Generally speaking, Chinese is the
common language used in public, except in certain cities where a single ethnic
minority may be numerically dominant. Putonghua is the working language of the
government in the capital city of the province, as well as in other major cities and
towns. It is also the norm in schools at all levels and in public service, and is
commonly used as a lingua franca by people of diVerent ethnic minority groups.
Most of the ethnic minority people living in major cities and towns speak putonghua,
with proWciency levels varying greatly according to their age and educational back-
ground. Some of the minority people in townships and villages speak their own ethnic
language only, particularly the elderly and those with little education.
In comparison with the strong inroads of Chinese into Inner Mongolia and
Xinjiang, the mountainous area of Tibet in the southwest of China is a region
 China 165

where the locally dominant ethnic language (Tibetan) has been holding on particu-
larly strongly in the face of the spread of putonghua. Tibetan is the major language of
administration, law, and public service in Tibet, and while Chinese is also used in such
domains, it is second to Tibetan in importance. Tibetan is furthermore the medium of
instruction in primary and secondary schools for local children, with Chinese being
taught from the upper grades of primary schools. Currently more than 80 per cent of
the Tibetans speak only Tibetan, resulting in Tibet having a much smaller bilingual
population than Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and other minority areas.
Where bilingualism exists in ethnic minority communities, this is commonly seen
as an important bridge between communities, allowing in particular for connections
between monolingual minority language speakers and monolingual Chinese speakers.
Because of this function, it has the support of the central and local government, and,
generally speaking, is embraced with enthusiasm by minority language speakers as
well, especially those who are in close contact with the Han and eager to participate in
the economic, social, and political life of the majority Han society. With many
minority languages, particularly those in the Wrst (Tibetan/Uygur/Kazak) group
discussed above, bilingualism, once in place, is expected to be a long and stable
process. With certain other minority languages, such as those in the third group,
bilingualism seems to be more of a transitional process that is relatively short and
unstable. Overall, it is currently estimated that about half of the minority languages
are in decline in terms of population of speakers and domains of use, mostly in favour
of Chinese and in a few cases in favour of another, stronger minority language. Quite a
few minority languages are also now on the verge of extinction; for example, Hezhe
presently has only about a dozen remaining speakers, all of whom are more than 60
years old. Two other languages which are clearly endangered are She and Tujia. In the
1980s it was reported that just 1,000 of the She, which had a population of 368,000, still
spoke the She language, and the rest spoke Chinese or another minority language,
and similarly that only 6 per cent of the Tujia spoke their ethnic language and the rest
Chinese (Fu and Wang 1987). The number of minority language speakers in these two
communities is likely to have shrunk further over the past two decades, so it seems
fairly clear that the She, the Tujia, and the Hezhe are following the Manchu and the
Hui in abandoning their own languages.13 Although no reliable nationwide investi-
gation into the issue has been conducted so far, it is a safe assumption that in many
minority communities, particularly those in the third group discussed above with
close contacts to the Han Chinese, language shift toward Chinese is in steady
progress, and may lead to the signiWcant endangerment of many of China’s minority
languages.
As in the case with regional dialects of Chinese, economic and pragmatic motives
have been the most potent forces directing language use in ethnic minority areas.

13
Another similar case is that of the Jino, who have recently abandoned bilingual education in Jino and
Chinese, and decided to adopt Chinese as the exclusive medium of instruction in schools.
166 P. Chen

With the expansion of putonghua into all parts of China, Chinese now is a very strong
language in many minority areas, and for ethnic minority people, competence in oral
and written Chinese is very helpful to upward mobility and economic progress,
opening up many opportunities which are not available to those who speak their
ethnic languages only. Consequently, even in areas where there may be a close
connection between minority language and ethnic identity, such as in Xinjiang with
its Uygur and other Turkic Muslim groups, it is reported that ethnic minorities are
very eager to send their children to Chinese-language kindergartens or Chinese-
language schools. Since there are more applicants for admission than the schools
can accommodate, ethnic minority business people are now using private funds to set
up Chinese-language kindergartens and schools to meet the increasing demand, and
some ethnic minority primary schools, at the request of parents and students, are even
oVering Chinese as a subject from the Wrst grade, instead of from the third grade as
stipulated by the government.

7.6 Conclusions
Examining the recent history of China and the relation of language to national
identity, this chapter began by emphasizing that language has in fact seldom played
a positive ideological role in fostering the consciousness of the national identity in
China and in mustering loyalty to the nation. In stark contrast with the situation
in various European nations, in mainstream intellectual and political discourse in
China from the late nineteenth century onward there has been relatively little
nationalist passion in China for the Chinese language as a possible symbol of national
identity. On the contrary, the perceptions of Chinese on the part of the elite of
Chinese society were in general very negative during the important period of
nation-building in the early half of the twentieth century, and rather than being
viewed as a sacrosanct symbol representing the essence of the Chinese nation, the
Chinese language was instead seen as an instrumental utility, and perceived to be a
very ineYcient one.
More or less the same utilitarian view has been taken toward regional dialects of
Chinese in relation to the new standard form putonghua. While an overwhelming
majority of the population in dialect areas speak and comprehend putonghua in
addition to their dialects, there has been a clear shift toward putonghua in certain
major dialect areas such as the Wu and Min, particularly among the people of the
younger generation in urban areas. In these areas, bi-dialectalism now seems to be
turning to monolingualism. Local dialects of Chinese are without question the most
important markers of regional identity in China, but factors other than utilitarian ones
seem to be unable to halt the decline of the dialects in these areas. While the
promotion of putonghua by language-planning institutions since the 1950s has deW-
nitely played an important role in the decline of certain regional dialects, the most
 China 167

important factors causing changing patterns of language use and maintenance are
pragmatic and economic.
The situation with ethnic minority languages is similar to that with regional
dialects of Chinese in that they too have come into contact with a much stronger
language. An important diVerence between the two cases is that while bi-dialectalism
(i.e. competence in putonghua and a regional dialect of Chinese) is just tolerated, to
some extent, by language-planning institutions, considerable eVorts have been
exerted by government at all levels to eVect and support bilingualism in the ethnic
minority areas. Partially as a result of government encouragement of the maintenance
of minority languages, it appears that bilingualism in some ethnic minority areas may
remain quite stable – at least more stable than bi-dialectalism in some of the Chinese
dialect areas. Meanwhile, it has to be re-emphasized that there has also been a shift
towards Chinese in other ethnic minority communities; the process has been com-
plete with some minorities, and is still in progress with certain others.
Whereas the ethnic identity of non-Han minorities is perhaps likely to survive the
loss of their ethnic languages (at least for a certain time), as in the case of the Manchu
and the Hui, one can be less optimistic about the continuity of regional Chinese
identities if the local dialects are abandoned. The situation with regional dialects of
Chinese and, to some extent, ethnic minority languages in China can be summarized
in the words of Edwards (1985: 163): ‘Economic success and communicative eYciency
militate against the viability of ‘‘small’’ languages in contact with powerful ones.
These are factors of great weight, accompanying social processes like urbanisation,
modernisation and social access which are very diYcult to combat (even if this were
generally desired, which it is not).’ What can be added here is that where a utilitarian
rather than an ideological view of language prevails, as is the case in modern China,
the maintenance of such smaller languages and dialects is set to be even more diYcult.
 8
Hong Kong
Andrew Simpson

8.1 Introduction
Modern-day Hong Kong is a territory of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which
has undergone a quite extraordinary development in its recent history, from being a
small Wshing port in the early nineteenth century to becoming one of the most high
proWle, cosmopolitan, and economically successful cities in Asia during the last forty
years. Having functioned as a British colony from 1842 until 1997, Hong Kong is now
(once again) an integral part of ‘mainland China’, where it currently enjoys the status
of ‘Special Administrative Region’ (SAR) and the opportunity to continue with its pre-
hand-over economic and social systems for a Wfty-year period following 1997, the
Chinese government in Beijing having pledged not to interfere in the internal aVairs of
the territory during this time. Because Hong Kong is therefore now a component part
of the PRC, an examination of language and national identity issues in Hong Kong
could have been included as a section within this volume’s chapter 7 on mainland
China. However, due to the special complexity of Hong Kong’s past and present
circumstances, there are good reasons for deciding to devote an independent chapter
to the study of Hong Kong here. First of all, what is commonly characterized as the
basic identity of Hong Kong and its inhabitants was formed during a period when
Hong Kong was largely isolated from mainland China due to twentieth-century
political developments in China and Hong Kong’s status as a British colony. Secondly,
Hong Kong currently functions with a socio-economic system which is signiWcantly
diVerent from that of the rest of China, as part of the Chinese government’s promise
of ‘One Country, Two Systems’; constraints on life in Hong Kong are therefore
markedly diVerent from those further north in the rest of the PRC. Thirdly, the
level of post-industrial economic development present in Hong Kong is greater than
that in most areas of mainland China, as is the degree with which Hong Kong
maintains regular international connections with other countries in the rest of Asia
and the West. All of these factors, and the existence of a long-lasting colonial presence
in Hong Kong have had important eVects on the formation of identity in the territory
and have presented challenges and inXuences which are diVerent from those
 Hong Kong 169

experienced by people who have grown up elsewhere in the PRC, justifying their
independent consideration.
The result of such forces, prior to 1997, was the creation of a semi-isolated, strong,
Cantonese-dominant identity interacting with a British Other in the form of the ruling
colonial government. Now this Western-inXuenced, modern, south Chinese identity
is faced with the need to adapt to incorporation in a much larger and comparatively
less modernized Chinese state with its power centre located in the distant north of
the country, and dominated by Mandarin Chinese. How Hong Kong and its popula-
tion have reacted to these changing pressures and developed an identity which
is by necessity non-political yet at the same time highly distinctive and particular to
the territory is considerably interesting and demonstrates an internal language and
identity dynamic that is not repeated in parallel form elsewhere in the region. The
current chapter’s examination of Hong Kong begins by charting the initial develop-
ment of the Hong Kong identity in the 1970s as a by-product of economic progress
and a stabilizing immigrant population. It then reXects on how this identity evolved
further in the 1980s and 1990s in the shadow of the scheduled return of Hong Kong to
China in 1997, and Wnally turns to consider what has actually occurred since the
important reincorporation of Hong Kong into China proper and the change of
external ruling force from Britain to the PRC government in Beijing.

Hong Kong
170 A. Simpson

8.2 The Formation of Identity in Prospering Hong Kong

Prior to the arrival of the British in Hong Kong, the island and its surrounding area
had a relatively small population of under 10,000 local Chinese engaged in Wshing,
agriculture, and maritime trading. The important natural resource provided by Hong
Kong which attracted the interest of the British was a high quality, sheltered, deep-
water harbour, and in 1842 following victory in the First Opium War, the Treaty of
Nanking granted full ownership of Hong Kong to Britain ‘in perpetuity’, with the
Kowloon peninsula area being ceded in a similar way in 1860 after the Second Opium
War. Following this, in 1898 the larger mainland area to the north of Kowloon known
as the New Territories was added to Hong Kong and Kowloon via a lease which was
set to run for a 99-year period, with this hinterland area (though not Hong Kong or
Kowloon) oYcially due to be returned to China in 1997. Once established as a British
colony, the population of the territory began to expand at a considerable speed.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the development of
entrepot trade in the new colony, immigrant workers were attracted to Hong Kong in
large numbers from various parts of China and particularly from the neighbouring
province of Canton. Throughout the Wrst half of the twentieth century the population
of Hong Kong also grew sizeably from the arrival of political and economic refugees
trying to escape escalating internal chaos in China and the hardships caused by serious
natural disasters in the country. In particular, in the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese
invasion of China and the civil war which engulfed the mainland caused many to Xee
to Hong Kong, including a large number of wealthy merchants from Shanghai, and
large-scale famine in the 1960s drove further masses of immigrants to Hong Kong.
Still later on, in the 1970s, many mainland Chinese Xed to the British colony to avoid
political persecution during the period of the Cultural Revolution. The population of
Hong Kong was therefore built up during the twentieth century by waves of immi-
grants arriving in Hong Kong for simple reasons of economic advancement or to
avoid extreme diYculties of life experienced on the mainland.
In the 1950s and 1960s, this burgeoning population, which had already grown to
over two million, enabled the signiWcant development of industry in Hong Kong,
providing a cheap, hard-working labour force for the production of textiles and other
export goods. The result was that the Hong Kong economy boomed during the 1970s
and was accompanied by an important rise in the standard of living for much of the
population. In the 1980s, when access to trading with mainland China was revived by
the country’s new ‘Open Door’ policy, Hong Kong took further strong advantage of
its position as a natural gateway city to China and was able to prosper hugely from
trading which it facilitated between China and the rest of the world, at the same time
also becoming a highly successful international banking centre.
Against this background of economic development, a distinct Hong Kong culture
and identity began to form and consolidate itself, being initially discernible during the
 Hong Kong 171

1960s and then becoming particularly vibrant and strong in the 1970s. The emergence
of a clear, local Hong Kong identity is commonly attributed to two major socio-
economic factors. The Wrst of these is the increased prosperity experienced by a
sizeable part of the population due to the dramatic growth in the Hong Kong
economy in the 1960s and 1970s. The second is the signiWcant stabilization of the
population during the same period. Prior to the 1950s, there was continual Xuctuation
in the composition of Hong Kong’s population, and much of the labour force was
made up of immigrant workers who stayed only temporarily in Hong Kong, and who
considered their real homes to be their towns of birth/origin in mainland China. With
the constant arrival and departure of workers from many diVerent parts of China,
there was consequently no permanence and cohesion to the population, and no
natural opportunity for the innovation of a shared, local Hong Kong identity. In
1949, political change within China led to this situation being altered in a major way,
and a barrier was set up by mainland China disallowing the free, regular movement of
people between Hong Kong and the mainland. As a result of this, it was no longer
possible for workers in Hong Kong to regularly return to their ancestral homes in
China, and contact between the inhabitants of Hong Kong and their relatives in China
became much more diYcult. Consequently, while there continued to be inXows of
immigrants into Hong Kong escaping (illicitly) from China due to political and
economic hardship experienced there, from the 1960s onwards, there were increas-
ingly few from Hong Kong who decided to try to return to their home towns in
China, and Hong Kong came to have a much more settled core population of
residents who identiWed Hong Kong as their long-term, new home (Lau 1997).
Over time, the percentage of the adult population which was actually born in Hong
Kong rather than in mainland China also signiWcantly increased, and many of the
generation who came to maturity in the 1970s had no memories of life within China
and little sense of belonging to any ancestral home in the mainland ( Johnson 2000).
The speciWc Hong Kong culture and identity which did emerge once the popula-
tion was more settled and economically advantaged was strongly inXuenced by a
number of contingent forces constraining and leading the development of identity in
Hong Kong in a very particular direction. First of all, the colonial polity of Hong Kong
was largely a new society made up of immigrants from diVerent parts of China with
no long shared history to provide a natural foundation for a common Hong Kong
identity. Secondly, the inhabitants of Hong Kong were aware of the fact that there
were no real prospects of political independence for the territory, neither in the
immediate present nor in the long-term future, and Hong Kong was destined to be
continually dependent on some other power, either Great Britain or (incorporated
into) mainland China. Aspirations of achieving independent nationhood were there-
fore not present among the population of Hong Kong (at any time), and so did not
facilitate the creation of a common, binding identity in the way that is often
experienced in newly emerging nation-communities. In addition to this, and largely
because there was no serious anticipation of independence, there were no political
172 A. Simpson

leaders in Hong Kong deliberately attempting to mold or invent an identity for the
territory, and the identity which did arise in Hong Kong emerged more spontaneously
than in other polities where there has been conscious, directed identity construction
‘from above’ by aspiring nationalist politicians and community leaders.
A fourth important force in the development of a speciWc Hong Kong identity was
Hong Kong’s considerable isolation from mainland China following 1949, through
until the mid-1980s. The discontinuation of contact with China not only had an eVect
on individuals’ personal links with their home towns and relatives in the mainland, on
a more abstract level it also cut the population of Hong Kong oV from the continual
reinforcement of traditional Chinese thought and culture which came with regular
contact with China. Such a weakening of the hold of traditional Chinese culture on
the Chinese population of Hong Kong then allowed for rather diVerent modes of
thinking to inWltrate and play a role in daily life within the territory. Added to this
separation of Hong Kong from the dominance of Chinese tradition and China of the
past came strongly negative attitudes towards modern revolutionary China and life in
China during the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did the chaos of the Cultural Revolution
alienate any identiWcation with China during this time, the striking diVerences in
standard of living in Hong Kong and China also engendered attitudes of superiority
and disdain for mainland China among many of the new generation in Hong Kong
(Lau 1997). Rather than looking to China for inspiration and inXuence during the
early period of identity formation in Hong Kong, much attention was instead given to
the West and aspects of Western culture, with this naturally aided by the growing
international connections Hong Kong was establishing as it integrated itself into the
widening global economy.
What emerged from the interaction of all of these factors was a new culture and
identity which were strongly divergent from those present in mainland China, manifest-
ing four highly salient characteristics. The new Hong Kong identity was Wrst of all one
which laid central emphasis on the value of economic success eVected within the
capitalist system of Hong Kong, and Wnancial advancement and the enjoyment of
wealth became widely acceptable primary goals of life, functioning as substitutes, in
many observers’ eyes, for the lack of access to any real political power under British
colonial rule. Though this new (and often public) indulgence in materialism might have
suVered criticism in a more traditional, Confucian Chinese environment, with success
being judged more in terms of cultural and scholarly achievements, the increasing
distance from Chinese tradition felt in post-1949 Hong Kong allowed for the new
consumerist way of life to Xourish in a largely unbridled way.
The distinctive culture which emerged in the 1970s in Hong Kong was secondly
very modern in nature, and manifested itself most visibly in forms of entertainment
such as pop music, cinema, and television, as well as fashion. Hong Kong successfully
produced and sold Wlms and popular music to a range of other Asian countries, and
within Hong Kong itself there was a strong preference for local entertainment
products even over international imports. This development of modern pop(ular)
 Hong Kong 173

culture took advantage of recent advances in technology and had a high degree of
appeal to the rising, youthful generation in Hong Kong, projecting an image of Hong
Kong as an exciting place to live, with a vibrant expanding new culture. To some
extent it also represented a rejection of traditional Chinese culture, and marked a
radical departure from developments relating to social identity in mainland China
during this time, where the Cultural Revolution had come to dominate life.
Thirdly, culture and the identity which it supported in prospering Hong Kong
during the 1970s was signiWcant in the way that it incorporated Western inXuences
and produced a new hybrid mix of modern Chinese and Western culture. Hong Kong
and its people consequently came to be associated with an innovative Asian identity
which was more cosmopolitan and global in nature than that of other countries in
the region.
Finally, it can be noted that Hong Kong housed an increasingly industrial and urban
society and this also had consequences for the way that identity developed in the
territory, resulting in a disdain of the rural as backward and unsophisticated. As the
majority of mainland China continued to retain a traditional, rural lifestyle, this
increased the growing feeling in Hong Kong that it was more advanced and develop-
mentally superior to the rest of China.
In summary then, a Hong Kong culture and identity quite distinct from that of
mainland China was established during the 1960s and 1970s with the following prop-
erties. It was modern, Western-inXuenced, materialist, and predominantly urban, and
emerged spontaneously among a newly-stabilized, immigrant population experiencing
increased prosperity, a lack of access to political power, and an erosion of tradition
following isolation from China. Although not all of the inhabitants of Hong Kong
participated equally in this developing identity, and more recent immigrants and those
who were older in age or living in rural parts of the territory tended to hold onto more
traditional views (Hung 1998), the new identity was increasingly characteristic of a
majority of the population, and particularly strong among those who were younger,
born in Hong Kong, in better paid employment and with greater education. From this
time on, therefore, there was a clear sense of being ‘Hongkongese’ for large numbers of
those living in Hong Kong, and a majority of people actively identiWed themselves as
Hongkongese rather than Chinese in investigations into identity carried out from this
time (Lau and Kuan 1995).

8.2.1 Language and Identity in Developing Hong Kong

Importantly, the new Hong Kong identity was also very much dominated and in great
measure signalled by Cantonese. Cantonese occurred heavily in all of the major forms
of expression of the Hong Kong identity such as Wlm, pop music, and television, and
was the form of speech which came to dominate everyday, colloquial interactions
among the stabilized population of Hong Kong. Originally, when the population of
Hong Kong began to grow signiWcantly in the twentieth century, immigrants arrived
174 A. Simpson

in the territory from various parts of China, including speakers of a variety of diVerent
types of Chinese, such as Hakka, Shanghainese, Hokkien, and Chaozhou. Although
such forms of speech are in fact mutually unintelligible, their grammatical systems
and basic vocabularies are closely related, and there is a strong belief in the existence
of a single, all-inclusive Chinese ‘language’, with (sub-) varieties such as Hokkien and
Cantonese being regional variants (see, for example, P. Chen 1999). Because of Hong
Kong’s geographical location on the periphery of the province of Canton, large
numbers of those settling in Hong Kong from the mainland came from Canton
province and were speakers of Cantonese. Cantonese therefore rather naturally
developed as a lingua franca amongst speakers of diVerent regional Chinese dialects
living in Hong Kong, and proWciency in Cantonese became widespread among the
Chinese population, which accounted for as much as 98 per cent of the total
population of Hong Kong during most of the twentieth century. In the area of public
education, Cantonese was also adopted as the language of instruction in almost all
primary schools, and whatever other regional dialects of Chinese children may have
spoken at home with their parents, they were obliged to acquire their basic (public)
schooling through Cantonese. As Cantonese accordingly became more and more
known and furthermore associated with positive values due to its use in the inter-
nationally successful popular music and Wlms produced in Hong Kong, this resulted in
increasing assimilation of speakers of other varieties of Chinese, and although other
dialects continued to be spoken at home and in dialect-support groups to some extent
(Kuah and Wong 2001), they never posed a challenge to the rapid spread of Canton-
ese, and were not associated with the growing sense of Hong Kong identity in the way
that Cantonese signiWcantly was. It can also be noted that although Cantonese was
spoken widely in neighbouring Canton province, the promotion of a fully national
socialist culture by the government of China during the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a
stiXing of Chinese regional cultures and identities and therefore blocked the develop-
ment of a strong Cantonese culture centred in the mainland ( Johnson 2000). This
consequently allowed Hong Kong to take the lead in creating its own form of
Cantonese-based culture largely free of inXuences from the mainland, and to pioneer
a new Cantonese-led culture which was highly innovative and distinct.
Besides Cantonese, the other major language in the broader Hong Kong picture
during this period of identity formation was English. When the British took posses-
sion of Hong Kong in the nineteenth century, English was declared to be the single
oYcial language of the territory, and was used primarily in government administra-
tion, law, and international relations in Hong Kong throughout the twentieth century.
In the 1950s, with the introduction of mass, public education, there was much
increased access to the learning of English and growing numbers of the younger
generation began to receive their secondary education schooling in English as a
medium of instruction. Due to Hong Kong’s expanding role as an internationally
important Wnancial and trading centre with links to the global economy, there was
a growing demand for white collar workers able to speak English as well as Chinese,
 Hong Kong 175

and the use of English spread further into commerce and the services industry. During
much of its twentieth-century period of high growth, Cantonese and English there-
fore existed side by side in a diglossic-like relation (Pennington and Yue 1994), with
Cantonese fulWlling the primary L-domain functions of aVective communication
amongst a vast majority of the population, and English being used by an expanding
elite in H-level functions and increasingly being acquired in schools.
Though the knowledge and use of English consequently grew in prospering Hong
Kong, this increase in familiarity with the language signiWcantly did not give rise to
any sense of obvious identiWcation with the British, and English was learned almost
exclusively for utilitarian reasons, providing better access to high-paid employment.
Investigations of the linguistic habits and preferences of Hong Kong Chinese during
this period testify to feelings of unease and embarrassment being experienced when-
ever English was used in informal situations with other speakers of Chinese, and it
was considered ‘un-Chinese’ and pretentious to attempt to use English where Can-
tonese could be successfully used for communicating with others. Towards the end of
the 1970s, the occurrence of Cantonese in more formal domains originally reserved
for English also started to occur, and some government oYcials began to use
Cantonese in their interactions with the public in Hong Kong. This was primarily
due to an increase in the technical status of Cantonese eVected in 1974, when the
lobbying of local Chinese language activists resulted in the British colonial govern-
ment declaring ‘Chinese’ to be an oYcial language of Hong Kong, with a status equal
to English. Although the government did little in practice to promote this new
recognition of Chinese, individuals in administrative posts often found it useful to
employ Cantonese in situations where English was impractical or diYcult to make use
of. Cantonese thus started to make some initial headway into more formal-level
territory, paving the way for further expansion in such domains towards the end of
the century. This growth in more formal linguistic situations was, however, also
hampered by a major inherent diYculty facing Cantonese, which continued to hold
back its progress in subsequent decades: Cantonese has never been standardized and
so there is no agreement on what should be the ‘correct’ forms of usage, and no well-
respected written form of the language. Though there are various ways of represent-
ing Cantonese in written form, these are widely regarded in a very negative way and
standard Modern Written Chinese is instead used as the common written form for
Chinese in Hong Kong, as indeed elsewhere in the Chinese world (Modern Written
Chinese being closer to the speech of northern varieties of Chinese and being
accepted by most speakers of other regional varieties of Chinese as the only educated
way that Chinese should be represented in written form). The obvious diYculties
anticipated in promoting a predominantly spoken language such as Cantonese as an
oYcial, territorial language were clearly reXected in the government’s wording of its
new ruling on oYcial languages in 1974 which ambiguously identiWed ‘Chinese’ as the
co-oYcial language of Hong Kong rather than Cantonese. This ambiguity usefully
allowed for the interpretation of ‘Chinese’ as Cantonese in spoken form and Modern
176 A. Simpson

Written Chinese in written form, and so shied away from encouraging the provocative
use of non-prestigious written Cantonese in H-level domains.
The language situation in 1960s/1970s prospering Hong Kong can therefore be
summarized as follows. Cantonese maintained a highly dominant position among the
population as a spoken form of language, uniting the Chinese community and driving
the development of the new Hong Kong culture and identity. Other varieties of
Chinese were still present in Hong Kong, but were rapidly losing out to Cantonese
in public domains, with wide-scale adoption of Cantonese especially amongst the
younger generation. English, originally imported by the British colonial management,
continued to hold a prestigious position in H-level domains and began to spread from
use just within government administration and the law into the areas of education and
international business. Cantonese was also coming on to the scene in some H-domain
functions but was not being promoted or extensively adopted as a regular oYcial
language due to a lack of standardization and accepted written form. Finally, Manda-
rin Chinese, which was to have a greater potential importance in later years, was
relatively insigniWcant in Hong Kong during the 1960s and 1970s. All of this important
period was instead predominantly characterized by the rise of Cantonese as a unifying
force building up a conWdent, successful population with its own new identity,
international recognition, and a booming economy producing signiWcant, rising
standards of living.

8.3 The 1980s and 1990s: Worries about the Future

of Hong Kong
The optimistic mood of success which was present throughout most of the 1960s and
1970s gave way to feelings of worry and uncertainty about Hong Kong’s future in the
following two decades, as 1997 and the scheduled return of the New Territories to
China drew ominously closer. Although the island of Hong Kong and the area of
Kowloon were technically not due to be returned to the mainland, having been ceded
to Britain in perpetuity, there was a serious question as to whether the PRC would
tolerate Hong Kong and Kowloon continuing to remain in British colonial hands, and
also whether the latter could eVectively exist on their own without the addition of the
New Territories. Such worries resulted in the beginning of a pattern of emigration of
Hong Kong people to other countries, fearful of what would happen in 1997. In 1984,
negotiations between the British government and the PRC resulted in the signing of
the Sino-British Joint Declaration and a clariWcation of what was to be Hong Kong’s
future. While the government of the PRC predictably insisted that Hong Kong island,
Kowloon, and the New Territories all be returned to China, it declared that the
former colony would become a ‘Special Administrative Region’ in which the capitalist
way of life previously pursued by the people of Hong Kong would be allowed to
continue undisturbed for a further Wfty years following 1997. For its part, the PRC
 Hong Kong 177

would control foreign and defence aVairs, but promised not to intervene in the social,
economic, and legal systems developed in Hong Kong prior to 1997. Such pledges, as
part of the Basic Law for Hong Kong agreed to by Britain and the PRC and captured
by the slogan ‘One Country, Two Systems’ did much to relieve concern about post-
1997 life in Hong Kong and reduced the growing exodus of emigrants out of the
territory. However, Wve years later the crushing of the pro-democracy movement in
China in the Tiananmen Square incident with the deaths of large numbers of
demonstrators sent shock waves throughout Hong Kong and rekindled the worst of
worries about the territory’s future, causing serious doubts among many as to
whether the PRC would really abide by the negotiated ‘One Country, Two Systems’
agreement come 1997. Once again the emigration of tens of thousands of Hong Kong
residents to Canada, Australia, and the United States was triggered, taking wealth and
vital personnel away from the troubled territory on an annual basis.
The Tiananmen Square incident also marked a high point in the formation of a
common Hong Kong identity, triggering a massive protest of over a million of the
population worried about their joint future. This bonding together in the face of a
perceived external threat solidiWed links among the population and highlighted for all
the fact that though Hong Kong had been under foreign colonial rule, it had
nevertheless developed its own semi-autonomous identity and life style, in part due
to the laissez-faire governing style adopted by the British, and this, it now seemed, was
in danger of being lost on return to an unpredictable and powerful China. The
imminence of Hong Kong’s return to the PRC and the Tiananmen Square incident
therefore focused people’s minds on what had been achieved in common during the
time of British rule, and heightened an awareness of belonging to an established state
of aVairs and identity which was generally enjoyed in a positive and familiar way, and
which the new mainland Chinese Other from the north would soon be in a position to
threaten and dismantle.
ReXections on the identity of the population of Hong Kong in the period running
up to 1997 have also revealed two further ‘complications’ in the way it is formed and
understood. The Wrst twist to considerations of identity in Hong Kong is that people
in Hong Kong regularly conceive of their relation to mainland China in two rather
diVerent ways, with diVering results. An overwhelming majority of the Chinese
inhabitants of Hong Kong identiWes itself as being proud of the cultural history and
achievements of China in previous centuries, and so there is a positive link with
inhabitants of the mainland who also share in this Chinese cultural identity based on
achievements of the past. This contrasts, however, with a feeling of non-identiWcation
with the China of the twentieth century, and signiWcant numbers of Hongkongese
who are proud of their (distant) past cultural heritage and who therefore may identify
themselves as Chinese in this sense, rejecting a modern Chinese identiWcation deWned
in terms of the present socio-political system and recent history of mainland China.
Although diVerences between past cultural and present political identities surface
within many communities and nations in the world, in Hong Kong the eVects of this
178 A. Simpson

are particularly pronounced and interesting, simultaneously connecting its population

to that of another state and future overlord and also distancing the former from
the latter.
A second, somewhat unusual observation made about identity patterns in Hong
Kong is that the strong Hongkongese identity professed by many in the 1980s and
1990s may be more an attachment to the lifestyle made possible by Hong Kong rather
than a sense of belonging and allegiance to the territory itself and its people (Lau
1997). If this is correct, it might suggest an important diVerence between the feelings
of national identity and loyalty experienced by inhabitants of other more ‘patriotic’
communities and the relation felt by Hong Kong people to Hong Kong, which would
be more of a self-centred and ‘instrumental’ attachment, viewing Hong Kong simply
as a convenient location for the pursuit of a particular way of life. However, it is also
possible that some of the mixed feelings displayed by people towards Hong Kong in
studies carried out in the 1980s and 1990s (which led to the suggestion that there may
be a lack of deep attachment to Hong Kong as a place) may simply be examples of the
typical ambivalent reactions which many city-dwellers have to the urban environ-
ments in which they live, with both positive and negative aspects of life in cities being
very obvious to their inhabitants. Feelings of Hong Kong dwellers towards Hong
Kong can therefore in this respect be usefully compared with the kind of love-hate
identity relation which inhabitants of other large, complex, international cities such as
New York and London have to their respective ‘home towns’.

8.3.1 Linguistic Developments in the 1980s and 1990s

If one now considers linguistic developments accompanying the change of mood in
Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s prior to the hand-over of Hong Kong to the PRC,
there are Wve basic trends and innovations which can be observed. The Wrst of these is
a clear change in the perception of and attitude towards English. Earlier, before there
was much serious thought of Hong Kong’s potential reincorporation into China, the
British government had functioned as the local ruling Other, and growing assertions
of a common Chinese identity in Hong Kong were constructed partly in opposition to
the identity of the colonial power-holders. Use of English, as a linguistic symbol of the
dominating foreign power, was therefore often consciously avoided (wherever pos-
sible) and considered a sign of disloyalty to the Hong Kong identity, which was
represented by Cantonese. As 1997 and the scheduled departure of the British grew
nearer, however, English became perceived less and less as the alien property of an
enduring British colonial domination, and more and more simply as an economically
useful, neutral, international language. The Cantonese identity of Hong Kong had
also established itself Wrmly by the 1980s and was strong enough not to be seriously
threatened by the continued temporary presence of the British, who would Wnally be
departing in 1997. There was consequently a marked reduction in the stigma associ-
ated with the use of English, and an increase in positive attitudes towards the
 Hong Kong 179

language, English from the 1990s onwards being predominantly taken to reXect
modernity, cosmopolitanism, and connections with the global economy (Pennington
and Yue 1994).
A second linguistic innovation which occurred in Hong Kong during this period
was the signiWcant rise of a mixed code of Cantonese and English. This began within
the school system, with ‘English-medium’ schools coming to use more and more
Cantonese in the classroom to aid the further explanation of subjects oYcially taught
through English. In certain classes, such as those of the social sciences and humanities,
new topics would Wrst be introduced in English and then expanded on at length in
Cantonese, in order to make sure that students fully understood the content of the
subject matter being taught. In other more heavily theoretical and challenging classes,
such as mathematics and science, the majority of teaching was often carried out using
a full Cantonese language base mixed with technical terms and other specialized
vocabulary inserted from English. Such a mixed code of Cantonese (grammar and
basic vocabulary) plus English (supplementary specialized vocabulary) has proved to
be a highly eVective teaching aid and has been increasingly used where students’
English is not proWcient enough to cope with input given solely in English. From this
initial use in education, the mixed code has however now spread further as a
fashionable new style of speech among the educated younger generations in
Hong Kong and is often used for purely aVective reasons in the home, with friends,
and in the work place, even when pure Cantonese could be employed without a risk
to understanding. Such a use of mixed code is said to result in speakers sounding
‘educated’, ‘modern’, ‘western’, and ‘knowledgeable’ (Pennington 1998) and may be
deliberately employed when speakers do not want to sound too traditionally
Chinese, yet also wish to avoid the perceived artiWciality of speaking to Chinese
friends in English alone (Li 1996). As a new form of speech initiated by the educated
young, mixed code Cantonese-English is distinctively Hongkongese and serves
as a new marker of identity which is rapidly spreading in a number of domains,
encoding a further linguistic development of the West-meets-East modern identity of
Hong Kong.
At the same time that mixed code Cantonese-English was rising in popularity
among younger people in Hong Kong, the dominant position of Cantonese in
unmixed form established during the 1960s and 1970s continued strongly through
the 1980s and 1990s, and expanded further in three particular domains. First of all, the
use of spoken Cantonese in government debates and public address became increas-
ingly more common and eventually overtook the use of English in these arenas.
Secondly, Cantonese entered the domain of law, and in the mid-1990s became the
language most commonly used in court (P. Chen 2001b). Thirdly, there was a sig-
niWcant increase in the production and consumption of written Cantonese during the
1980s and 1990s (Snow 1993). This occurred in the form of popular Wction written in
colloquial Cantonese, as well as newspapers, magazines, and advertising, and con-
tained much vernacular usage particular to Hong Kong, thus representing (and
180 A. Simpson

supporting) a clearly local Cantonese identity. Though written Cantonese certainly

still has a long way to go before being widely accepted, and is not yet used outside
certain very colloquial forms of writing (for example, not occurring at all in non-
Wction books or more conservative periodicals), the collective advance of Cantonese
into politics, the law, and vernacular writing indicates a visible increase in the prestige
of the language, adding ‘overt’ prestige in the former two cases, and ‘covert’ prestige in
the instance of colloquial writing.
A fourth clear trend in the 1980s and 1990s was a continued preoccupation with
English-medium secondary education amongst the general public, indicating how a
knowledge of English was still perceived to be the vital key to future career advance-
ment in Hong Kong. This perception became particularly noticeable in the 1990s
when a government report suggested that bilingual education was failing and that
only 30 per cent of students receiving English-medium instruction in secondary
schools were actually beneWting from this and reaching satisfactory levels of academic
achievement. The government subsequently proposed to drastically scale down the
availability of English-medium education and promote mother tongue teaching (i.e.
instruction through Cantonese) for the majority of students as a more eVective means
of learning. However, implementation of the proposed changes met with widespread
opposition from parents and students, who argued that access to higher education and
the upper levels of both private sector and government employment required proW-
ciency in English, and so those who would no longer be taught via English would be
unfairly disadvantaged. The issue of how to balance Hong Kong’s emphasis on a
desired ability in English in the professional world and the diYculties of achieving
eVective bilingual education has therefore come to the fore for the government as an
important new dilemma, with no easy solution in sight (Chao 2002).
The Wfth general linguistic issue arising in the pre-1997 decades was an increasing
awareness of the potential importance of Mandarin Chinese (‘putonghua’) for the
future life of Hong Kong, Mandarin being the unoYcial state language of the PRC
(see Chen, this volume, chapter 7) and promoted as a lingua franca throughout the
country. In the period preceding hand-over, the Hong Kong government made
ambitious plans to create wide-scale proWciency in Mandarin in the territory in a
policy known as ‘yi-man-saam-yuh’, literally ‘two written languages, three spoken
languages’, which identiWed the aim of having people become literate in both English
and Modern Written Chinese, and be able to speak English, Cantonese, and Manda-
rin. Previously, Mandarin had only been available as an optional subject in certain
schools, but the new language policy indicated that it would become a regular part of
the curriculum for all students. What has however added an early complication to the
learning of Mandarin in pre-1997 Hong Kong is the existence of diVerent attitudes
towards the language. On the one hand, Mandarin is associated with the political
power of the PRC, and so has a considerably positive status in this respect. On the
other hand, Mandarin is strongly associated with the north of China and a negative
lack of the modernizing economic development which has characterized Hong Kong
 Hong Kong 181

and other areas of the southeast of China. Perhaps more serious for the success of the
government’s ‘biliterate trilingualism’ policy than any negative feelings possibly
associated with Mandarin is however the question of how students will be able to
cope with the intellectual burden of acquiring yet another language when the existing
system of bilingual education is already not working very well. Compounded with a
lack of trained Mandarin teachers, and the rigours of an overcrowded curriculum, the
Wrst steps towards adding an advanced level of proWciency in Mandarin into students’
repertory have been slow, and it remains to be seen how such an ambitious policy can
be successful in the long run.
ReXecting generally on the development of language in Hong Kong during the
period preceding the return of Hong Kong to China, a number of broad points can be
made. First of all, despite considerable worry about the future and absorption of
Hong Kong into mainland China, the buoyancy and vitality of Cantonese did not
show any signs of weakening in the 1980s and 1990s and continued to function as a
strongly dominant symbol of Hong Kong’s identity, spreading further into domains it
had not been widely used in before. Secondly, a new Cantonese-English mixed code
developed in the territory, showing further signs of an independent innovative identity
in Hong Kong with its roots in Cantonese. Thirdly, English remained the prestige
language of international business, but no longer dominated government and legal
proceedings as exclusively as in the past, with Cantonese becoming more important
here. Finally, Mandarin began to occur oYcially on the scene, with government plans
that the language would be learned widely within schools, and ideally to a high level.
Without the help of formal education, however, and due to increased commercial
interactions with Mandarin speakers from China, Singapore, and Taiwan, a signiWcant
number of the population had in fact already acquired a working ability in Mandarin,
and as many as 25 per cent claimed to be able to speak at least passable Mandarin in
1996 (compared to an overall 89 per cent proWciency in Cantonese, and a 35 per cent
self-reported knowledge of English: Chao 2002). Though not yet nurtured properly
within the educational system, Mandarin had actually crept quite naturally into Hong
Kong via the route of business relations and established a footing for further potential
growth following 1997. In the Wnal section of the chapter we now consider what
developments have occurred since the fateful year of 1997 and the transfer of Hong
Kong’s sovereignty from Britain back to mainland China.

8.4 The Return to China

Much of the 1980s and 1990s was Wlled with nervousness and apprehension among
Hong Kong’s population about what would really happen in 1997 when the territory
reverted to China and came to be under distant rule from Beijing. Despite China’s
promises that Hong Kong would be able to continue with its pre-1997 lifestyle for Wfty
more years, there were worries that the PRC government was not fully predictable
182 A. Simpson

and there might be shocks awaiting Hong Kong once the territory was formally
handed over to the PRC. In the event, when 1997 arrived, people were quite surprised
to Wnd that very little actually did appear to change with the switch to mainland
Chinese rule, and daily life in Hong Kong continued largely unimpeded much as
before. The PRC’s promised non-intervention in the internal aVairs of Hong Kong has
furthermore generally been maintained since 1997 and the government in Beijing
is commonly credited with having shown much self-restraint in dealing with various
delicate aspects of life such as annual Hong Kong demonstrations marking the
Tiananmen Square incident.
Serious challenges to Hong Kong’s established patterns of life came from quite
unexpected other sources, however. Immediately following hand-over in 1997 Hong
Kong was badly aVected by the pan-Asian Wnancial crisis, tumbling real estate prices,
and spiralling unemployment. Other crises included a serious epidemic of Asian viral
chicken Xu, and a disastrous opening of the new showpiece Chek Lap Kok airport. All
of these situations were seen to be badly handled by the new government of Hong
Kong and led to a general crisis of conWdence and identity. Although on hand-over the
new head of government, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, had outlined visions of
Hong Kong as a further-expanding, global city on a par with New York, Paris, and
London, leading China into the twenty-Wrst century, very quickly it seemed that the
new administration was incompetent and unable to cope with a range of problems
immediately aZicting Hong Kong. Importantly, as Hong Kong’s identity was also in
signiWcant measure built on its economic success, the downturn in the economy and
obvious vulnerability to external threats experienced in the period following hand-
over posed a direct challenge to the foundations on which the Hong Kong identity
had been established and was maintained. All of a sudden, after decades of tremen-
dous growth and success, Hong Kong was shocked by the prospect of failing in the
area which had most accrued it international recognition and admiration, its ability to
maintain one of the highest levels of economic development in Asia.
Though the Asian Wnancial crisis and the chicken Xu epidemic were survived by
Hong Kong, there are other, new fears now lurking in the background in Hong Kong.
In recent years, Hong Kong has developed an increasing amount of trade and
commercial interaction with mainland China as a substitute for decreased trade
with other international partners, and this has resulted in closer social and cultural
contacts with the rest of the PRC (Chan Ming 2002). Due to this heightened
dependence on the mainland, there is a worry amongst many in Hong Kong that it
may over time come to lose its cherished international character and identity, and
become considered to be just another large conurbation within the PRC. On top of
this, there is considerable concern about increasing competition from Shanghai,
which is rapidly developing as mainland China’s most important economic centre,
with the potential to eclipse Hong Kong in international commercial importance, if
Hong Kong proves unable to maintain its cutting edge.
 Hong Kong 183

To some extent, Hong Kong may now seem to be at a crossroads in its develop-
ment where important decisions about the future orientation and identity of the
territory have to be made. Either Hong Kong can continue with further integration
into the PRC in terms of increased trade and investment with the mainland, as has
been happening in recent years, or it can strike out in a diVerent direction and attempt
to win back more of its earlier international character and trading connections, and
distinguish itself more clearly from other cities in China by closer links to the West
and other countries in Asia. Whichever route comes to be the primary focus of Hong
Kong’s development in the next few decades, there will be consequences for its social
orientation and identity. A continued, increased dependence on trade with the rest of
China is likely to result in greater emphasis on the general Chinese roots of people’s
identity in Hong Kong, whereas a reconsolidation of links with the West has the
potential to nurture and further develop the more modern, cosmopolitan, Cantonese-
based identity of Hong Kong established in the 1960s and 1970s.
In terms of language, it is probable that the economic focus of Hong Kong’s
development, either more towards the rest of China or more towards international
trading and Wnance, will determine the relative status of English and Mandarin with
regard to each other, as rival languages of wider, economic communication. English
has been a useful language to acquire for career advancement in twentieth-century
Hong Kong and will continue to have importance and prestige as a global language in
the twenty-Wrst century. However, Mandarin is also set to become a language with far-
reaching use and increased prestige, due to the growing visibility of the PRC in world
aVairs and its vastly expanding economy. Whichever of these two languages ultim-
ately comes to be more prominent for utilitarian reasons, facilitating interaction with
the outside world, neither expresses (nor can be anticipated to express) the distinct,
vibrant identity of people in Hong Kong, and this still remains very much the
stronghold of Cantonese. Since the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, there has been
no attempt by the Chinese government in Beijing either to restrict the use of
Cantonese or to impose the use of Mandarin in any domain, and Cantonese continues
to be heavily dominant in everyday life in Hong Kong. If Beijing continues with such a
hands-oV policy with regard to language in Hong Kong, as far as can be guessed and
surmised from opinion polls, this will naturally allow for what people in Hong Kong
seem to want both for their present and for the future: Cantonese as the primary
oYcial language permitted for use in government, (parts of ) education, and most of
everyday life, and English and Mandarin as additional languages available for ancillary,
optional use in certain H-level interactive domains and commerce carried out at all
levels. Finally, it can be noted that the earlier dominance of English in H-level domains
allowed Cantonese to thrive very freely in areas where the identity of local people was
developing, because the population of Hong Kong was never tempted to adopt British
culture as part of its identity. Supposing, however, that Mandarin were to dislodge the
position of English as primary non-local H-level language and bring with it more
manifestations of modern Mandarin Chinese culture (Wlms, popular music) as an
184 A. Simpson

accompanying by-product, it will be interesting to see whether the Cantonese identity

of Hong Kong will be as impervious to such a cultural ‘threat’, or whether the less
foreign nature of a Mandarin-based culture might depress and dampen the strength of
the highly buoyant Cantonese identity. However the future actually unfolds and
economic factors interact with Cantonese, English, and Mandarin in Hong Kong,
the unique complexity of the situation present in Hong Kong is certain to continue to
fascinate and throw up interesting questions about language and its relation to
identity. In closing this chapter, we now revisit and summarize some of the main
factors which conspire to make this comparatively small piece of Chinese territory of
such considerable interest from the point of view of linguistic and socio-political
identity.
Hong Kong Wrst of all has undergone the experience of Western colonial rule.
However, the laissez-faire character of British colonial management did not impede
the development of a distinct and strong Hong Kong identity, when the right socio-
economic conditions favoured such a development. Secondly, although the popula-
tion of Hong Kong relates to a much larger, adjacent Chinese population with a
shared cultural tradition, political events within mainland China during the second
half of the twentieth century resulted in Hong Kong’s emerging identity being largely
formed in isolation from China, and having many innovative properties, being a very
modern, hybrid East–West identity based on Cantonese and the pursuit of economic
success. Though it may be technically incorrect to label this a national identity, as
Hong Kong has never sought or enjoyed national independence, it nevertheless has
many of the common trappings of national identity, characterizing a distinct popula-
tion living in a bounded location with passport-regulated borders, and sharing a
speciWc, distinctive culture and economic system. Thirdly, though Hong Kong has
now witnessed the departure of its colonial rulers, this has not resulted in a new
independence for the territory, as normally occurs when there is a termination of
foreign colonial rule. Instead, Hong Kong is now reintegrated into a vast Chinese
nation which has mostly been a stranger for the past Wfty years, and has to cope with
the challenge of accommodating its identity in some way with that of mainland China
as the nation it now belongs to, despite signiWcant diVerences in culture and lifestyle
which have arisen in recent decades. Last of all, because of the ‘One Country, Two
Systems’ promise made to Hong Kong, the territory has actually not been incorpor-
ated into China in a fully regular way and will continue to exist in an odd, half-way-
house-like condition until 2047 as a semi-autonomous, privileged part of the country
with a visibly diVerent lifestyle and economic system. This has the eVect of fostering
feelings of being distinct from the mainland, though politically under the control of
Beijing, and works against attempts at a potentially fuller identiWcation with the rest
of the nation. All of the above, and the way that conXicting socio-political forces have
speciWcally interacted with language in the form of Cantonese, English, and Mandarin
to construct and direct the development of identity in Hong Kong, make the study of
this dynamic and complicated territory a paradigm case of modern identity formation
 Hong Kong 185

under the continual and changing political dominance of an external ruling Other.
How Hong Kong and the status of its current Cantonese-based identity adapt to the
imposing, growing power of mainland China in the decades to come, and the
predicted spread of China’s economic and cultural inXuence in the PaciWc region
will be interesting to follow and is clearly expected on the programme as the next
major phase in Hong Kong’s further, innovative development.
 9
Japan
Nanette Gottlieb

9.1 Introduction
The major language of Japan is Japanese, spoken by most of the 127.5 million people
living in the Japanese archipelago stretching from Okinawa in the south to Hokkaido
in the north. Dialectal variations exist, but the standard form of the language, based
since 1916 on the dialect of an area of Tokyo, is that taught in schools and used in all
areas of Japan. Estimates of how many people worldwide speak the language vary:
many sources (e.g. Crystal 1987) limit the number to the population of Japan itself,
ignoring the possible heritage speakers living in other parts of the world such as
Hawaii, the west coast of North America, and Brazil, while others speculate that when
all the overseas and other learners of Japanese since the late 1970s are taken into
account another ten million may be added to that number (Katō 2000: 3).
Within Japan itself, several other languages are spoken. They include Ainu, Korean,
Chinese, Okinawan, English, and the languages of communities of migrant workers
from places such as Brazil, the Philippines, and the Middle East. The linguistic
landscape of Japan is by no means as Xat and monotone as the prevailing popular
view both within Japan and outside it would have it. Japan, like every other society, is
multilingual, though the contours of that multilingualism have until recently been
ignored and in some cases suppressed in the interests of nationalism.
It is important for any discussion of the ties between language and nationalism in
Japan to focus brieXy here on the nature of written Japanese. Ironically, given that
orthography was used as one of the premier icons of nationalism in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, the Japanese writing system owes its origins to China. As no
indigenous writing system had yet been developed in Japan, characters were imported
from China along with Buddhism as part of a massive wave of cultural borrowing in
the sixth century. Such were the signiWcant diVerences between the two languages,
however, that characters could at Wrst be used only to write Chinese as a foreign
language. Over time, phonetic scripts were developed from the characters which
enabled the written representation of Japanese pronunciation for the words which the
characters represented, and of elements of Japanese grammar such as tense inXections
 Japan 187

and postpositions which did not occur in Chinese (see Twine 1991 and Seeley 1991).
Two diVerent phonetic scripts had been developed by the tenth century: the cursive,
Xowing hiragana, each symbol an adaptation of an entire character (e.g. , the
phonetic representation of the sound ‘i’ derived from the character ), and the
angular katakana, each symbol being one constituent element of a character (e.g. ,
the phonetic representation of the same sound ‘i’ derived from the left-hand side of
the character ).
Despite this invention of phonetic syllabaries, the prestige and inXuence of charac-
ters were such that they remained the script of choice for men of power and
scholarship, that is, the only ones able to write during that early period. Hiragana
were used by literate upper-class women. When Chinese was written out in Japanese
word order or with glosses to show Japanese word order and inXections, katakana was
the script used for the notations. It was not until the twentieth century that today’s
mixture of hiragana and kanji came into common use in newspapers and later legal
documents, with katakana reserved for loanwords from Western languages and for
purposes of emphasis. Other elements commonly found in texts of various kinds
today are the Arabic numerals and Roman letters, although these are not oYcial
Japanese scripts. The Japanese writing system is regarded as one of the most complex
in the world. Nevertheless, literacy rates in Japan today, although unlikely to be the

Japan
188 N. Gottlieb

99 per cent commonly cited given the fact that a certain percentage of any population
will have conditions that aVect the ability to read and/or write, are very high, as
evidenced by the size of the publishing and printing industries and the high circulation
counts of daily newspapers.

9.2 Nationalism and the Japanese Language

The link between language and nationalism is well documented. Languages across the
world have been pressed into the service of states, usually to provide a common pole
around which to rally a cohesive body of citizens when the state is involved in nation-
building or to provide a framework for identity within the state, often in the service of
a particular state ideology. Language use at national (and indeed sub-national) level is
never without its political dimension, as studies such as Fishman (1972), Barbour and
Carmichael (2000), Gottlieb and Chen (2001), and a host of others show. In Japan’s
modern period (and even earlier), nationalism and language issues have always been
closely connected and language has been made to serve the purposes of the state in a
multiplicity of ways. The three which I will examine here are the role of language in
deWning the borders of the nation-state, in prosecuting militarist ideology, and in
post-war cultural nationalism.

9.2.1 One State, One Language

Japan’s modern period began with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, following a period of
self-ordained seclusion for two and a half centuries during which the country was
ruled by the dynastic Tokugawa Shogunate. The external political environment in
which the Meiji government operated was one in which powerful European countries
had colonized most of the rest of Asia, a fate which Japan was determined to avoid. It
was imperative, therefore, that the construct of a modern nation-state with a cohesive
national identity, at least on the surface, be formed without delay. In language terms,
this meant Wxing on and disseminating a standard form of Japanese comprehensible to
all citizens, and ensuring that Japanese was spoken everywhere in the archipelago. The
latter project involved suppression of both the Ainu and Okinawan languages in order
to avoid perceived porosity of borders, particularly in the north where nearby Russian
inXuence was strong.
The political structure in place during the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868) contrib-
uted substantially to the need for placing a standard language high on the linguistic
agenda during the following period. In the pre-modern period, Japan was segmented
into a large number of local domains, each ruled by a local daimyo who reported to
the shogun in Edo (today’s Tokyo). Since the domains were relatively tightly sealed oV
from each other in the interests of the ‘divide and rule’ principle, and since travel was
with very few exceptions forbidden to residents of each, local dialects Xourished and
little in the way of language (or dialect) contact took place. The de facto standard used
 Japan 189

throughout Japan by those who travelled during this period was based on the speech
of Edo (see Twine 1991).
Actually deciding on what the standard language in the new Japan should be took
longer than one might have expected, given the intensity of the nation-building project
on so many levels, although it may perhaps be explained by the very multiplicity of
those levels. The creation of modern political and social institutions and the establish-
ment of an infrastructure capable of supporting rapid industrialization took precedence
over linguistic matters until the last decade of the nineteenth century. This is not to say
that language matters were not discussed during this period; they were, with voices
from intellectuals in various sectors calling inter alia for the replacement of the archaic
written styles then in use with a modern written style based on the spoken language
and/or modiWcation (or replacement) of the writing system to free up time spent
in schools on learning to read and write so that it could be diverted to education in
other urgently needed areas. Old habits and mindsets proved hard to change, however,
and no oYcial steps were taken to promote desired language outcomes until after an
upsurge of nationalism following Japan’s victory over China in the 1894–5 Sino-
Japanese War.
During this time, inXuential articles and lectures by Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937), a
Tokyo Imperial University academic who was greatly inXuenced by several years spent
studying linguistics in Germany, compared the national language to the country’s life
blood and exhorted the government to ensure that it was treated with the degree of
respect the language of a modern state deserved (e.g. Ueda 1894). In Ueda’s view, this
involved improving the language through standardization and modernization, con-
trary to the views of purists who saw any form of artiWcially induced language change
as an unwarranted attack on standards and tradition. Ueda and the group of students
he trained in the methods of Western linguistics were instrumental in lobbying for the
establishment in 1902 of the Wrst oYcial body charged with working on language
issues, the National Language Research Council. As a result of the work of this body,
the dialect of the Yamanote area of Tokyo was announced as the standard language
in 1916.
There followed an intensive period of dissemination of the standard, in both written
and spoken form through the education system and in spoken form through the
national broadcaster, NHK ( Japan Broadcasting Corporation) (see Twine 1991 and
Carroll 2001). It was important for the purposes of the state that all citizens were
proWcient in the standard, the language of public life through which full participation
in society as a citizen of Japan rather than as a resident of a regional area was made
possible. Dialect use was therefore rigidly suppressed in schools, to the extent that
children caught using their local dialect were made to wear the hōgenfuda (dialect
placard), a wooden placard on which was written ‘I used a prohibited dialect’, until
they could Wnd another child doing the same thing and pass it on. Linguistic ties with
local regions were thus severely discouraged, at least at oYcial level, and the connec-
tion with the nation-state emphasized as oYcial education policy. As Hobsbawm
190 N. Gottlieb

reminds us, however, ‘the controversial element is the written language, or the
language spoken for public purposes. The language(s) spoken within the private sphere
of communication raise no serious problems even when it or they coexist with public
languages, since each occupies its own space’ (Hobsbawm 2000: 113). In Japan’s case,
in the early days of the implementation of the standard, both students and teachers
went home to private spaces of family and friends within which they spoke their
regional dialects. In schools and other areas of public life, however, use of anything
but the standard was strongly discouraged.

9.2.2 Defining the Borders: Ainu and Okinawan

The issue of what constituted the nation-state in territorial terms was naturally a
matter of pressing concern during this period. It was essential not only that the
linguistic identity of the mainland be deWned through standardization but also that
the periphery areas of Hokkaido (the northern island) and Okinawa (the chain of
islands to the south, also known as the Ryūkyū Islands) be secured against possible
encroachment. Language played a key part in achieving the aim of strengthening
borders which might otherwise have been perceived as porous and therefore laid
open to other claims.
The Ainu, Japan’s indigenous minority, had by the eighteenth century become
concentrated in Hokkaido. Over two centuries of trade and control by the Matsumae
clan and other Japanese who ran the trading posts, they had been by and large
forbidden to speak Japanese or adopt Japanese customs as part of a strategy which
constituted them as barbarian Other in relation to the civilized mainstream of Japan.
The same thing was also happening in the south after the Satsuma clan of Kyushu
invaded the Ryūkyū kingdom in 1609. ‘The relationships with the Ainu and the
Ryūkyū Kingdom were important precisely because they represented the subordin-
ation of foreign people to Japanese dominion. Everything about the relationship,
therefore, had to be structured in such a way as to magnify the exotic character of the
peripheral societies’. (Morris-Suzuki 1998: 18) Clearly the use of the same language as
the Japanese did not qualify as exotic and was therefore prohibited.
This changed, however, during the Meiji Period (1868–1912), when it became
important to assert that the Ainu and the Okinawans were in fact Japanese in order
to strengthen Japan’s territorial claim to those areas already under its control. To
achieve this end, the former policy was reversed and replaced with one of assimilation:
the formerly prohibited use of Japanese language and customs now became manda-
tory. In 1899, Ainu were given Japanese citizenship and were to be educated in
Japanese schools. What this meant in practice was that the Ainu changed from
being barbarian Other to being a minority in a nation-state, albeit not oYcially
recognized as an ethnic minority until the mid-1990s by a Japanese government intent
on maintaining the long-term Wction of a racially and culturally homogeneous Japan.
 Japan 191

They were now oYcially Japanese, and this made the island of Hokkaido indisputably
part of Japan’s territory.
The southern border was secured by applying similar measures in Okinawa,
although the policy of assimilation was not at Wrst as rigorously applied as in the
case of the Ainu (Morris-Suzuki 1998: 26). The dialect placard became a particular
feature of Okinawan schools, where education was to be conducted in the standard
form of Japanese. Factors in promoting the use of the standard language in Okinawa
ranged from a desire to Wnd employment on the mainland, the need for a lingua
franca among speakers of diVerent Okinawan dialects, and the fact that Japanese
became the language of instruction in schools (Osumi 2000: 71–2). Just as with the
northern border, the suppression of the local language in favour of the imposed
standard was a key factor in assuring desired political outcomes.

9.2.3 The Militarist Years: Language and Ultranationalism

In terms of language and nationalism, then, the Wrst Wfty years of Japan’s modern
period were spent establishing and disseminating the standard language as an indica-
tor of national unity and imposing the use of Japanese on the formerly exoticized
borders to the north and south. These were not the only developments related to
language, of course: modernization of the written language was occurring (see Twine
1991), the Wrst oYcial language policy bodies were formed, and initial attempts
toward script rationalization were being formulated and in their turn increasingly
frustrated by conservative forces both inside and outside government (see
Gottlieb 1995).
As political power came to rest more and more in the hands of the ultranation-
alists in the years leading up to 1930 and beyond to the Second World War, oYcial
resistance to any suggestion of language reform other than standardization became
even stronger than it had been. The voices of those who diVered were suppressed:
Education Minister Hirao Hachisaburō (1866–1945), for example, was censured by
the Diet in 1936 for expressing support for the abolition of characters in an article he
had written six years earlier (Gottlieb 1995: 88). An earlier Prime Minister, Hara
Takashi (1856–1921), who had supported character limits during his term as
editor of the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun, had begun with his like-minded Education
Minister to institute steps to move script rationalization out of the realm of the
abstract toward practical possibility but was assassinated by a fanatic (not on
language grounds) before he could achieve that aim, leaving conservative views in
the majority.
Earlier conservative lobby groups on language issues, such as the Kokugokai
(National Language Association) formed in 1905 and led by a member of the Privy
Council (Gottlieb 1995: 68), had argued that a strong connection existed between the
fortunes of the language and the fortunes of the nation. To tamper with the former
was bound to mean a decline in the latter. This world view reXected feudal values:
192 N. Gottlieb

during that period, although functional (and often more than merely functional)
literacy was widespread among commoners, only the upper class had the time and
opportunity to devote to mastering the many thousands of characters and the Chinese
classics and other documents in which they were used. Instrumentalist attempts to
simplify the written language, in particular the script, in order to refashion it into a
vehicle which the newly educated citizens of the modernizing state could more easily
master were not just a formal recognition but a manifest embodiment of the fact that
the former upper classes from which the intellectuals came were no longer sole
guardians of inherited tradition as embodied in the language. Little wonder, then, that
such reforms were opposed for so long: far from seeing such rationalization as
improving the language, conservatives considered it a weakening of sanctiWed trad-
ition which in turn could only weaken the ‘national spirit’ and, by extension, the
future prospects of the nation.
In line with this view, language came to form a powerful tool in nationalist
ideology, being viewed as encapsulating a mystical essence of ‘Japaneseness’. The
focus of this philosophy, known as kotodama (literally, ‘the spirit of the Japanese
language’), was the written language, and in particular the script. Never mind that
characters had been originally imported from China and that the phonetic hiragana
and katakana scripts had been developed in their diVerent ways from those characters,
as we saw above: by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries characters had long been
such an integral part of written Japanese that they were seen as far more than just a
means of writing. Bound up as they were with hegemonic tradition, and on that
account sanctiWed, they functioned as the embodiment of elite values and notions of
national cultural heritage, regardless of their foreign origins. Within this prevailing
political and intellectual climate, therefore, proposals to simplify complex character
shapes or to limit the number in general use were regarded as an outright attack on
the deWning symbol of Japanese cultural traditions. The complexity of Japanese
thought being such that only the existing script could properly express it, it was
argued, tradition, and not convenience, was the order of the day. Those who thought
that characters should actually be abolished altogether in many cases suVered right-
wing persecution. To support Romanization was seen as a sign of communist
tendencies, and in June 1939, a number of Waseda University students who did so
were rounded up and arrested by the secret police on the charge of harbouring anti-
nationalist sympathies (Kitta 1989: 53). Later, during the war, of course, to support
Romanization was to support the script of the enemy.
Language thus played a prominent role in the ideological construction of the Japan
for which the war was being fought, possibly second only to the Emperor as the
symbol of ultranationalist values. In the name of tradition, and in particular of the
indeWnable mystique accorded to the written language as the repository and expres-
sion of that tradition, reforms to the writing system were discouraged, disrupted, and
postponed until the end of the war brought an end to ultranationalist control of
language policy (see Gottlieb 1995).
 Japan 193

9.2.4 Language and Post-war Cultural Nationalism

After the release from ultranationalist control and the newly-permitted script reforms
of the late 1940s and 1950s (see Gottlieb 1995 for details), it might have seemed that
nationalism had lost most of its power to control developments in relation to
language in any more than the usual terms of day-to-day functioning of state
apparatus such as the education system. In the late 1960s, however, a new form of
nationalism, this time largely cultural rather than political, arose in which language
yet again played a deWning role. This period saw the beginning of an essentialist
literary genre known as Nihonjinron (theories of what it is to be Japanese) which was
to prove highly inXuential for the next thirty years and may still be found in dedicated
sections in major Japanese bookstores. Authors of Nihonjinron books put forward in a
variety of Welds the argument that Japanese society is uniquely diVerent from all other
societies, not just in the ways that all societies diVer in particulars from other societies
and cultural traditions but in a much deeper way that emphasized the separateness of
Japan and the Japanese from the rest of the world’s experience. Language was no
exception: the Nihonjinron view was that the Japanese language was uniquely
diYcult, even sometimes for the Japanese themselves, and thus functioned as a kind
of linguistic moat between Japan and the world.
For language to function eVectively as a symbol of cultural speciWcity, it must be
exclusive in some way, inextricably linked with the particular nation-state in which it is
spoken and preferably only with that nation-state, that is, in the main not used outside
its borders. Although Japanese certainly is not spoken widely throughout the world, it
is nevertheless spoken by an increasing number of people outside Japan, thanks in
large part to the economic boom of the 1980s which saw sudden growth in the
number of students hoping to achieve employment opportunities through language
proWciency. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, that growth had yet to occur, and so –
with the exception of pockets of heritage speakers in Latin and North America and
Hawaii – the language Wt that criterion well. This enabled the construction of what
linguist Roy Andrew Miller referred to as Japan’s modern myth: a set of values and
beliefs surrounding language which invested Japanese with the status of a mythical
maze which none could hope to penetrate to its centre. Here, language was used to
reinforce the image of a culturally, racially, and linguistically homogeneous nation
which experienced no conXict because it encompassed no diversity.
The two main aspects of the language which were emphasized were that it was the
only language spoken in Japan, which as we have already seen is not true, and that its
properties made it uniquely diYcult for any non-Japanese to learn. Corollaries were
that the intrinsically special, pure, mystical nature of Japanese enabled non-verbal
communication on a higher plane than possible elsewhere and that the special
nuances of certain words could only be understood by native speakers. Language in
this view is tightly linked to culture and race, and indeed was yet again made to serve
the political purpose of fostering a national belief in homogeneity, exclusivity, and
194 N. Gottlieb

certain core national characteristics which served the economy well. At the same
time, however, this view of Japanese fostered a belief that Japan diVered from the rest
of the world in linguistic terms, in what Miller (1982: 209) suggests constitutes a kind
of reverse Orientalism. While acknowledging that Said’s inXuential book Orientalism
(1978) does not deal explicitly with Japan, Miller nevertheless hypothesizes that the
exceptionalist nature of the sociolinguistic myth in Japanese society might be charac-
terized as the Japanese, in a sense, claiming for themselves an Otherness, a radical
diVerentness, before other cultures can do it to them:
By insisting that the Japanese language is unique . . . Japanese sociolinguistic culture has
taken a major step toward its own Orientalization. It is then in a position to employ this
same attitude of the Other – the attitude that is at the heart of all Orientalism – as a
convenient way for coming to terms with the West – not only with the West itself,
conceptualized as a conglomeration of cultural, social, and political entities, but also with
the West as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. (Miller 1982: 209–10)

Mouer and Sugimoto (1983: 277) explicate the uses to which the Nihonjinron
ideology of cultural uniqueness, which subsumes the language, was used to good
eVect as a negotiating tactic in international business:
If the Japanese are seen by foreigners as being inscrutable and if Japanese decision making
is seen as a unique process which foreigners cannot understand, on the one hand, and if
the doctrine of ‘cultural relativism’ is then used to defend one’s own way of doing things,
on the other, a tremendous barrier is placed in the way of the foreigner’s understanding of
and involvement in the activities of his or her Japanese counterparts. A mystique is
created in which Japan is hidden in mist.
The beliefs surrounding the language described above provide a good example of how
Japan was ‘hidden in mist’ for most of the post-war period by the ideology of cultural
nationalism, promoted by government and by large volumes of academic and popular
writing both to foster in the Japanese people a secure sense of their own cultural
identity and to discourage speculation on aspects of Japanese society which did not
contribute to the national myth. During those same years, however, in direct contra-
diction to the myth that Japanese was too hard for foreigners to learn, the Japan
Foundation, under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign AVairs, was pouring large
sums of money into promoting the study of Japanese overseas in order to achieve
cultural recognition concomitantly with economic power. The fact that large num-
bers of non-Japanese today can speak Japanese is testimony to their eVorts, and to the
fact that learning Japanese poses no greater diYculty than does learning any other
second language when the will is there.

9.3 The Reality: Linguistic Diversity

The myth of linguistic homogeneity was a substantial component of the sustaining
ideology of Japanese essentialism which informed Japan’s relations with the world for
 Japan 195

several decades following the Second World War and which has only recently begun
to show cracks. As we saw above, Japan has a long history of suppressing or ignoring
other languages spoken within its borders, purposely subjugating the evidence and
needs of diversity to the monolithic project of a nation-state intent on presenting a
unitary facade of homogeneity to the world. Recognition of the fact that other
languages are spoken in Japan has been slow in coming. The inXux of foreign workers
into Japan in the 1990s raised concomitant language issues in both adult society and
schools which are beginning to lead to a gradual reconsideration of the status quo.
Political and social changes within Japan itself have also contributed to a new
awareness of linguistic diversity.

9.3.1 Other Languages Spoken in Japan

Thanks in part to the international attention given to issues of indigenous minority
rights in the 1980s and to the subsequent renewed Ainu activism in Japan which
resulted, in 1997 a law was passed which recognized the Ainu as an ethnic minority
within Japan, putting a major crack into the myth of racial and linguistic homogen-
eity. Earlier politicians had Wrmly denied the existence of any such minority; Prime
Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, for example, declared in 1986 that Japan was a mono-
ethnic nation (tan’itsu minzoku), and in 1980 the government assured the United
Nations that Japan had no minorities in relation to an article in the International
Covenant on Human Rights. The new law, however, which succeeded the 1899 law
under which assimilation had been enforced, provided for Ainu language and culture
to be promoted by a specially established body, the Foundation for the Research and
Promotion of Ainu Culture (FRPAC). Not before time, either: the Ethnologue
‘Languages of Japan’ page (www.ethnologue.com) lists Wfteen speakers of Ainu in
1996 and labels the language as ‘nearly extinct’. Gottlieb (2001) and Siddle (2002)
provide information on the speciWcs of this act and its subsequent cultural impact:
while Ainu language-teaching activities have indeed been promoted, in the main those
attending classes are non-Ainu Japanese rather than Ainu themselves, whose interests
have diverged to other sites of cultural representation such as jazz and modern art.
The eVect of the law seems to have been to promote traditional culture and language,
blind to the realities of modern Ainu life in which language is less of a focal point,
given that young Ainu today speak Japanese as a result of the assimilation policy.
Several community schools exist, however, in which children are taught to speak their
heritage language.
In Okinawa, cultural revitalization began with the reversion of the islands to Japan
in 1972, aided by the return of large numbers of Okinawan expatriates or their
children. Okinawan music, both traditional and modern, has spearheaded the growth
of interest in Okinawan culture outside the immediate area. The use of Okinawa’s
vernacular languages is promoted to a certain extent through speech contests, radio
programmes, and local literature, though not in isolation from or opposition to
196 N. Gottlieb

standard Japanese (Osumi 2000: 92). This revival, however, is self-motivated; there is
no government body such as FRPAC providing facilities and funds.
The Korean minority in Japan, whose presence is intimately related to Korea’s
experience as a colony of Japan (1910–45: see King, this volume, chapter 10), numbered
over 625,000 in 2002, making them the third largest minority group after the Burakumin1
and the Okinawans. Until recently, however, there has been little positive government
recognition of the Korean language within Japan. Community-group schools have
provided language education for students of Korean descent, but the primary language
of these students is Japanese. Until April 2004 those children who completed their
education in these schools (as opposed to attending Japanese schools, which the majority
of Korean children do) were not eligible to sit for the national university entrance
examinations, as the schools were classed as ‘miscellaneous schools’. As in the case of
Okinawa, popular culture in the form of the 2002 World Cup, modern novels, and
Korean music groups, has increased interest in Korean culture and perhaps contributed
to a greater recognition that the Korean language is spoken in Japan, but this may merely
reXect a view of the language as ‘exotic’ and ‘cool’ rather than something intrinsic to
Japan (see Maher 2002).
Other languages spoken by ethnic minority communities in Japan include Chinese,
where those children who do not go to Japanese schools attend a small number of
bilingual community schools (see Maher 1995), and to an increasing extent Portu-
guese, owing to the large numbers of immigrants from Brazil who have come to Japan
to work (see Hirataka, Koishi, and Kato 2000). In recent years the number of schools
(mainly private, but some government) teaching Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean has
been increasing as a result of a 1987 recommendation that the number of elective
subjects be increased ( Japan Forum 1998). Owing to the persistence of the monolin-
gual-state ideology, Japan has no national language policy on the teaching of lan-
guages other than Japanese, whether community languages or languages likely to be
of use in strategic and cultural linkages with other countries. High school enrolments
in foreign languages are very small ( Japan Forum, 1998).

9.3.2 English: a Special Case

The major exception to this is English, the only foreign language recognized by the
government as being particularly important for Japan’s relationship with the rest of
the world, or at least, with the English-speaking world. Japan came early in its modern
period to the pragmatic realization that English was going to prove more useful than

1
A group of Japanese socially ostracized for their ancestors’ involvement in pre-modern times in
occupations linked to notions of death and impurity, e.g. abattoir workers, graveyard attendants, leather
workers. Estimated to number today around 3 million, the Burakumin are a distinct minority group
within Japanese society but are not an ethnic minority, being themselves Japanese and speaking Japanese
as their native language.
 Japan 197

Dutch, which had been the foreign language studied during the two and a half
centuries of closed borders. In 1947, during the Allied Occupation, English was
introduced to middle schools as an elective subject. Foreign language education did
not become a required subject for middle and high school students until 2002,
although some schools had made the study of English compulsory earlier. In practice,
however, generations of students had studied English for six years – three at middle
school, during the period of compulsory education, and three at high school – because
many university degrees included a foreign language requirement and the central
university entrance tests thus emphasized foreign language (in practice, mostly
English) testing (Kitao et al. 1994). In 1997, English conversation was introduced
into elementary schools as an elective activity during the Period of Integrated Study
activities; by 2002, this option had been taken up by around half of all public
elementary schools (MEXT 2003). Also in 2002 the Ministry of Education, Culture,
Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced the formulation of a strategic
plan for producing ‘Japanese with English Abilities’, which has laid out a Wve-year
(2003–2008) action plan involving such strategies as designating 100 high schools as
Super English Language High Schools, conducting classroom research on innovative
teaching methods and encouraging both teacher and student study-abroad periods in
English-speaking countries.
A very mild suggestion was made in the report by a commission set up by then
Prime Minister Obuchi to consider Japan’s goals for the twenty-Wrst century that
consideration might be given at some stage in the distant future to designating
English as the second oYcial language of Japan. The report stressed that: ‘First,
though, every eVort should be made to equip the population with a working
knowledge of English. This is not simply a matter of foreign-language education. It
should be regarded as a strategic imperative’ (Prime Minister’s Commission 2000).
The idea of English as an oYcial language excited mostly negative comment in the
press for a few months thereafter, but the issue soon dropped from public notice. The
emphasis on the strategic importance of learning English, however, did not, as we
have seen from the MEXT activities described above.
Hashimoto (2000: 49), analysing Japanese government policy documents on the
teaching of English, argues that while ‘TEFL is located at the core of promotion of
internationalisation . . . the promotion of internationalisation is in reality only a diVerent
form of promotion of Japaneseness’. Far from embracing English as an aspect of
globalization, she contends, Japan is actually resisting it in its educational policies,
accepting its pragmatically useful parts without allowing the underlying values of
individual empowerment embedded in English-language cultures to take hold and
threaten the traditional view of what makes a good Japanese citizen. In terms of
linguistic abilities, we might extrapolate, this boils down to a Japanese who speaks
English in a limited way, without ever embracing the diVerent world views which
can be opened up by the study of other languages: in theory a person with bilingual
abilities but in practice constrained by teaching approaches to forgo true immersion
198 N. Gottlieb

in the worldviews those abilities open up. In other words, this amounts to a reinforce-
ment of the Nihonjinron principle of one-nation, one-language, despite the surface
rhetoric of internationalization and globalization. Good Japanese citizens are not
bilingual.

9.4 Changing Concepts of Language and Nation

Whether we accept that particular view or not, it is true that any real progress – in
terms of action – in accepting and acknowledging the existence (let alone the role) of
linguistic diversity within Japan itself has only really begun to occur in the last decade
in the case of internal language diversity. The important thing, though, is that it has
begun to happen (Coulmas et al. 2002: 11–12). Noguchi (2000: 8) attributes the change
to four developments during the 1990s: the older ethnic minorities (Ainu, Korean,
Okinawan) began to assert themselves; the popularity of overseas travel fostered
awareness of otherness; an inXux of new labour immigrants settled in communities
across Japan; and research on minorities experienced new growth.
What this means is that Japan has begun to face the prospect of reinventing itself in
terms of its self-image as a one-nation, one-language polity, a position no longer
defensible in a globalizing world of population Xows, international travel, labour-
based immigration, and refugees. ‘The new paradigm required of postmodern Japan
resides not in the celebration of micro-ethnicities, of mere ‘‘diVerence’’, but in a
growing awareness of social hybridity, life-style heterogeneity and cultural crossing’
(Maher 2000: vii). Social hybridity is becoming increasingly evident in sections of
Tokyo, where the population makeup, as in all large urban centres in countries which
attract labour migration, has changed as workers of diVerent ethnicity form commu-
nities. Around 18,000 children speaking sixty-Wve diVerent native languages are now in
the Japanese public school system (Coulmas et al. 2002: 11).
While ethnic diversity has thus undeniably increased since the early 1990s, and
public schools in some areas are attempting to cope with children whose Wrst
language is not Japanese, any government policy initiatives have occurred mainly at
the local rather than the national level (Noguchi 2000: 15). There is no provision for
education in students’ native languages; the relationship between Wrst and second
language literacy is not recognized at policy level. Special instruction in Japanese
language for foreign students is provided on a voluntary (on the part of the schools)
rather than mandatory basis through the pull-out system, whereby the students are
pulled out of regular classrooms for a few hours of Japanese language instruction per
week, an approach which Vaipae (2000: 198) characterizes as ‘language as problem’.
Linguistic diversity is not yet seen as a national resource to be mined for its treasures
and the beneWts it can confer on society, except in the pragmatic case of English.
A recent survey of Japanese attitudes to bilingualism found that, while bilingualism
was generally viewed positively (in the case of elite bilinguals rather than of speakers
 Japan 199

of heritage languages), ‘to most subjects, the term bilingual refers to a speaker
of Japanese and English, but not to speakers of other languages’ (Yamamoto 2000:
39–40).

The new social conWgurations which underlie recognition of language diversity are
already in place, adding to the pre-existing but until recently ignored older conWgura-
tions. The issue of the lack of education for minority students in their mother tongues
has been raised internationally: a 1998 position paper written for the United Nations
Working Group on Indigenous Populations stressed the importance of reviving the
Okinawan languages through perhaps teaching them as an elective in schools, and in
2001 the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
(UNCERD) recommended that Japan ‘undertake appropriate measures to eliminate
discriminatory treatment of minorities . . . and to ensure access to education in
minority languages in public Japanese schools’ (UNCERD 2001: 16).
It may be that increased international exposure, as so often in the past in Japan, will
lead to policy-level changes, but that is likely to take some considerable time.
Ideological change is slow in coming, particularly in the one-nation, one-language
polities, involving as it does the reinvention of the national self-image from a
nationalist to a post-nationalist paradigm. It would seem, however, that Japan – like
many other advanced industrial nations – is now Wrmly set upon this path, in real
terms if not yet in terms of oYcial policy.
 10
North and South Korea
Ross King

10.1 Introduction
Until the separate states of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (henceforth,
North Korea or DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (henceforth, South Korea or ROK)
were declared in 1948, Korea for hundreds of years was a rare case of a near-perfect Wt
between nation and language: it has for centuries been characterized by an extremely
high degree of homogeneity, both linguistically and ethnically. Now, the Korean
nation and its territory is divided into two distinct nation-states, each with quite
diVerent political and economic systems and conditions in operation, and character-
ized by very diVerent conditions and experiences of everyday life. Since the end of the
Second World War, the North, with a current, estimated population of 22 million,
has largely isolated itself from the outside world and spawned a resolutely independ-
ent form of communist development that has yielded minimal economic success in
recent years. The South, by way of contrast, has undergone signiWcant modernization
and growth in its open economy, established extensive contacts with other countries
in Asia and the West, and with a population of 48 million now enjoys much
prosperity as one of Asia’s major economic forces. In both North and South Korea,
there is a strong attachment to the idea of a single Korean nation, and language is an
extremely important symbol of national identity, but since the division of Korea into
two separate states there have been growing signs of increasing divergence in the
national language as the result of diVerent forces of development in the North and
the South. In the North, under the dominant leadership of Kim Il Sung and later Kim
Jong-il, language has been explicitly recognized as an important ideological tool for
nation-building, leading to a deliberate, large-scale redirection of the national lan-
guage towards a ‘purer’, native form of Korean, and several decades of heavy, state-
led language planning. In the South, there has been less forceful and widespread
government intervention in language matters, but a steady, and to some alarming,
rise in the incorporation of foreign loanwords has continued to occur, taking the
South Korean lexicon further away from that used in the North after its re-nativization
of Korean. With such increasing divergence in the ‘national’ language and the nation
 North and South Korea 201

split in two distinct political units, Korea and its special sociolinguistic conWguration
raises the important question of whether (or perhaps how long) a nation identiWed
signiWcantly in terms of a shared language can remain distinguished and identiWed as a
single nation when its language is undergoing change into increasingly distinct sub-
varieties associated with diVerent populations. This chapter examines the separated
development of the Korean language over the last sixty years in the two Koreas, and
how the diVerent patterns of linguistic growth now pose a challenge to the maintenance
of a single Korean national identity and any eventual reuniWcation of the nation. The
chapter also considers how the orthographic representation of Korean has regularly
been an important and contested feature of the language both in earlier times and
during more recent periods of nationalism and post-war independence and growth, and
how the unique, native script of Korean and other aspects of the language are striking in
the way that they arouse strong emotions and attitudes among many of their speakers,
resulting in the clear occurrence of language nationalism. Setting out the background to
this primary focus on the second half of the twentieth century, in sections 10.2 and 10.3
we begin with a brief overview of language in pre-modern Korea and during Japanese
colonial occupation from 1910 to 1945.

North and South Korea

202 R. King

10.2 Language and Writing in Pre-modern Korea1

Korea’s remarkable linguistic and ethnic homogeneity2 can be traced back until at
least the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392), and most Korean historians would push this back
further to the time of the UniWed Silla kingdom (668–935). However, both the origins
of the Korean language itself and the details of the language(s) spoken on the Korean
peninsula prior to the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) are shrouded in mystery and
controversy. As we will later see (section 10.5.3, note 18), the notion that Korean is an
‘Altaic’ language is widely accepted in South Korea, but vehemently contested in
North Korea. In its conservative version, the Altaic hypothesis holds that Korean
constitutes an independent branch of the Altaic language family, the other branches
being Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic.3 Another view present in international schol-
arship which has been slow to gain support in Korea suggests that Korean is a sister
language to Japanese due to ‘Japonic’ (comprising Japanese and Okinawan) also
belonging to the larger ‘Macro-Altaic’ family. Still other scholars prefer to consider
Korean a full ‘isolate’ with no proven genetic aYliation to other languages. However,
the dearth of extensive and phonetically reliable linguistic materials reXecting lan-
guage in Korea before the Wfteenth century AD makes any claims about genetic
aYliation a risky and controversial business. This is not to say that there are no written
records from Korea in the Wrst millennium AD. Such records do exist and are relatively
abundant, but they are all written in Chinese, an isolating language that is structurally
very diVerent from highly agglutinative Korean, and with a writing system – Chinese
characters – that is highly unsuited to the purposes of phonetic writing.
Although the precise origin of the Korean language therefore remains open to
debate, it is well known that Chinese language and script were imported into Korea
from the earliest attested times, and by the time of the UniWed Silla kingdom at the
latest this resulted in a complex form of diglossia being present in Korea. In their
everyday lives people in pre-Chosŏn (pre-1392) Korea spoke vernacular Korean, but
the primary oYcial, written language – the language of the bureaucracy and of high
culture – was formal written Chinese (Literary Sinitic). In addition to Literary Sinitic,
there was a secondary hybrid writing system known as itwu or ‘Clerk Readings’ which
occurred in the production of administrative documents. The itwu system made use
of certain Chinese characters to represent Korean morphosyntactic elements (verb
endings, nominal particles, etc.), and some native Korean words, and combined these

1
The Romanization systems used to render Korean in this chapter are Yale (in italics, and also for
author names) and McCune– Reischauer (elsewhere). Some proper nouns like Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-il,
etc., are rendered idiosyncratically as they appear in popular publications.
2
The divided Koreas today also maintain this exceptionally high linguistic and ethnic homogeneity,
and neither North nor South Korea has any signiWcant linguistic or ethnic minorities.
3
In fact, many South Koreans are still taught in school that their language belongs to the ‘Ural-Altaic’
language family, but international scholarly opinion since the 1950s has been in agreement that ‘Uralic’
and ‘Altaic’ should be treated as separate groupings, and one rarely hears the term ‘Ural-Altaic’ outside of
South Korea anymore.
 North and South Korea 203

with Literary Sinitic to create texts that looked like Literary Sinitic (due to being fully
composed of Chinese characters), but had Korean word order and were read in
Korean. Finally, there existed a system of auxiliary annotations known as kwukyel
written in the margins of texts in Literary Sinitic as a kind of reading-aid-cum-
translation device. If the Korean reader followed the auxiliary markings, the original
Literary Sinitic text came out ‘translated’ into Korean word order with appropriate
Korean morphology in place. The complex skills of reading and writing pure Literary
Sinitic, itwu, and kwukyel were, however, mastered by only an elite few, and further-
more were conWned to speciWc, limited spheres of usage, hence not in widespread
usage among the Korean population. Because of the vast structural diVerences
between Chinese and Korean, itwu and kwukyel ‘borrowed character’ orthographies
were also clumsy and ineYcient means for recording vernacular Korean.
The Koryŏ dynasty was replaced by the Chosŏn dynasty in 1392, and this dynasty
lasted more than half a millennium, until 1910 when Korea became a Japanese colony.
It was during the early years of the Chosŏn dynasty that Korea’s sage king, Sejong,
with the assistance of some of the best minds in the kingdom, invented the Korean
indigenous alphabet hwunmin cengum, promulgated in 1446, and henceforth often
referred to as (native) Korean script.4 With the advent of this brilliantly designed
vernacular script, it now became possible to write eVectively in Korean. However, this
did not in fact result in Literary Sinitic being ousted from its privileged position as the
only oYcial and ‘serious’ means of written communication. Nor was a democratic
revolution in literacy practices the primary motivation behind King Sejong’s promul-
gation of the script. Indeed, due to the staunchly Sinocentric and Neo-Confucian
ideology of the new Chosŏn dynasty, the promulgation of the new Korean script met
with stubborn resistance from many of the Neo-Confucian literati at the Chosŏn
court, and to this day, Ch’oe Malli, one of the court oYcials at the time, is viliWed in
both Koreas for his memorials protesting against the new script and bemoaning
Chosŏn Korea’s sinking to the level of other ‘barbarians’ with scripts of their own,
such as the Mongols, the Tanguts, etc. Any departure from the Sinocentric, Neo-
Confucian worldview, and any threat to the monopoly that the Chinese-educated
literati had on written language, was anathema to Ch’oe and most oYcials like him.
So what were the primary motivations behind the invention of the new script?
Though King Sejong himself indicated that the script was intended to help ordinary
people be able to read and write and would be a more natural representation of
Korean than Chinese characters, in practice, and from other sources, it seems clear
that the new script was meant more, among other things, to (a) help those reading
Chinese texts by alleviating the diYculty of understanding Chinese characters, and (b)
replace the itwu writing system in legal documents and government oYces. Because
4
This script form was later adapted (in the twentieth century) to a new spelling convention and
became known as hankul (section 10.3). As it is technically inaccurate to refer to the script invented by
King Sejong as hankul (though this is sometimes done), the term ‘(native) Korean script’ is used to refer
to King Sejong’s alphabet prior to its twentieth-century conversion into hankul.
204 R. King

of this, for the next half millennium, one of the primary eVective functions of the new
Korean script was indeed the creation of bilingual annotations or cribs of works in
Literary Sinitic – typically Confucian and Buddhist classics. In this sense, then, the
new script largely supplanted the functions of kwukyel orthography. However, it failed
to dislodge itwu, which continued to be used in much the same way for low-level
administrative purposes right until the end of the Chosŏn dynasty. The new Korean
script also did not (and was not designed to) displace Literary Sinitic from its vaunted
position as the one and only ‘true writing’ form. Mun or ‘writing, literature’ in Chosŏn
Korea was, by default, Chinese, and the educated male elite ignored (and typically
despised) the new vernacular script. Consequently, Literary Sinitic persisted as the
written language of government and high literature, and the deeply ingrained,
Sinocentric view of writing was reXected in the widespread terms that came to be
used to refer to the two rival writing systems: cinse or ‘true script’ for Chinese writing,
and enmun or ‘vulgar/vernacular script’ for writing with Korean script.
For the next Wve hundred years, this enmun continued to be used for annotations of
Literary Sinitic texts, in bilingual publications of the Interpreter’s Bureau for manuals
of Japanese, Manchu, Mongolian, and spoken Chinese, and for vernacular Korean
literary production (though being dwarfed by the quantity of literary production in
Literary Sinitic). Its ease of use made it especially attractive to Buddhists, who found
in the Korean script a useful tool for evangelization and the propagation of Buddhist
doctrine, and to women, who were typically denied opportunities for education in
Literary Sinitic. Educated male literati might use native Korean script in letter
exchanges with their womenfolk and children, but simultaneously denigrated it as
amkhul or ‘women’s script’, another derogatory term applied to the vernacular script
throughout the course of the Chosŏn dynasty.
Long known as the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ because of its largely isolationist and
reclusive foreign policy, Chosŏn Korea was not opened up to Japan and the West
until the 1870s and 1880s; all this while, Korean linguistic life was characterized by the
complex diglossia and digraphia described above: the educated elite used Literary
Sinitic for all their oYcial, written needs, and all Koreans used Korean as their spoken
language. Korean script was held in low esteem, had no oYcial status, and moreover,
was never once the object of coordinated language policy at the state or any other
level until the very end of the dynasty. Nor were vernacular Korean language and
script ever subjects of formal education, all of which focused on the mastery of
Literary Sinitic, and in any case was conWned to a tiny elite.
It was during the ‘enlightenment period’ spanning from the 1890s until 1910, a
dizzying period of nationalist awakening characterized by intense international rivalry
over Korea and multiple competing external inXuences and internal developments,
that Korean script Wrst became the object of oYcial policy attentions and a bona Wde
school subject in the new schools that began to develop. In 1894, one of the statutes
promulgated as part of the Kab’o Reforms elevated the status of native Korean script
signiWcantly, reclassifying it as the ‘national script’ (kwukmun), and stating that legal
 North and South Korea 205

statutes should from that time be written in Korean script, or alternatively in a

mixture of Korean script and Chinese characters representing Korean words, a style
referred to as ‘Sino-Korean script’ (kwukhanmun). With such a positive new recogni-
tion of native Korean script, the use of itwu in oYcial documentation was Wnally over,
and the days of Literary Sinitic, while not over, were certainly numbered. The catch-
phrase of the time in terms of literacy practices soon became ‘uniWcation of speech
and writing’ (enmun ilchi), and the old days of severe diglossia and digraphia char-
acterized by a polarization of Korean speech and Chinese writing were nearly at
an end.
EVectively what happened following the proclamation of the Kab’o Reforms,
however, was not an immediate switch to use of full Korean script for all or even
most oYcial administration, but overwhelmingly the use of the second permitted
option of mixed Sino-Korean script. This style of writing, which also occurred
pervasively in non-oYcial publications during the period, was almost certainly in-
spired and solidiWed by the successful use of a similar mixed script of native alphabet
(kana) and Chinese characters in neighbouring Japan for the writing of Japanese. As a
result of the dominant popularity of the Sino-Korean writing style, publications in full
Korean script remained relatively few, and Korean-only orthography had very much a
peripheral and minority status. Nevertheless, the common switch from Literary
Sinitic and itwu to a form of writing (Sino-Korean) that directly correlated with
spoken Korean, and the symbolic recognition of native Korean script as being suitable
and permitted for formal writing, was an important swing towards elevating the
prestige of the Korean language in general. The coining of a new term hanmun for
Literary Sinitic in opposition to the equally new term kwukmun ‘national script’ was
also signiWcant in being part and parcel of a general ‘de-centering of the Middle
Kingdom (i.e. China)’ that accompanied the spread of modern, progressive, and above
all, nationalist thought during this period.5 The term kwukhanmun (Sino-Korean
script), blended from kwuk-mun ‘national writing’ and han-mun ‘Chinese writing’ to
indicate the blending of Chinese characters with the Korean alphabet in the same text,
was also new and continues to be used today to indicate texts in vernacular Korean
that incorporate Chinese characters for the indication of words coined from original
Chinese sources (‘Sino-Korean’ words). However, kwukhanmun is best thought of as a
continuum of orthographic practices, ranging from the mixed-script texts of the late
nineteenth-/early twentieth-century enlightenment period in which Korean script
symbols were a distinct minority, used primarily to indicate just verb endings and
nominal particles and sandwiched between Chinese characters taken from a theoret-
ically unlimited set, to the mixed-script texts from some South Korean newspapers
today, where it is the Chinese characters that are a distinct minority, chosen from a
more limited and well-deWned repertoire.

5
See Schmid (2002) for an excellent discussion of the ‘de-centering of China’ in this period.
206 R. King

Hence generally, while the earliest attempts to enshrine Korean script as the only
legitimate ‘national script’ and orthography at this time must be seen as largely
ineVectual, it is nonetheless true that the native script began to emerge as a potent
symbol of a modern, authentic, and indigenous Korean identity in the late 1890s and
1900s. As modern schools began to be created in Korea during this period, often with
the backing of Western missionaries or Japanese supporters, Korean language and
script became part of the curriculum. Shim-Fabre (1986: 61–2) notes that: ‘The laws
concerning primary education (19 July 1895), secondary education (April 4 1899) and
the Seoul normal school (April 16 1899) put the Korean language front and center,
and considered it an indispensable instrument for introducing Western civilization
and promoting Western education.’
After the statute of 1894 elevating Korean script to the status of national script, an
act which carried more symbolic meaning than anything else, the Wrst concrete
attempt by the Chosŏn government to place matters of language planning and policy
on an oYcial, institutional basis was the creation in 1907 of the National Script
Research Centre, formed two years after Japan had made Korea its new protectorate.
The body of scholars that constituted this centre included Chu Si-gyŏng, Korea’s Wrst
grammarian, who had been deeply involved in the early promotion of Korean script,
and in 1909 the group made a number of speciWc recommendations, all related to
issues of script and orthography. However, the heavily pro-Japanese Minister of
Education of the time showed no inclination to act on any of the recommendations,
and before any further attempts at language planning and reform could be made,
Korea lost its sovereignty in 1910.

10.3 Language and Writing during the Japanese

Colonial Period (1910–1945)
With the full absorption of Korea into the Japanese empire in 1910, the Korean
language and script lost their short-lived, oYcially recognized ‘national’ status, and
also much of their nascent importance as focal points for Korean nationalist and
patriotic sentiment. Instead, Japanese, a language that had been the target of various
ongoing modernization projects since the Meiji Restoration in Japan (1866–9) and
which was increasingly becoming an important, if not the most important model for
Korean intellectuals, was installed as the national language in Korea. Korean was
itself demoted to being simply chōsengo ‘Korean (the language of Chōsen, i.e. Cho-
sŏn)’, and the script was once again just referred to as vernacular/vulgar script
(enmun).
The Wrst decade of Japanese colonial rule was particularly harsh, and allowed for
little freedom of expression on the part of Koreans, let alone concerted eVorts by
Koreans in the area of language cultivation. Korean grammarians and patriots, led
primarily by Chu Si-gyŏng until his death in 1914, and then by his students and
 North and South Korea 207

associates, continued to work in private on language cultivation projects that would

bear fruit much later, but it was, in fact, the Japanese colonial authorities who put in
place the Wrst oYcial, modern orthography of native Korean, ‘Enmun Orthography for
Use in Elementary Schools’, announced in April 1912, and revised in 1921 and 1930.
This Japanese-sponsored orthography explicitly took Seoul speech as its model, and
thus appears to be the Wrst time that the Seoul variety was accorded oYcial recogni-
tion as a standard form of Korean by an administrative body (though having been the
prestige form of Korean for many centuries). It was also the Japanese colonial
government-general that published the Wrst comprehensive dictionary of Korean in
1920 of some one thousand pages. Here, aspirations of the Japanese rulers for full
control of the colonized language can be seen by the fact that in the unpublished page
proofs to the Korean Dictionary preserved in Seoul, all entries for Sino-Korean
vocabulary that also existed as Sino-Japanese lexical items, but had meanings or usages
diVerent from those in Japanese, were systematically marked for exclusion in the Wnal,
published version of the dictionary.6 As we shall later see (section 10.4.2), this practice
of manipulating dictionaries for discursive control would be continued in post-
Liberation North Korea.
After peaceful, nationwide protests against Japanese rule in 1919, the colonial
authorities changed to implement a more lenient, ‘cultural policy’ from 1919 to 1931
which allowed Koreans limited freedom in cultural matters, and the 1920s and early
1930s subsequently witnessed a relative Xourishing of research and publication activ-
ities in connection with Korean language and writing. Common Korean accounts of
this period written after 1945 concentrate on the Korean Language Society, founded in
1921 by students of patriot grammarian Chu Si-gyŏng, and its eVorts to devise a
reformed, modern orthography for Korean as well as to lay the foundations of a
modern, standardized Korean language. The Korean Language Society called its new
orthography ‘hankul’, a neologism actually coined by Chu Si-gyŏng around 1910 on the
basis of the morphemes han, a Chinese character meaning ‘Korea’ and kul, meaning
‘script; writing’, and began promoting the new spelling in earnest in the late 1920s.7
The new hankul orthography was by no means uncontroversial, and was vigorously
opposed throughout the 1930s by a rival linguistic society, so that well into the 1930s
the word hankul continued to attract the epithet ‘so-called’. In 1933, however, the
Korean Language Society published the Wnalized version of its UniWed Orthography
for the Korean Language (also known as the UniWed Hankul Orthography). Though
making use of Korean native script, the new orthography departed radically from
traditional spelling practices in that it was morpho-phonemic, representing the
underlying etymological shape of morphemes rather than just their surface pronun-
ciations, and also incorporated word spacing, a feature Wrst experimented with in the

6
Professor Ki-moon Lee (personal communication).
7
Note that the character han in hankul is diVerent from the character han meaning ‘China’ which
occurs in words such as hanmun ‘Chinese writing’.
208 R. King

late 1890s.8 The 1933 UniWed Orthography was modiWed in 1936, 1937, 1940, and
1946.
In 1936, the Korean Language Society then published its ClassiWed Compendium of
Standard Korean, which, among other things, reaYrmed the deWnition of ‘standard
Korean’ that had appeared in the 1933 UniWed Orthography as follows: ‘In general, as
standard language we take the Seoul speech used by contemporary middle-class
society.’ Korean Language Society members continued to work doggedly into the
1940s on their Great Dictionary of the Korean Language until more than thirty of
the society were arrested in 1942 by the Japanese colonial authorities; many were
imprisoned, and two members perished in jail. In general, the Korean language came
under increasing pressure from the mid-1930s. According to Popov (1958: 189), only
25 per cent of Korean children of school age were able to attend elementary school in
1933, and Korean language was not a priority in the curriculum. The use of Korean
was later prohibited in public in 1938 as part of a more generalized ‘Japanese
everyday-use policy’ that included recognition and rewards for Korean homes that
were exemplary in using Japanese – the kokugo jōyō no ie ‘homes where the national
language ( Japanese) is used regularly’ (Shim-Fabre 1986: 68) – and 1938 also marked
the demotion of Korean to the status of an optional subject in schools. Following this
in 1940, Korea’s two major Korean-language dailies, the ‘Chosŏn ilbo’ and ‘Tong’a
ilbo’, were closed by the Japanese colonial authorities.
The Korean Language Society did not resume its activities again until after
liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, when it changed its name to the
Hankul Society. Perhaps the most important points to remember about the nearly
thirty-six years of Japanese colonial rule can be summarized as follows: (1) despite
limited freedoms granted after 1919 and allowed until the renewed and intensifying
constriction of liberties beginning in the late 1930s, the Korean language had no
oYcial status in its own land; (2) Koreans had few opportunities for formal education
in their native tongue; (3) knowledge of and education in Japanese language was
promoted aggressively by the colonial authorities and pursued as aggressively by
many Koreans (especially among the elite), with the result that by 1945 a signiWcant
proportion of the population (especially among intellectuals) could be considered
bilingual in Japanese to a certain extent; (4) despite the tireless eVorts of the members
of the Korean Language Society, their UniWed Hankul Orthography and attempt to
deWne ‘standard Korean’ were never oYcial policy under the Japanese, and it is not
clear to what extent their ideas and policy recommendations permeated Korean
society in the late 1930s and 1940s (R. King 1996, 1998); and Wnally, (5) in general,
Japanese policies during the colonial period can be characterized as having as
their main goal the extirpation of Korean culture and language and concomitant
8
Hence, for example, a word such as kes ‘thing’ whose Wnal consonant sound might be realized as
either /s/, /n/, or /t/ in diVerent environments (depending on the initial sound of the following word/
morpheme), came to be represented in the same way in all environments in the new hankul, but would
have been represented in diVerent ways in traditional spelling.
 North and South Korea 209

assimilation of Koreans to Japanese language and culture, a fact that leaves much
bitterness and hatred towards Japan to this day in both North and South Korea.

10.4 Korean Language and Writing in a Divided Land,

1945–Present
With the defeat of Japan in World War II, Soviet troops occupied the northern half of
Korea while American troops occupied the south. The domestic political vacuum left
by the departing Japanese led to considerable political and ideological conXict through-
out the peninsula, and the ad hoc division into North and South along the 38th parallel
soon developed into separate and mutually hostile regimes with the formation in 1948
of the ROK in the south (15 August) and the DPRK in the north (9 September).
Following this, the border between North and South grew more and more volatile,
with Korean leaders on both sides eager to unify the country by force, and many would
maintain that the surprise attack by the North on the South in June 1950 was in origin
part of a festering civil war that subsequently erupted into international conXict. In any
case, the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 was the Wrst time that the new ‘Cold War’
turned hot. By the time the armistice agreement was concluded in 1953, most of
Korea – and especially the North, which had served as a testing ground for new
American carpet bombing techniques and other novel features of aerial warfare (still
referred to as ‘war crimes’ by North Korea) – had been laid waste. No peace treaty was
ever signed, and to this day North and South remain technically at war.
Since the conclusion of the war, the DPRK has continued to pursue a unique form
of communism that has kept the country isolated from most of the world, including
even its closest allies, the former USSR and China, while the ROK has pursued a
capitalist form of development under the close patronage of the United States, and has
been much more integrated into the world economy. Though the North was eco-
nomically more successful than the South well into the 1960s, since the 1970s South
Korean economic growth and the ‘miracle on the River Han’ have left the North
increasingly in the dust in economic terms. Politically, South Korea was ruled by
virulently anti-communist, authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships until
1987, but since then has enjoyed more democratic government and continued
impressive economic growth. The result today is a nation split in two, with radically
diVerent politico-ideological systems, radically diVerent economies, and increasingly
divergent sociocultural complexes. UniWcation remains the stated goal of both re-
gimes, and indeed of most average Koreans in both the North and South, but in the
ROK more and more people are questioning the feasibility, and also the Wnancial
aVordability, of uniWcation – at least in the near future – and there seems little real
prospect of uniWcation in the short term.9
9
Hence there is a deep worry among many in the South that reuniWcation with the North will impose
a signiWcant Wnancial burden on the South, much in the way that the reuniWcation of Germany was
primarily funded by the West.
210 R. King

Just how far apart the North and South are can be gleaned from something as
simple as the signiWcant diVerence in Korean words used for ‘Korea’ and ‘Korean
language’ in the ROK and the DPRK. The South uses hankwuk for ‘Korea’, literally
‘Country of the Han’, using a word han which harks back to the ‘Three Hans’,
kingdoms in the southern part of ancient Korea, and tayhan minkwuk (‘Great Han
people’s country’) for its oYcial, full name, Republic of Korea. The North uses quite
diVerent terms, however: cosen for Korea (harking back to the mythical kingdom of
ancient Chosŏn/cosen, claimed to have lasted from 2333 to 108 bc across a huge
swathe of territory in what is now northwestern Korea and Manchuria) and cosen
mincwucwuuy konghwakwuk, literally ‘Chosŏn democratic republic’ for its oYcial, full
name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. As for the language, the South uses
hankwuk-e or hankwuk-mal, literally ‘Han country language/speech’ to refer to ‘Kor-
ean’, while the North uses cosen-e or cosen-mal, ‘Chosŏn language/speech’. So averse is
North Korea to the morpheme ‘han’ that the word ‘hankul’ has never caught on there
for the Korean script – instead, North Korea uses cosen-kul ‘Chosŏn script’ or just
wuli-kul ‘our script’.
To summarize, then, all these factors – Korea’s late opening to the world, its harsh
colonial experience under the Japanese, and its national division since 1948 – have had
profound inXuences on Korean language and identity, as we shall see below and in
section 10.5. In terms of speciWc issues relating to language and writing facing Korea
immediately after liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, the most pressing concerns
were: (a) attending to widespread illiteracy in both the north and south of Korea, (b)
the continuing question of the orthographic representation of Korean (and particu-
larly the issue of use of Chinese characters), (c) the need to establish language-
planning institutions to co-ordinate the ‘recovery’ of the Korean language and its
‘cleansing’ of Japanese inXuences, and (d) the elaboration, codiWcation and legitim-
ization of a standardized national language. In the remainder of this section, we
outline the main trends in these areas after 1945.

10.4.1 The Post-1945 Drive for the Eradication of Illiteracy

It is diYcult to gauge the extent of vernacular literacy in Korea until the 1930s, when
the Japanese colonial authorities Wrst attempted to measure it, but despite widespread
assumptions today of high literacy in the vernacular/Korean script in pre-modern
times, it seems certain that literacy rates in Korean were never high in Chosŏn times,
and fared only slightly better during the Japanese colonial period. According to
Skorbatiuk (1975: 143), even before the formation of the DPRK, one quarter of the
population in the north was illiterate. This is conWrmed by the more-or-less contem-
poraneous report of Popov (1958: 194), who writes that after liberation, there were
some 2.5 million illiterates in North Korea. Popov gives a detailed account of the
systematic way in which North Korean authorities tackled illiteracy. By September
1946, there were nearly 10,000 schools of ‘national writing’ functioning in the North,
 North and South Korea 211

and the authorities waged an energetic anti-literacy campaign during the winter
months of 1947/8 when peasants (the bulk of the populace) were not busy farming,
so that: ‘During these months, thanks to the selXess work of the entire Korean
population, 951,320 people learned to read and write.’ (Popov 1958: 195). Two similar
winter campaigns followed, and Chin-Wu Kim (1978a: 166) notes a North Korean
editorial claiming that illiteracy had in fact ‘totally disappeared’ by the end of 1948
already, and comments: ‘If true, this is a remarkable achievement and contrasts with
the situation in South Korea, where, as of the winter of 1954, there were 3,105,000
illiterates.’ Kumatani (1990: 91) echoes this sentiment, noting that South Korea still
had 8.3 per cent illiteracy as late as 1958.

10.4.2 The Beginnings of Language Policy in North Korea

As early as February 1947, the interim People’s Committee in the northern part of
Korea, through Decision no. 175, gave an early indication of what the ideological
underpinnings of language policy would be in the North:
Today, as we stand on the road of construction of an independent, self-reliant, democratic
state, the uniWcation and development of Korean language and literature based on
scientiWc ideals and continuous research are the basis for reWning the cultural construction
of the Korean people and are a matter of urgent demand. (cited in R. King 1997: 117)

Numerous observers of North Korean language policy (e.g. Skorbatiuk 1975 and
Fabre 1994) have characterized the early years of DPRK policy as ‘democratizing’ –
that is, as intending to make written language as accessible as possible to the populace
at large. This was accomplished in part by banning the use of Chinese characters from
public life and writing exclusively in the vernacular script, and by late 1949 Chinese
characters were for the most part gone from newspapers and magazines in the North.
It is also widely assumed outside of North Korea that the ban on Chinese characters in
the North extended to a renunciation of their teaching in schools, but Chinese
character education was in fact revived in 1953, and North Korean school children
have been consistently trained in a total of some 1,800 characters for the purposes of
reading texts with Chinese characters produced either prior to 1949 or contempor-
aneously in South Korea (Hatholi 1991).
In terms of language-planning institutions responsible for discussing and suggesting
language policy in the DPRK, the Wrst of these was the Research Society for Korean
Language and Literature, set up shortly after the end of World War II, incorporated
into the new Kim Il Sung University, and then placed directly under the Ministry of
Education in 1948. Somewhat later on, in the mid-1960s, language policy was co-
ordinated by the National Language Assessment Committee, attached directly to the
cabinet, and working with a range of other government committees. The most
signiWcant shaping and direction of language policy in the DPRK, however, came
from the direct involvement of North Korea’s dominant post-war leader Kim Il Sung
in matters of language and in pronouncements on the proper relation of language to
212 R. King

the development of a socialist society. Of critical importance here were two ‘conver-
sations with linguists’ which took place in a meeting between Kim Il Sung and an
assembly of North Korea’s senior linguists, subsequently published in 1964 and 1966.
These extended statements on language by Kim Il Sung radically redeWned the
ideological orientations and future directions of North Korean language policy, and
as Fabre (1998: 311) notes, were ‘a sort of act of birth of the new language in North
Korea and the consummation of its linguistic divorce with the South’. Besides the
guidelines for future policy that they set down, the two documents are also important
for the insights they aVord into general questions of language and national identity in
North Korea. Indeed, the DPRK’s two most prominent linguistics journals – the more
academic ‘Korean Language and Literature’ (Chosŏn Ŏmun) and the more populist
‘Practice in the Cultured Language’ (Munhwaŏ Haksŭp) – both feature frequent
citations from various classic points in these ‘conversations’, prefaced by the obliga-
tory phrase, ‘The Great Leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung, has instructed as follows: . . . ’
For example, one such passage from the 1964 conversation ‘Issues Concerning the
Development of the Korean Language’ reads:
Our language is rich in expression and can express both complicated thoughts and subtle
emotions: it can move people and bring them both to tears and laughter. Because our
language is capable of expressing clearly the rules of etiquette, it is also useful in people’s
communist moral upbringing. (cited from R. King 1996: 127)

One important theme brought up (again) in the 1964 conversation is the issue of
Chinese characters, where we Wnd clearly articulated the notion (also characteristic of
South Korea, and diVerent from attitudes in Japan) that Chinese characters are ‘not
ours’:
Must we continue to use Chinese characters or not? There is no need to use Chinese
characters . . . Because they are the writing of another nation, we should use Chinese char-
acters only up to a certain point . . . We absolutely must conceive of the Chinese characters
problem in connection with the problem of uniWcation of our nation . . . [T]oday, as long as
South Koreans continue to mix Chinese characters with our script, we cannot completely
abandon Chinese characters. If we abandon Chinese characters completely now, we end up
unable to read newspapers and magazines produced in South Korea. Thus, for a certain
period of time, we must learn Chinese characters and use them. Of course, this does not
mean we are proposing to use Chinese characters in newspapers. We must use our own
script in all of our publications. (cited from Hatholi 1991: 270)

As noted by both Chin-Wu Kim (1978a: 168) and Kumatani (1990: 89), the 1964
dialogue accorded a special role to the dictionary. Kim Il Sung laments that the six-
volume Dictionary of the Korean Language looks more like a traditional Chinese
character dictionary for Koreans than it does a genuinely Korean dictionary, and sets
forth recommendations for a more prescriptive role for dictionaries, and for the
cleansing of the language of foreign elements (especially the vast number of words
of Chinese origin, the ‘Sino-Korean’ words). Kumatani (1990: 98) writes of DPRK
 North and South Korea 213

dictionaries being ‘abused as a method of social control for vocabulary prescription’,

and describes the ‘social control of word meaning in North Korea’ as dating from this
conversation. The 1964 dialogue ends with a call for linguistic mobilization and a
social movement to spread the habit of ‘using Korean correctly’.
The 1966 conversation, ‘On the Proper Development of the National Character-
istics of the Korean Language’, was concerned more with the question of ‘standard
language’ and the role of linguists in researching and establishing language norms. In
this dialogue, Kim Il Sung criticized Seoul Korean, which had previously often been
referred to as standard Korean, as being a poor model of speech for a developing
socialist (North) Korea. Seoul Korean was viliWed as being the product of a feudal,
bourgeois society and over-contaminated with foreign loanwords from Chinese,
Japanese, and (more recently) English sources to the extent of becoming a mixed
and impure language. The dialogue then stresses that ‘we communists must save the
national character of our language and develop it further’, and calls for the recogni-
tion of a new standard/model Korean crafted by responsible, socialist eVorts and in
tune with the language of the labouring masses. Such a more genuinely national (and
socialist) form of language should then be explicitly distinguished from Seoul Korean
by being given a new name, it was declared:
We must replace the word ‘standard language’ [phyocwune] with a diVerent term: if we use
the term ‘standard’, it is possible to interpret it incorrectly as meaning the Seoul standard
language: thus we should not use it. Rather than taking P’yŏngyang speech . . . as standard
and calling it phyocwune, we who are building socialism should call it by another
name. (cited from R. King 1996: 128)

The term then proposed as a label for the new standard language to be nurtured and
developed in North Korea was munhwae ‘Cultured Language/Cultured Speech’. Accord-
ing to Sohn (1991: 99, citing the 1973 Cosen munhwae sacen dictionary), this new Cultured
Speech was deWned as ‘the richly developed national language that is formed centering
around the revolutionary capital [i.e., P’yŏngyang in North Korea] under the leadership
of the proletarian party that holds sovereignty during the socialism-constructing period,
and that all people hold as a standard, because it has been reWned revolutionarily and
polished culturally to Wt the proletariat’s goals and lifestyle.’
The 1966 conversation also returns to the question of Chinese characters and
Chinese-character education:
Even as we strive to use Chinese character words as little as possible, we must give our
students the Chinese characters they need and also teach them how to write them. Insofar
as there are quite a number of Chinese characters in South Korean publications and
documents from the old days, if we want people to be able to read these, we have to teach
them Chinese characters to a certain extent. (cited in Hatholi 1991: 270)

The long-term result of these two ‘conversations with linguists’ has been to set the
course of DPRK language policy along certain Wxed lines: abolition of Chinese
214 R. King

characters from public life, and an emphasis on indigenousness and purity in lan-
guage, along with a sense that the DPRK is somehow the last bastion of national
purity in Korea. Concomitantly with Kim Il Sung’s highly personalized intervention in
language policy in this way, we also Wnd what Kumatani (1990: 105) has termed the
‘standardization of Kim Il Sung’s idiolect’. Such a personality cult had evolved in
connection with the prominent North Korean leader (similar to that with Mao
Zedong in China) that Kim Il Sung’s speech was seen as a standard to be revered
and oYcially modelled; new words proposed by the leader were therefore automat-
ically listed as elements of Cultured Speech in the evolving dictionaries and in the
spread of the new standard, and any pronouncements on the meanings of newly
coined words by Kim Il Sung were taken to be fully deWnitive. The ‘supremacy’ of the
leader was also ‘expressed in the printing of his name, which should be printed in
Gothic letters and cannot be broken in the middle and carried over to the next line’
(Kumatani 1990: 106). The 1966 conversation furthermore signiWcantly coincided with
the advent of Kim Il Sung’s ideas of chuch’e philosophy, North Korea’s peculiar brand
of socialist autonomy and self-reliance in all national matters, and yuil sasang, the idea
of the uniqueness of the Korean race and culture, both of which became activated and
highly important after 1967 (Kumatani 1990: 90).
One major consequence of Kim Il Sung’s conversations of 1964 and 1966 and their
recommendations on Chinese characters and Sino-Korean vocabulary was the inten-
siWcation of an ongoing campaign to purify the language of foreign words, of which
Sino-Korean borrowings and coinages were by far the most pervasive, making up
approximately 60 to 75 per cent of the Korean lexicon according to various estimates.
This involved the promotion of native Korean dialect words in many instances as
replacements for foreign-origin words and phrases, and also the large-scale coining of
new words from pure Korean sources where appropriate existing native Korean words
could not be found. The results of such extensive ‘vocabulary management’ (Kuma-
tani 1990: 96) or ‘lexical adjustment/tweakage’ and neologizing subsequently shocked
many South Korean observers when they Wrst became aware of it in the 1970s, as
some of the North Korean lexicon had been altered and could not be immediately
understood by those in the South. Other observers outside South Korea were less
emotional in their assessments of North Korean lexical management. Shim-Fabre
(1986: 84), for example, notes that ‘Despite the dirigiste and normative character of
this movement in favor of the Cultural Language, public opinion was by and large
consulted by the media,’ and her judgement is corroborated to a certain extent by the
Russian linguist Skorbatiuk (1975), an eyewitness to the beginnings of the intensiWed
nativization movement in North Korea. According to Skorbatiuk (1975: 146–8), the
establishment of a state-wide radio service in the North was fully in place by 1966,
leading to the distribution of lists of proposed neologisms or ‘adjusted words’ by radio
and television throughout the North. This was further supported by the distribution
of the populist language-planning journal, ‘Munhwaŏ Haksŭp’, from 1968 onwards as
another platform for propagating neologisms. At the time of his writing (1975),
 North and South Korea 215

Skorbatiuk claimed that nearly 400 ‘new word’ lists had been published (with 10–15
words per list), and that ‘Munhwaŏ Haksŭp’ had published 728 ‘adjusted’ words
(Skorbatiuk was in P’yŏngyang from 1965 to 1969). He describes the reactions of the
general public at the time as follows:
. . . at Wrst there was a sense of awkwardness amongst the populace, who experienced
diYculties in understanding what was read – especially on radio broadcasts. This can be
explained by the fact that in the Wrst stages, the Linguistic Commission released into
circulation perhaps too large a quantity of adjusted vocabulary for everyday use. However,
a few months later, the situation normalized: the population began to listen with
interest to radio broadcasts dedicated to problems of lexical adjustment. In numerous
public places many proposed neologisms for lexical units of Chinese provenance were
discussed in animated fashion. Now the work has taken on a systematic and constant
character.

By 1991, the DPRK had coined as many as 50,000 new lexical items, in a highly
signiWcant reorientation of core Korean vocabulary away from foreign sources and
towards a puriWed ‘true’ national language built on native Korean words. Given the
rapid progress of the Korean language in South Korea in an entirely opposite direction
and the adoption of increasingly more English loanwords (estimated in Sohn 1991: 99
to have reached 10,000 in number by 1991) despite certain government attempts at
control of the lexicon, this has opened up a major gap between language in the North
and that in the South, as will be discussed later on in section 10.5.

10.4.3 The Beginnings of Language Policy in South Korea

As in the North after liberation, a primary concern in South Korea in 1945 was illiteracy
and the question of Chinese characters in orthography. Technically speaking, all
national policy in the years 1945–8 was actually in the hands of the US Allied Military
Government in Korea occupation oYcials. One such oYcial working in the Depart-
ment of Education was a man named Anderson, who wrote in 1948 of the diYculty
posed by Chinese characters in the South – a diYculty that ‘prevents the mass literacy so
essential in a modern nation . . . ’ (P. Anderson 1948: 508). Anderson (ibid: 510) goes on:
‘It is obvious that as long as it is essential to read Chinese characters to understand a
newspaper, literacy will remain a possession of the educated elite.’
While there were certainly forces south of the 38th parallel in favour of the
curtailment or outright abolition of Chinese characters, a number of factors conspired
against them. First and foremost among these was the simple fact that, unlike in
the North, where any and all individuals with former ties to local elites and the
Japanese colonial administration were purged, US military occupation oYcials in the
South ended up leaving largely intact and in fact relying upon the Japanese-educated
elite and oYcialdom, all of whom were well versed in Chinese characters.
In June 1948 the Ministry of Education launched a ‘Reclaim Our Language’
movement, and the Korean Language Society submitted a proposal legislating
216 R. King

hankul-only usage that was passed on 30 September 1948, but was amended the next
day under pressure from conservative, pro-Chinese-character elements to include the
rider, ‘For the time being, however, Chinese characters may be used together with
hankul.’ This subsequently led into a protracted and inconsistent back-and-forth in
South Korean policy concerning Chinese characters throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and
1970s. In 1951 the Ministry of Education published an oYcial list of 1,260 characters
for common use/recognition, of which 1,000 were to be learned in elementary
school. Six years later, in 1957, the Council of Ministers decided to ban the use of
characters, however, and police were reportedly even given orders to remove any
signs written in ‘foreign scripts’, not just those in Chinese characters (Fabre 1994: 245).
Then in 1963 it was decided to go back to ‘mixed script’ in school manuals, and in
1964, the Minister of Education published a new list of 1,300 Chinese characters for
everyday use. A further change in policy away from Chinese characters occurred in
1968–9 when a Committee for the Exclusive Usage of Hankul was created by the
President of South Korea and the Minister of National Defence announced that the
army would use only hankul in its written materials. Invoking national independence,
the government also banned Chinese characters from all school manuals in 1969, only
to turn around again in 1972 and publish a new list of 1,800 ‘basic Chinese characters’
for secondary school education, oYcially reintroduced into South Korean school
textbooks in 1974.
In addition to this to-and-fro policy cycle in relation to issues of script and Korean
orthography, various government committees since the declaration of the ROK in
1948 have declared campaigns to ‘purify’ the national language of foreign (mostly
Japanese) elements, in a way that recalls the programmes of lexical adjustment in
North Korea but which, by comparison, turned out to be much less eVective and
extensive. Thus, in April 1976 the president of South Korea gave instructions to his
ministers of Education, Information, Health, and Social AVairs on the need to cease
using foreign loanwords; two months later, in June, in a meeting with his council of
ministers, this ‘movement’ was extended to all sectors, and in July a National
Language PuriWcation Council was created. The following year, the Minister of
Education published a list of 630 foreign loans to be replaced with pure Korean
words, and in November 1978 authorities obliged merchants to remove signs written
with ‘foreign letters’ for a period of time. The ‘campaign’ continued three years later
in 1981 when the Minister of General AVairs edited a manual for the puriWcation of
administrative vocabulary with a list of 1,035 loanwords from Japanese and English to
be replaced/discontinued from use (Shim-Fabre 1986: 75). These oYcial ‘puriWcation’
campaigns initiated in the 1970s and early 1980s have now largely subsided, at least
from the government purview, but the notion of ‘puriWcation’ (swunhwa) retains its
currency in many quarters of South Korean society, and Korean broadcasters like KBS
and EBS maintain programmes aimed at lexical puriWcation and inculcation/propa-
gation of ‘correct’ Korean. However, in the more democratized political climate since
the free elections of 1987, ‘puriWcation’ has also been negatively identiWed with fascist
 North and South Korea 217

proclivities by critics such as Ko Congsek (1999) in a work entitled ‘Infected Korean’,

where it is suggested that the importation of foreign loanwords can alternatively be
celebrated as a source of enrichment for the language.
In the period from 1945 onwards, South Korean linguists and grammarians, like
their counterparts in the North, also did their utmost to complete dictionaries and
grammars of the ‘national language’. The Wrst volume of the Great Dictionary of the
Korean Language begun by the Korean Language Society under the Japanese occu-
pation was completed in October 1947, and volume two was Wnished in May 1949, but
the entire dictionary was not published until after the Korean War in 1957. Since the
1980s, dictionary compilation in particular, but also the publication of grammars, has
been somewhat of a free-for-all of competing academic societies, university research
centres, and individual scholars. The National Academy of the Korean Language’s
Great Dictionary of the Standard National Language appears to enjoy the most
prestige among dictionaries now, but is by no means the only one available, and
there is no single ‘oYcial’ grammar of the language as there is in North Korea. On a
separate front, linguists in the South have independently grappled with a further,
rather diVerent script-related problem and the issue of how best to represent Korean
in Roman script (a non-trivial problem, due to properties of the phonology of Korean
and the rather abstract morpho-phonemic nature of hankul spelling). Though a
systematic Romanization scheme had been developed in the 1930s, the McCune–
Reischauer system, in the 1990s the South Korean National Academy of the Korean
Language developed a strong (and rather ill-informed, misguided, and nationalism-
fuelled) distaste for this, and went on to promulgate a new, and rather controversial
system. The ROK and DPRK consequently do not have a co-ordinated approach to
Romanization, and the Romanization of Korean seems destined to remain controver-
sial in the future (at least in the South).10

10.4.4 The Result: Linguistic Divergence

As can be seen from this sketch of trends in the post-liberation development of Korean,
Korea has, for all practical purposes, actually never had a uniWed, standard(ized)
national language.11 Initial attempts at standardization starting around the turn of
the twentieth century were soon impeded by the Japanese colonization of Korea, and
since national division in 1948, Korean language cultivation eVorts have proceeded in
two diVerent directions in two diVerent regimes with radically diVerent political
ideologies. Chin-Wu Kim (1978b: 256) has criticized the ‘zigzagging government
policies’ of the ROK (concerning the use of Chinese characters), while Shim-Fabre
(1986: 77) has characterized DPRK language policy as ‘more consistent, faster,
and more eVective’, as well as ‘more normative and also more coercive’. The

10
See Schroepfer (2001) for more discussion.
11
South Korean grammarians like to claim that Seoul speech has been the ‘standard’ Korean language
for centuries, but this confuses the notions of ‘prestige dialect’ and ‘standard language’.
218 R. King

inevitable result of this has been a signiWcant and growing divergence between North
Korean and South Korean language practice. This divergence most deWnitely runs
wider and deeper than the linguistic diVerences which developed in the German
language when Germany was separated into two independent states in 1945 (diVer-
ences which, though linguistically insigniWcant, nonetheless generated hundreds of
research publications on both sides of the Berlin Wall).12 North–South Korean
linguistic divergence is most obvious in (i) the lexicon (from the weeding out of
Sino-Korean and other foreign loans in North Korea, plus concomitant lexical adjust-
ment, vs. massive foreign (mostly English) loanword introduction in South Korea) and
(ii) orthography, partly because of diVerences in hankul spelling practices in North and
South, but especially with respect to Chinese characters (the full absence of Chinese
characters from North Korean publications, vs. the continued presence of characters
in many South Korean newspapers and journals). But there are diVerences and
divergence in other areas, too, and these diVerences are especially salient to Koreans
themselves. For example, South Koreans perceive North Korean speech as vulgar and
aggressive, while North Koreans perceive South Korean speech as infected, eVete, and
eVeminate. We shortly return to the important issue of divergence and its conse-
quences below, in section 10.5.3.13

10.5 Language and Identity in the Koreas Today

We now turn to consider language and national identity issues in North and South
Korea today, at the beginning of the twenty-Wrst century. As a way to begin, it will be
useful to sharpen our understanding of what is meant by the expression
‘language nationalism’. In his useful survey of European linguistic nationalism from
1850 to 1945, Gardt (2000: 247) makes a distinction between language nationalism
and language patriotism. The following features are suggested to be true of a nation’s
language and its approach to language when associated with both kinds of attitude,
language nationalism and language patriotism:

12
An important linguistic diVerence between the situation in Korea and that in Germany is that when
the latter was separated in 1945, the German language had already undergone a long process of
standardization stretching well back into the nineteenth century, whereas Korean eVorts at standardiza-
tion were really only initiated in the late 1930s under conditions of Japanese colonial oppression.
Consequently, major, unconstrained attempts at the standardization of Korean have only occurred
following the separation of the country, and this has allowed for the wider degree of divergence in Korean
when compared with that of German during the period of East–West separation of Germany (see King
1998 for further discussion).
13
One area where Kim Il Sung was adamant that divergence should not occur was in the reform of
Korean script in the DPRK in any way that might make it potentially opaque to Koreans in the ROK. In
the 1964 conversation, it was emphasized that: ‘If North and South Koreans come to write diVerent
characters, they will not understand each other when they write letters, . . . We communists absolutely
cannot permit such an orthographic reform that would divide our own people.’ In a further, strong and
clear aYrmation of the belief in a single nation of Korean people linked by a shared language, and some
time to be reunited in a single polity, Kim Il Sung added that: ‘Our people are one nation; therefore we
need not reform the writing until the entire country is united.’
 North and South Korea 219

(1) emphatic praise, even hypostatization, of the language, and attribution to it of a

nature independent of its speakers (character, strength, force, spirit, genius,
etc.); the language is often described in organic (botanical) concepts (language
as a plant that blooms, words as fruits, etc.); other qualities typically attributed
to the language are antiquity, genealogical purity, and structural homogeneity
(2) mixing and intertwining, in ways that can border on the mythological, mystical,
and sacred, of matters linguistic with those ethno-cultural (language–people/
Volk–culture–nation, etc.), ethico-moral, political (language–nation–land–
empire, etc.), and in part anthropological (language–tribe–race–people), resulting
in the identiWcation of a language character, nature, or essence with a unique
national or ethnic character
A further feature argued to be unique to language nationalism is:
(3) pointed and aggressively formulated assertion of the superiority of one’s own
language and therefore of the community, over other communities, as well as
the assertion of the endangerment of the integrity and identity of one’s own
linguistic–national–cultural community by foreign languages, peoples, races,
nations, and cultures; and as a consequence of these assertions, the partly
aggressive devaluation of that which is linguistically (and at the same time
ethno-culturally, politically, and anthropologically) foreign
As we shall see below, Gardt’s deWnitions of both language patriotism and language
nationalism apply equally well to North and South Korea today.

10.5.1 Strongly Positive Attitudes to Korean at the Turn of the

Twenty-first century
10.5.1.1 General Pride in Korean For the most part, the sources for the
sections that follow are printed materials from both South and North Korea from
the past two decades, but especially from the 1990s to the present. Ideally, any study of
language and national identity should be grounded in Weldwork in the relevant
countries, but gaining access to North Korea and to North Korean spoken language
data is notoriously diYcult. Thus, we conWne ourselves here to information gleaned
from various printed sources which are available. In the case of South Korea, strongly
positive attitudes toward Korean today are easily found in the literally dozens and
dozens of popular books on questions of Korean language and script encountered in
any South Korean bookstore. A representative sample of the books that have appeared
in this popular genre over the last Wfteen years yields titles such as the following, well
conveying the sense of pride in Korean commonly felt among people in South
Korea: ‘Beautiful Korean’, ‘Opening the Way to Love of Our Language’, ‘Journeys
through Beautiful Speech and Correct Writing’, ‘Beautiful Korean: Must-knows for
Elementary School Pupils’, ‘Love of the National Language is Love of the Nation’.
220 R. King

Concerning North Korean attitudes towards language, interesting and revealing,

oYcially endorsed attitudes can be found in North Korea’s two leading language and
linguistics periodicals Munhwae Haksup ‘Cultured Language Learning’ (henceforth
‘MH’), a didactic quarterly aimed at the general public and teachers of Korean
language in schools, and Cosen Emun ‘Korean Language and Literature’ (henceforth
‘CE’), the premier venue for scholarly research in this Weld published bi-monthly by
the DPRK Academy of Sciences. The degree to which attitudes expressed by various
authors in these government journals are shared by the North Korean public in
general is, as with other public–private matters in North Korea, diYcult to gauge.
However, information from such leading government journals is certainly indicative
of the way that North Koreans are encouraged to think and feel about both their
language and North/South Korean linguistic diVerences, and constitutes their only
real source of information on the subject. It is therefore not unlikely that the views
expressed in these journals are accepted and to some extent shared by the wider
public in North Korea. As in South Korea, it is found that there are strongly positive
feelings and pride expressed about the Korean language in the North. The pages of
MH are Wlled with regular short articles extolling various aspects of the richness of the
Korean language, and not just its lexicon, which is praised for its richness and variety,
but a whole range of other speciWc features of the Korean language (see below in
10.5.1.3–4).
The general feeling of pride in Korean is clearly communicated in the following oft-
quoted public statement by Kim Il Sung:
Our people have possessed a superior language since ancient times. This is a matter of
great pride for our people. (MH 1988 Vol. 1)

Kim Jong-il (the son of Kim Il Sung, who succeeded the latter as leader of North Korea
following Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994) has also made statements on the high respect
that Koreans should have for their language:

Our ancestors created their own language already long ago. Whether in its purity or
homogeneity, it is diYcult to Wnd a language like Korean elsewhere in the world. (MH
2002 Vol. 2: 209)

And articles on the generally superior nature of Korean are frequent in their occur-
rence in the DPRK literature, for example Kim Cengtek ‘On the superiority of our
national language’ (MH 2002 Vol. 3: 210), Pak Sungkwuk ‘Our Korean language is a
superior language with the strongest originality and stoicism’ (MH 2002 Vol. 2: 209),
and Kim Yengil ‘Delicate and innovative linguistic formations that revive and use our
superior Korean’ (MH 1987 Vol. 4), among many others.

10.5.1.2 The Hankul Phenomenon and ‘Script Nationalism’ Discussions of

linguistic nationalism – especially in European contexts – tend to focus on the classic
German/Romantic notion of ‘language ¼ nation’ that is usually traced back to the
 North and South Korea 221

thought of Fichte and Herder. With the exception of some well-known attempts at
orthographic reform and their relationship to national identity, writing and script rarely
surface in discussions of linguistic nationalism in these contexts. However, it is not
diYcult to identify in Asian contexts cases where writing systems and scripts assume an
importance equal to or even greater than the languages they convey, for example
Suleiman (2003: 33) on Arabic and Abrahamian (1998: 15–16) on Armenian in the West
of Asia, and Musa (1989: 108) on Bengali in South Asia. East Asia is of course the other
repository of strong script-related linguistic nationalism. In this region, as Coulmas (1999:
399) has shown, ‘ . . . popular notions of language strongly depend on writing to the
extent that writing is often confused with language’. This common confusion between
or outright conXation of language and script is especially pronounced in Korea, and
even more so in South Korea, where for many people, including even academic writers
on language, hankul has in a sense come to be synonymous with the Korean language.
Korean ‘script nationalism’ manifests itself above all in an almost cult-like respect
and even worship-like reverence for both the invention of Korean script (the hwunmin
cengum) and for King Sejong, the Chosŏn dynasty monarch who invented and
promulgated it. With respect to the genre of popular South Korean works on
language mentioned above, such books invariably include one or more sections on
the script and its outstanding qualities. More than anything else, Korean script
nationalism manifests itself in repeated assertions and celebrations of the ‘superiority’
(wuswuseng) of hankul, where the Sino-Korean word wuswuseng is variously translated
as ‘predominance, superiority, excellence’.14 In modern Korea, there seems little
doubt that in the collective Korean linguistic imagination, the Korean script is
superior to all others, and indeed, from a strictly linguistic, writing systems design
perspective, the native Korean script does indeed deserve praise as one of Korea’s
Wnest intellectual and cultural achievements.15
A simple illustration of this widespread sentiment can be found in the recent book
‘The ConXict between Language Nationalism and Language Toadyism’ by Professor
Yi Minhong (2002). Surveying the development of linguistic nationalism and writing
systems in the Sinitic sphere, he concludes that: ‘Hwunmin cengum, our national
writing system, was devised latest of all, but is the greatest and most perfect writing
system’ (p. 20). In fact, Professor Yi’s book takes the traditional Fichtian/Herdian
notion of ‘language ¼ nation’ one step further, arguing, in eVect, that ‘script ¼
nation’, and claims that ‘ . . . when people have no national writing system with which
to write down their national language, the language faces a crisis’ (pp. 12–14). The
general, national reverence for hankul is also highly evident in the fact that every year,

14
Indeed, a quick Google search in hankul for this word invariably produces more co-occurrences with
the words hankul and hwunmin cengum than with any other – save perhaps kimchee, another modern
symbol of Korean identity.
15
It is also important to remember that the current pride in hankul is a relatively recent phenomenon,
beginning in the late nineteenth century, and that for most of the 500 years since its invention, the elites in
Korea generally viewed hankul in a negative way (see section 10.2).
222 R. King

on 9 October, the ROK celebrates the Korean indigenous script with a national
holiday called Hankul Day, in commemoration of the day in the twenty-eighth year
of the reign of King Sejong (1446) when the hwunmin cengum was oYcially promul-
gated. Thus, Korea is probably unique in the world today in having a national holiday
in honour of its alphabet, a day when Koreans are called upon to reXect on their
national language and script. This annual event calls forth numerous essays and
paeans in the national newspapers and journals, and also occasions the production
on a regular basis of hour-long documentary Wlms by the leading ROK television
networks. The written pieces typically review the greatness of King Sejong and his
invention, and in recent years lament the fact that, while still a national holiday of
sorts, Hankul Day is no longer a day oV from work.
Koreans’ conWdence in the superiority of their script has even led, in recent years, to
a growing movement to ‘export’ or ‘globalize’ hankul, by developing it into a new
form of phonetic notation which might be used internationally as a means to write
down other languages in other states. Thus, a Korean phonetic alphabet for wide
international use and the ‘globalization of hankul’ has in fact been promoted in a
considerable range of serious linguistic works.
Like South Korea, North Korea also evinces a strong script nationalism. The North
Korean variant is not as pronounced as the South Korean, and is much less lionizing in
its treatment of King Sejong (true adulation being reserved for Kim Il Sung). It does
nevertheless observe a holiday in honour of the alphabet, on 15 January, this being the
day when King Sejong is thought to have completed his work on the creation of the
new writing system. The clear pride in the native script in North Korea is revealed in
the following quotations from Kim Il Sung:
Our people had already been using itwu script since the Three Kingdoms era, and the
creation in 1444 of the most developed writing system called hwunmin cengum contributed
greatly to cultural development. (MH 1984 Vol. 1)16
With our script, not only can one write down the sounds of our language freely and easily,
one can also record all manner of sounds in nature and practically all the sounds of other
nation’s languages almost perfectly. (MH 1984 Vol. 4)

The oYcial North Korean view on the Korean script can also be seen from the titles of
the following articles which have appeared in recent times: ‘Hwunmin cengum – pride
of our people’ (MH 2002 Vol. 2: 209), ‘Our superior national script – hwunmin cengum’
(MH 1984 Vol. 1), ‘Hwunmin cengum is the most scientiWc writing system, based on an
original writing system theory’ (CE 1994 Vol. 1: 93), and ‘Hwunmin cengum is the most
superior national indigenous script’ (MH 1994 Vol. 7). However, whereas the South
Korean discourse of ‘superiority’ is highly focused on the script – hankul – in North
Korea the same discourse of superiority is applied across the board to Korean

16
Note that while the creation of the Korean writing system is commonly believed to have been
completed in 1444, it was not oYcially promulgated until 1446.
 North and South Korea 223

language and writing alike (as will shortly be illustrated in 10.5.1.3 below); indeed, it
has even been incorporated into oYcial DPRK linguistic theorizing.
10.5.1.3 Pride in Specific Aspects of Korean In South Korea, many popular
books on Korean language revel in the lexical riches and delights of Korean vocabulary –
meaning, more often than not, words that are allegedly ‘pure Korean’ in their
etymology (as opposed to loanwords or Sino-Korean elements). In North Korea, we
Wnd the interesting phenomenon of highly focused praise for particular aspects of
Korean linguistic structure, and the didactic journals Munhwae Haksup (MH) and
Cosen Emun (CE) have carried articles claiming to demonstrate the superiority of
various features of the language, especially during the past Wve years. For example,
‘The superiority of Korean pronouns in comparison with those of foreign languages’
(MH 2001 Vol. 3: 206), ‘The superiority of Korean suYxes’ (CE 2000 Vol. 3/4), and
‘Korean, the most superior language in speech levels’ (CE 2003 Vol. 2: 213). No less a
Wgure than Kim Jong-il has singled out speciWc features of Korean worthy of particular
praise: ‘particles in Korean are rich and diverse and have developed in Wne detail’ (MH
2001 Vol. 3: 206). Kim Jong-il also notes the special pragmatic suitability of Korean for
political education purposes:
Because our language can express etiquette and politeness exactly, it is also extremely
useful in educating for communist morality. (MH 2002 Vol. 2: 209)

The notion of ‘superiority’ has therefore appeared in serious linguistic research

articles in the major DPRK academic journals as well as in the speeches of the leaders
of the country.
10.5.1.4 Korean as an Embodiment of National Characteristics One
important genre of the class of popular South Korean works on Korean language is
what might be called the ‘lexical fetish’ category, and within this one Wnds an
interesting sub-genre – a kind of psychoanalytical ‘pop etymology’ that attempts to
read Korean national traits from lexical semantics.
For example, Ceng Howan (1991) is titled ‘The Imagination of Korean: the Nation’s
Emotions and Consciousness as seen through the Origins of Korean Vocabulary’, and
there are many other works of a similar orientation, linking national characteristics to
aspects of the Korean language. One particular word that attracts constant attention is
the Wrst-person plural pronoun wuli ‘we; our’. This is the Wrst member of the most
common designation for ‘Korean’ in much of this literature: wulimal – literally ‘our
language’, and is given special discussion in many essays, bringing to mind Silverstein’s
(2000: 115) reminder that ‘nationalism is an imaginative sense of Bakhtinian ‘‘we-
voicing’’ ’, serving to distinguish the in-group as nation from outsiders. Though this
general sub-genre is much less in evidence in the North than in the South, the ever-
present Wrst-person plural pronoun interestingly shows up in works produced in
the North, too, for example ‘Wuli ‘‘we’’– the pronoun of love and faith’ (MH 2003
Vol. 2: 213).
224 R. King

Concerning the relation of language to the nation, the North Korean literature is
replete with positive links between Korean language and the Korean nation, indica-
tions as to why Koreans should be proud of their language, and warnings to remain
vigilant about potentially harmful foreign inXuences on the language and nation. One
particularly common trend found in North Korean materials is the constant impulse
to cite aphorisms and quips on such (as well as other) linguistic matters by Kim Il Sung
and Kim Jong-il. Although there is an initial temptation to dismiss such quotations as
nothing more than propaganda, there are in fact a great many interesting parallels
that emerge between the populist-oriented, highly puristic and resolutely nationalist
and patriotic statements of North Korea’s leaders and the pronouncements of many of
the nationalist authors producing popular literature on language in South Korea. In
what follows, a number of the public statements on language issued by Kim Il Sung
and Kim Jong-il reveal the perception that the Korean language is tightly bound up
with Korean identity and the Korean nation. Kim Il Sung, for example, is quoted in the
journal MH as having made the following pronouncements on the connection
between language and nation:
Language is one of the most important common features deWning a nation. No matter
whether people share the same blood and live on the same territory, if their languages are
diVerent, they cannot be said to be one people. (MH 1984 Vol. 2)
The fact that our nation has its own indigenous language and writing is our great pride
and strength. (MH 2002 Vol. 2: 209)

Among other things, statements like these also indicate a desire to see people in the
North and South as one Korean people. Kim Il Sung furthermore explicitly indicates
that the ‘national characteristics’ of Korean are to be valued and protected:
We communists must revive the national characteristics of our language and develop
them further. (MH 1984 Vol. 2: 4)
In linguistics, too, we must establish self-reliance (chuch’e), develop our language system-
atically, and bring people to feel pride and dignity when they use it. (MH 1989 Vol. 4)

And it is signiWcantly proclaimed that knowledge of Korean (as well as the history of
the Koreans) is a necessary condition for being part of the Korean nation, below
referring to ‘Koreans’ residing in Japan:
If Koreans in Japan do not know our language and writing and do not know our nation’s
history, we cannot call such people Koreans. Wherever they live, Koreans absolutely must
know Korean language and writing and know Korean history. (MH 1985 Vol. 2)
If Koreans in Japan do not know Korean, they may become assimilated to the Japanese
race. (MH 1987 Vol. 1)

The theme of seeking out and developing the ‘national characteristics’ of Korean is
seen in many recent DPRK works of linguistics, perhaps inspired by Kim Il Sung’s
 North and South Korea 225

pronouncement quoted above. In many cases, this manifests itself in shorter pieces in
MH emphasizing indigenous, pure Korean. Typical examples are ‘Salvaging national
characteristics in word combinations’ (MH 1985 Vol. 2), ‘Through positively accepting
and using nativized words, let us further revive the national characteristics of our
language’ (MH 1990 Vol. 4), ‘Great guidance in reviving and using indigenous Korean’
(MH 2002 Vol. 2: 209), and ‘Blocking the ideologico-cultural invasion of imperialism
in our language life is the fundamental problem in insisting on self-reliance and
national identity in language’ (2002 Vol. 2: 209). Elsewhere, more mainstream
DPRK linguistic research also shows the same trend, especially in recent years, for
example Sin Kyeysung’s (1982) ‘National characteristics of Korean word order’, and
Sim Yongcwu ‘On the national characteristics of lexical meaning’ (CE 2001 Vol. 3: 23).
Finally, a general emphasis on attaining and maintaining a truly national language
with national characteristics is further stressed by Kang Myenseng: ‘The fundamental
question in constructing a national language worthy of the dignity of a strong and
prosperous nation is positively encouraging and correctly reviving that which is
national’ (CE 2003 Vol. 2: 13).

10.5.2 Worries about the State of the Language, Past and Present
10.5.2.1 The Purity of Korean, Past and Present One problem that continues
to surface in both North and South Korean discussions on language is that of the unity
(and hence ‘purity’ in the sense of non-dilutedness) of the Korean language in
antiquity. The question of whether the languages of the three ancient Korean
kingdoms of Silla (57 bc–ad 935), Koguryŏ (37 bc–668 ad) and Paekje (18 bc–ad 660)
were mutually intelligible or not has long vexed Korean historical linguistics, and
some South Korean (and non-Korean) scholars continue to entertain the possibility
that these languages were not necessarily the same. Given the lack of decisive, hard
evidence, it is diYcult to be sure whether there was a single Korean language in
ancient times. However, the mere suggestion that there might have been diVerent
languages present on the Korean peninsula in the ancient period is anathema to
ardent Korean nationalists, who insist on a Korean history signiWcantly connected
together by a common language, and who therefore, to a considerable extent, see the
Korean nation as being deWned by its sharing of a common language right back to the
dawn of the ‘Korean race’. The possibility aired by ‘irresponsible’ linguists that
diVerent, mutually unintelligible languages might in fact have been spoken during
the Three Kingdoms period poses a direct threat to ideas of Korean ethnic unity, and
consequently provokes outrage among dedicated Korean nationalists in both the
North and South.
The pronounced abhorrence induced in North Koreans by the notion of ethnic or
linguistic diversity in ancient Korea can be seen in a number of articles written to
counter South Korean research suggesting that the languages of the Three Kingdoms
might not have been identical. Such, for example, was one of the aims of senior North
226 R. King

Korean historical linguist Lyu Lyel (1994) with his article on ‘Names of capitals and
states of our ancient race demonstrating the homogeneity of our nation’. The Great
Leader Kim Il Sung himself was also concerned to ‘smash the false claims of bourgeois
linguistic scholars concerning the origins of Korean, and reveal in depth the unity and
indigeneity of our language’ (cited in CE 1994 Vol. 3: 95). Choy Cenghwu presses the
attack further with his (particularly long-titled) piece: ‘The Korean people is a wise
nation that has guarded and developed the homogeneity of its language since ancient
times: criticism of the ‘‘theory’’ of the pro-Japanese imperialist scholars who distort
the homogeneity and unity of the Korean language’ (MH 2001 Vol. 2: 205), and cites
Kim Jong-il as stating:
They say that among the bourgeois linguistic scholars in South Korea and Japan there are
those who espouse the view of a ‘dual origins theory’ for the Korean language. The claim
is that the Koguryŏ line of the northern language and the Silla line of the south had
diVerent origins . . . but this is a forced claim without basis in scientiWc reasoning.

Kim Jong-il also further conWrms this anathema of mixed and impure blood lines and
linguistic pedigrees in his emphatic declaration that:
The Korean race is no mixed-blood group of people from various origins. Our nation has
its origins since ancient times on Korean soil, and is a homogeneous people that has
always had one blood line and used one language.

The issue of racial purity, linked to linguistic purity and descent from a unique
linguistic source, is therefore felt to be of paramount importance in North Korea
and a non-negotiable area of intellectual discussion.
As for attitudes towards the present-day purity of the Korean language, in section
10.4.3 it was noted that there have been various ‘national language puriWcation’
movements orchestrated by the government since 1948, in which native Korean
substitutes for foreign loanwords were identiWed or coined as neologisms. Many of
the proposed changes that have emerged from this ongoing eVort actually have their
origins in suggestions mooted in popular works on the language, and the process is
still ongoing in present-day South Korea, though no longer driven by government
organizations in the way it was earlier in the 1970s and 1980s.17
Turning to North Korea, as described in section 10.4.2, lexical adjustment – the
replacement of undesirable Sino-Korean and other non-indigenous lexical material
with neologisms composed wholly or at least in part of ‘pure’ Korean word-formation
elements – has been a dominant component of North Korean language planning ever
since the 1960s. With the considerable nativization of the North Korean lexicon
achieved during the 1960s–1980s, there currently appears to be less of an ongoing

17
Both North and South Korea also evince a vibrant discourse advocating the revival and recovery of
pure Korean names. However, it must be said that despite all the activism and advocacy, one rarely
encounters people or places in either North or South Korea with pure Korean (as opposed to Sino-Korean)
names.
 North and South Korea 227

drive to emphasize further lexical puriWcation. However, awareness of the desirability

of a pure form of Korean remains very strong in North Korea and manifests itself in
self-congratulatory statements about the achievement of a puriWed language, as in the
quotation from Kim Jong-il below:
Pyongyang Cultured Language is a composite of superior linguistic elements of our
national language as created and cultivated by the joint eVorts of all the people in the
northern half of the republic, and has also developed by absorbing those Wne elements of
the national language as used traditionally everywhere in the south, including
Seoul. (MH 2003 Vol. 1: 212)
It also shows up particularly strongly in criticism of the state of Korean south of the
38th parallel. Thus, highlighting of the perceived linguistic decline in South Korea is
common in the journals MH and CE, as can be seen in the following abrasive headline
and article: ‘News from South Korea: South Chosŏn – a linguistic cesspool’ (MH 1997
Vol. 4: 191). The same issue of MH quotes Kim Jong-il on the same subject as saying:
‘Today in South Chosŏn (South Korea) our language is gradually losing its purity and
is turning into a bastardized language.’
10.5.2.2 Concerns about Language Decay, and Calls for Language
Purification and Revival As Milroy and Milroy (1985: 32) note in their discussion
of Orwellian moralistic complaints about language, the notion of linguistic decline is
widespread in standardization situations, and is closely connected to the idea that
‘conduct and morality in society are also in decline’. The notion of linguistic decline
can assume crisis proportions in the eyes of language nationalists, and this is certainly
the picture painted by popular South Korean works on language from the past decade
and more. The list of metaphors for linguistic decline, abuse, and crisis in Wn de siècle
and turn-of-the-millenium South Korea is extensive, with the language being
described as ‘a victim’, ‘diseased/infected’, ‘a bordello’, ‘abandoned’, ‘twisted’, and
‘downtrodden’. Yi Minhong (2002: 191–7) describes the Korean language as being
‘under attack from’, ‘at war with’, and ‘occupied by’ English: ‘Our national language
is being occupied mercilessly by languages from around the world.’ Many South
Korean indignant authors complain at length of the continuing inundation of foreign
loanwords into Korean, and consider the language as the embodiment of national
values and therefore to be defended from foreign impurities.
Japanese words are also accused of entering into the language and ‘making our
language sick’ (Yi Otek 1992/1996); they are ‘stealing our race’s spirit’ so much so that
‘even our sensibilities are becoming Japanese’ (Yi Otek 1995/1996). Thus, more than
half a century after the end of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, and unlike in North
Korea, Japanese still looms large as a target for language purists in South Korea,
especially for those much older writers who were born under the Japanese colonial
occupation. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that Japanese has re-emerged
as a target for South Korean purists; the number of Japanese loanwords in Korean
certainly pales in comparison to those from English, but the recent reopening of the
228 R. King

Korean cultural market to Japanese popular culture exports seems to have rekindled
this particular Xame. An extreme paranoia is felt in this regard by those, such as Li
Uyto of the Korean Language Society, who believe that the most dangerous Japanese
expressions in Korean are those hiding incognito in the depths of the language: those
that are in the disguise of Chinese characters (i.e. Japanese loanwords/phrases coined
with Chinese characters, which may consequently look like simple Sino-Korean
expressions), referred to as the ‘Japanese language dregs (or Trojan horse) inside
Korean’ (Li Uyto 1993/1994: 127–39).
The continued use of Chinese characters in South Korea is furthermore still felt
quite widely by language nationalists to be perpetuating impurity in Korean. Nam
Yengsin (1998: 45–58) represents this view and criticizes the ‘traditional worship of
Chinese’ among Korean intellectuals and their perceived aversion to the indigenous
script, hankul. Yi Otek (1992/1996: 19), in a similar vein, advocates the need to ‘Free
ourselves from Chinese-character words’, and characterizes Sino-Korean diction as
‘destroying our language’.
In South Korea, dictionaries are also a frequent target of criticism for what is seen as
the senseless copying of words and expressions from Japanese and Chinese dictionaries
without any regard as to whether these ‘Sino-Korean’ expressions might ever actually
be in use in Korea. The author Ceng Cayto (1989: 223) writes of ‘our tainted
dictionary’, and suggests that Korean dictionaries may commonly contain only 20
per cent Korean words: ‘This is not a dictionary of our national language, but of foreign
loanwords. No matter what, at least half [of the dictionary’s entries] should be Korean.’
Connected with criticisms of the impurity and decay of Korean are calls for
puriWcation and ‘revival’ of the language. The revival metaphor is particularly wide-
spread in South Korean publications and of course carries with it the implication that
Korean is somehow less than alive, or that bits of it are in need of resuscitation. Pak
Namil (1996), for example, is an entire book on ‘Old Korean that we should revive and
use again’. But the theme of revival of the language is also mentioned often in North
Korean materials. The following are quotations relating to language revival from Kim
Jong-il:
We must revive, actively use, and know the beautiful and reWned Cultured Language of
our age. (MH 1987 Vol. 2)
Only if our people revive and use the standardized language that we all understand in
common and strive not to use uncultured language such as dialects can we guarantee
cultured-ness in language life. (MH 2001 Vol. 1)
We must raise the level of culture in language life. Only when we speak and write in a
cultured way will people’s characters improve and will we be able to establish a noble,
moral demeanour. (MH 2001 Vol. 2)

And Kim Jong-il on the ideological value of language puriWcation:

 North and South Korea 229

Skimming away the scum of older eras remaining in the language and constructing a new
linguistic culture is a type of revolution. (MH 2002 Vol. 1: 208)

In line with North Korea’s chuch’e philosophy of self-reliance, Kim Jong-il has also
strongly urged North Koreans to become ‘self-reliant’ in their language:
Because language life is intimately connected with social life, and exerts great inXuence on
social life, establishing self-reliance in language life emerges as one of the important
demands for successful carrying out of the project of establishing self-reliance in the
revolution and in all areas. (MH 2001 Vol. 1)

10.5.3 The Problem of Language Divergence in North and South Korea:

Who is to blame?
Popular South Korean publications on language from the past two decades, but
especially from the last ten years, devote an inordinate amount of attention to the
perceived divergence that has arisen between ‘South Korean’ and ‘North Korean’ since
the formation of separate regimes in 1948. The South Korean publications reveal an
intense preoccupation with the notion of racial and linguistic homogeneity, and a
growing anxiety over the perceived threat to the alleged primordial ethno-linguistic
oneness of Koreans. Indeed, the notions of single race/nation (tanil mincok) and single
language (tanil ene) are central to modern Korean concepts of national identity.
The question of divergence in fact Wrst captured public, and then scholarly attention
in the 1970s in South Korea. When Korea was divided in 1948, it had never had an
oYcial standard national language, and since 1948, there has been virtually no
communication between both sides. This state of aVairs has produced serious conse-
quences, both for language facts themselves, and also (perhaps more importantly) for
speakers’ attitudes towards divergence. Thus, the linguistic consequences of national
division in Korea seem to have been (and promise to become considerably) more
serious than they were in post-war Germany, where by the 1980s most German
researchers had abandoned the notion of Spaltung (cleavage, rupture) in the language
and had embraced the notion of pluricentricity and multiple, equally valid norms for
German (see Stevenson 2002: 41; King 1998). The notion of pluricentricity is a most
uncomfortable one for Koreans on either side of the 38th parallel.
The general concern with linguistic divergence and recovery of Korean ‘oneness’ is
represented in several works by leading Wgures and organizations concerned with
language issues. For example, a ‘Proposal for the recovery of the homogeneity of
North Korean and South Korean’ appears in KBS’s Korean Language Research Society
(2001) ‘North and South Korean Language and Writing must Develop Together’. Kim
Minswu is a leading scholar of Korean language policy in the North and South, and a
2002 volume edited by this academic also addresses the issue of future North–South
linguistic reconciliation: ‘How are we to Unify the Languages of the North and the
South?’ Another eminent scholar of Korean language and linguistics is Ko Yengkun;
230 R. King

part two of Ko Yengkun (1996) is ‘In Support of an AYrmation of the Homogeneity

of Korean Language and Writing’, with a subsection on ‘Divergence in North–
South language and the problem of overcoming it – an open letter to the North
Korean language and writing authorities’. (Very little oYcial contact has in fact taken
place between North and South language-planning authorities – one of many con-
trasts with the former East–West German situation, where, for example, three major
conferences of East and West German linguists and language planners occurred in
1962, 1970, and 1983 – see Roemer 1988.) In addition to such scholarly works, current
popular literature also contains much writing concerned with the same divergence-
related themes, a good, representative example of this being Ko Congsek (2001).
Much South Korean writing on divergence points an accusing Wnger at the North.
Since early on in the history of Korean national division, North Korea’s attempts at
creating new words have assumed at times mythical proportions in the South Korean
popular imagination, and many incorrect beliefs are held about words that have
supposedly come into existence in the North. Where such (frequently non-existent,
rumour-generated) words seem comical and odd to those in the South, this often
serves to strengthen the feeling among South Koreans that people in the North are
now genuinely quite diVerent from those in the South. Various of these word-myths
are successfully debunked in Pak Yuhuy et al. (2003/2004: 159, 298), which stresses the
need to ‘correct false information leading people to regard North Koreans not as
fellow members of our race but as strange people living in a strange place’. Moreover,
of the more than 50,000 words of foreign origin replaced by neologisms before 1986,
the comprehensive Tatumun mal (‘adjusted words’) listing of October 1986 oYcially
reduced the total of adjusted words to around 25,000, implying that approximately
half of the original attempts at new adjustments had been abandoned. However, even
with such a large reduction (the great majority of which were in fact in the realm of
technical vocabulary and terminology and hence not high-frequency use items), a vast
number of newly introduced words and phrases remain in the language, and it is
indeed the lexical aspect of North–South divergence that captures the South Korean
public imagination, with many popular books capitalizing on this interest, for ex-
ample Ceng Congnam’s (2000) ‘2,000 North Korean Words that South Koreans Need
to Know: Terms Used in Newspapers, on TV, and in Everyday Life’ (part of a series
entitled ‘Recovering North–South Korean Linguistic Homogeneity’), Chen and Cha
(2002), ‘Words that have Diverged in South and North Korean’ (a work of some 407
pages), and Co Cayswu (2000), ‘Dictionary of South and North Korean’.
The ‘divergence Angst’ expressed above by Pak Yuhuy et al. that extreme linguistic
divergence may lead to South Koreans regarding North Koreans as strangers rather
than as fellow Koreans is reinforced by other images of North Korea from the public
media that highlight the diVerences in living standards and socio-political life in the
two countries. It is also backed up by Yim’s (2000) survey of South Korean university
students’ attitudes toward regional variation in Korean. Yim found that his subjects
reserved the word mal ‘language’ for both Seoul speech (the South Korean standard)
 North and South Korea 231

and North Korean, using words such as sathwuli ‘brogue/regional accent’ and pangen
‘dialect’ for other regional forms of Korean. As a consequence of this, it is suggested
(p. 42) that ‘Perhaps the young informants have come to see North Korean speech not
as a sub-variety of their language, but as a parallel variety, diVerent but equal’, and that
the North–South political border is playing a signiWcant role in the perception of
distinct language varieties.
All told, the attitudes toward North Korean language and language policy and
North–South linguistic divergence found in South Korean popular publications range
from aversion, alienation, derision, betrayal, hostility, and anger (e.g. with respect to
the ‘combative and rough’ sound of North Korean broadcasting because it has ‘so
many tense sounds’, as claimed in Co Tongo 2003: 75) to a kind of morbid fascination
and even scarcely concealed envious approval of the ability of those in the North to
‘stick to their indigenous linguistic guns’ (as, for example, when Yi Minhong (2002:
205) writes that ‘the sense of alienation that we sometimes feel in North Korean
language arises from the fact that they have either dug up and revived or created
Korean’). And the evaluations of the extent of divergence and its signiWcance as a
present and future problem also vary, from outright alarmism to a laissez-faire
embrace of diversity. Thus, Ko Congsek (1999: 29–31) Wnds the sense of crisis
expressed by some North Korean language watchers exaggerated, and writes: ‘ . . . ‘‘di-
vergence’’ is nothing other than ‘‘enrichment’’ [and is] . . . a matter of a certain
amount of unfamiliarity, but not inability to understand’. Although a less worried
attitude towards divergence therefore seems to be held by certain public intellectuals
like Ko Congsek, the most common and widespread reaction to divergence appears to
be one of worry, concern, and alienation from the North and its speakers. Divergence
in language, therefore, is playing a potentially signiWcant role in dividing an erstwhile
very homogeneous nation.
Quite generally, then, South Koreans appear to blame North Korea for divergence
in the language, ascribing it to the introduction of the ‘Cultured Language’, new
dialect words promoted to the status of standard, the elimination of Sino-Korean
words, ‘lexical adjustment’, and so on. However, for their part, the North Koreans
assert that South Korea has allowed so many foreign loanwords to come into the
language that this has sown the seeds of massive divergence from real, ‘pure’ Korean;
both sides, then, lay the blame for divergence at each other’s respective doors. The
following is a quotation from Kim Il Sung on the subject:
Our language, repository of our national pride, and precious national resource of our
people, is experiencing a severe crisis in South Chosŏn. Due to the national language
extermination policy of the American imperialists, the Korean language in South Chosŏn
is gradually disappearing, and gradually turning into a bastardized language. (MH 1988
Vol. 3)

In fact, North Korean sources lay the blame not only at the feet of South Koreans (for
their feeble retention of national traits), but also at the feet of the American military
232 R. King

and government, who are alleged to have waged a persistent campaign to exterminate
the Korean language in the South. This is the gist of Kim Punghwan’s (1986) article,
‘The reactionary nature of American imperialism’s policy to wipe out the national
language’ (MH 1986 Vol. 4: 60), in which he cites Kim Il Sung as follows:
Actually, in the language used in South Chosŏn, if you get rid of the Chinese character
words, Japanese, and English, all that is left in Korean is particles like ul and lul [object
case-markers]. Language is an important symbol of a nation, but the language they use in
South Chosŏn is so Westernized, Japanized, and Wlled with Chinese character words, that
it no longer seems like Korean, and is gradually losing its national characteristics.

In North Korean propaganda, it has been regularly suggested that the government of
the USA is intent on keeping North and South Korea divided and on continuing to
‘occupy’ the South. To this end, it is argued that Korean is being deliberately Xooded
with English loanwords to destroy it as an important, pure symbol of national
identity.18 Writing in a tone and direction similar to that of Kim Punghwan, Choy
Wencip, another linguist from the North, viliWes language use in South Korea and
attributes at least partial blame for this to American intervention, with a paper
entitled: ‘Our language is facing a dire crisis in South Chosŏn due to the American
imperialists’ policy of national language eradication’ (MH 1985 Vol. 2). In this article,
South Korean newspapers are described as being riddled with foreign words and slang,
and South Korean streets as crowded with signs in foreign languages. Many other
pieces of a similar nature have appeared over the years in North Korean journals, all
speculating that there is a plot afoot to convert the Korean language into gibberish in
the South as a way to undermine national unity and the possibility of future (re-)
uniWcation with the North.

10.6 Summary and General Conclusions

Summing up in brief and slightly expanding on what has been observed during the
course of this chapter, three very general points can be emphasized about the relation
of language to national identity in the Koreas. First of all, considered over the last sixty
years and today, both North and South Korea can be held to be textbook examples of
linguistic patriotism and linguistic nationalism, and are also important examples of the
phenomenon of ‘script nationalism’. As discussed in section 10.5, South Korea takes
the latter to almost cult proportions with its ‘hankul nationalism’, reverence for King
Sejong, and ideas of script export bordering on missionary zeal, while in the North,
the ‘superiority’ of hankul extolled in the South is extended to a substantial discourse
on the superiority of Korean language and writing across the board.

18
It is also suggested that the ‘divisive’ belief held among certain South Koreans that Korean was not a
united language during the Three Kingdoms period and may also have had ‘foreign’ Altaic origins is due to
the malevolent inXuence and ideas of Western (and most speciWcally American) linguists.
 North and South Korea 233

Secondly, it is a clear and important fact that the relation of language to national
identity in the Korean peninsula is made particularly complex by the post-war division
of Korea into two parts. North and South Korea exhibit the phenomenon of a single
nation that has been divided after a long united history, having been linked for at least
a thousand years by a common, shared language and culture. Now, however, in place
of a uniWed Korean nation-state, at the turn of the twenty-Wrst century there are two
outwardly quite diVerent states, each with highly distinct socio-political systems and
trajectories of post-war development, and although language continues to maintain a
great symbolic importance as an embodiment of Korean national identity, critically
the ‘shared’ Korean language has already undergone divergence in the two Koreas.
How this creeping splintering of Korean may consequently aVect the common goal
of future reuniWcation is causing worry in many quarters and the occurrence of
increased ‘divergence Angst’, though the way this manifests itself in North and South
is rather diVerent and determined by the views that North and South have of each
other with relation to language and the blame they see as belonging to the other side
for the occurrence of divergence. Quite generally, the tone with which ‘language
watchers’ study each other on either side of the 38th parallel can be characterized as
one of mutual morbid fascination: the South gazes at highly centralized and dirigiste
North Korean language planning (especially lexical adjustment and innovation), as if
watching helplessly as a dear relative drifts away in the current, while the North looks
on disdainfully at South Korean linguistic ‘bastardization’, as if unable to prevent a
close friend from falling prey to heroin addiction. Whether this divergence may
become so great that the ability of the language to function as a unifying symbol of
national identity is really lost among Koreans separated in the North and South is not
yet clear, but the diVerent routes of the language over the past decades have certainly
already complicated and weakened the image of a shared Korean identity, and will
most likely cause signiWcant linguistic problems for reuniWcation, if this can ever be
brought about.
Finally, if one reXects on the causes of continuing shows of language nationalism in
the Koreas, at a time when independence from foreign domination has long been
achieved, it is possible to see this as a potential reaction to the perception of diVerent,
modern pressures on the sovereignty and status of nations issuing from increased
forces of globalization. Where both North and South Korea continue to highlight the
superiority and special nature of various aspects of the Korean language, it is actually
tempting to read into these emphatic assertions a deep-seated anxiety about the
future viability of Korean in a world arena which is ever more dominated by English
and where a modern global culture is threatening to replace local tradition and
identity. In the case of South Korea, a major source of the latter perceived ‘cultural
crisis’ is surely the ROK’s dizzyingly frenetic pace of compressed modernization,
industrialization, and incorporation into the global economy, along with all its socio-
cultural side eVects. In North Korea, one has to tease hints of linguistic unease
from between the lines of chuch’e-inspired philological bravado, but it lurks there
234 R. King

nonetheless, and the phenomenon of language endangerment and death is being

increasingly reported as a growing threat caused by the expansion of languages such
as English. Both Koreas, then, can be suggested to be good examples of how ‘today,
there is an emphasis on ‘‘national’’ language in order to preserve and assert a feeling
of uniqueness in a time of cultural globalization, economic interdependence, and the
weakening of traditional sovereignties’ (Safran 1999: 92). And in the words of Gramsci
(1975):
Whenever the language question surfaces, in one way or another, it means that another
series of problems is imposing itself: the formation and enlargement of the ruling class,
the necessity. . . of reorganizing cultural hegemony.
 11
Taiwan
Andrew Simpson

11.1 Introduction
Issues of language and national identity have been of considerable importance for
those living on the island of Taiwan for much of the twentieth century, and continue
to be the subject of great public debate in contemporary Taiwan as the population
tries to establish what kind of nation it thinks it should belong to. Having initially
been incorporated into China as part of the Qing empire during the seventeenth
century, Taiwan became an oYcial part of the Japanese empire in 1895 when ceded to
Japan following the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–5. For much of the Wfty years after this,
there were concerted eVorts to assimilate the population of Taiwan to a Japanese
national identity, with the manipulation of language playing a key role in the attempts
at assimilation. In 1945, the forced departure of the Japanese led to Taiwan coming to
be occupied by a second, twentieth-century long-term ruling force from outside the
island, the Chinese nationalist army of the Kuo Min Tang (KMT), which adopted
Taiwan as its main base of operations and stronghold after being defeated by
communist forces on the Chinese mainland. Continued claims by the KMT to be
the oYcial government of all China resulted in policies on Taiwan which promoted an
idealized Chinese national identity and simultaneously enforced the suppression of
local Taiwanese language and culture. More recently still, since the lifting of restric-
tions on language and political opposition in the mid-1980s, there has been a dramatic
growth in the championing of a local, potentially national, Taiwanese identity, and the
celebration of languages spoken on the island prior to the arrival of the mainlander
nationalist government. Taiwan has thus experienced a complex twentieth century
from the point of view of language and national identity, with various, quite diVerent
national identities being promoted on the island, and language continuously being
manipulated for political reasons. The present situation of Taiwan also remains highly
complex, with the sovereignty and future of the territory still very much under
dispute. While the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) claims that
Taiwan is an integral part of the PRC subject to the authority of the government in
Beijing, this is not accepted by political leaders on the island, and Taiwan continues to
236 A. Simpson

maintain its own government and military forces, eVectively functioning like an
independent state, though without having made any formal declaration of independ-
ence. Within Taiwan, the debate concerning whether to pursue reuniWcation with
mainland China or independent nationhood divides the population in an important
way and corresponds to diVerent conceptions of national identity for Taiwan and its
people, one stressing a common Chinese identity and the other highlighting a
distinctive Taiwanese culture and linguistic background. In this chapter we set out
to show how the present unsettled situation and the two opposing Chinese and
Taiwanese nationalisms have arisen on the island, charting the development of
national identity among the people of Taiwan from its beginnings during the Japanese
colonial period, through the confrontational post-war KMT era into the 1990s and
the emergence of democracy. In each period it will be seen that policies of both
the repression and promotion of languages have been of central importance in
attempts to shape the loyalty and identity of the population, and that languages and
language choice have come to be invested with remarkable symbolic power on
Taiwan, polarizing, dividing, and at other times unifying the population as explicit
and deliberate signals of ethnic and political allegiance.

Taiwan
 Taiwan 237

11.2 Patterns of Early Settlement and the Japanese

Colonial Period
11.2.1 Taiwan prior to 1895
The original inhabitants of Taiwan, before any immigration from mainland China
took place, were a mixed group of Austronesian tribes who are known to have
inhabited the island since early times, farming the fertile plains of the western part of
Taiwan and also occupying its extensive mountainous areas. Collectively referred to
as the ‘aborigines’ of Taiwan, these non-Sinitic peoples signiWcantly outnumbered
other later settlers on the island until the seventeenth century, when Taiwan was
oYcially incorporated into the territory ruled by the Qing dynasty empire. The Qing
occupation of Taiwan occurred largely for reasons of security, to prevent the island
from falling into the hands of other foreign powers, and there was no intention to
develop Taiwan in any particular way, with periodic bans on immigration being
introduced to deliberately keep the population low and more easily controllable.
Despite such bans, large numbers of Chinese economic migrants did come to settle
in Taiwan, building the Chinese population up hugely from 5,000 in the mid-
seventeenth century to 3 million at the beginning of the twentieth century
(Tse 2000). During the same period, as the result of conXict over land with Chinese
settling on Taiwan, the aborigine population was itself reduced from 150,000–200,000
to 113,000, and Taiwan consequently came to be an island dominated by south
Chinese immigrants.
The two principal Chinese groups which arrived in Taiwan were Hakka Chinese
from the province of Canton, and Southern Min speakers from the province of Fujian,
both Han Chinese groups but ones with distinct languages and culture. During the
competition for land and resources which ensued on the island, the Hakka, Southern
Min, and Austronesian tribes all frequently fought each other, and even within the
Hakka and Southern Min groups there were regular occurrences of feuding and
inWghting between villages and diVerent clans. Taiwan from the seventeenth to the
end of the nineteenth century was therefore a fairly lawless place lacking in coherence
and any common identity. Territorially, it was part of the Chinese empire, but was
eVectively seen and treated as an undesirable frontier outpost with little to oVer,
where oYcials sent from the mainland often turned out to be corrupt and focused on
self-enrichment rather than the improvement of conditions on the island. In terms of
language and communication on Taiwan, there was also little coherence and instead a
set of mutually unintelligible language forms divided up the population, with the
Southern Min speakers being most numerous (80 per cent at the end of the nineteenth
century), followed by the Hakka (16 per cent), and then the various aborigine tribes
(totalling 4 per cent).
238 A. Simpson

11.2.2 The Japanese Occupation of Taiwan

In 1895, the Qing dynasty suVered an unexpected defeat at the hands of the recently
modernized army of Japan, and as part of the ensuing peace settlement, the island of
Taiwan was ceded to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. The reaction on Taiwan
to this change of ownership was one of complete shock and dismay and there were
strong feelings among the population of the island that they had been let down
and betrayed by the mainland Chinese. There were also numerous local rebellions
against the Japanese for some time after their arrival on Taiwan, but these were all
successfully quashed and the Japanese occupation of Taiwan ended up being
signiWcantly long, lasting a full Wve decades from 1895 to 1945. Importantly, during
this period, the ethnically Chinese population of Taiwan found themselves cut oV from
all contact with Chinese culture on the mainland and gradually came to believe that
the Japanese occupation might well be a permanent state of aVairs for Taiwan.
The Japanese rule of Taiwan was unquestionably harsh and oppressive in many
ways. However, there were also many aspects of the Japanese period which were
beneWcial for Taiwan and its population. The Japanese constructed a much better
communications infrastructure on the island, building new roads and railways, and in
agriculture established eVective new irrigation systems, improving farming produc-
tion and the general economy quite considerably. In the area of health, new hospitals
were built and public health programmes introduced, and in education a new island-
wide system of elementary schools was created resulting in an enrolment rate which
actually became the highest in Asia (Huang 2000). The standard of living for people on
Taiwan was thus signiWcantly raised as the result of Japanese management of the
island, and came to be better than that of any part of mainland China. In turn, such
advances in the economy and public health furthermore translated into a sharp
increase in the population of Taiwan, and a rapid doubling of the total population
to over 6 million by 1945 (Roy 2003).
Notwithstanding the general improvements people enjoyed in many aspects of
their lives, there was a clear and very negative perception of an important division
between the foreign, colonial rulers from Japan and the majority local population.
Although the latter were oYcially classiWed as citizens of the Japanese empire, they
were clearly discriminated against in obtaining senior positions in government,
education, and the state-run enterprises, and all such high-level positions were held
by Japanese arriving from Japan (Wong 2001). Dissatisfaction with being treated as
diVerent from those from Japan subsequently led many intellectuals to voice their
discontent in the development of a new nativist literature movement known as
xiangtu wenxue which described the diYculties of life in Taiwan for local people and
for the Wrst time highlighted the common, trying experiences of all ethnic groups
born on the island (Hsiao 2000).
In order to try to win the loyalty of the unhappy Taiwanese towards Japan,
considerable eVorts were made by the Japanese to assimilate the local population
 Taiwan 239

and make them feel more like Japanese citizens, despite the unequal treatment in
higher-level career advancement. These attempts at assimilation became particularly
strong in the 1930s and were focused on aVecting both the cultural habits of
people and the languages they spoke. People were encouraged to adopt Japanese
culture, take Japanese names, and follow Shinto religious practices instead of those of
Taoism and other local religions. Concerning language, Japanese was vigorously
promoted over Hakka, Southern Min, and the various aborigine languages spoken
on Taiwan, and the use of Japanese was strictly enforced in certain areas of the public
domain such as in banks and all government oYces. Within the media, Chinese
was gradually replaced by Japanese in newspapers and was eventually oYcially
banned from newspapers in 1937, as well as from radio broadcasting. The growing
education system was also a heavy target for the assimilation programme. Public
schools were all obliged to teach with Japanese as the medium of instruction and to
focus strongly on the actual teaching of the language. Private schools were for some
time tolerated and were permitted to teach Chinese language and culture, but later on
were closed down, and all education came to be transmitted through the Japanese
language and ceased to include any coverage of Chinese culture and history, in the
hopes of erasing links to a possible Chinese identity (P. Chen 2001a). Students found
speaking in languages other than Japanese in school were furthermore subject to
punishment by teachers. Finally, even the domestic arena was seen to be a domain
where the use of Japanese could be usefully promoted for purposes of assimilation,
and incentives were oVered for families to adopt Japanese as the language of the home
(Roy 2003).
The concrete linguistic results of the Japanese language policy were that a majority
of the population on Taiwan did indeed learn and become highly proWcient in
Japanese, especially in the urban centres and in the last ten years of the colonial
period, as more and more of the rising younger generations completed their school-
ing fully in Japanese. The exclusive use of Japanese in education and public
domains also had a dramatic negative eVect on people’s ability to speak other
languages such as Hakka, Southern Min, etc., and there was such infrequent oppor-
tunity to make use of languages other than Japanese in the more formal domains of
life, that people forgot (or never learned) how to use Hakka and Southern Min to
discuss H-level issues relating to politics, education, and other intellectual matters.
Instead these languages were largely conWned to the home and became restricted to
very informal conversation; if the need arose to switch to the discussion of more
formal topics, Japanese then invariably had to be employed. Importantly, though, the
forced learning and spread of Japanese did not eliminate other languages on
Taiwan, and people continued to learn Hakka, Southern Min, and the aborigine
languages as their Wrst language in the home before entering the school system. The
younger generations therefore mostly became bilinguals, with a restricted formal
competence in their mother tongue but daily use of these mother tongues in
domestic, aVective domains. The enforcement of Japanese as the sole medium of
240 A. Simpson

education from the late 1930s onwards additionally had a highly damaging eVect on
the younger generations’ opportunity to acquire a knowledge of written Chinese. Not
being able to learn how to read and write Chinese meant that rising generations were
cut oV from literary access to Chinese culture and the reinforcement of Chinese
identity that would normally come from such a source. In general, then, the Japanese
language policy of the late colonial period was a partial linguistic success (for the
Japanese ruling elite): it created a widespread proWciency in Japanese and fully
replaced other previously spoken languages with Japanese in all formal domains,
yet nevertheless failed to eliminate Chinese and aborigine languages from the im-
portant domain of the home, and was not able to convert Taiwan into a fully
monolingual Japanese society.
In terms of how successful the Japanese assimilation programme was overall,
generally there is little to suggest that it did in fact create any positive identiWcation
with Japan or the Japanese. While there may have been a certain respect for the way
that the Japanese developed the infrastructure of the island, the discrimination which
local people saw at work in the distribution of upper-level employment was too strong
for it to allow for any real feelings of shared identity with the Japanese. Instead, the
assimilation measures actually caused a quite diVerent, and unanticipated result – the
emergence of a sense of bonding and common identity amongst the various non-
Japanese groups on Taiwan. Isolated from the Chinese mainland and dominated by a
foreign colonial power, the local inhabitants of the island began to feel naturally
connected to each other and increasingly connected to Taiwan as well, as a permanent
homeland now quite separate from China. This growth of a new sense of identity
with the island and fellow residents was principally the result of the perception of
being bound up in a common fate together, but may have also been assisted by the
increased prosperity experienced on the island, allowing people the space in their lives
to think more about their political relations with others and less about simple survival
needs. Added to this there was also a conscious attempt among many intellectuals to
develop local cultural forms as props to establish and embed a new non-Japanese
island identity (Hsiau 2000), and it is even suggested that the spread and availability of
Japanese as a new inter-group common language on Taiwan may also have encour-
aged contact, social exchanges, and connections between the diVerent local ethnic
groups living on the island (Huang 2000). The signiWcant end result of this process of
being thrown together under a diYcult, foreign, imperial rule was that for the Wrst
time in the history of the island, there was a clear sense among the population that
they formed a collectivity with common interests linked to a speciWc territory.
Although this was by no means a conscious nationalism, in the sense of realistically
imagining Taiwan as an independent state, it was certainly the beginnings of a
common identity which would develop further, when given the chance, and later
give rise to a much stronger quest for a national identity in the latter part of the
twentieth century.
 Taiwan 241

11.3 Post-colonial Taiwan and Rule by the KMT

During the period of the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, much of importance had
occurred on the Chinese mainland. In 1911, the Qing dynasty had been overthrown
and in its place the Republic of China (ROC) was established, led by the Kuomintang
(KMT) Nationalist Party from 1919 onwards. Following this, in the late 1920s, an
extended internal conXict began between the forces of the KMT under Chiang Kai
Shek and those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Zedong. This
continued for almost a decade until Japan invaded China in 1937 and both nationalists
and communists agreed to cease their hostilities in order to better Wght against the
foreign invasion. With the Wnal defeat of Japan at the end of the Second World War,
the Chinese nationalist vs. communist confrontation was still not resolved, and was
set to continue after 1945. Concerning the future of Taiwan itself, when Japan was
required by the Allies to withdraw its forces from the island, it was the KMT which
immediately deployed troops and oYcial representatives there to ensure Chinese
nationalist control of Taiwan.

11.3.1 The Occupation of Taiwan by Chinese National Forces

After Wfty years of Japanese colonization and forced separation from the mainland, the
majority of Taiwanese people of Chinese descent were happy and excited to re-
establish contacts with the mainland and welcomed the arriving KMT forces. This
initial enthusiasm did not last long, however, as the new mainlander governor quickly
imposed a harsh and repressive regime which treated the Taiwanese more like a
conquered people than as liberated fellow Chinese (Wong 2001). The newly arrived
mainlanders immediately occupied all of the senior posts in administration, educa-
tion, and state-owned businesses in a discriminatory way fully similar to that of the
Japanese, and many abused these positions of power to amass personal wealth when
overseeing the transfer of resources to the mainland for the ongoing KMT war with
the communists. At a lower level of society, the ill-disciplined and uneducated ROC
soldiers who arrived from the mainland also acted in self-interested ways and took
part in widespread looting and theft (Roy 2003). Furthermore, as a result of the
general mismanagement, corruption, and stripping of much of Taiwan’s wealth for
the campaign on the mainland, the economy and agricultural production on Taiwan
rapidly went into decline and the relatively prosperous stability of the preceding
Japanese era unexpectedly disappeared from people’s lives. The Taiwanese were
consequently very soon disillusioned by the arrival of the KMT/ROC ‘liberators’
and dismayed to Wnd that Chinese from the mainland would act in such apparently
exploitative and discriminatory ways.
For their part, the mainlander forces and leadership looked on the Taiwanese with
extreme distrust and believed that Wfty years of Japanese rule had oriented the
population and its loyalty towards Japan and away from China, particularly in
242 A. Simpson

the case of the Taiwanese elite who were suspected of close collaboration with the
Japanese. In the eyes of the mainlanders there was therefore a need for the Taiwanese
to be re-educated and re-Sinicized before they could be accepted as equal Chinese
citizens. It was also felt that the Taiwanese owed a great deal to the eVorts and
suVering of the mainland Chinese in Wghting against the Japanese for many years prior
to 1945, and there was consequently an obvious justiWcation for the appropriation of
resources on Taiwan for the continued civil war on the mainland.
Two years after the instillation of the KMT/ROC government on Taiwan, the
increasing frustrations of the Taiwanese came to a head and boiled over when govern-
ment investigators shot dead a member of an angry crowd which had gathered to
protest against the inspectors’ rough treatment of a woman selling cigarettes. The 28
February Incident triggered a general uprising against the mainlander presence on
Taiwan and led to two weeks of destruction of mainlanders’ property and assaults on
mainlanders themselves. When ROC troop reinforcements subsequently arrived from
China to quash the rebellion, they engaged in a widespread, random killing of Taiwan-
ese in many parts of the island, resulting in the death of possibly thousands of
Taiwanese, and creating a critical memory of animosity and distrust towards the
mainlanders which would continue to haunt the island throughout the coming decades.
A further two years later, in 1949, the KMT-led war against the communists on the
mainland had gone so badly that all KMT forces and personnel had to be evacuated
from the mainland and withdrawn to Taiwan. This resulted in a massive inXux of 2.5
million new mainlander immigrants into Taiwan, dramatically increasing the popu-
lation to over 8 million and creating a huge new population to feed and provide
housing for, which served to further increase the tensions existing between Taiwanese
and mainlanders (Hughes 1997). Taiwan then became the main base of operations for
the KMT and its continued claim to be the government of all of China. Within Taiwan
itself, the KMT declared a rule of martial law on the grounds that its ROC forces were
still at war with the communists. This move eVectively imposed the KMT as a
government which could not be challenged by any other political force on Taiwan,
and was intended to be a temporary measure, with the KMT planning to regroup and
then lead a return to the mainland to overthrow the CCP. However, as the intended
invasion of the mainland had to be continually postponed, the state of martial law and
one-party rule was maintained by the KMT for a signiWcant period of time, resulting
in the complete political dominance of Taiwan by the KMT for almost four decades
following their arrival.
Linguistically, the Chinese nationalist programme of the KMT translated itself into
a number of strict measures and campaigns relating to language which aimed at re-
Sinicizing the Taiwanese and making them Wt to be considered citizens of the
Republic of China. A Wrst step taken was the complete banning of the use of Japanese
in public places and on the radio, together with a general seizure of written materials
in Japanese and the forced discontinuation of Japanese in newspapers. The KMT was
intent on purging the Taiwanese of any Japanese inXuences they had picked up, and
 Taiwan 243

this naturally extended to include use of the Japanese language, which had further-
more been openly used as a symbol of anti-KMT rebellion by certain young Taiwanese
during the 28 February uprising. The result of this elimination of Japanese from public
life was that for some considerable time, before they were able to acquire Mandarin
Chinese, the Taiwanese were left unable to discuss formal matters in public and had
no access at all to any written materials they could understand.
A second major programme initiated by the KMT was the energetic pro-
motion of Mandarin Chinese. Referred to as guoyu in Chinese – literally ‘national
language’ – Mandarin Chinese was a form of speech based on a northern variety of
Chinese and had been spread by the KMT while still on the mainland as a lingua
franca intended to allow for communication among speakers of the diVerent dialect
groups. Prior to the arrival of the mainlanders, Mandarin was largely unknown to the
Taiwanese, but was made into an essential requirement for obtaining employment in
government oYces. This resulted in the Taiwanese not being able to realistically
compete for work in the civil service for quite some time, so that mainlanders
occupied all senior government positions and monopolized the bureaucracy. Such
linguistic discrimination in favour of Mandarin Chinese (and the mainlanders proW-
cient in it) was justiWed as a national policy. Mandarin was presented as the national
language of all China, and as Taiwan was argued to be part of China once again, it
should necessarily be subject to the national language policy and the required
imposition of the lingua franca Mandarin in all public domains. As noted in Kubler
(1988), the institution of Mandarin Chinese as the oYcial language of the island of
Taiwan was full of political signiWcance. Had the KMT been trying to identify the
most eVective means of (non-Japanese) inter-group communication available for
Taiwan, this would have naturally led to the selection of Southern Min as the oYcial
language of Taiwan, as it was clearly spoken by the majority of inhabitants (and the
minority mainlanders would then have had to learn and use Southern Min in place of
Mandarin). But politically, promotion of Southern Min could have been interpreted as
signalling that KMT-controlled Taiwan was not likely to be reunited with the rest of
China, where the national language policy had been to promote Mandarin. By
extension this would also have signalled a recognition from the KMT that they saw
themselves simply governing the island of Taiwan both in the present and in the
future, and not later returning to the mainland as the government of all China.
However, the legitimization of martial law and one-party rule by the KMT on Taiwan
critically rested on the claim of the KMT to be the government of all of China, where
it would one day return and assume power. Consequently, Mandarin rather than any
more local, provincial language had to be promoted by the KMT as the oYcial
language on Taiwan as part of the larger Republic of China. Furthermore, not only
was the promotion of Mandarin fully in line with the KMT’s general position on its
status as rightful controllers of power on Taiwan, it also assured a simple, highly
important advantage to the mainlanders in their dominance of the civil service
and state-owned corporations, due to the Mandarin language requirement made
244 A. Simpson

necessary in such employment. The oYcial promotion of Mandarin was therefore

connected with the control of power on Taiwan following 1945 in various signiWcant
ways.
At the same time that Mandarin was being vigorously pushed into Taiwanese life,
the local languages spoken on Taiwan were subject to clear repression. The Wrst
mainland governor of Taiwan issued orders to ban the use of Southern Min from
public places and the radio in the same way that Japanese had been banned (P. Chen
2001a), and later there were campaigns and propaganda designed to create negative
attitudes towards Southern Min, stressing its vulgarity and lack of grace when
compared with Mandarin Chinese (Wachman 1994). Although people continued to
speak Southern Min and other local languages at home, they were made to feel that
these forms of speech were just broken, rough dialects rather than genuine ‘lan-
guages’. The KMT also ordered the discontinuation of all eVorts to write local
languages in Roman script form in an attempt to stop further increase in their use.
Finally, in the area of education, there was similar repression of local languages.
Although Southern Min was initially used quite extensively in classrooms alongside
Mandarin to help ease students through their early schooling, it was later banned as a
medium of instruction (as were also Hakka and the aboriginal languages), and
Mandarin was required to be used exclusively throughout the compounds of schools,
even outside of oYcial class-time. Students caught switching into languages other
than Mandarin anywhere on school grounds were then automatically given punish-
ments and Wnes as a way to coerce them to consistently speak Mandarin.
As pointed out in Hsiau (2000), the KMT therefore applied linguistic policies to the
Taiwanese very similar in nature to those which had been enforced by the Japanese.
As in the Japanese colonial period a non-local language imported from outside Taiwan
was imposed as the new oYcial language of the island and made mandatory in
all formal, public domains. Other local languages spoken on the island were then
severely restricted and subject to various bans as an ‘assimilative monolingualism’ was
aimed at (Hsiau 2000: 126), in which non-oYcial language skills would ideally atrophy
and fall into disuse along with any non-linguistic loyalties associated with such
languages. Rather than being a period of linguistic freedom where Southern Min,
Hakka, and the aboriginal languages could Xourish after suppression during the
Japanese occupation, the post-war ‘liberation’ of Taiwan by the KMT therefore
unexpectedly resulted in the same kind of linguistic repression and attempts at
assimilation that had characterized Japanese colonial rule.

11.3.2 Chinese Nationalism, Political Isolation, and a Growing Economy

During the 1950s and on into the 1970s and 1980s, the KMT further consolidated its
position and power on Taiwan. It also dedicated itself to the promotion of Chinese
nationalism, presenting itself and the ROC as the protector of Chinese culture and
history with a ‘sacred mission’ (Roy 2003) to restore true Chinese civilization to the
 Taiwan 245

mainland and all of China. It pointed to the ongoing denigration of Chinese tradition
by the communists on the mainland and set about championing itself as the saviour
of China’s glorious cultural heritage. To this end, a ‘Chinese Cultural Renaissance
Movement’ (Wong 2001) was initiated and the media and education focused on
promoting knowledge and appreciation of Chinese national culture. In the schools,
students were subsequently taught exclusively about mainland Chinese history, geog-
raphy, philosophy, and literature and nothing about Taiwan and its own history and
local culture, and KMT-supported educationalists and the media continually empha-
sized that everything of essential importance in cultural and historic terms was
located on the mainland and that Taiwan itself had no culture and no independent
history (Wachman 1994). For thirty years, the Taiwanese were therefore taught to
feel negatively about local Taiwanese manifestations of culture and to identify instead
with an idealized Chinese national culture which there was a responsibility to
safeguard and restore to the mainland. During this time, the KMT nationalist
programme also continued to provide legitimization for sustained KMT one-party
rule and maintain the mainlanders’ monopoly on power in Taiwan.
This stranglehold on power, in which no political opposition was permitted, was
assisted by the pervasive use of a much-feared state security service, which monitored
the activities of intellectuals and potential dissidents and frequently used intimidation
and imprisonment to curb the organization of any anti-KMT political groups. Because
most of those arrested for political oVences were Taiwanese, this increased the
feelings of alienation many Taiwanese held towards the mainlander-dominated
KMT, and led to the heightened perception of a Taiwanese–mainlander divide in
which Taiwanese of diVerent ethnic backgrounds were bound together as victims of
mainlander oppression (Wachman 1994).
Alongside the heavy promotion of Chinese national culture, the period up until the
mid-1980s also saw the continuation of the KMT’s attempts to spread Mandarin
Chinese and decrease the use of other languages on Taiwan. The National Language
Movement was in fact very successful in ensuring the growth of proWciency in
Mandarin through much of the population, and rising generations schooled in Man-
darin came to have native speaker abilities in the language. There was also continued
discouragement of the use of Southern Min, Hakka, and the aborigine languages, and
speaking languages other than Mandarin was characterized as being unpatriotic as well
as backward and an indication of low intellectual and socio-economic status (Hsiau
2000). When television was introduced on the island in 1962, the state moved to
regulate the amount of programming broadcast in Southern Min and in 1972 reduced
this to a maximum of one hour per day, to the considerable annoyance of Taiwanese
who had begun to enjoy receiving programmes in what for most was still the informal
language of home life. Though Southern Min and other non-Mandarin forms of speech
were therefore not eliminated from Taiwan, their speakers felt much frustration in not
being able to make free, unfettered use of these languages and in being constantly
urged to speak Mandarin ‘for the good of the nationalist cause’.
246 A. Simpson

In Taiwan’s political relations with the outside world, the post-war period through
until the 1970s was a time of ups and also signiWcant downs. Initially supported by the
USA as a result of communist-led mainland China’s involvement in the Korean War
on the side of North Korea, Taiwan received useful Wnancial aid and public arena
support through much of the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, however, there was an
important political rapprochement in relations between the USA and the PRC which
resulted in the USA withdrawing its support for Taiwan’s ROC seat in the United
Nations and instead recognizing the PRC. This led to a range of other nations doing
the same, and Taiwan soon found itself increasingly isolated in the political world, no
longer being recognised as the legitimate representation of ‘China’ by most of the
Western world and without any oYcial seat in the United Nations after an ignomini-
ous and embarrassing ejection in 1970. Although domestically on Taiwan the Chinese
nationalist movement remained vigorous and powerful, to the outside world it came
to be seen as an anachronism and an outdated, misplaced fantasy, as the Chinese
nation was increasingly being recognized as having its permanent government located
in Beijing.

11.4 The Advent of Democracy and the Growth of

Taiwanese Identity
If the 1950s–1970s was a period dominated by the continued promotion of a Chinese
national identity on Taiwan, what characterized the 1980s was a growing demand for
full democracy and the clear strengthening of a Taiwanese identity on the island,
which subsequently led to a new Taiwanese nationalism and calls for independence
for Taiwan. Such developments were the result of a number of factors interacting with
each other. First of all, the tremendous growth of the economy in the 1960s and 1970s
led to a widespread increase in the general standard of living and the creation of a new,
large, well-educated middle class with serious aspirations for participation in a fully
democratic political system. Secondly, as time wore on and the likelihood that Taiwan
would be reunited with China under the KMT became weaker and weaker, it became
increasingly diYcult to justify the continued imposition of martial law on Taiwan and
the one-party system which this resulted in. Calls for an end to martial law and the
institution of general elections therefore became louder and more strident from
the unoYcial political opposition in the 1980s and attracted the support of much of
the population. Thirdly, years of frustration caused by heavy-handed KMT attempts to
instil a Chinese national identity led to negative feelings towards such an idealized
‘foreign’ identity centred on culture, history, and geography from the mainland rather
than Taiwan, and many on the island began to explore instead how the pre-1945
inhabitants of Taiwan and their oVspring might be diVerent from mainland Chinese
and have their own collective identity. The promotion of Chinese nationalism by the
KMT consequently had the unanticipated eVect that it triggered a reactionary interest
 Taiwan 247

in things Taiwanese and a focus on identity links among the non-mainlander popu-
lation on Taiwan, something which might not have happened had there not been such
a concerted push towards a Chinese national identity. As the domineering KMT was
furthermore perceived as being largely populated with and supported by mainlanders
living on Taiwan, heavy antipathy towards the KMT also translated into a marked
social distancing of many Taiwanese from the mainlander population, and feelings of
distrust towards the latter.
Faced with a continued rise in often militant calls for wider political participation
and greater individual freedom from an opposition with widespread support during
the 1980s, Chiang Ching-kuo, the then president of Taiwan and leader of the KMT
decided not to attempt to further repress the growing opposition movement with
the use of the public security apparatus, and instead implemented a number of highly
signiWcant reforms. In 1987, a full thirty-eight years after it had been initially imposed,
martial law was Wnally lifted from Taiwan. In the same year, the KMT government
proclaimed that it would allow the formation of other political parties on Taiwan, and
that there would be future island-wide elections which all political parties could
contest. These did indeed occur, with important elections for a new National
Assembly taking place in 1991, and openly-contested presidential elections in 1996.
The lifting of a ban on political parties other than the KMT then led to the oYcial
recognition of the Taiwanese opposition and their Democratic Progressive Party
(DPP), which would continue to spar vigorously with the KMT in elections and
political debates over the next two decades and eventually assume power in 2000. In
1987, the government also lifted its long-term ban on business and travel contact with
the Chinese mainland, with the result that many Taiwanese began to do business and
invest in the mainland, and individuals were permitted to travel and visit relatives and
ancestral homes located there. Finally, in 1987 restrictions on language use started to
be lifted as well. The punishment and Wning of students for speaking languages other
than Mandarin in schools was discontinued, and the use of local languages in the
public domain came to be oYcially tolerated and was no longer forbidden. Within
broadcasting, regular television news programmes were soon added in Southern Min
and Hakka, and censorship of the media and general restrictions on the amount of
time allowed for programmes in local languages on television and the radio were also
done away with.
This introduction of democracy and increased freedom of expression was keenly
exploited by both the DPP and the general Taiwanese public. In the area of language,
people Wnally found themselves able to use their mother tongues in all areas of life,
something which had not been possible since the introduction of extensive linguistic
repression during the Japanese colonial times, and from 1987 onwards local languages
came to be unoYcially promoted and revived via a signiWcant increase in their
use in television, radio, popular music, cinema, and local theatre productions. Well-
respected, prominent individuals also helped elevate the perceived status of particu-
larly Southern Min by using it in public addresses, and in many universities there were
248 A. Simpson

new linguistic associations which enthusiastically dedicated themselves to the revital-

ization of Southern Min and Hakka (Hsiau 2000). Amongst the public, three broad
sets of eVects could be observed. First of all there was a tremendous sense of relief at
being able to use mother tongue languages without restriction and simultaneously
jettison the negative attitudes towards these languages which had been built up by the
continual prioritization and elevation of Mandarin. Secondly, there was a widespread
sense of empowerment generated by the ability to use mother tongue languages in
various formal, H-level domains, where they had previously been outlawed. In
political debates and in congress, members of the DPP opposition started to use
Southern Min to make speeches and ask questions of their Mandarin-speaking KMT
opponents, who often could not understand Southern Min. Local language was
therefore used in a deWant way as a new weapon to potentially embarrass politicians
in the KMT and so reverse the previous relation of power between Mandarin and
Southern Min, obliging mainlander politicians to gain a proWciency in the latter as
well as Mandarin. Thirdly, the increase in use of local mother tongue languages served
as an important expression and declaration of local Taiwanese identity, and a rejection
of the KMT’s promotion of a Chinese national identity founded on Mandarin, the
‘National Language’ (of China).
These latter, growing feelings of belonging to a Taiwanese community with a
shared fate and distinct identity, which had Wrst emerged on the island during the
Japanese period and then increased under post-war KMT rule, were deliberately
encouraged and emphasized at every available opportunity by members of the DPP
from the 1980s onwards with the aim of developing a clear Taiwanese national
identity. DPP politicians and intellectuals continually pointed to the distinctiveness
of Taiwan in terms of its special mixture of languages, local culture, and shared
history, and downplayed what Taiwan might have in common with mainland China
and Chinese national culture. Nativist literature describing everyday life on Taiwan
further supported the highlighting of a speciWcally Taiwanese community facing
common challenges, and, from another angle, the initiation of direct contacts with
mainland China and visits to the mainland is also likely to have reinforced the sense of
diVerence from the PRC felt by people on Taiwan. Those many who made the trip
across the Taiwan Straits to the mainland found that conditions there and the
standard of living were signiWcantly diVerent from and lower than those on Taiwan,
and that the separate paths of development pursued on Taiwan and in the PRC had
resulted in quite distinct social and economic systems.
The growing idea of a Taiwanese identity formally distinct from any Chinese
identity importantly was not only a political concept promoted by those in the DPP
opposition during the 1980s, it rapidly became an issue which was discussed often
heatedly at all levels of society, and frequently resulted in demands among people to
openly declare their identity and their commitment to being either Chinese or
Taiwanese. In anonymous surveys carried out during the period where there was
no public pressure on informants to side with a particular categorization, it was also
 Taiwan 249

clear that more and more people did indeed identify themselves primarily as Taiwan-
ese (Liao 2000b), and hence that the notion of a distinct Taiwanese identity had come
to be both psychologically real and widely assumed. It is also important to note that
the nature of the central properties which supported this identity – a shared, imagined
history dating back many centuries, local Taiwanese culture and languages – tended to
exclude the mainlander population from easily and naturally participating in this
Taiwanese identity. Those who had arrived in Taiwan after 1945 (a) could not claim to
have memories (or family members with memories) of the Japanese occupation, (b)
largely followed the Chinese nationalist culture which had been promoted by the
KMT, and (c) often did not speak any of the languages which were viewed as local
languages of Taiwan. They therefore considered themselves, by and large, not part of
the new Taiwanese identity and in surveys and in public continued to indicate their
identity as Chinese.
The considerable public momentum that was created by the encouragement and
genuine growth of a Taiwanese identity was channelled by the DPP towards two
particular goals. First of all, the DPP opposition hoped to dislodge the KMT from
power on Taiwan and made the question of identity central to all their attempts to
win votes and representation in government (Hughes 1997). Secondly, the DPP began
to make calls for formal independence for Taiwan and used the rise of Taiwanese
identity as a platform to demand nationhood for the island and an abandonment of
plans to try to engineer future uniWcation of Taiwan with mainland China. From the
late 1980s onwards, there was consequently a genuinely Taiwanese nationalist move-
ment on Taiwan which explicitly argued that Taiwan should be an independent state.
Though the beginnings of nationalism and a national identity on Taiwan can be traced
back to the bonding eVect triggered by oppression during the Japanese period and the
diYculties experienced under post-war KMT rule and its imposition of Chinese
nationalism, it was only in the late 1980s and 1990s that the growing sense of islander
community was exploited to the full to develop a realistic imagination and projection
of Taiwan as an independent nation. Once aired and promoted as a political plan for
the future, the issue of independence vs. reuniWcation came to dominate public
debate and remained tightly bound up with the question of Taiwanese identity and
whether or not and how it might be genuinely distinct from Chinese identity.
Seriously challenged by the DPP’s deliberate cultivation of feelings of Taiwanese
identity amongst the population and its use to help its political ambitions, the KMT
reacted by cloaking itself too in a Taiwanese image, recruiting over 70 per cent of its
membership and candidates from the non-mainlander section of the population. This
included the new president Lee Teng-hui who took over from Chiang Ching-kuo as
leader of the KMT and president of Taiwan, and who was a Hakka born in Taiwan. In
political campaigns, the KMT candidates also copied the DPP in using local languages
to address the public, and even mainlander candidates with a poor knowledge of
Southern Min made eVorts to include a few words or sentences in the language mixed
in with their Mandarin speeches. At the crucial, much anticipated island-wide
250 A. Simpson

elections in 1991, the KMT also muted its previous emphasis on reuniWcation with
China and instead highlighted issues relating to success in the economy, while the
DPP continued to focus heavily on its goal of independence for Taiwan. The results of
the election, a signiWcant victory for the KMT, showed that the DPP had in fact
overplayed the independence card and that fear of provoking the PRC into military
action against Taiwan if it had a leadership attempting to declare independence led
voters to elect a new conservative KMT government instead. Although Taiwanese
identity had aspirations to be national and independent, the practical dangers of trying
to break away from mainland China (which saw Taiwan as a renegade part of its
territory) with a formal declaration of independence were seen to be too great to vote
in the DPP, and a majority of those on Taiwan were left in the curious limbo state of
feeling like a nation with a national identity without however being able to institu-
tionalize this politically and receive international recognition as a nation.
A Wnal important aspect of the development of Taiwanese ‘national’ identity in the
1980s and early 1990s which needs to be understood and appreciated is the high degree
to which it was both driven and dominated by the Southern Min linguistic group.
Southern Min speakers were in a great majority within the DPP, which formed the
core of the nationalist opposition movement, and Southern Min quite naturally came
to be used as the major language of party meetings, demonstrations, and political
rallies (Hsiau 2000). Given the fact that Southern Min speakers comprised 73 per cent
of the total population on Taiwan (Huang 1993), this is perhaps not surprising, as the
use of a local language (‘local’ in the sense of having been spoken on Taiwan for several
centuries) was extremely important as a symbol of anti-KMT, anti-Chinese nationalist
sentiment, the KMT and Chinese nationalism being symbolically represented by the
‘foreign’ language Mandarin, much more recently imported from the mainland.
Without any real consultation with other linguistic groups, however, Southern Min
was also soon promoted and perceived as a (potential) national language by its speakers
within the opposition, and for many became a necessary expression of Taiwanese
nationalism. This unoYcial elevation of Southern Min to the status of national
language in the minds of the growing opposition was helped by the fact that Southern
Min had actually been referred to informally as ‘Taiwanese’ since the Japanese period
(taiwanwe in Southern Min, and later on taiwanhua in Mandarin), and so really was the
representative local language of Taiwan – ‘Taiwanese’ – for a large amount of the
population (especially since its use was permitted in all H-level domains after 1987 and
it came to be viewed as a real ‘language’ and not just a reduced dialect).
In general daily life, the new enthusiasm for a Taiwanese as opposed to a Chinese
national identity (whether this also involved aspirations for formal independence or
simply the continuation of Taiwan’s existence separate from the mainland) resulted in
a widespread, vigorous pushing of the use of Southern Min by many as a symbol of
this identity, and the use of Mandarin was often openly branded and criticized as un-
Taiwanese, especially in the south of Taiwan, where the great majority of the
population were speakers of Southern Min. In some instances, verbal abuse directed
 Taiwan 251

at people who spoke Mandarin rather than Southern Min even escalated further into
physical violence, and taxi drivers in particular were known to aggressively demand
that their fares speak Southern Min as an expression of Taiwanese national identity.
Such insistence on the use of Southern Min, perhaps the result of pent-up anger
following decades of linguistic oppression, was often directed not only at people who
had a proWciency in Southern Min but did not make use of it, but also at mainlanders
who could only speak Mandarin, and even, reportedly, at Hakka speakers and
members of the aborigine population. The Hakka community (12 per cent of the
population of Taiwan – Huang 1993) quite justiWably felt unfairly treated by the
assumption that they should speak Southern Min in order to be seen as pro-Taiwan-
ese, as Hakka should also qualify as a local Taiwanese language in the same way that
Southern Min does (and the aborigine languages pre-date both Southern Min and
Hakka by many centuries as languages of Taiwan). Strong protests against the
appropriation and use of the term ‘Taiwanese’ as an exclusive label for Southern
Min have consequently been made by Hakka and aborigine communities alike.
However, it is actually still very common to hear Southern Min being referred to as
Taiwanese, and many scholarly works on Taiwan also use the term ‘Taiwanese’ when
politically it would be more neutral to refer to the language as Southern Min (other
neutral terms for the same language found frequently in the literature are: Hokkien,
Fujianese, Hoklo and Minnanhua, the latter being the Mandarin translation
of Southern Min). The more direct results of pressure on Hakka people to speak
Southern Min from the late 1980s have been that many older members of the
community have felt alienated from the Southern Min-led Taiwanese nationalist
movement and have therefore sided with the KMT and the group of mainlanders
on Taiwan rather than with the DPP. Younger Hakkas, by way of contrast, have
tended to assimilate more and have learned Southern Min, and this has caused a
signiWcant loss of Hakka language amongst the younger generation, and a general
reluctance to speak Hakka in public (Liao 2000a, 2000b).
Consequently, it can be said that the revitalization of Southern Min from a severely
repressed state in earlier decades not only resulted in the strengthening of a very
important public, outward symbol of ‘national’ identity in the 1980s/1990s, it also
brought with it certain problems for those Taiwanese islanders (Hakka and abori-
gines) who were not speakers of the language. Section 11.5 now considers how
Taiwan has moved from the early, frenetic Taiwanese nationalism of the late 1980s
and early 1990s forward into the present, and how it is continuing to confront the
diYcult issues of language, national identity, and the relation of Taiwan to China.

11.5 Taiwan Today and the Continual Question of Identity

Out of the excited, Wrst period of experiencing new freedoms in the late 1980s/early
1990s, when Taiwanese nationalism was largely centred around a Southern Min core
252 A. Simpson

and its language and culture, there came a second more general phase of adjustment
and adaptation in the growth of Taiwanese nationalism and a new, measured focus on
an explicitly multicultural Taiwanese national identity. This redirection of the emer-
ging nationalist programme away from an over-dominance of Southern Min lan-
guage and culture and towards the promotion of a much more self-consciously
pluralistic national identity began in the mid-1990s and has been pursued by the
pro-independence DPP until present. It was also accompanied and assisted by an
important switch in political power on Taiwan, with the DPP displacing the KMT
as the government of Taiwan in general elections held in 2000, the DPP’s candidate
Chen Shui-bian being elected president both in 2000 and again later in 2004. In
practical terms, the new emphasis on a multicultural, multi-ethnic Taiwanese identity
which included the Hakka, the aborigines, and the mainlanders as well as the
Southern Min, resulted in an increased presentation of Taiwanese-speciWc culture
and history in its broadest, most inclusive sense within education, the state-run media,
and in cinema, as well as the regular discussion of multiculturalism within political
debate about government policy. In education in particular, following the decision to
make the school curriculum less China-centric, new textbooks were introduced to
help students learn about and understand the geography, history, and multi-ethnic
society of Taiwan in a novel and open-minded way, and at university level, courses on
Taiwanese literature, religion, and society began to attract signiWcant numbers of
students. There was also new discussion of the role of the ‘plains aborigines’ in the
development of the modern population of Taiwan, and a highlighting of the inter-
marriage which took place between early Han Chinese settlers from the mainland and
aborigines who lived in lowland areas of Taiwan, resulting in an almost full absorp-
tion of the latter amongst the settlers. This fresh public emphasis on the earlier mixing
of Chinese with aborigines was eVectively used to stress the potentially multi-ethnic
origins of twentieth-century Taiwanese people and to deny the assumption that
Sinitic Taiwanese people were necessarily purely Han Chinese in origin (Hsiau 2000).
For many of the KMT and their supporters, who were still Chinese nationalists, the
DPP presentation of a distinct, local Taiwanese culture stemming from the mixing of
diVerent peoples on Taiwan appeared to be little more than a fantasy, however,
speciWcally designed to provide support for the invention of a Taiwanese national
identity. Such die-hard Chinese nationalists suggested that what was presented as
‘Taiwanese culture’ was for the most part simply a regional variation of very general
Chinese culture, similar to that of Fujian province on the mainland, and that it did not
in fact distinguish the population on Taiwan from Chinese people on the mainland in
any really signiWcant way, contra the suggestions of the Taiwanese nationalists (Wach-
man 1994). Despite such potential criticisms, and even granting that the imagination
of a distinct Taiwanese national culture and identity may have been deliberately
provoked and encouraged by the DPP for political reasons, the degree to which it
has stimulated public discussion and thinking about national identity on Taiwan is
now very real indeed, and has resulted in the quest for national identity in fact
 Taiwan 253

becoming ‘the single issue that looms largest in Taiwanese consciousness’ (Huang
2000: 139), likened to a national sport.
It is also argued at length in Friedman (2004) that the establishment of a national
identity on Taiwan is a critically important survival need for those who hope that
Taiwan will continue to enjoy some form of existence independent of the PRC. As
Taiwan develops an increasing economic dependence on trade with mainland China,
this poses a threat to the unoYcial autonomy of Taiwan from the PRC and its ability
to act independently of the PRC. The simultaneous development of a strong and
distinct Taiwanese identity is therefore argued to be essential under such circumstan-
ces for Taiwan to maintain the hopes of a sustained independence as China becomes
ever stronger, and Friedman (2004: 23) accordingly stresses that the DPP ‘cannot back
away from promoting a separable Taiwan identity – it is a life and death issue for
Taiwan, not merely a game of identity politics for short term political advantage’.
To this it can be added that for those who seemed sceptical of the authenticity of a
fully multicultural Taiwanese identity, a second, rather diVerent conceptualization of
political and ethno-cultural identity was aired by various politicians with the same
essential goal of intellectually justifying independence from the PRC. It has been
suggested on many occasions that quite generally there should be no automatic
equation of ethnic identity with political unit and that individuals from the same
ethno-cultural background might sometimes elect to belong to diVerent political
entities. Hence in the case of Taiwan, it should be possible for people to acknowledge
the possession of a Chinese cultural identity and origin without this entailing that they
should also automatically belong to a single Chinese polity governing all peoples of
Chinese origins. What has instead been proposed by various leading Wgures to be
more important than common ethno-linguistic background for the establishment and
maintenance of a nation as a political unit is a strong sense of community and shared
destiny amongst a population. Such a route to nationhood is clearly available to the
population of Taiwan, and theoretically allows for the acknowledgement of a Tai-
wanese political identity alongside a separate Chinese (or other) cultural identity. The
existence and success of multicultural societies is directly endorsed by such an
approach which divorces cultural aYnities from political allegiance, and the DPP
president Chen Shui-bian has repeatedly stressed that a single country may host an
array of diVerent peoples and cultures which are committed to the same political
community.
Considering now the consequences of the development of nationalist thinking in
recent years, and assessing the present state of languages in Taiwan, a number of
signiWcant trends and generalizations relating to language policy and development
policy can be observed. As in most of the post-war era, the linguistic landscape in
present-day Taiwan is largely taken up by four main languages/language groups:
Southern Min, Hakka, the aborigine languages, and Mandarin, with a Wfth language,
English, just starting to make an important intrusion into education and civil service
entrance requirements.
254 A. Simpson

Beginning with the aborigine group of languages, there are currently ten diVerent
Austronesian languages spoken on Taiwan, with a total of approximately 400,000
speakers. Language shift among the aborigine peoples is however endemic, as young
people use more and more Southern Min and Mandarin when at work, and there is
continuing cultural assimilation and intermarriage with the non-aborigine majority
population. As part of the government’s stated commitment to multiculturalism,
there have been attempts to halt the loss of the aborigine languages, which are now all
endangered, with funding provided for the initiation of bilingual education pro-
grammes and the support of aboriginal culture, but so far the success rate in teaching
young people aborigine languages has been low. In addition to a chronic shortage of
good-quality teaching materials and competent teachers, there is also an ingrained
lack of motivation to learn and speak the aborigine languages amongst the aborigine
peoples themselves, and negative attitudes are often held towards the aboriginal
languages, especially among the young. Such diYculties are further compounded
by other more general social problems aVecting the aborigine communities, in
particular low socio-economic status and poor education, and high rates of alcoholism
and unemployment. The outlook for the future of the Wrst languages of Taiwan is
therefore currently rather bleak, and although there is a high awareness of the
problem and a willingness to attend to it, it is possible that the continual shift to
Southern Min and Mandarin will not be easily halted and may lead to certain of the
aborigine languages dying out over the next Wfty years.
Turning now to Hakka, this language, like the aborigine languages, has been under
pressure from both Mandarin and Southern Min for many years, though with a
current 11 per cent of the population and 2,500,000 speakers it is signiWcantly more
vibrant and sustainable than the aborigine languages. Nevertheless, there are frequent
complaints from the Hakka community that young Hakkas are learning Mandarin
and Southern Min and cannot communicate well with grandparents who may know
only Hakka and Japanese. Following the initial Southern Min domination of Taiwan-
ese nationalism and the switch to a more tolerant, multicultural view of Taiwanese
identity, the Hakkas have been able to beneWt from the introduction of Hakka
language and culture classes into the school curriculum as an option in elementary
schools. This was actually part of a language initiative introduced by the KMT
government in 1993 in an attempt to partially compensate for its previous repres-
sive treatment of local languages in schools, and was later continued under DPP
rule, allowing students to select the learning of non-Mandarin mother tongue lan-
guages in addition to Mandarin. However, despite the good intentions of the new
mother tongue educational programmes, not enough time is set aside for any
eVective learning of Hakka and the other mother tongue languages – generally just
one hour per week – and there is also a serious shortage of qualiWed instructors for the
teaching of non-Mandarin languages. In addition to this, there is also no strong
support from the public for either the full or partial substitution of non-Mandarin
languages for Mandarin as languages of instruction in the classroom. Finally, increased
 Taiwan 255

pressure on the linguistic attentions of the rising, younger generations is being applied
by the growing presence of English in the school curriculum. Although English is not
much used in everyday life in Taiwan, its learning is being emphasized in schools, and
signiWcantly more so than the mother tongue languages, with the result that more
hours are spent learning English per week than any non-Mandarin mother tongue.
The government has furthermore recently introduced a proWciency requirement in
English for new civil servants, increasing the pressure on the acquisition of English
over the mother tongues. In such a general situation, Hakka is continuing to survive
on Taiwan and is not endangered, but is clearly still losing out to Mandarin, Southern
Min, and now in certain domains even to English.
The two major, contending languages on Taiwan at present continue to be
Southern Min and Mandarin, and much of the population (perhaps even over 80
per cent) is now proWcient in both varieties of Chinese, using both varieties on a daily
basis in diVerent domains. Considering Southern Min Wrst: having been the mother
tongue of the majority of Taiwanese residents and suppressed for many decades by
both the Japanese and the KMT, Southern Min bounced back into public life with
great vitality in the 1980s and 1990s, and rapidly became a major symbol of Taiwanese
nationalism during this period. Currently the language is still very widely spoken and
is particularly dominant in the south of Taiwan, in business, rural areas, and among
the older, established middle class and the lower class. An ability to speak Southern
Min may even be necessary to secure good jobs in certain areas of employment. One
semi-inherent restriction on the further growth of Southern Min in various H-level
domains where it might otherwise challenge Mandarin, however, is the fact that to
date there is still no standardized and commonly accepted way to write Southern Min.
Though much of Southern Min can be represented with standard Chinese characters,
approximately 30 per cent of the language cannot, and there has so far been no broad
agreement on how best to bridge this gap and devise an eVective and satisfactory
written form, though many possible systems have been experimented with, including
fully Romanized alphabetic representation and character-based syllabaries. Until a
solution is found and accepted, the usefulness of Southern Min will always be
restricted to oral communication and it will not be able to serve as a major language
of education or oYcial/national representation. In addition to this, there have also
been concerns that younger people are actually not learning Southern Min in the
home today as well as in the past, especially in new middle class families outside of the
south of Taiwan, where it is perceived that Xuency in Mandarin may help advance
children in their future life more than a knowledge of Southern Min.
ProWciency in Mandarin Chinese is now very widespread in Taiwan, and as much as
95 per cent of the population are estimated to be able to speak and understand it,
though to diVerent degrees (P. Chen 2001a). Mandarin is the principal language of
education, functioning as the unique medium of instruction from kindergarten
onwards, and is the only language on Taiwan to be regularly written in widely
distributed publications. Mandarin is also used on virtually all formal, public
256 A. Simpson

occasions, in administration, and facilitates overseas trade and communications

between Taiwan and the mainland. Generally the language dominates a wide range
of domains in present-day Taiwan and is currently made use of, written and spoken,
more than any other language on the island, especially in more formal domains and
amongst the educated middle class and urban population living outside the south of
Taiwan.
In earlier, post-war years, it is clear that there were many negative feelings towards
the use of Mandarin among much of the non-mainlander population, as Mandarin
was seen as a symbol of the KMT and political domination by mainlanders. However,
as the KMT has in recent years become more clearly Taiwanese in its membership,
and political power has also been won by the DPP, the frequent association of
Mandarin Chinese with dominance by outsiders has become signiWcantly less and
for many has fully disappeared. The mainlander population itself has now also largely
accepted that Taiwan will be its long-term home, and increases in intermarriage and
social contact with non-mainlanders has eliminated much of the distinctiveness of the
mainlanders as a group (Hughes 2000), including the automatic identiWcation of
Mandarin Chinese as a symbol of the mainlanders as opposed to other inhabitants
of Taiwan. In general, then, Mandarin is now importantly much more widely
accepted as a useful, neutral language no longer tied to a particular dominant group
on Taiwan, and so has come to have a substantially increased use on the island. It can
also be noted that the form of Mandarin that is commonly spoken on Taiwan has
been inXuenced by Southern Min in its grammar and vocabulary and is now clearly
diVerent from the Mandarin spoken on the mainland in various ways. To a certain
extent, therefore, Taiwanese Mandarin now not only functions as a lingua franca
within Taiwan, but with the loss of earlier negative associations with the KMT,
somewhat ironically it may also be beginning to fulWl a new function as a marker
of Taiwanese identity, distinguishing those on Taiwan from Mandarin speakers on the
mainland (and in Singapore).
Alongside Taiwanese Mandarin, there is also a new mixed code of Mandarin and
Southern Min which has emerged in recent years (Huang 2000). This is frequently
formed from a Mandarin base combined with lexical insertions from Southern Min,
and is further testimony to an increasing rapprochement between mainlander/
Mandarin and Southern Min groups. Overall, it can therefore be observed that
Mandarin Chinese is coming to be used more and more on Taiwan without any
negative symbolic association, and is assuming the status of a common language
among much of the heavily bilingual population of the island.
Considering the last ten years as a whole, since the mid-1990s there has been a
general increase in integration and reconciliation of the diVerent parts of the popu-
lation on Taiwan with each other, and a concomitant decrease in the interpretation of
languages as symbols of division and dominance/oppression. Military threats against
Taiwan from the PRC during times of general elections (to discourage the election of
any pro-independence candidate) have served to bring the population closer together
 Taiwan 257

in the face of a common, new, external foe, and the use of languages on Taiwan has
become ‘more communicatively oriented and less emotionally triggered’ (Tse 2000:
160). There has also been a growing, open identiWcation with Taiwan. Wong (2001)
notes that in 1993 only 17 per cent of the population declared themselves to be
Taiwanese, whereas in 2000 this had increased to 45 per cent, with a further 40 per
cent identifying themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese. Those identifying them-
selves as (only) Chinese during the same period, by way of contrast, dropped heavily
in number from 49 per cent to 14 per cent. A new linguistic symbol of these changes
was the introduction in the mid-1990s of the term ‘New Taiwanese’ as an all-inclusive
way to refer to the unity of mainlanders and non-mainlanders who felt a common
Taiwanese identity. Subsequent investigations into how such a Taiwanese identity was
perceived and might be deWned revealed that language choice and competence was no
longer a strong indication of a Taiwanese identity. Considerably more important than
the ability to speak Southern Min (i.e. the language which many refer to as ‘Taiwan-
ese’) was an individual’s self-identiWcation as being/feeling Taiwanese and being born
in Taiwan (Tse 2000). Language is therefore currently understood not to be a
deWnitive characteristic of the new Taiwanese identity, in strong contrast to the period
immediately following 1987, when the use of Southern Min was seen to be vitally
important amongst new Taiwanese nationalists, and now even politicians from the
DPP are seen to use Mandarin rather than Southern Min much more frequently and
without hesitation in public address (apart from the times of elections, when political
campaigning still includes much non-Mandarin speech to attract voters from diVerent
backgrounds).

11.6 Language and (National) Identity on Taiwan 1895–2005:

a Century of Turbulence
Taiwan over the last hundred years has experienced a turbulent, disruptive history of
occupation and oppression in which its multi-ethnic population has at various points
been encouraged to adopt three quite diVerent national identities, each of which has
been strongly associated with a particular language and in two instances a repressive
programme of language planning. During the Japanese period, Taiwan was isolated
from the rest of China and attempts were made to assimilate the inhabitants of
Taiwan to a Japanese national identity via the suppression of local languages and
the imposition of Japanese. Following the liberation of Taiwan in 1945, the new
KMT/ROC rulers from mainland China attempted to inculcate a Chinese national
identity largely based upon Chinese culture from the mainland and Mandarin Chi-
nese, again suppressing local languages on Taiwan. Finally in the 1980s and early
1990s, a new Taiwanese nationalism came to the fore, which was initially promoted
(in part) via the heavy linguistic symbolism of Southern Min. Throughout the various
switches in political regime and ruling power during the past hundred years, language
258 A. Simpson

and language use have been constantly identiWed and manipulated as key resources
and a critical means to instil, mould, and control a national identity in the people of
Taiwan, and this has resulted in considerable eVort being expended in the promotion
of Japanese and Mandarin Chinese as national languages, and to a lesser extent the
later presentation of Southern Min as a potentially national language of the Taiwan-
ese. What is equally important to observe, however, is that the forceful promotion of
national languages on Taiwan has in each instance not achieved the desired result of
assimilation to the targeted national identity, and has instead provoked a negative
reaction and a united opposition to such an identity. This occurred both during the
Japanese period and also when the KMT attempted to force a Chinese national
identity on the inhabitants of Taiwan after 1945, and ironically created and strength-
ened feelings of belonging to an oppressed community amongst people on Taiwan,
where previously no real sense of community or shared destiny had been present.
Pressure from outsiders to adopt an essentially foreign national identity therefore had
the clear eVect of crystallizing and forming a local Taiwanese identity, which would
later be deliberately exploited and developed by Taiwanese nationalist politicians and
intellectuals to give rise to a budding new national identity on Taiwan. To a sign-
iWcantly lesser extent, the promotion of a Taiwanese national identity which was
initially centred very heavily on Southern Min also had the eVect of alienating people
who were not speakers of this language (e.g. the Hakka), driving them away to the
opposition camp, to side with the KMT.
In summing up, the general failure of the attempted linguistic engineering of
national identity by both the Japanese and the KMT on Taiwan can arguably be
attributed to two factors. First of all, the encouragement to adopt a new national
identity introduced by outsiders was not accompanied by the oVer of full access to the
privileges enjoyed by the ruling outsiders (including unrestricted career advance-
ment), and hence was not seen as a fully genuine invitation to adopt the new national
identity. Secondly, the mother tongues of people on Taiwan were not fully replaced by
the introduction of Wrst Japanese and then Mandarin, and the Taiwanese were
permitted to maintain Southern Min, Hakka, and the aborigine languages as lan-
guages of the home and informal conversation. This allowed for the language-based
maintenance of local Taiwanese identities and a defence against the promotion of
Japanese and Chinese national identities. Had mother tongue languages been fully
eliminated from Taiwan either during the Japanese period or under the KMT, the
success of Japanese and Chinese nationalist assimilation programmes might possibly
have been quite diVerent.
Currently, Taiwan still remains in its peculiar stateless condition, being claimed by
the PRC as part of China, but having its own government, armed forces, passport and
international immigration controls and politically not recognizing the authority of
Beijing over Taiwan – yet also not willing to run the risk of declaring independence
from the PRC, which might trigger military action from China. In this limbo-like
situation, the issue of Taiwanese national identity remains a very hotly debated public
 Taiwan 259

issue, bound up as it is with the issue of whether to attempt to break with China and
pursue Taiwanese independence and declare the island a new sovereign nation-state,
or whether eventual uniWcation with China should be planned for, this implying the
emphasis of a more Chinese future national identity. How Taiwan’s international
status will ultimately be resolved is diYcult to predict, but until the political fate of the
island is Wnally settled one way or the other, the issue of national identity is likely to
remain an absolutely key area of discussion among politicians, intellectuals, and the
common people of Taiwan, and though the issue of language is now less critically tied
up with Taiwanese nationalism than a decade ago, the underlying division of Taiwan
into ethnic groups still largely associated with diVerent languages retains the hidden
potential for worrisome, renewed diYculties in the process of any future nation-
building, and will continue to throw up challenges for those aspiring to administer the
island.
This page intentionally left blank
 PART III
Southeast Asia
 Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia
 12
Burma/Myanmar
Justin Watkins

12.1 Introduction
Like much of Southeast Asia, the territory of the state formerly known as Burma, now
oYcially renamed Myanmar, is an area of considerable ethnic and linguistic diversity.
At least seventy languages are spoken in the country (Bradley 1994, Gordon 2005), and
these are associated with a similar number of ethnicities and identities. Within the
range of such variety, a broad and important distinction can be made between the
largely monolingual, ethnically Burman central area and the multilingual, ethnically
diverse border areas. Since independence from British colonial power in 1948, the
rulers of Burma/Myanmar – a military government since 1962 – have been concerned
with maintaining control over the entire country, and government forces have
periodically engaged in armed conXict with up to twenty insurgent groups comprising
the larger of the minority ethnicities around the country’s border areas. The lan-
guages of the larger groups, in particular Karen, Mon, Shan, and Kachin, have at times
been used as a means of dissimilating from the ethnic Burman/Bamar majority, in
some cases by organizations seeking political separation. For the government, the
Burmese language functions as an important element of its general eVort to consoli-
date control over the country and has accordingly been promoted and spread
throughout the nation with considerable eVort.
This chapter sets out to give a sense of the complexity of the sociolinguistic
situation in Burma/Myanmar and two major struggles and tensions which have
characterized the country through the twentieth century and which still have an
important relevance for the present. The Wrst of these is the nationalist drive of many
decades to establish, maintain, and develop an independent state free of colonial and
other foreign inXuences, coalescing an essentially Burman national identity at the
centre and heart of the country. The second major tension concerns the relation of the
dominant, majority Burman/Bamar ethnic group to the kaleidoscope of minority
groups which make up as much as one third of the total population of the country,
living mostly outside of the central lowlands, and how these groups are integrated in
the growth of a single Myanmar nation.
264 J. Watkins

Burma/Myanmar

Approaching such general themes, the chapter is structured as follows. Section 12.2
begins by providing a brief overview of the range of languages that are spoken in the
country and where these are predominantly located. Section 12.3 then describes the
sociolinguistic development of Burma/Myanmar from pre-colonial times through to
independence and the increasing nationalism of the post-independence era, with its
recent ‘Myanmarization’ of the national identity. Section 12.4 focuses on the country’s
ethnic minorities and presents a sample of case studies illustrating a range of non-
Burman/Bamar identities and their relationships with language use. Finally, section
12.5 revisits the sociolinguistic situation in present-day Burma/Myanmar and outlines
a change in attitude towards the presence of English in the country, as well as oVering
an assessment of the strength of acceptance of the country’s projected national
identity.1

12.2 A Linguistic Profile of Burma/Myanmar

In beginning this chapter proper, it should be noted that the use of a two-word
coupling ‘Burma/Myanmar’ in the title of the chapter and elsewhere, rather than
1
This chapter could not have been written without the help and comments freely given by David Bradley,
John Okell, Mandy Sadan, Andrew Simpson, and William Womack. All errors which remain are my own.
 Burma/Myanmar 265

simply ‘Myanmar’, the oYcial name of the country since 1989, is made because the
latter name has not become fully widespread, and the term ‘Burma’ is still often heard
in English reference to the country. The fact that the country is known by two names
is indeed something which regularly attracts much interest. Changes of name are
quite commonplace in Burma/Myanmar, with many people using a variety of names
during their lifetime, reXecting diVerent identities and relations to others in society.
Changes of name for the country have similarly been common phenomena in the
recent history of Burma/Myanmar. Since independence, the country has oYcially
been known as the Union of Burma (1948–74), the Socialist Republic of the Union of
Burma (1974–88), the Union of Burma (1988–89), and the Union of Myanmar (1989 to
present). Scholarly works in English completed after 1989 are found to diVer in their
use of reference term for the country, with both Burma and Myanmar being fre-
quently attested and justiWcations for the choice being given. For example Okell and
Allott (2001: vii) write:
In the Burmese/Myanmar language, the name of the people, the country and the
language has two forms: [b@ma] and [mj@ma
mjãma]. The name ‘Burma’, which in
one version or another has been internationally current since the 15th century, is derived
from the former. In 1989 the government announced that they wished to change the
name to ‘Myanmar’, to reXect the latter form instead of the former. The world has been
slow to implement this change, with the result that both versions of the name are now
current in diVerent contexts.

In the spirit of inclusivity and linguistic objectivity, the present chapter will use the
paired form ‘Burma/Myanmar’ to refer to the country, except in historical contexts,
where the term ‘Burma’ may be used alone. The political signiWcance of the re-
naming of the country and the continued use of the form ‘Burma’ are considered in
section 12.3.
Once lexicalized in English from the original form [b@ma], the word ‘Burma’
historically gave rise to two morpho-phonologically well-formed English adjectives
‘Burmese’ and ‘Burman’. By the end of the colonial era the deWnitions of these two
adjectives had become reasonably stable, with ‘Burmese’ denoting the major
language spoken in the country and all its indigenous inhabitants, and ‘Burman’
speciWcally denoting the ethnic majority nationality (native speakers of Burmese),
though in practice the former term has also often been used to refer to both the
language and the ethnic majority in contexts where no Wner distinction has seemed to
be necessary.2 The narrower term ‘Burman’ was oYcially replaced by a new term
2
One purely linguistic reason why the term ‘Myanmar’ has not been successful in its adoption in
English is that there is no obvious adjectival form of the word that speakers can use to refer to the
language, the people, and other properties of the country ‘Myanmar’. Hence morphologically diVerent,
adjectival forms of the word ‘Myanmar’ paralleling the clearly adjectival ‘Burmese’ (or ‘Burman’) have not
been oYcially coined and promoted, leaving native speakers of English uncomfortable in referring to the
language as simply ‘Myanmar’ and the people as ‘Myanmars’. The common reaction in such instances
where adjectival forms would naturally seem to be required is simply to revert to the older and more
familiar term ‘Burmese’.
266 J. Watkins

‘Bamar’, and so in this chapter the paired term ‘Burman/Bamar’ is used to show that
these two terms are equivalent. Other pairings of older and post-1989 oYcial terms
imply a similar equivalence.
In general, the Burmese-speaking Burman/Bamar majority live in the fertile
central plains, occupying about half the area of the country and constituting two
thirds of its population, recently calculated as some 54 million (World Gazetteer
2006), while other languages and their speakers are found in the more mountainous
areas nearer the borders in all directions. Burmese is the oYcial and national
language. It is the sole language of all oYcial business and administration of the
military government, all broadcast media and state education.3 The Burmese spoken
throughout the large, populous central part of Burma/Myanmar exhibits little in the
way of regional variation, and local diVerences do not hinder mutual intelligibility.
Away from the centre, a number of distinct ‘dialect’ forms of Burmese such as
‘Arakanese/Rakhine’, ‘Tavoyan/Dawei’, and ‘Intha’ are found. These are suYciently
diVerent from the standard, oYcial language that they have been argued to be
separate languages (Okell 1995). Written and spoken forms of Burmese have also
diverged to a considerable degree: the two forms of the language use diVerent
grammatical morphemes and structures, and exhibit certain lexical diVerences.
Turning to languages other than Burmese, the task of determining precisely how
many languages are spoken in Burma/Myanmar, and by how many people, is not
straightforward and is confounded by three major factors. First of all, there is a
general dearth of accurate and up-to-date demographic data describing the ethnic
composition of the population of Burma/Myanmar and the languages diVerent
groups speak. No formal linguistic survey of the entire country has ever been
completed, and many of the data which have been published are patchy and unreli-
able. Secondly, languages and dialects, and the groups of people who speak them, are
often referred to by multiple names, which may be a mixture of ethnonyms and/or
language names, both autonymic and exonymic. Conversely, in some cases we Wnd
that one name may be used to refer to multiple languages or ethnic groups. Lastly, the
perennial problem of how to deWne distinct languages as opposed to dialects of the
same language, or how to deWne ethnic nationalities and their identities, is a highly
complex one in the context of Burma/Myanmar. Bearing such diYculties in mind, the
following picture of groupings and populations can be presented as a reasonable
estimation of broad linguistic divisions in the country.
Tibeto-Burman languages are widely spoken in Burma/Myanmar. In addition
to Burmese, the largest by far of all Tibeto-Burman languages, languages of
the Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman, spoken mainly in Kachin and Shan States
and in the Sagaing and Mandalay Divisions of Upper (central) Burma/Myanmar,

3
Other languages may be used as the medium of instruction in some circumstances, for example
English and Chinese in urban private schools or ethnic languages in locally organized educational
institutions, to the extent that these are permitted by the government.
 Burma/Myanmar 267

include Lisu (125,000 speakers), Lahu (125,000 speakers), and Akha (200,000
speakers).4 The western side of Burma/Myanmar is home to the languages of the
diverse Kuki-Chin branch of Tibeto-Burman, and in northern Arakan/Rakhine State
and in Chin State (again to the west of the country) some two dozen Chin languages
are spoken, typically with thousands or tens of thousands of speakers at most. Tibeto-
Burman languages are also found in the areas of eastern Burma/Myanmar bordering
Thailand, with about twenty languages of the Karen/Kayin branch of Tibeto-Burman
spoken by 3 to 4 million people.
Secondly, languages of the Tai-Kadai language family – the family to which Thai
and Lao belong – have been long present in the territory of Burma/Myanmar. Tai-
Kadai languages are spoken by about one tenth of the country’s population, predom-
inantly in Shan State, in the northeast of the country, but also found north, south, and
west in some areas of Kachin and Kayah States and Mandalay Division. Shan speakers
account for approximately 6 per cent of the country’s population and over 3 million
speakers.
Mon-Khmer is the third language family in Burma/Myanmar to which numerically
signiWcant, indigenous/long-present languages belong. Mon-Khmer languages ac-
count for about 7 per cent of the population. The major Mon-Khmer language spoken
in the country is Mon itself, which is spoken by some 800,000 people in the Mon State
in southeastern Burma/Myanmar. Other Mon-Khmer languages are spoken by scat-
tered communities in Shan State and in northern central Burma, including Wa with
600,000–700,000 speakers and about half that number again speaking other related
languages such as Palaung.
In addition to the ethno-linguistic diversity accounted for by the above three
language families which have long been settled in the territory of Burma/Myanmar,
several other languages not indigenous to the country can be recognized as relevant to
the interaction of language and identity, though in diVerent ways. As a result of
Burma’s colonization by the British, some South Asian languages not indigenous to
the country – principally Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, and Tamil – are spoken, mainly in
urban centres. The speakers of these languages are the descendants of people brought
to Burma as part of the colonial administration established by the British in the
nineteenth century. In Arakan/Rakhine State, a particular variety of the Chittagonian
dialect of Bengali is also spoken by the Muslim Rohingya population there, number-
ing in the hundreds of thousands. Thirdly, Chinese is now spoken both natively in the
country by an inXuential minority of the population, especially prominent in private
education, and used as a major lingua franca in areas near the Chinese border, such as
the Kokang area.
Finally, two further extraneous languages deserve mention as continuing to have
a clear importance in modern-day Burma/Myanmar: Pali and English. The former,

4
Figures given here and in following paragraphs are best estimates and cannot be oYcially conWrmed.
268 J. Watkins

a historical import and no longer a living language, remains culturally prominent

in Burma as the language of the Buddhist scriptures which are routinely studied
and chanted as part of Buddhist religious practice. Pali is also an important
source of loanwords – typically scholarly and religious vocabulary – in written
languages with predominantly Buddhist speaker populations, namely Burmese,
Mon, and Shan. English, as will be seen in sections 12.3 and 12.5, has had waxing
and waning importance in Burma/Myanmar over the past century and a half, and
has recently begun to re-establish itself after several decades of rejection and neglect
driven by nationalist policies after independence which promoted Burmese over
English.

12.3 Language and National Identity in a Historical Perspective:

the Coalescence of Burman/Burmese Identity
12.3.1 Pre-Colonial Times
Looking into the history of Burma/Myanmar to Wnd the roots of modern, Burmese-
centred national identity, considerable caution is necessary in interpreting historical
references to ethnic groups. Ethnic diversity and the multilingualism which accom-
panies it have long been major factors in the politics of the territory of Burma/
Myanmar, as in the present age. Lieberman (1978) in particular warns against the
tendency to make potentially mistaken assumptions about the principal ethnic
groups and political entities that feature in historical accounts of the area: historians
have, for example, regularly assumed that each ‘racial’ or ‘national’ group active
during the history of the country constituted an exclusive, stable, empirically iden-
tiWable population, while Lieberman argues that this was rarely, if ever, the case.
Both the terms ‘Myanmar’ and ‘Bama’ (the latter yielding English ‘Burma’, ‘Burman’,
and ‘Burmese’) are themselves labels which denote identities with complex and
multiple histories which are hard to deWne. Taylor (1982: 7–8) argues that it was in
fact during the colonial period, from the eighteenth century onwards, that ethnic
labels such as these began to be used as an ‘accepted conceptual shorthand [grouping
a] great range of geographically and/or linguistically contiguous peoples under
broad ethnic labels [ . . . ] as if they were uniWed national groups with ancient
historical antecedents’. The truth, as ever, would appear to have been far more
complex.
Citing the analyses of Leach (1954) and Lehman (1967), Lieberman (1978: 457)
makes the further important point that ethnic identity in Burma/Myanmar is not
necessarily Wxed by blood descent: ‘a ‘‘Kachin’’, if he chooses, can ‘‘become a Shan’’
by adopting Buddhism and/or Shan dress and speech’ in the same way that Burmese
or Mon living in bilingual areas in pre-colonial Burma might have been able to choose
whether to become culturally Burman or Mon. Even the sixteenth-century Burmese
King Tabin-shwei-htı̀ adopted Mon identity by cutting his Burmese-style hair and
 Burma/Myanmar 269

wearing Mon-style clothing. Lieberman maintains that language has been one of the
major prerequisites for the successful adoption of a particular ethnic identity in
Burma. Ethnic identity in pre-colonial Burma can therefore usefully be viewed as a
role which could be chosen and learned, with competence in the appropriate lan-
guage, and sporting of the appropriate clothing, hairstyle, and tattoos forming major
components of the role. Lieberman (1978) also suggests that the possibility of role
choices – and hence adaptability – in fact promoted ethnic homogeneity at a time
when many people had a need to maintain good relations with two major centres of
inXuence during pre-colonial times – the Mon at Pegu and the Burmans at Ava, both
signiWcant kingdoms. Right up until the mid-eighteenth century, in fact, the correl-
ation between ethnic identity and political loyalty remained quite imperfect, because
groups which shared the same language and culture were fragmented by diVerent
regional ties.
The diverse, mixed ancestry of modern Burmese society is similarly highlighted by
Myint-U (2001: 27), who notes that in the eighteenth century ‘[while] most in the
Irrawaddy valley spoke Burmese as their mother tongue, many others were descend-
ants of Pyu, Thet or Kadu, gradually adopted Burmese and assimilated into the
majority society’. Likewise, the ruling class of Arakan in the west also adopted
Burmese in place of their native language Arakanese. In further expansions of the
Burmese-language area of dominance, a Sanskrit-educated elite from neighbouring
states such as Assam and Manipur was imported to the court at Ava, and later captive
traders were added to the mix, including Armenians, Jews, Chinese, Persians, Ben-
galis, Tamils, and others from further aWeld:
In 1758 for example, a French warship was seized towards the end of the civil war. Its crew
were marched north, enlisted into the king’s army as hereditary gunners and given land
near the capital. There they joined the descendants of earlier European mercenaries,
Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. . . . A few small Roman Catholic villages remain to this
day, and their inhabitants are aware of their European ancestry. But in every other way
they are virtually indistinguishable from their neighbours . . . very few are aware of the
great mix of backgrounds which went into creating the modern Burmese. (Myint-U
2001: 27)
The land over which the kings of the court at Ava ruled was referred to consistently
with the term ‘Myanmar’ (as the Myanma naing-ngan ‘state of Myanma’) only from the
mid-nineteenth century. A century earlier, King Alaungpaya had referred to himself as
king of Tampradipa and Thunaparanta, of Ramannadesa and of Kamboza – old and
imprecise names for parts of the Irrawaddy valley – or as ‘Lord of the White Elephant’
and ‘Ruler of All Umbrella-Bearing Chiefs’ (Myint-U 2001: 27).
The picture which emerges in pre-colonial times is therefore of an expanding and
inXuential Burmese-speaking heartland at the centre of modern Burma/Myanmar,
formed from diverse ethno-linguistic groups with just the beginnings of an eventual,
more clearly deWned collective Burman identity.
270 J. Watkins

12.3.2 The Colonial Period

In the nineteenth century, the British military came to Burma from India, initially
in response to an attack on Bengal by forces from within Burma. The British
annexed Burma in stages following each of three Anglo-Burmese Wars. Arakan
and Tenasserim were formally ceded to the British under the Treaty of Yandabo in
1826 which ended the First Anglo-Burmese War. Under the treaty, the British also
occupied parts of Lower Burma, which were formally annexed in 1853 following the
Second Anglo-Burmese War. The British took Upper Burma including the capital Ava
in the Third Anglo-Burmese War. King Thibaw of Ava was exiled and Burma was
made a province of British India until 1937, when it was separated from the British Raj
and became a separate crown colony of the British Empire until independence in
1948.
With the occupation of Burma by the British during the nineteenth century there
began a long period of linguistic interaction between English and Burmese. For much
of the time from the colonial period through into the post-independence era language
policy in Burma has been primarily concerned with the use of English relative to
Burmese, rather than with the use of the dozens of other languages spoken in the
country. According to Euan Bagshawe, cited in Allott (1985), the use of English was in
fact welcomed in central Burma during the early colonial period. The reasons given
are that despite the British colonial power’s best eVorts to give prominence to
Burmese so that it might develop ‘to cope with the modern world’ which colonization
had brought it into contact with, local pressure from the non-Burmese-speaking
commercial world (Indians, Chinese, and Europeans present in the country) and
from Burmese parents hoping to improve their oVspring’s opportunities of employ-
ment and business success led to the increased use of English in the education system
developed by the British.
With the growth of such a system, following on from general economic develop-
ment during the colonial period, a new elite class of western-educated Burmese
began to emerge in urban areas of the country, and in the early half of the twentieth
century members of this elite increasingly came to challenge colonial rule and
call for independence for the country. As noted in Church (2003: 114–15), the
nationalist movement which evolved during this time and which eventually achieved
full separation from Britain in 1948 had four particularly salient and important
attributes. First of all, it was led and fully dominated by speakers of Burmese, who
elevated Burmese language, literature, and culture as national symbols, ideally char-
acteristic of an independent Burma. As a central part of the nationalist drive, the Do
Bama Asi-ayone or ‘We Burmese Organization’, founded in 1930, explicitly sought to
reform and re-Burmanize Burmese society from top to bottom, removing foreign
inXuences. Their Wrst political publication placed the status of Burmese language
critically at the very centre of this reform with the following lines, later used as a
national anthem:
 Burma/Myanmar 271

Burma is our country.

Burmese literature is our literature.
Burmese language is our language.
Love our land.
Praise our country.
Respect our language.
(cited in Tin Htway 1972: 50)

Political literature written in Burmese and produced by nationalists throughout the

colonial period until the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942 helped further the struggle
for independence from British rule, and anchor it strongly to the Burmese language –
and hence the Burman majority ethnic group. There was a simultaneous increase in
popular discontent voiced against the dominance of English in administration and
education. Tapping into and further exciting this development of negative perceptions
of English as an unwelcome foreign imposition, the anti-colonial nationalists cam-
paigned for a universal system of Burmese-language education instead. Such Burm-
ese-led nationalist activity had two important eVects. It signiWcantly helped to coalesce
and solidify a Burmese-speaking, Burman-dominated ethnic identity which was pre-
sented as a (targeted) national identity, having Burmese language as a major deWning
component, alongside other aspects of promoted culture. It also sparked the concern of
non-Burmese minorities who began to worry about the threat to their distinctive
languages and cultures from a future Burmese-dominated independent state, and
hindered the potential participation of minorities in the nationalist movement.
A second prominent characteristic of the nationalist movement noted in Church
(2003) is that it was overtly critical of the strong Chinese and Indian inXuence on the
economy of the country, the result of immigration during the colonial period. Openly
articulated anti-‘foreigner’ sentiments translated naturally into a further strengthening
of the uniWed identity of (those portrayed as) the disadvantaged, a nation economically
dominated by outsiders. Thirdly, it is pointed out that this heavy domination of the
economy by foreign capital caused Burmese nationalism to become speciWcally socialist
in ideological orientation. Finally, the nationalist movement consistently emphasized
Buddhism as ‘the core of cultural, religious and personal identity’ in Burma, and in so
doing ‘further alienated the non-[Burman] minorities, especially those who were
Christians’ (Church 2003: 115).
Consequently, as Burma moved inexorably towards independence from British
colonial rule, those who were campaigning for self-rule and set to take over the
country following the departure of the British were also pre-establishing a Wrm
Burman hand on the future direction of the nation and indicating that it was
conceived of centrally in terms of Burman cultural properties. Such nationalist
activity and its exclusive focus on Burman culture served to increase and highlight
the divide between Burmese-speakers and those of other ethnic backgrounds, keeping
the latter distanced from the nationalist project and kindling early thoughts of
272 J. Watkins

separatism, which would later translate into the occurrence of multiple, prolonged
insurgencies in independent Burma.

12.3.3 From Independence to the 1990s

Following independence from British rule in 1948 and during the period leading up to
the beginning of military rule in 1962, Burma became free to assert its own identity
using its own language, which essentially meant the free development of majority
Burman identity in the centre of the country. Perceiving that the position of Burmese
as a language of prestige Wt for potential future use in all domains of life was still very
much under threat from the presence and status of English, many nationalists
emphasized the need to assert Burmese strongly and in very clear terms as the
national language of the newly independent country. For example, in preparing his
Burmese language dictionary, Ashin Awbathabiwuntha (1948) recalls feeling com-
pelled to create the dictionary for fear that the Burmese language and with it the
culture of the Burmans might be swamped by foreign dominance. One of the
provisions of the new constitution therefore declared that the oYcial language of
the Union of Burma should be Burmese, though it was also stated that the continued
use of English in oYcial domains would be tolerated as well, for natural reasons of
expediency (as occurred in a similar way in independent India and Pakistan). The
Burma Translation Society was established just prior to independence with the aim of
translating educative books to increase general reading habits in Burmese, and
worked to encourage good writing in Burmese through the establishment of prizes,
initially for novels, but later additionally for translations, non-Wction writing, poetry,
and collections of short stories (Allott 2000).
The new free rein given to the promotion of Burmese language in the post-
independence era and the promotion of Burmese culture that accompanied it took
place against a more worrying background of wider and growing instability in parts of
the minority-inhabited border areas of the country. In 1948 the Union of Burma was
established in negotiation with the British as a federal state in which non-Burman
minorities were assured of considerable independence in states lying outside the
central lowlands. However, the right to regular authority over these minority states
soon came to be assumed by the central Burmese government, defeating the intended
spirit of independence in the federal design and triggering a number of armed
insurgencies against the government. As struggle with the central Burmese govern-
ment increased, Callahan (2003: 158) notes that ‘local populations gradually began to
interpret their struggle in ethnic terms, and previously unconnected communities of
Shans and Karens began to forge pan-ethnic communities (‘the Shans’ and ‘the
Karens’) to challenge central Burman intrusions on their autonomy’.
Despite consistent government attempts to subdue insurrections in the minority
border states through the 1950s, these proved largely unsuccessful and, combined
with an ever-worsening national economy, in 1962 eventually triggered a military
 Burma/Myanmar 273

take-over of central power and an end to the post-independence ‘democratic period’.

The country was thereafter governed by the Burmese Socialist Programme Party
(BSPP) led by General Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council. In addition to attempting to
deal with the challenges posed by rural insurgencies among minority groups such as
the Karen, the Chin, the Shan, and the Kachin, General Ne Win’s new military
government was ‘Wercely anti-foreign and determined to rid Burma of all vestiges of
colonialism by refocusing on Burmese culture, language, tradition and religion’ in a
new heightened wave of Burmese nationalism (Church 2003: 118). From this point on,
the status of English was drastically reduced under all-Burmese education policies
of the BSPP which declared that Burmese would become the primary medium
of education throughout the schooling system even up to university level, replacing
English within higher education. The 1960s also saw the launch of an extended
campaign to improve literacy in Burmese amongst Burmese speakers and major
eVorts, described passionately by Minn Latt Yêkhaung (1966), to bring Burmese up
to date by coining new vocabulary to describe the socialist politics of the time and
other technical terms. In the 1970s the formal standardization of Burmese was then
initiated in a broad attempt to promote the status of Burmese and sideline the
presence of English in the country.
Tight state control over written publications was imposed during the BSPP
period, and literature was harnessed as a means of propagating socialism. Accordingly,
the Burma Translation Society, renamed Sarpay Beikman (‘The Realm of Literature’)
in 1962, now promoted literature which conformed to the political aims of the
BSPP and heavily fostered Burmese culture and patriotism. The Press Scrutiny
Board was also established in 1962, beginning an era of strict censorship of all
forms of published writing and information in Burma/Myanmar which continues
today.
This vigorous promotion of Burmese language took place and should be understood
in the wider context of a general nationalist struggle to reduce the inXuence of ethnic
groups – especially Indians – who had collaborated with the British in the colonial period;
language policy therefore promoted Burmese and simultaneously undercut the status of
Hindi/Urdu, Chinese, and English. One further group to be particularly aVected by the
emphasis on a clearly Burmese-anchored national identity were the so-called ‘Anglo-
Burmese’. In the late nineteenth century, large numbers of British began mixing with the
local population in Burma and a Eurasian community emerged. Frequently, European
men took Burmese women as ‘temporary’ wives, but then deserted them and their
oVspring after their tours of duty ended in the country. When such a ‘temporary’
relationship ended, the European father often left behind a sum of money for the upkeep
of their children, who were sometimes removed from their Burmese mothers and placed
into convent schools run by Europeans, where their Burmese heritage – and their
Burmese identity – was often undermined. The seemingly unbroachable cultural divide
separating Anglo-Burmans from both Burmese and Europeans is vividly portrayed in
Orwell’s Burmese Days, in which the two Anglo-Burmans are social misWt caricatures
274 J. Watkins

who belong neither with the Europeans nor the local Burmese. In 1937, when Burma
was separated from British India and ruled as a separate colony, Anglo-Burmans were
oYcially recognized as a distinct ethnic group, and were often privileged, assuming
dominant positions in society and in the economy. Those Anglo-Burmese who remained
in Burma after independence from Britain in 1948 and the establishment of military rule
in 1962 were subsequently forced to assimilate, to speak Burmese, use Burmese names,
and often convert to Buddhism, or suVer discrimination without their former privileged
status. A Burmese national identity was eVectively forced on this group and its non-
Burmese heritage largely suppressed.
General Ne Win continued to lead the BSPP until 1988, by which time the condition
of the economy had deteriorated further. Ne Win’s resignation and the appointment
of General Sein Lwin as replacement BSPP chairman provoked large numbers of
people from all sectors of society to take to the streets in protest. Large-scale
demonstrations were then brutally suppressed by the army, and a military junta,
known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) took direct control
of the country. In late 1997 SLORC reconstituted itself with the new name State Peace
and Development Council (SPDC), explaining at the time that the task of restoring law
and order had largely been achieved, and that what was subsequently required was to
strive for peace and development. SLORC/SPDC intensiWed the drive to establish a
Burmese/Myanmar national identity using propaganda in the form of slogans on
public display and in all published and broadcast media. Callahan (2003: 167) describes
a campaign launched in 1989 which ‘touted the creation of a sacred and ancient history
of a singular national race called the ‘‘Myanmar’’’ and recounts that the 1990s saw ‘an
unprecedented obsession with the propagation of cultural homogeneity and purity’.
As part of this campaign for national unity and the creation of an over-arching,
indigenous, and pure national identity, the decision was taken to change both the
oYcial English name of the country ‘Burma’ and the English name of the language
‘Burmese’ to the single term ‘Myanmar’. Following the establishment of a ‘Commis-
sion of Inquiry into the True Naming of Myanmar’ by the government to examine
and remove any British imperialist inXuences from place names in the country, in June
1989 the ‘Adaption of Expressions Law’ was proclaimed, and decreed that: ‘The
expression ‘‘Union of Burma’’ and the expression ‘‘Burma’’, ‘‘Burman’’ or ‘‘Burmese’’
contained in existing laws enacted in the English language shall be substituted by the
expression ‘‘Union of Myanmar’’ and ‘‘Myanmar’’ respectively.’
The Adaptation of Expressions Law ruled similarly on other place names within
Burma/Myanmar as follows:
If it is necessary to amend in the English language the name of any state, division,
townships zone, township, town, ward, village tract or village, or the name of any river,
stream, forest, mountain, or island, which is presently written and used in the English
language, so as to conform to the Myanmar pronunciation, the government may, by
notiWcation, amend the same.
 Burma/Myanmar 275

Among the many changes made, some change the English spelling of a name to
reXect Burmese pronunciation, hence the earlier forms ‘Rangoon’, ‘Moulmein’, and
‘Sandoway’ were converted into ‘Yangon’, ‘Mawlamyine’, and ‘Thandwe’. Other
changes were introduced to remove overt colonial references, hence the town of
‘Amherst’ was renamed ‘Kyaikkami’, and the streets of ‘Windermere’ and ‘Fraser’
became known as ‘Thanlwin’ and ‘Anawratha’, respectively. Further examples are
shown in Table 12.1.5
Such naming changes are clear examples of the military government’s sensitivity to
language use and its political implications and shed light both on the government’s
management of its image in the eyes of the rest of the world, where in some contexts
the choice of ‘Myanmar’ or ‘Burma’ replicates political debate inside and outside the
country and identiWcation with either government or opposition, and on the govern-
ment’s eVorts to promote a single national ‘Myanmar’ identity in Burma/Myanmar.
Through the explicit imposition of a new naming practice and the eradication of
British place names and place names in languages other than Burmese, the military
government was asserting its authority, as the country’s rulers, to determine key
aspects of the identity of the country projected to the world outside Burma/Myanmar

Table 12.1 English toponyms in Burma/Myanmar changed under the 1989 Adaptation of
Expressions Law
Old Name New Name Old Name New Name

nation and majority ethnicity states and divisions

Burma Myanmar Arakan Rakhine
Burmese Myanmar Irrawaddy Ayeyarwady
Burman Bamar Karen Kayin
Karenni Kayah
towns and cities
Magwe Magway
Tavoy Dawei Pegu Bago
Allanmyo Aunglan Rangoon Yangon
Maymyo Lyin-Oo-Lwin Tenasserim Tanintharyi
Pagan Bagan
streets in Rangoon/Yangon
Henzada Hinthada
Amherst Kyaikkami Lewis Seikkantha
Moulmein Mawlamyine Barr Maha Bandoola Garden
Mergui Myeik Phayre Pansodan
Bassein Pathein Windermere Thanlwin
Prome Pyay Fraser Anawrahta
Akyab Sittwe
Sandoway Thandwe

Sources: PCGN 2003, Rivet 2000

5
For further discussion and details see the PCGN (2003).
276 J. Watkins

through English language terms, removing the possibility that this identity be shaped
by external forces. The name changes and their political signiWcance were therefore
highly symbolic, both of the general rejection of foreign inXuences, and of the military
government’s assertion of the right to impose direction on the national identity.
‘Myanmarization’, or Gustaaf Houtman’s (1999) original coining ‘MyanmaWcation’,
is the process by which the SLORC/SPDC asserts and communicates its control over
the nation’s political identity.6
Concerning this latter aspect of the 1989 name-changing procedure, the govern-
ment’s decrees resulted in much political discussion, and, as in other areas of Burmese
politics, some of the most vigorous debate here has taken place on two fronts. The
Wrst centres on diVerences between the military government and its political oppon-
ents, as represented by the government’s insistence on the use of the new place names
(in particular ‘Myanmar’) and the reluctance of its opponents, such as pro-democracy
politicians and activists, to adopt them. The second centres on diVerences between
the ethnic Burman/Bamar majority and the various non-Burman/Bamar ethnic
nationalities, and involves an extension of the renaming programme which has
removed oYcial status from place names in indigenous languages other than Burmese
and installed Burmese-language names in their place.
Simpson and Thammasathien (this volume, chapter 18) refer to the series of State
Conventions issued by the Phibun government which changed the name of Burma/
Myanmar’s eastern neighbour from Siam to Thailand in 1939. It can be noted that
there are signiWcant parallels between this and the 1989 name change from Burma to
Myanmar, in particular the motivation to inXuence the country’s image in the
perception of the outside world through the coining of a new name for international
reference to the country – essentially a rebranding exercise aimed at reclaiming
control over the national identity displayed to the outside world. The change from
Burma to Myanmar has proved to be as politically divisive as it is possible for a name-
change to be, though this is not altogether surprising in a context where political
neutrality is a rare luxury indeed. By aiming the 1989 Adaptation of Expressions Law
speciWcally at English-language usage concerning Burma, SLORC eVectively required
the world to drop the words ‘Burma’ and ‘Burmese’ in favour of ‘Myanmar’, or else be
seen as anti-government, while opponents of the government, and in particular
groups aligned with the pro-democracy movement which suVered terribly both in
1988 and in the following elections and their aftermath, tended to brand all those who
used ‘Myanmar’, for whatever reason, as pro-government and anti-democracy. Pres-
ently, the choice of country name continues to be highly politicized and divisive,

6
The promotion of Burmese Theravada Buddhism as a quasi-state religion is another element of this
eVort, and is linguistically supported by the widespread public featuring of writings in Pali, the classical
language of the Buddhist scriptures. The use of Pali as a vehicle of government-sponsored Myanmariza-
tion is most clearly evident in the occurrence of Buddhist aphorisms in Pali alongside their Burmese
translations as government propaganda slogans in the state newspapers, in much the same way that sets of
political, economic, and social objectives appear in every publication.
 Burma/Myanmar 277

though the hybrid label ‘Burma/Myanmar’ chosen for use in this chapter oVers at
least the possibility of an inclusive compromise.
Concerning the eVects of the Adaptation of Expressions Law on non-Burman/Bamar
sections of the population, originally the names of places in Burma/Myanmar written
in English had for the most part reXected written Burmese forms, while some instead
reXected the pronunciation of names in other languages without reference to Burmese
at all, such as the Arakanese capital ‘Sandoway’ or the Tai Khün ‘Keng Tung’ (in
Southern Shan State). During the British colonial period, survey personnel working in
non-Burmese areas recorded toponyms simply as they heard them, in whatever local
language they might have been, and these subsequently became established as the
oYcial ‘English’ names used by the colonial administration. Now, since the application
of the Adaptation of Expressions Law to all place names in the country, oYcial English-
language toponymic spellings have been changed to represent only Burmese-language
pronunciation, even in the many instances where the original name of a place comes
from one of the minority languages rather than Burmese. ‘Sandoway’ and ‘Keng Tung’
have been renamed ‘Thandwe’ and ‘Kyaing Toung’, reXecting a Burmese pronunci-
ation. While the primary motivation given by the government for making changes to
English-language place names has been to remove traces of colonial inXuence still
present and perceived in these names, the extension of the renaming initiative to place
names deriving from minority languages may be interpreted as part of the govern-
ment’s general attempts to bring the minority-inhabited border regions under greater
central control, regulated by a uniform national identity and language wherever
possible. In section 12.4 the chapter now focuses on the situation of the ethnic
nationalities, the issue of internal coherence among such populations, and how their
diVerent backgrounds do not seem to connect them naturally with a heavily Burman/
Bamar-centred ‘Myanmar’ national identity.

12.4 Language and Cohesiveness among the Ethnic Minorities

12.4.1 History of Minority Nationalities in Burma/Myanmar
As noted earlier in section 12.3.1, considerable caution is necessary in attempting any
description of the ethno-linguistic complexity of the non-Burman/Bamar peoples in
Burma/Myanmar, and Taylor (1982) has emphasized that the existence of historically
long-standing, discrete minority nationalities, such as the Shan, the Chin, and the
Karen, cannot be assumed with any great conWdence, despite the assurances and
documentation of British surveys carried out in the nineteenth century. The taxo-
nomic fervour of colonial ethnographic surveyors and their lack of accuracy in
discerning genuine divisions among continua of cultures and languages has been
frequently remarked on with regard to South Asia, and a warning about the over-
simpliWcation of ethno-linguistic categorization is equally well warranted in the
context of Burma/Myanmar. Nevertheless, concerning the general development of
278 J. Watkins

distinct identities among non-Burman/Bamar peoples in Burma/Myanmar, it is

relevant to note that the regions largely inhabited by these peoples were signiWcantly
separated oV from the Burmese central lowlands during the British colonial admin-
istration of Burma. In the years after 1886, the country was divided into ‘Burma
Proper’ and the ‘Frontier Areas’ governed separately from each other by the British.
Church (2003: 112) suggests that such conditions allowed for the natural growth of
independent identities amongst the non-Burman/Bamar people, and that this dee-
pened the divide between the majority Burmese/Bamar and the minority ethnic
groups.
It is diYcult to ascertain the extent to which particular ethnic identities among the
groups living in the former ‘Frontier Areas’ crystallized under colonial rule, but it is
clearly probable that a system of administration separate from ‘Burma Proper’ made
possible the development of independent identities existing side by side.
Following the departure of the British, the border states increasingly came under
central government regulation despite the federalism encoded in the constitution of
the Union of Burma in 1948, triggering armed insurgencies in many instances. It is at
this point, Callahan (2003) suggests, that broader ethnic identities such as Shan and
Karen began to form, coalescing many smaller groups in a uniWed struggle against a
perceived common threat. More recently, since the early 1990s, the military govern-
ment has attempted to put an end to many of the border region insurgencies by
negotiating cease-Wres with representatives of various minority nationalities. Much of
the conXict which characterized earlier decades has been brought to a halt, though
several groups nevertheless continue to engage in Wghting with government forces
and have not agreed to cease-Wres.
OYcial government sources list the number of ‘national races’ in the country as
135. This tally of distinct ethnic groups may be compared with recent estimates of the
number of distinct languages currently spoken in Burma/Myanmar. Two of the most
comprehensive listings are Bradley’s language map of the country in the Atlas of the
World’s Languages (Bradley 1994), which puts the number of languages in the seventies,
and SIL International’s Ethnologue (Gordon 2005), which tends to be rather over-
inclusive and not entirely accurate, listing as many as 107 languages spoken in Burma/
Myanmar. Of these many languages, several are much larger than others, with their
names being given to the seven border area states where most of their speakers are
located: Arakan/Rakhine, Chin, Kachin, Shan, Karenni/Kayah, Karen/Kayin, and
Mon. To a considerable extent, the precise distribution and interrelation of the
country’s minority languages is still not fully clear as no comprehensive survey of
language in Burma/Myanmar has ever been published. Both Allott (1985) and Call-
ahan (2003) point out that it is not in the interests of any government wishing to
emphasize the unity of Burma/Myanmar to promote a linguistic survey which would
demonstrate the astonishing diversity of the country, and highlight how large a
proportion of the population does not speak Burmese. Hence while the current
government acknowledges the ethnic diversity of the country, it has no reason to
 Burma/Myanmar 279

emphasize ethnic divisions further by engaging in research that would show the
country’s great mixture of languages. The oYcial list of ‘national races’ is rather
crude, categorizing groups simply according to the state where they reside, with no
regard for the ethnic identities or linguistic relationships holding between diVerent
groups, and the many complex divisions and subdivisions which exist within larger
groups.
The government categorization of minority nationalities furthermore does not
admit the possibility of multiple identities existing among members of non-Burman
ethnic groups. The speakers of many smaller languages typically lead multilingual
lives, and while it is rare for monolingually-raised ethnic Burman/Bamar people to
learn languages other than English, most people whose Wrst language is a language
other than Burmese speak Burmese to some degree, and frequently other languages
besides. A simple straw poll taken by the author in the Shan State in the late 1990s
revealed that a quarter of a group of about twenty-Wve speakers of the Mon-Khmer
language Wa spoke Wve or more languages in their everyday lives, and this is fairly
representative of the complex linguistic relations maintained by many non-Burmese.
Frequently one of the languages acquired by multilingual members of minority
nationalities will be one of the various lingua francas spoken regionally in the country.
Hence in addition to a likely knowledge of Burmese, depending on the degree of
contact with Burmese-speakers and/or time spent in Burmese-language state educa-
tion, members of smaller language communities might also learn to speak a regional
lingua franca such as Arakanese in Arakan/Rakhine State and southern Chin State, or
Shan, Lahu, or Chinese in various parts of Shan State, where all of these three may be
used between speakers of other languages. In many areas the existence of a lingua
franca allows a common ethnic and linguistic identity to pertain across a set of diverse
and often mutually unintelligible dialects and languages, as for example in the Kachin
hills, where Jinghpaw serves as a lingua franca linking speakers of related but mutually
unintelligible languages or dialects.
A signiWcant factor in the identity of many minority nationalities living in the seven
border states is the fact that many of the languages spoken in areas near Burma/
Myanmar’s borders with neighbouring countries are spoken on both sides of the
border by speech communities that may have a common sense of identity despite the
political divisions imposed by the border. Examples of such communities are the Wa
whose speakers also live in neighbouring China, the Karen/Kayin and Karenni/Kayah
who are additionally found in Thailand, and the Naga in the west whose speakers are
split between Burma/Myanmar and northeastern India.
As it is clearly not possible to oVer a description of all Burma/Myanmar’s many
minority nationalities and their relation to group and national identity, what follows is
a set of three brief case studies of non-Burman/Bamar identities, presented to give an
impression of the diversity in the country and various issues that arise among the
minority nationalities. The Mon, Karen/Kayin, and Karenni/Kayah groups are good
examples of larger ethnic nationalities in Burma/Myanmar, each being the dominant
280 J. Watkins

group in the State named after it, while Wa is a relatively smaller ethno-linguistic
group found in various parts of Shan State. All of these groups speak languages which
are found near and across Burma/Myanmar’s borders with other countries, and so
raise the issue of how cross-border populations may be internally coherent but
accomodate more than one national identity. We begin with the Wa, a group
perceived by many in Burma/Myanmar as distant and remote from the Burmese/
Myanmar nation.

12.4.2 Wa
The Wa are a linguistically diverse ethnic nationality of about a million people who
live mostly between the Mekong and Salween/Thanlwin rivers in the northern part of
Shan State and over the border in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. In
recent years, the Wa have received a generally negative press, routinely and broadly
associated with the production of opium and methamphetamines. As a rule, Wa
identity is poorly understood in the rest of Burma/Myanmar, where it is popularly
held by many that the Wa are basically a kind of Chinese. It is also commonly believed
that they are a backward people with an infamous history of head-hunting, warfare,
and opium production. As Chouvy (2003) notes, however, in reality the Wa remain
one of the least-known peoples of Asia.
Both politically and ethnically, Wa identity is a complex matter. Magnus Fiskesjö
(2000) suggests that the outside world’s understanding of the Wa, and thus of Wa
identity, has tended to be critically framed in the perspective of the external observer
mentally centred outside the territory of the Wa, with the result that the Wa are seen
as living on the periphery (of Burma/Myanmar), on the edge, on the boundaries. In
contrast, writes Fiskesjö, if one is a member of the Wa community looking outwards
from the Wa centre, a quite diVerent perspective oVers itself and helps shape Wa
identity – one encounters Wrst the galaxy of Shan Buddhist principalities found along
the China-Burma frontier, and second, the Chinese and Burmese states, located at a
still farther distance.
The Wa and the Chinese have a close relationship. The United Wa State Army
(UWSA), which has led the Wa from the de facto Wa capital Pang Hsang (Pang Hkam)
since the collapse of the Communist Party of Burma in 1989, is largely Chinese-
speaking, and the key Wgures in it are an ethnic mix of Wa and Chinese. The UWSA
was one of the twenty or so armed groups in Burma/Myanmar which signed a cease-
Wre with the central military government during the 1990s. However, the cease-Wre
granted to the Wa Special Regions in the Shan State a degree of autonomy not oVered
in other such cease-Wres. The Wa authorities now eVectively operate as an independent
government with little reference to Rangoon/Yangon to run its internal aVairs,
including Wa language policy. Among other oYcial organizations there is a self-styled
UWSA education committee which includes in its responsibilities issues relating to Wa
language, such as decisions on the continued standardization of written Wa on the
 Burma/Myanmar 281

Burmese side of the border with China. Education, when it is available to Wa speakers
in Burma/Myanmar, is however predominantly in Chinese or in Burmese, other than
at the grass-roots level, and only a small minority of Wa speakers are literate in Wa,
typically as a consequence of Christian practice, approximately 10 to 15 per cent of Wa
being Christian. The orthography most commonly used to write Wa in Burma/
Myanmar is derived from one designed for a 1930s missionary translation of the
New Testament. A very small number of Wa in China are also literate in an alternate
orthography developed in China as part of oYcial Chinese government minority-
nationality language policy and intended for use in bilingual education in schools in
Wa-speaking areas. In practice, at the time of writing no schools are using Wa in
Yunnan, but the Chinese-developed orthography retains its oYcial status and is used
for some Wa-language publications – mainly translations from Chinese – at the Yunnan
Minorities Publishing House in Kunming. To a certain extent, the two diVerent
orthographies delimit two overlapping sub-identities within the uniWed Wa whole.
Linguistically, it needs to be added that Wa is actually a fragmented cluster of
perhaps forty closely related languages and dialects, many of them not mutually
intelligible, spoken in an area where Lahu, Shan, and Chinese are the major lingua
francas. Two closely related dialects of Wa, those of Yaong Rung and Yaong Soi, have
emerged as standard forms which are widely understood, underpinning a sense of
linguistic unity among the Wa. As an illustration of the frequent complexity of
language and its interaction with identity among minorities such as the Wa, one
Wa speaker interviewed by the author in 2004 and typical of many to be met in the
Shan State identiWed himself entirely as Wa and routinely used a Wa name (though
also possessing several others). However, this speaker had only learnt Wa in his early
adolescence, having spent his childhood bilingual in Lahu and Shan because those
were the languages of the village he was sent to for schooling at a very young age. By
the age of Wfteen he was equally comfortable speaking in Wa, Chinese, and Burmese,
and later in life added Thai and some English to his repertoire. The testimony of such
multilingual individuals to having a strong and primary identiWcation with a smaller-
sized ethnic group despite a good knowledge of more widely spoken and prestigious
languages, including the oYcial language of Burma/Myanmar, indicates the high
degree of identiWcation with a particular minority ethno-linguistic group that is often
observed among the ethnic nationalities in Burma/Myanmar.

12.4.3 The Mon

A salient feature of Mon is its rich and ancient literary history which predates that of
Burmese. Now located primarily in Mon State in the southeastern part of the country,
the Mon-speaking population lives in the area from Thaton across the lower Salween
river area and down the coastal strip as far as Ye, in villages that are interspersed with
those of Burmans/Bamar and Karen/Kayin. Further east across the international
border, the Mon minority in Thailand is thinly scattered in provinces surrounding
282 J. Watkins

Bangkok. Spoken Mon exists in a range of dialects in both countries, although all are
mutually intelligible.
An important observation concerning the Mon and Mon language is that the
number of people who speak Mon is small compared to the large number of people
who may identify themselves as ethnically Mon but who do not speak the language. In
this respect they may be compared with the now predominantly Mandarin-speaking
Hui nationality in China (see Chen, this volume, chapter 7). Although there is a
general lack of fully reliable demographic data, Bauer (1990) attempts an analysis of
the information available and concludes that there are probably one million Mon
speakers in total (out of several million ethnically Mon people), though this Wgure
incorporates various degrees of bilingualism. Most of the Mon-speaking population is
also bilingual in Burmese or Thai. A large majority of the Mon resides in Burma and
the minority that lives in Thailand has become culturally and ethnically assimilated to
a considerable extent through extensive intermarriage, though being of Mon descent
still seems to carry a degree of prestige. Historically, the Mon used to be the dominant
ethnic group in a large area that now straddles the border between Burma/Myanmar
and Thailand.
After the Mon kingdoms had fallen to Burmese rule in the mid-eighteenth century,
Mon language and literature became conWned to Buddhist monasteries. Under British
colonial rule Mon was once again taught in vernacular schools under British admin-
istration. Teaching in Mon continued after independence, but was stopped following
military rule in 1962. South (2003) recounts how in 1964 the new system of education
introduced by the BSPP made no allowance for ethnic minority language instruction,
which was eVectively banned from the state education system: ethnic minority
citizens could only participate in the aVairs of state at the cost of suppressing their
ethnic identity. On the other hand, the Mon Education Committee of the New Mon
State Party (NMSP) actively promotes Mon language education in some 150 Mon
National Schools as part of a vehemently nationalistic education policy. The contra-
diction between the central government’s and NMSP’s policies has caused problems.
At times, the Mon National Schools have been closed down, or operate with no
permission to run a Mon-language curriculum. Quite generally then, Mon is an
example of a language which has contracted over time under pressure of assimilation
from the national language Burmese, but where there are clear and consistent
attempts by (Mon) nationalist leaders to rebuild knowledge of the language, in spite
of apparent government hindrances to such reconstruction. It is also relevant to note
that the continued maintenance of a Mon ethnic identity may seem viable for a
signiWcant proportion of the Mon group without any necessary proWciency in or daily
use of the Mon language.7
7
In this regard, the Mon community may resemble ethnic groups and nations in other parts of the
world where the continued existence of a partial body of speakers or alternatively simply the memory of a
language having existed at one time in a community appears to be suYcient to satisfy the linguistic aspect
of the maintenance of a separate ethnic identity (see, for example, Barbour’s (2000) discussion of the Irish).
 Burma/Myanmar 283

12.4.4 Karen/Kayin and Karenni/Kayah

The Karen/Kayin and Karenni/Kayah are large and important ethnic nationalities
with an estimated population of at least seven million in Burma/Myanmar. A brief
consideration of certain aspects of these populous groups reveals further patterns of
complexity similar to that of other minority nationalities in the country, and in
particular illustrates how internal hierarchies of ethnic identity may obtain within
the nationalities.
In terms of geographical distribution, a majority of both groups are located in
Karen/Kayin and Karenni/Kayah States on the eastern side of Burma/Myanmar. The
Karen and Karenni have been engaged in anti-government insurgencies for several
decades; forces of the Karen National Union (KNU) have fought the central govern-
ment forces for over Wfty years in the attempt to win full independence for a separate
Karen nation. The KNU-led Wght is ongoing; unlike many of the other ethnic
nationalities, the KNU did not sign a cease-Wre agreement with the military govern-
ment during the 1990s.
As a result of this prolonged conXict, perhaps 200,000 villagers have been dis-
placed, and an estimated 120,000 have Xed to refugee camps established in neigh-
bouring Thailand, where a further 400,000 are permanently resident. Studies of the
populations of these camps highlight the diVerent levels of identity within the wider
Karen and Karenni groups. Sandra Dudley’s (2000) work on Karenni refugee com-
munities in camps opposite Karenni/Kayah State in Burma/Myanmar began with a
note to herself: ‘I am so confused by the discrepancies in use and meaning of
‘‘Karen’’, ‘‘Karenni’’ and ‘‘Kayah’’, etc. – Who are they all?’ Her exploration of
identities refers to complex ways in which the Karenni categorize and segment
themselves, on the one hand distinguishing between diVerent subgroups, on the
other hand emphasizing their unity and membership of one large ‘family’ of Karenni.
With reference to the languages in use in this complex community, Dudley notes
that ‘the Kayah, Kayan, Kayaw and Paku [the major subgroups within the Karenni]
are all members of the wider Karen ethno-linguistic family, . . . but not all Karen
peoples are Karenni.’ However, she points out that some people with non-Karen
ethno-linguistic origins living among the Karenni camps describe themselves as
‘Karenni’, while others do not. The picture which emerges is one of unWxed and
adaptable identity and a hierarchy of relations among groups all broadly character-
ized as Karen.
The de facto political authority in the Karenni camps in Thailand is the Karenni
National Progressive Party (KNPP). In the analysis of Sproat (2005), the situation
faced by the KNPP in trying to mould a uniWed Karenni identity from the diverse
ethnic mix in the camps under their control is eVectively a microcosm of the situation
in Burma/Myanmar generally, using ‘policies in education to strengthen the desig-
nated national language and to de-emphasise languages which pose a threat to
national goals’. Sproat reports that in the Karenni camps the three languages which
284 J. Watkins

thrive are Karenni, Burmese, and English owing to a combination of the oYcial
approval given to Karenni and English by the KNPP and the active use of all three
languages in a range of public settings. A bleak future is predicted within the KNPP-
controlled camps for other minor Karenic languages such as Bre, Manaw, and Kayaw
which are regularly sidelined in the drive to promote Karenni.
At a ‘higher’ hierarchical level, Womack (2005) notes that an early, general, pan-
Karen ethnic consciousness is attributed in English-language histories of Burma/
Myanmar to the introduction of Karen literacy by Protestant missionaries in the
nineteenth century. The institutions which arose from this spread of literacy are
recorded as spawning a perception of connectedness among Karen communities
which in turn gave rise to the Karen nationalist movement and its twentieth-century
struggle for independence. In contrast to this literacy-triggered awareness of an
over-arching Karen identity, Womack shows that Burmese-language research has
emphasized the diversity which exists within Karen writing, with nearly a dozen
scripts being used for a range of Karenic languages. This line of research concludes
that disparate Karen social identities – sometimes mutually antagonistic – can be
discerned along the lines of speciWc literate networks, in contrast with notions of
pan-Karen nationalism and unity. There are consequently diVerent perceptions of the
relation of unity or divisiveness that may link or separate the various peoples of
the Karen ‘nationality’. Linguistically, the Karenic languages are for the most part
not mutually intelligible, and distances in comprehensibility among the Karen group
of languages can reasonably be compared to diVerences separating the Romance
family of languages in Europe. SigniWcantly, no Karenic lingua franca has emerged
that can be used throughout the wider Karen area, creating an obstacle to any
language-assisted furtherance of nationalism. An ironic result of this is that the
Karen National Union (KNU), the force which has been Wghting the Burmese army
for half a century, uses Burmese for its formal meetings rather than any of the
Karen languages, as only Burmese can be uniformly understood by all those
attending political meetings. The Karen are consequently a complex group within
which no single Karen language serves as a unifying base for the expansion of pan-
Karen nationalism. Such observations emphasize two Wnal points concerning lan-
guage and the development of national identity in Burma/Myanmar. First of all, if
Karen nationalists Wghting for independence from the central government are
themselves Xuent in Burmese, then it seems clear that the spread and learning of
Burmese has not triggered the acceptance of a Burman/Bamar-centred national
identity and a willingness to be part of a state with such an identity. Secondly, the
use, alongside Karenic languages, of Burmese as a shared means of communication
among the Karen nationalists after many decades of allied struggle shows that
nationalist organizations may function eVectively using a range of languages –
including a ‘foreign’ language, even when the ‘foreign’ language is that of a political
and military opponent.
 Burma/Myanmar 285

12.5 Concluding Remarks: Language and Identity

in Burma/Myanmar Today
Returning now to general issues of language and national identity in Burma/Myan-
mar, the single theme that has dominated government concern in post-independence
Burma/Myanmar is the maintenance of the political and territorial unity of the
country, and the prevention of fragmentation of the state. Emerging from a period
of colonial rule during which the ethno-linguistically non-Burman/Bamar, diverse
‘Frontier Areas’ had never functioned as part of a uniWed nation-state alongside
‘Burma Proper’ with its Burman/Bamar majority, the post-independence years saw
a concerted attempt to promote and develop a new national consciousness among the
population, making heavy use of two salient symbols of the majority Burman/Bamar
ethnic group: the Burmese language and Theravada Buddhism. Following much
activity to expand the potential functions of Burmese and disseminate it as a national
language, Burmese has successfully spread into all formal domains of life in most of
the country and serves as the means of communication in informal domains of life in
the central Burman/Bamar area as well as many other areas besides. One important
aspect of the post-independence development of the national language was a simul-
taneous attempt to downgrade the status and presence of English in the country, with
the result that the use of English largely disappeared from Burma/Myanmar for
several decades. Now, however, in present-day Burma/Myanmar, there has been a
marked resurgence in the use of English. Currently, English is recognized publicly and
oYcially as the linguistic tool which enables Burma/Myanmar to communicate with
the rest of the world, and this is reXected in the reintroduction of English into the state
educational curriculum and popularity of English language classes. Private schools
may furthermore deliver all or part of their curriculum in English.8
While the oYcial promotion today of English is unlikely to challenge the status and
widespread use of Burmese, now long and Wrmly entrenched as a major symbol of
national identity alongside Buddhism, a candid assessment of national identity in
Burma/Myanmar today might conclude that the widespread use of the national
language and the continued popular observance of Buddhism in much of the centre
of the country have by themselves not engendered a national identity in Burma/
Myanmar that is as strongly unifying a force as the government might wish, even if
attention is just focused on the central, majority Burman/Bamar part of the country.
In an attempt to understand why this may be the case, three factors which may
undermine attachment to national identity can be posited. Firstly, the peoples in the

8
English is also now the medium of instruction in postgraduate courses at universities, but in some
cases this is having a negative educational eVect. Teachers with insuYcient English are forced to condense
their teaching into awkward and unspontaneous English text to be read aloud, while students, who are
obliged to ask questions in English, are tongue-tied and have no means of getting help if they fail to
understand the subject material or the language in which it is being delivered.
286 J. Watkins

territory of present-day Burma/Myanmar have only come to be faced with the

prospect of forming a single, uniWed nation-state as a result of boundaries which
were Wxed under colonial rule: before colonization in the nineteenth century the area
was governed by a variety of centres of greater and lesser inXuence. There is
consequently no long, shared history as a united population that can be called on as
a resource for promoting the unity of the present-day nation. Secondly, and perhaps
more importantly, the economy of Burma/Myanmar is at present severely depressed,
and though Burma during colonial times was one of the wealthiest countries in
Southeast Asia, it is now among the poorest. Current prosperity and positive expect-
ations for future growth cannot therefore be used to strengthen national identity, in
contrast to other new nation-states such as Singapore. Any comparison of the poor
condition of the economy in Burma/Myanmar with the economies of other countries
in Southeast Asia is unlikely to induce feelings of national pride. Thirdly, the
attempted promotion of a Myanmar national identity which is strongly associated
with the military government which has been in power since the early 1990s may run
aground if support for the military is not high, as the results of the last elections held
in 1990 strongly suggest.
We turn now to focus speciWcally on the minority nationalities, and how policies
relating to language may aVect diverse peoples in their feeling part of the nation of
Burma/Myanmar. Firstly, it is relevant to note that renaming the country ‘Myanmar’
has been presented by the government as a move not only to distance the country
from the external inXuences of the British colonial period, but also to promote an
ethnically more inclusive image and shift the national identity away from its associ-
ation with the Burman/Bamar centre. However, while the constitution enshrines the
right of all the country’s nationals to use their own language, no government
resources are in fact expended on supporting, developing, or preserving the written
or spoken use of any language other than Burmese, and no special rights of use in
oYcial domains have been accorded to the seven larger-nationality languages which
name the border states, unlike the situation in the linguistic states of India (Amritavalli
and Jayaseelan, this volume, chapter 3). Education provided by the state is exclusively
in Burmese, and the government is therefore promoting the use of Burmese through-
out the country rather than actively supporting nationality languages.9 The move
to rename the country ‘more inclusively’ as Myanmar has also been viewed with
scepticism in many parts, for the reason that the term ‘Myanmar’ is now additionally
speciWed as denoting the Burmese language, and so the name of the country is directly
linked to the language of the Burman/Bamar majority, and is no more obviously
inclusive in its reference than the previous appellation ‘Burma’ was.

9
This is not to say that there is no education in languages other than Burmese. Various regional ethnic
nationality organizations have established systems for providing education in their own languages,
operating in addition to Burmese-language state education. In remote areas where no state education is
available, grass-roots education at the village level may also be conducted in local languages, sometimes in
connection with religious instruction.
 Burma/Myanmar 287

Generally, in the absence of wide-ranging research data from sources such as Weld
studies or language surveys carried out among the minority nationalities, it is diYcult
to be sure about attitudes held among minority peoples towards integration with the
Burman centre of the country and a Myanmar national identity. However, if one
attempts to judge from outward displays of behaviour, the regular occurrence of
insurgencies in the border states during the last Wfty years might naturally lead to the
conclusion that for a salient and inXuential part of the nationality populations there is
perhaps no strong identiWcation with a Myanmar nation and a desire instead for
independence. This would in turn seem to indicate that the promotion of national
identity, in which the spread of Burmese language has Wgured in a central role, has not
been successful in establishing a broad, fully collective will to belong to the nation
throughout the country. Nevertheless, for those nationality groups which have
negotiated cease-Wres with the government, it may be that increased independence
within the state of Burma/Myanmar may now result in a more stable relation as part
of the country and the beginnings of a connection to a rather diVerent federal identity
more similar to that in neighbouring India. Looking to the future, and how things
might ideally develop in a positive way, Burma/Myanmar may Wnd that a peaceful and
successful way forward to integrate both its border populations and its central
Burman majority, maintaining long-term unity in the country, is to explore more
ways in which the fears of cultural absorption and domination reported to be present
among many of the nationalities can be allayed through an expanded federal system,
whilst at the same working to make integration with the nation and its Burman centre
more attractive for the nationalities through signiWcant development of the economy
and wider prosperity spread throughout all the nation. Perhaps with an increased
recognition of the validity and value of diVerent ethnic identities, a broad national
identity may come to be added to the set of identities held by many individuals in the
country without the need being felt for this to overwrite and replace pre-existing
patterns of culture and language.
 13
Cambodia
Steve Heder

13.1 Introduction
Since the early twentieth century, the Khmer language has been at the centre of a series
of only partly successful attempts by Cambodian politicians to rework and re-present
ethnic identities in Cambodian society into one with a unitary national core. Their
lack of success reXects that of Khmer nationalist movements themselves, a failure all
the more striking given the overwhelming linguistic hegemony of Khmer for a
millennium in what is now Cambodia. The current Hun Sen-led political regime
lacks a credible nationalist pedigree, and Cambodia now seems to be passing – some
would say disappearing – into an era of Asianization within globalization, having
never passed through a period of viable nationalist rule. Instead, after a series of
at best weak and at worst catastrophically self-destructive regimes since the nine-
teenth century – late classical, colonial, royalist, republican, communist, and liberal
democratic – Cambodia still lacks an eVective modern state and a self-sustaining
national identity.
This chapter begins in section 13.2 with an outline of pre-colonial Cambodian
history, looking at language and identity from prehistoric times, through the
renowned Angkor period to subsequent polities and the establishment of a French
Protectorate in 1863. In section 13.3, it considers French–Cambodian interaction
in the elaboration of the idea of a Cambodian nation and discusses the role of
language and Khmerization in Cambodian nationalism and political contestation up
until the end of the French domination in Cambodia in 1953. Sections 13.4–7 – covering
1953 to 1991 – document the at Wrst Wtful and then accelerating advance of lingu-
istic Khmerization in often fraught political contexts, including war, revolution,
genocide, and renewed foreign domination: in independent Cambodia under Prince
Sihanouk, then during the ill-fated Khmer Republic, on through the catastrophic years
of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and thereafter under Vietnamese occupation in
the 1980s. Finally, section 13.8 looks at issues of Khmer language use, national
identity, foreign involvement, and multi-ethnic revivalism in contemporary Cambodia
 Cambodia 289

Cambodia

since the United Nations peace-keeping intervention of 1992–3, bringing the account up
to 2006.1

13.2 Pre-colonial History: Before, During, and After

the Angkorian Period
Khmer, the national language of Cambodia, is categorized as one of the Austro-Asiatic
family of languages, closely related to Mon, distantly related to Vietnamese and
possibly also to Thai (HuVman 1970). A written Khmer has existed since at least
the sixth century, being standardized when a script based on the Pallava way of
writing Sanskrit was formulated for Old Khmer. Speakers of the Austro-Asiatic
languages that begat contemporary Khmer, Mon, and Vietnamese probably moved

1
I would like to thank the following, among others, for their many comments, corrections, criticisms,
and suggestions regarding various earlier drafts of this chapter: Michel Rethy Antelme, Chan Sambath,
David P. Chandler, Mike Davis, Penny Edwards, Ian Harris, Khing Hoc Dy, Helene Lavoix, Henri Locard,
Laura McGrew, John Marston, Laura Summers, and Touch Bora. All have contributed to important
improvements in the text, although not always in the ways their remarks intended, and the matters
discussed here will, I hope, be the subject of much further research and debate.
290 S. Heder

southward out of what is now south China into what is now Southeast Asia some
4,000 years ago. Those who spoke Old Khmer eventually established scattered,
competing chieftainships around the Dang Rek escarpment which forms the modern
border between Thailand and Cambodia and in the Mekong river delta and coastal
areas that straddle both sides of what is now the frontier between southern Vietnam
and Cambodia. The warring lowland chiefs Xourished through interaction with
maritime trade that produced multi-religious, culturally syncretic societies, but
when these polities declined as sea-borne commerce moved elsewhere, the cockpit
of Khmer political contestation shifted up the Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers to
the plains north of the Tonle Sap Lake and below the Dang Rek, culminating in the
seventh to eighth centuries with more state-like political creations that inscribed
Khmer on stone. These were the precursors of the principalities that built the
monumentally awe-inspiring Angkor Wat and other temple complexes between the
ninth and thirteenth centuries. The temples were the cosmic-symbolic centres
of classical ‘empires’ that at times stretched to the shores of the South China
Sea and the Malay Peninsula. Their stitching together of widely separated centres of
population – some primarily Khmer, others not – signiWed a quantum leap in political
organization. However, it was not until the twentieth century that, in interaction with
European political concepts, the temples were interpreted by Khmer as emblematic
of a single and particular national culture associated with the Khmer language
(Edwards 1999).
The word ‘Kampuchea’ was evidently Wrst applied to these Angkorian polities
(Mabbett and Chandler 1995), in which Old Khmer was the main vernacular language
of elites and of many ordinary people alike, but in which other languages were
spoken, constituting a cosmopolitan Cambodian civilization, in which a variety of
cultural idioms were internalized.2 Thus, Angkorian civilization was heavily
inXuenced by South Asian Brahmanist and varied Buddhist ideals, models, concepts,
and vocabulary, and Chinese inXuences are also apparent. All of these were mixed and
elaborated in fantastically creative ways that made the Angkorian polities re-creations
of universal cosmic powers on earth (Wolters 1999).
Like most other such pre-modern empires, their inherent socio-economic and
socio-political contradictions meant they experienced repeated episodes of political
disintegration, as rivals challenged every established hierarchy, attempting to re-
localize power and re-legitimate it as a new centre of the universe. Such claims to
universality were, however, generally tolerant of diversity, culturally eclectic, and

2
Note that some conventions contrast the word Khmer as a reference to the language and an ethno-
linguistic group speaking it with the term Kampuchea and its Western-language derivatives such as
Cambodia and Cambodge which have been used to designate a series of multi-ethnic polities existing from
the sixth or seventh century through to the present. By such conventions, Kampucheans/Cambodians
would include all these polities’ ethnically diverse entourages, followers, subjects, and citizens. However,
these correspondences have been far from perfect and appear to have lost their applicability in the late
twentieth to early twenty-Wrst-century context.
 Cambodia 291

subject to frequent reinvigoration by new ideas, in a context where multi-religiosity

was often seen as an indication of power (Harris 2005).
During the Angkor period, many Sanskrit terms were incorporated into Khmer,
and rich poetic and other literatures in Khmer and Sanskrit developed, the texts of
which were often considered sacred ( Jacob 1996). This increased the distinction
between written and spoken versions of Khmer, which was loaded with linguistic
markers of the relative social status of speakers. From the thirteenth century, with the
increasing adoption of Theravada Buddhism, its sacred language Pali became a major
source of loanwords into Khmer, adding a new layer to the dichotomy between high
and low Khmer. All of this was indicative of a lasting pattern, according to which
Khmer speakers at all social levels have ‘enjoyed using for eVect vocabulary drawn
from diVerent foreign origins’ ( Jacob 1993: 164).
Having Xourished for over four hundred years, Angkor as the centre of Khmer
civilization was eventually abandoned in the Wfteenth century as the centre of power
shifted southeast to downriver sites such as Udong and Phnom Penh, closer to the
newly developing maritime trade and further away from exposure to attack by
increasingly aggressive Siamese forces. For the next several hundred years, the
Khmer kingdom remained under heavy pressure both from Siam to the west, and
Vietnam to the east, and in the process forfeited signiWcant amounts of territory as
both Siam and Vietnam expanded their areas of direct and indirect control.
By the early nineteenth century, the Cambodian polity known as Krong Kampu-
cheatheupatai had in fact become geographically isolated from the maritime trade
that was crucial to the development of neighbouring kingdoms centred on Bangkok
(Siam) and Hue (Dai Nam). It was less centralized and had not travelled as far down
the path of proto-national ethnicization as its neighbours (Lieberman 2003), leaving
its subjects with a weaker sense of shared identity and the state a much less
formidable entity with a limited reach. Its realm was highly vulnerable to attack
from without and susceptible to disintegration from within. During the Wrst half of
the nineteenth century, it was overrun by rapacious Siamese military expeditions,
annexed by Dai Nam, and beset with civil wars and rebellions, devastating its
population and creating diYcult conditions for cultural continuity. Bangkok and
Hue imposed their candidates on the throne, and, at times, the court was in some
ways almost as Siamese or – brieXy – Vietnamese as it was Khmer. Hue’s attempts
to Confucianize and Vietnamize Cambodia violated the previous Southeast Asian
pattern of expanding political control by multi-ethnic coalition-building and working
through local rulers, not only provoking elite-led popular rebellion, but adding a
persistent element of poison to Khmer–Vietnamese relations (Chandler 2000).
Krong Kampucheatheupatai had its court at Udong, and the largest population
centre was at the riverside entrepot of Phnom Penh. Long-established towns and
villages were populated primarily by Theravada Buddhist Khmer speakers, but were
also home to more or less assimilated Chinese from various dialect groups and
Muslims who spoke Western Cham, an Austronesian language written in an Arabic
292 S. Heder

script and with many borrowings from Arabic, Malay, and Khmer. Living near or in
the hills were a multiplicity of Lao and other ethnic groups whose links to the realm
were intermittent and primarily economic. Some of the uplanders’ languages were in
the Mon-Khmer family, others related to Malay and Polynesian.
Although many Chinese were socially segregated into dialect groups, incorporation
into the Khmer elite and Khmer society was relatively easy. Formally, any Chinese
born in the kingdom was considered Kampuchean if he or she adopted Khmer
customs and dress. In practice, many did become part of Khmer society and its
elite, though maintaining a Chinese cultural distinctiveness, as no necessary connec-
tion was made between cultural and political loyalties. At this time, ruling over a
multicultural realm was still seen as indicative of royal greatness, and because of this
the palace did not hesitate to appoint Chinese, Sino-Khmer, and Cham as provincial
oYcials (Edwards and Chan 1995).
Despite political turmoil, court and Buddhist literature (in Khmer and Pali)
was diverse. Literary Khmer was a sophisticated mix of Sanskrit, Pali, and the high
language reserved for royal and aristocratic discourse. After years of contact, Khmer
had adopted much Thai vocabulary and even – it seems – syntax, especially at
the court, but also in popular speech (HuVman 1973). This provided the linguistic
groundwork for a nineteenth-century vogue for imitating Thai that contributed to
a new wave of creative experimentation in literary style ( Jacob 1996), paralleling
a similar process on the religious front where the introduction of Siamese courtly
and religious culture encouraged a renaissance in the practice of Theravada Bud-
dhism. This was also a period of rising Chinese literary inXuence on Cambodian
texts via bilingual Sino-Khmer writers (Nepote and Khing 1987).
Still, Khmer was the lingua franca of political administration and the language of
religious communication between Buddhist monks and the laity. The many young
peasant men who became monks often learned to read and write at least some
Khmer. However, as in the past, most written records were not for commonplace
consumption: they were holy objects. Moreover, texts were recorded on perishable
materials. This and the unsettled situation meant few survived from earlier centuries.
Thus, for most Khmer-speakers, spoken literature – folktales, songs, riddles, and proverbs –
remained much more important than written texts.

13.3 Colonialism, Language, Nationalism, and Political

Division, 1863–1953
Given the adverse geo-economic and geo-political circumstances Krong Kampu-
cheatheupatai faced, some personalities in the elite opted in 1863 to accept French
protection for their position and the kingdom. They came from the most ‘Siamese’
circles of the royal family, those elements associated with Hue having been eliminated.
The Protectorate resulted in a deal for joint French–royal administration with its capital
 Cambodia 293

at Phnom Penh, a system which the French gradually subverted to the disadvantage of
the traditional elite and developed further with a neo-traditional bilingual elite created
from collaborative royals, aristocrats, nobles, interpreters, and hangers on (Tully 2002).
The French recognized that a key part of their protectorate project was to transform the
Siamese-educated, multilingual Kampuchean monarch from a petty kinglet whose royal
ideology required him to be an exemplar of universal cosmic-religious ideals into
‘the living incarnation, the august and supreme personiWcation’ of Cambodian ‘nation-
ality’ (Aymonier 1900–1904: 56). However, the French also treated the Royaume du
Cambodge as a backwater in a colonial construct that combined it with Vietnam (divided
north to south into Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina) and Laos under the overarching
administrative structure of Indochina, investing much less in the development
of Cambodia than Vietnam. It was thus relatively untouched by the capitalist transform-
ations and bureaucratic state-building that more quickly and solidly forged incipiently
anti-colonial nation-states in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, even where the
raw material was more multi-ethnic and economically less advanced (Dixon 1991).
Meanwhile, the Angkorian temples were portrayed in colonial historiography
as evidence that, since the fourteenth century, the Khmer and Cambodia had
suVered some extraordinary catastrophe that proved they were either doomed to
disappearance or needed rescuing and restoration to avoid extinction. A few French
believed their colonialism should Wnish oV the failed Cambodian state and incorporate
it into the direct French colony of Cochinchina in southern Vietnam. For many others,
French colonialism was seen to be the potential saviour (Edwards 1999).
With both visions in the background, the French imported and employed
many Vietnamese to work in the civil service in Cambodia. Accompanied by an inXux
of Vietnamese artisans, traders, and casual labourers, their numbers rose to perhaps
200,000 in the mid-1930s. Some of these Vietnamese began to see France’s
Indochina project as compatible with Vietnamese domination of Cambodia, raising
the prospect of a relaunching of Dai Nam’s annexation project. Meanwhile, Vietnamese
vocabulary began to seep into Khmer, joining numerous Chinese terms in common
usage. However, while Khmer–Chinese intermarriage continued, such liaisons remained
rare between Khmer and Vietnamese. Indeed, while the level of anti-Chinese animosity,
popular and elite, was lower than perhaps anywhere else in Southeast Asia, anti-Viet-
namese feeling seems to have undergone intensiWcation.
Within the boundaries of Cambodia as frozen by French colonialism during the
Wrst half-century of its Protectorate, Khmer was spoken quite uniformly. Although
local accents existed, the diVerences were not so great as to generate any recognizable
regionalism. Beyond Cambodia’s borders, among Khmer who had been living under
non-Khmer rule, diVerences were larger. Speakers of what came to be known as
‘Khmer Kandal’ (Khmer in the middle, within Cambodia itself ) might have diYculty
understanding some of the speech of ‘Khmer Kraom’ (‘lowland’ or ‘downriver’
Khmer) living in Vietnamese Cochinchina, and more problems conversing with
294 S. Heder

residents of border areas in Siam/Thailand, who referred to themselves as ‘Khmer

Loe’ (upland Khmer).
The opportunity for promoting national unity on the basis of traditional Khmer
texts was not grasped by the French, whose general attitude toward Khmer literature
was dismissive. The capacity for reading and writing sophisticated Khmer literary
works, already conWned to a tiny elite, declined rapidly under the French, creating a
cultural rupture with the past (Nepote and Khing 1981). Thus, at the end of the
nineteenth century, very little was being written or recorded and virtually nothing
printed in Khmer. Religious and other palm-leaf manuscripts were still produced,
many in Khmer but mostly in Pali, and printed materials circulated, but more in
French, Vietnamese, and Chinese than in Khmer. Young Buddhist monks still learned
the basics of reading and writing Khmer as part of their pagoda studies, but Cambodia
as a whole suVered from having less functional literacy in the main local language
than probably any other country in mainland Southeast Asia, such a situation
extending well into the twentieth century.
Yet, out of all this grew the embryonic imaginings of a nation – which happened
more slowly and later than in most of Asia, but happened nevertheless. The crucial
shift came in the early twentieth century and gathered pace in the 1920s and 1930s.
The growth of a secular elite, colonial patronage of reformist elements in the
Buddhist monkhood, the gradual expansion of colonial schools, and the introduction
of Khmer print production facilitated the emergence and popularization of a high
culture intended for the masses and presented to them as their national culture. This
process, however, began in French and was carried forward by French administrators
in dialogue with Francophone Khmer. Together, they formulated the concepts of a
Khmer or Cambodian ‘nation’, ‘soul’, ‘national character’, and ‘race’, whose place in
the world was often deWned with reference to the need to catch up intellectually,
administratively, economically, and otherwise with Siam and Cochinchina. Those
involved in such nationalist promotion produced printed French and Khmer texts
intended to tell Cambodians who they were historically and how they could become
better Khmer in the future by being more like the Khmer of yore, but simultaneously
becoming modern, thus making it possible to restore past glories in new ways. They
saw the vernacularization of Khmer as part of this nation-saving and nation-building
project, and this was intended to give Cambodia’s nationalism what they called a
‘national language’ and thus a linguistic dimension cordoning it oV from Laos,
Thailand, and Vietnam, although French remained the prime language of government
and indeed of nationalist thought. Presiding over all this was King Sisowath, who
although not highly proWcient in French was in other ways ‘almost a Frenchman’
(Tully 2002: 135). At the same time, he saw himself as a pious Buddhist, and was thus a
culturally hybrid embodiment of the emerging nation.
The establishment during the mid-1930s of Cambodia’s Wrst, Francophone lycée,
named after King Sisowath, was crucial in reorienting its formative generation of
modern intellectuals away from any possibility of seeing themselves as Indochinese
 Cambodia 295

and towards considering themselves as the leaders in creating a predominantly Khmer

Cambodian nation. The French-founded, Cambodian-staVed Buddhist Institute had
the same institutional eVect vis-à-vis the Cambodian monkhood, presiding over the
pinnacle of Buddhist/Pali schooling that promoted remaking Buddhism as modern
and Khmer.
However, while some French colonial oYcials were fervently promoting ‘Khmer-
itude’, opening doors for oYcially approved expressions of Khmer culture, they
practised intellectual repression more severe than in other parts of Indochina. Thus,
it is not surprising that the Wrst overtly political Khmer-language newspapers, maga-
zines, and novels only appeared in the 1930s alongside the tardy beginnings
of an organized nationalist movement, whose Wrst leaders were graduates of Lycée
Sisowath and staV of the Buddhist Institute (Tully 2002). The founding Wgures
included Son Ngoc Thanh, a Vietnamese-Khmer Kraom metis, and other Khmer
Kraom or Sino-Khmer Kraom. The inventiveness of Khmer nationalism is well
exempliWed by the background of the former: despite his ‘racial’ and cultural hybrid-
ity, Son Ngoc Thanh presented himself as more Khmer than the Khmer, someone
who knew politically ‘more about what it means to be a Khmer than . . . Khmer
born in Khmer-land’ (Nagaravatta, 1937). Similarly, the new Khmer literature that
emerged from this time reXected a culture that was socially more rooted in the
cosmopolitan Mekong delta, with its Chinese, Vietnamese, and French inXuences,
than the Angkorian realms that it celebrated as the heartland of Khmer-ness (Nepote
and Khing 1981).
This is the paradoxical context in which Cambodian proto-nationalists made
one of their key objectives the ‘Khmerization’ of the civil service, and above
all the displacement of Vietnamese oYcials, the latter move being part of a larger
process whereby Cambodian nationalism formatively deWned Vietnamese as a main
Other and denied the possibility that a Vietnamese could also be a Kampuchean
(Leonard 1995).
The Xagship publication of this movement was the newspaper Nagaravatta
(i.e. Nokor Voat or Angkor Wat). With the encouragement of some French believers
in Khmeritude, Nagaravatta was able to attack Vietnamese and Chinese ‘domination’
of the civil service and economy, respectively, although Nagaravatta also advocated
studying things Vietnamese and Chinese in realms other than language and religion,
using what was learned to catch up with other nations (Edwards 1999). The writers of
Nagaravatta stressed the need to use Khmer to spread Khmerism among the Khmer,
and called for the use of Khmer in education and in oYcial documents. This
furthermore coincided with the beginnings of the coinage of neologisms, translating
French terms into Khmer as an intended aid to the spread of Khmer through more
formal domains of language use. Much of the translation/coinage work was carried
out by Buddhist scholars quadrilingual in French, Sanskrit, Pali, and Khmer, and the
unfortunate end result was that many of the new vocabulary items turned out to be
296 S. Heder

Pali-Sanskrit jawbreakers, unintelligible to virtually everyone in Cambodia except

those who formulated them.
This diYculty was exacerbated by the tiny circulation of print media, as a result of
which most people in the countryside simply never encountered the new vocabulary
items. Even in urban areas, the neologisms were in fact little used, and those few
members of the elite who were familiar with them often preferred to employ the
original French expressions. Nevertheless, Khmer print media helped form a new
generation of urban students and other readers coming of age as World War II loomed.
The French colonial view that only reform could save Cambodia from extinction was
recast by these new Cambodians into redemptionist nationalist projects, according to
which Khmer/Cambodians themselves would prevent the Wnal demise of the Khmer
and Cambodia and relaunch the Cambodians as the people of a glorious nation-state.
Importantly, however, the new generation was also politically divided. Most palace and
aristocratic youth, including the future King Norodom Sihanouk, saw the Cambodian
nation as intrinsically royal and requiring signiWcant Francophonia. They were at odds
with those – inXuenced by the likes of Son Ngoc Thanh – who came to insist it must be
anti-colonial, and probably republican, democratic, or socialist.
The divergent streams of Cambodian nationalism emerging in the early 1940s were
encouraged by Japanese forces that had established bases in Indochina in 1941, provoked
by a fascist turn in French colonial policies and fanned by rumours of French plans to
rationalize the increasing use of Khmer by Romanizing it, like the vernacular Vietnam-
ese. This brought to the fore the inherent contradiction of French involvement in
promotion of the Cambodian nation, which the nationalist elite in Phnom Penh saw
as robbing the nation of its history and language. The nationalist opposition faced
violence in 1942, when French police attacked a protest against the arrest of a monk
accused of plotting a nationalist putsch, a demonstration in which other Buddhist clergy
played a prominent role. Several leading monks and nationalists were arrested, and
others Xed to the countryside or abroad.
Several years later, following the end of World War II, nationalist activists success-
fully pressed Sihanouk and the French to institute a constitutional monarchy and
parliamentary democracy, and themselves formed the new Democrat Party. To the
surprise of both Sihanouk and the French, the Democrats then managed to win a series
of elections and used parliament as a platform to demand more rapid Khmerization of
the bureaucracy, military, and police, that is, the replacement of Vietnamese, French, and
aging aristocratic oYcials with Cambodians of their generation educated in French, as
part of a drive for accelerated progress towards full independence. On the other hand,
full-Xedged linguistic Khmerization was not a burning issue for the Democrat national-
ists, not least because their claim to political leadership rested on their status as
intellectuals, as proven by their French-language education. Still, this group did show a
concern to raise the standard of the Khmer spoken by the Cambodian elite and some
wanted to rationalize and popularize (i.e. de-Sanskritize and de-Pali-ize) the language to
facilitate this.
 Cambodia 297

In another contemporaneous development, many of the protestors who had Xed to

Thailand after the demonstrations of 1942 became ‘Khmer Issarak’ (‘Emancipated’ or
Free Khmer). This phrase, originally coined by Thai irredentists inXuenced by Siamese
ideas of political freedom, promoted the concept of simultaneous liberation of Khmer
from the yoke of White colonialism and from retrograde feudalism. The anti-French,
anti-royalist Khmer Issarak movement was launched with covert Thai support and
supplemented by assistance and behind-the-scenes direction from Vietnamese commun-
ists. It was also backed by a signiWcant number of Vietnamese troops. The three Sino-
Khmer Kraom who fronted the organization were Son Ngoc Minh, Tou Samut, and Siev
Heng. None of these three spoke French, but all spoke Khmer and Vietnamese, and both
Minh and especially Samut were literate in Pali. Led by Samut, they created a new
communist Khmer language, translating basic Soviet and Maoist terms into Khmer. Like
the neologism-makers in Phnom Penh, they often used Pali or Sanskrit in the coining of
Khmer communist terminology. InXuenced by Cambodians exposed to Thai Marxism,
they also incorporated some Thai-isms into their political lingo. However, they relied
much more than those in Phnom Penh on attempts to Wnd colloquial Khmer equivalents
for Vietnamese words and tried much harder to avoid unpronounceable and arcane
polysyllabic Pali-Sanskritisms, while purging the language of royalisms and other terms
marking social hierarchy among speakers. The resulting revolutionary parlance was
quite accessible to peasant speakers of Khmer and was popularized with surprising ease
and rapidity. In communist-controlled areas of the countryside in what these Issarak
oYcially called ‘Nokor Khmaer’ (rendered ‘Khmeria’ in French), a political dialect
of Khmer thus became current. The dialect was spread through the publication of
communist Issarak periodicals.
Whether this new language qualiWed as a nationalist one is problematic, because
despite every attempt by the Vietnamese and Khmer Kraom ICP members to deny
it, the movement they led was under ultimate Vietnamese direction. Once again,
there was a profound contradiction in foreign promotion of a Khmer nation. This
time, by introducing and popularizing Khmer national-communist rhetoric, the
Vietnamese provided the linguistic vehicle through which Cambodian revolutionaries
and radicals could demand full national independence, and such demands soon began
to be whispered in Khmer by some in the Cambodian Communist ranks, behind the
backs of the Vietnamese (Heder 2004).
A third competing political dialect of Khmer that arose at this time was associated with
the republican-leaning ‘Populo-Movement’ (pracheachalana). Like Communist Khmer, it
was largely purged of royalisms, but maintained other linguistic markers diVerentiating
persons of high from lower social status. It also maintained most of the elite neologisms
coined in Phnom Penh, but had some of its own distinct political terminology.
Thus, political geography came to determine the words that Cambodians would use
to signify parallel concepts. For the Franco-aristocratic elite, ‘the people’, for example,
were the pracheareas or simply the reas, that is, ‘the subjects’, while for the communist
Issarak, they were the pracheachun, the simplest formulation for ‘people’, and for the
298 S. Heder

republicans, they were pracheapularoat, or ‘popular citizens’. In the countryside, peasants

became adept at using one word or the other to indicate which warring political side they
were on. So, too, did intellectuals who were exposed to all three dialects.
Quite generally, popular acceptance of a Vietnamese-led Khmer communism and the
development of rural pockets of communist and anti-communist Issarak-speak reXected
the weakness and incoherence of Cambodian nationalism, which in turn was at least in
part a result of the continuing lack of nationally penetrative, Phnom Penh-based Khmer-
language media. Circulation of Khmer-language newspapers and magazines remained
very low – some 3,000 copies for a population of around Wve million – and was even
outnumbered by Chinese publications. The ‘national’ radio station could not be heard in
outlying areas and included much French-language programming, and personal radio
receivers numbered only in the thousands, making the audience extremely limited. The
situation with regard to education was hardly any better. According to probably opti-
mistic statistics, a quarter of boys and half that proportion of girls attended primary
classes, and these often only Wnished three elementary years of Khmer-language educa-
tion, so functional literacy no doubt soon disappeared. For those few Khmer students
who went beyond the third year, French was still the predominant medium.
Outside of education, French and Chinese remained the default languages of adminis-
tration and business, respectively, alongside Vietnamese.

13.4 The Sangkum Reas Niyum Regime: Royal Official Nationalism

and Crisis, 1953–1970
In 1953, France granted independence to a Sihanouk-dominated Cambodian regime.
General elections then took place in 1955, but with full control of the bureaucracy and
security forces, Sihanouk managed to prevent the opposition from winning a single
seat in parliament (Heder 2004). This meant that, in contrast to trajectories of
decolonization elsewhere where Asian nationalist movements promoting a national
language seized or assumed power, in Cambodia the victors were politicians whose
history was one of collaboration with colonialism and whose claim to rule was
intimately linked to their Xuency in the colonial language.
Many Communists, Democrats, and republicans Xed the country, and by the early
1960s, a combination of rigged elections and severe repression made it impossible for
those still remaining in Cambodia to publish any political materials. Khmer literary
production also stagnated, after an outburst of creativity in the 1950s, as Sihanouk’s
regime deeply chilled the intellectual climate. Turgid, state-approved periodicals in
royalist Khmer oYcialese instead dominated national language media. The main
language of administrative record-keeping was still French, and most government
eVort was put into French-language publications praising Sihanouk’s statist economic
policies and anti-American diplomacy (Mehta 1997).
This dearth of reading material in Khmer, however, contrasted with rising literacy
in Khmer, the product of Sihanouk policies of expanding the national education
 Cambodia 299

system at all levels, including setting up Cambodia’s Wrst universities. The Sihanouk
regime claimed its various educational eVorts managed to raise functional Khmer
literacy from 40 per cent in the early 1960s to 60 per cent at the end of the decade.
However, such an expansion also lowered the quality of French-language instruction
and thus the French Xuency of secondary and tertiary school leavers, who further-
more often faced unemployment in a stagnating economy.
This was accompanied by a new, but still quite limited expansion in newspaper
circulation. As of the mid-1960s, Khmer newspapers had 27,000 subscribers, Chinese
newspapers 25,200, Vietnamese 6,000 subscribers, and French also 6,000. OYcial
government-produced political magazines in French had much larger print runs
(more than 30,000) than those in Khmer (8,000). ReXecting the continued importance
of oral Khmer culture, radio raced ahead of print media as the main form of Khmer-
language state communication, and Cambodia had perhaps the highest number of
radios per capita in Southeast Asia at the time.
Meanwhile, covert organizing by Communists and republicans continued in the
towns and countryside. The Communists and republicans recruited among dissa-
tisWed graduates for whom language was increasingly an issue. The latter’s relatively
poor education in French meant they thought politically much more in Khmer than
the ruling elites, and their educational and socio-political progress was often blocked
by failure to pass secondary school examinations set in French. Amidst a broad vogue
for modernity manifest in a desire to take forms established elsewhere and reproduce
them locally, with national but modern characteristics (Ly and Muan 2001), these
young intellectuals struggled against Sihanoukism’s constraints to master what they
believed was progressive knowledge and began, literally, to translate this into Khmer,
while also calling for the further Khmerization of education. In Phnom Penh, political
debate bubbled up in a nascent civil society. Underground Khmer language publica-
tions circulated, articulating grievances against the Sihanouk regime from various
political perspectives (Heder 2004). At the same time, novel-writing in Khmer
began to take oV again, and some works of Wction contained trenchant criticisms
of problems in Cambodian society, while displaying an obsession with modernity,
a fascination with past glories, morbid worries about contemporary obstacles to
progress, and a propensity to display cosmopolitan sophistication through demon-
stration of familiarity with Western literature and philosophy (Stewart and May 2004).
Former Democrat nationalists working from abroad also began reviving the move-
ment for expanding and improving Khmer vocabulary without over-reliance on Pali
and Sanskrit. Works of martyrs of this movement reappeared as part of an upsurge
of opposition to Sihanouk.
Following the occurrence of Communist-supported anti-government rural rebel-
lions and student demonstrations in Phnom Penh in 1967, Sihanouk allied with his
armed forces chief, Lon Nol, to bloodily suppress all left-leaning political activity.
While vigorously attacking the left, however, Sihanouk made common cause with
demands for the Khmerization of secondary education, and this began in 1967 under
300 S. Heder

the auspices of a National Committee of Khmerization, which published a glossary

providing new or standardized Khmer translations for French terms appearing in
textbooks used in the Wrst two years of secondary school. Its policies – reXecting a
resurgence of avoidance of Pali and Sanskrit in favour of derivations from Khmer –
gave a Wllip to the use of Khmer by urban intellectuals. As the leftists were either in
prison or hiding in beleaguered Communist guerrilla bases, this worked to the
advantage of liberal democratic and republican dissidents, who published Khmer-
language texts contributing to the public reactivation of anti-Vietnamese nationalism.
However, Sihanouk–Lon Nol repression caused the number of books published to
drop by almost half, crushing a tide of creativity that therefore peaked in the mid-
1960s.
This nipping in the bud of Khmer expression was accompanied by an upsurge in
Khmerization aimed at minorities. With regard to Cham and upland peoples, the late
1960s saw a major intensiWcation of Sihanouk policies of assimilation that made
‘Khmer’ the designation of citizen identity, oYcially referring to upland peoples as
‘Khmer Loe’ (a term these people themselves rejected – White 1995) and Cham
Muslims as ‘Khmer Islam’, retaining Khmer Kraom as an implicitly irredentist refer-
ence to Khmer living in southern Vietnam, and referring to Khmer in Thailand as
‘Khmer Surin’. Policy vis-à-vis Chinese made an even more dramatic U-turn. Previ-
ously, the often Sino-Khmer, Francophone elite had allowed Chinese communities to
maintain their dialect-based identities, Mandarin schools, and Chinese-ness, but
also lowered colonial-era barriers to assimilation, as a result of which the ruling
strata became even more Sino-Khmer. However, Sihanouk’s late 1960s turn against
the left was accompanied by vociferous public tirades against Chinese schools
for being hotbeds of Mao Zedong Thought, which slipped easily into anti-Chinese
rhetoric generally (Edwards and Chan). As for Vietnamese, their communities
always remained more segregated and distinct, with urban Vietnamese often speaking
little Khmer, and more French than Khmer.
In short, by the end of the 1960s, Khmerization of minorities – other than
Vietnamese – went hand in hand with Khmerization of state education, but both
eVorts remained half-way, leaving Chinese, Vietnamese, Cham, and upland langu-
ages spoken at home by 15 per cent of the population and French the language of
higher education and elite political discourse. Although Khmer remained the oral
lingua franca for 90 per cent of the people, there was a vast gulf between Khmer as it
was enunciated in formal contexts by the urban elite and the ordinary speech of
peasants.

13.5 The Khmer Republic, 1970–1975

The crises of the late 1960s culminated in the March 1970 overthrow of Sihanouk by
Lon Nol. Following this, the next Wve years saw an acceleration of the trend toward
Khmerization that had gathered steam since the 1960s, and indeed set the stage
 Cambodia 301

for its triumph during the last quarter of the twentieth century. For the second time
(since the communist Issaraks’ Nokor Khmaer), Cambodia was replaced by Khmer in
the polity’s name, it being declared a ‘Khmer Republic’ in October 1970, and Lon Nol
began the elaboration of a Xorid political philosophy of ‘neo-Khmerism’, reclaiming the
mantle of earlier colonial-era nationalist Khmerism. Neo-Khmerism called for ‘the
spread of traditional culture and absorption of the various philosophies of the world’s
civilisations’ to promote prosperity for the people via ‘a special accelerated economic
program’ to bring Cambodia rapidly to a high state of development, thus restoring it
to Angkorian glory (Lon 1974). In the meantime, Lon Nol’s army units massacred
thousands of Vietnamese civilians and ‘repatriated’ 200,000–250,000 to South Vietnam,
halving the Vietnamese population of Cambodia. This move came with state propa-
ganda that all ethnic groups in Cambodia, except Vietnamese and Chinese, belonged to a
single ‘great Khmer race’, while Republican policy further restricted Chinese schooling
and damned Chinese for ruining Khmer morals and sabotaging the national economy.
Popular republican nationalism was apparent within an outpouring of Khmer
literature and non-Wction, the latter including anti-Vietnamese, anti-French, and
anti-Sihanouk histories and general treatises on philosophy, religion, law, linguistics,
literature, and social science. One current combined opposition to Vietnamese
domination with promotion of liberal democracy in place of Sihanouk’s retrograde
autocracy, in order to move politically to catch up with or surpass Thailand and
Vietnam. This current turned against Lon Nol when it became obvious that virulent
ethno-nationalism could not sustain a regime that did not deliver on other fronts.
As tirades against the Vietnamese were replaced by angry criticisms of the corruption,
authoritarianism, political violence, and incompetence of the Khmer Republic, Lon
Nol imposed censorship.
Meanwhile, in the countryside, the Khmer Rouge insurgency led by Pol Pot’s
Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) imposed increasing control over villagers
and posed an ever-greater challenge to the republican government. As conditions
deteriorated and CPK forces took the upper hand, the Khmer Republic collapsed in
1975 and was replaced by the state of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), ushering in four
violent years of murderous domination.

13.6 Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1978

Although Pol Pot and several of his senior ministers were French-educated Sino-
Khmer, an important linguistic aspect of the DK regime was that it was more ethno-
linguistically Khmer than any previous twentieth-century polity. The overwhelming
majority of CPK local cadres and much of the top leadership spoke only Khmer, and
insistently so, demanding that everyone talk in the political dialect originally devised
by Tou Samut. For the Wrst time in Cambodian history the speaking of foreign
languages was also considered a dangerous political Xaw and could result in
the speakers’ execution. However, while pursuing violent linguistic Khmerization,
302 S. Heder

DK was also the also the Wrst regime since colonialism not to formally extol Khmer-
ism, proclaiming instead that all its people were Kampucheans, the aim being
transformation of the entire population into proletarianized, atheistic worker-peas-
ants with no ethnic diVerences (Heder 2005).
Notoriously, DK’s spectacular acceleration of previous trends toward linguistic
Khmerization was connected to a nationalist political project involving massive
murder, including genocide and other crimes against humanity. This project was
driven by Pol Pot’s ambition to restore Cambodian glory and its ‘national soul’ (Pol
1976: 13–14) by building a cosmically perfect example of universal communism,
combining the most radical aspects of the Soviet, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolu-
tions in order to surpass all of them by a ‘Phenomenally Great Leap Forward’ in
economic development. Everyone became an Other of this imagined perfect Marxist
Kampuchea: US imperialism, French colonialism, Soviet revisionism, Vietnamese
expansionism, and Chinese Communist interference internationally, national minor-
ities and the recalcitrant Khmer majority itself domestically. Estimates suggest that
during the less than four years of Communist rule, between one and three million
Cambodians out of a population of 7–7.5 million died by execution and from famines
and illnesses resulting from conditions created by the regime. One estimate suggests
the dead included one in seven of the country’s rural Khmer, a quarter of urban
Khmer, half of ethnic Chinese, more than a third of Islamic Cham, and 15 per cent of
upland minorities, while Vietnamese who had evaded the CPK’s not-to-be-refused
oVer of deportation after April 1975 were almost totally wiped out in an overtly
genocidal campaign of targeted killings that began in 1977.
During the self-destructive years of DK, Communist Party-speak created a new
high political Khmer, with translated Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist terminology
comprehensible only to cadre initiates, if in fact them. At the same time, a middle-
level of Khmer Rouge organizational and mobilizational vocabulary and of favoured
Khmer colloquialisms also came into use and was much easier to master and widely
internalized in ordinary conversation among cadre and people. This language was
mainly spread to the people orally (by cadres who had been speaking it since before
1975) through slogans and songs, to a lesser extent by DK radio, and also by the
written word (Locard 2004). The CPK did print internal Party magazines but access to
these was restricted to Party members, whose ranks were increasingly devastated by
murderous purges. Similarly, although the CPK additionally published a monthly
magazine and a fortnightly newspaper for the non-communist masses, the print runs
were extremely small, and hardly anyone outside the Party ever saw them.
The same fate befell a tiny handful of textbooks published by the Ministry of
Propaganda. Having abolished the previous education system, the CPK planned to
reintroduce a primary education programme from 1977 and to gradually re-establish
secondary education starting that same year, to be followed by the reinstitution of a
three-year tertiary education system later. However, neither the secondary schools
nor the university ever appeared, and CPK intentions to set up primary schools were
 Cambodia 303

carried out only in a very few model co-operatives and special schools for leading
cadres’ children. Combined with widespread arbitrary executions of Party and non-
Party ‘intellectuals’ suspected of opposing the CPK’s catastrophically radical policies,
the result was a devastating drop in the number of literate people.
More generally, CPK rule during the DK period caused a total fracturing of the
already weak and divided Cambodian nation. It not only turned Khmer against
Vietnamese, Chinese, Cham, and other minorities and turned lower class (peasant)
Khmer against upper class (urban) Khmer, it also provoked an extraordinary process
of regional ethno-genesis rooted in the seven zones into which the CPK arbitrarily
divided the country. For the most part, these were not congruent with any recogniz-
ably historical, geographic, socio-economic, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic regions.
However, they were pitted against each other politically, competing to make a
‘success’ of the revolution and curry favour with Pol Pot, such that the cadre and
people of zones began to take on proto-ethnic identities, characterized by tiny
diVerences in their Khmer accents and in the way they wore their ‘revolutionary’
clothing. By 1978, the cadres of two zones, the Southwest and the West, were being
used to purge and kill cadres and people of the others, before they were themselves
subjected to systematic arrest and execution late in the year. The victims in other
zones often identiWed their tormenters as ‘Southwesterners’ and ‘Westerners’, recog-
nizing them by the guttural way rural folk from these areas spoke Khmer.

13.7 People’s Republic of Kampuchea, 1979–1991

The CPK’s killing of Cambodians and divisive smashing of the Cambodian nation into
murderously hostile splinters opened the way for a more long-lasting and decisive
linguistic Khmerization but also destructive polarization of the nation under the
auspices of the Vietnamese Communists and Thai army, among other international
inXuences. This situation came about when the CPK provoked a Vietnamese invasion
that precipitated the collapse of the DK regime, after which the Vietnamese set up a
client regime in Phnom Penh, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), in
January 1979.
Although the Vietnamese maintained control of the PRK from behind the scenes, it
was under their direction that linguistic Khmerization was deWnitively carried out in
Cambodia (Clayton 2000). The use of Khmer as the language of administration was
nearly as complete as under CPK rule, a widespread national school system in which
Khmer was virtually the only language of instruction was established for the Wrst
time in history, and a signiWcant number of newspapers, magazines, and books were
published in Khmer, while virtually nothing was published in other languages.
The PRK constitution of 1981 provided for the development of Khmer as the
national language and for a campaign to universalize literacy in Khmer. By the mid-
1980s, primary school enrolment had supposedly once again reached 1969 levels, and
the reconstructed primary and secondary school systems were based on an entirely
304 S. Heder

Khmer curriculum, although foreign textbooks and teachers were used in tertiary and
technical faculties. A serious problem, however, was quality. With many teachers
having been killed or having died under CPK rule, many others having left the
country when the Vietnamese took over, and a signiWcant number of those who
survived and stayed having taken up other government jobs, the lack of competent
teachers available created a major obstacle to achieving progress. This was exacer-
bated by poor political morale, as the PRK curriculum was often not to teachers’
liking (Vickery 1986). Quite generally, such a situation in education was symptomatic
of the broader problem experienced by the PRK that they and the Vietnamese could
not actively promote ‘Khmer culture’ (in teaching materials and elsewhere) without
precipitating anti-Vietnamese Khmer nationalism; yet, if they failed to promote it,
they made themselves vulnerable to nationalist allegations that they might actually be
smothering Khmer-ness, which had the potential to further excite a nationalist
reaction.
As a result of these diYculties facing the regrowth of education, there continued to
exist fairly widespread illiteracy, despite PRK claims to have achieved 100 per cent
literacy in 1990, and informal channels of communication, overwhelmingly oral,
remained crucially important. Compared to most of the rest of Asia, certainly, there
was – as ever before – little habit of reading in the population at large, due to a lack of
printed materials of popular interest.
Nevertheless, the broad move to linguistic Khmerization was an irreversible fact,
and one whose triumph was furthered by PRK policies vis-à-vis minorities. Unlike the
Khmer Issarak, the PRK presented itself as Kampuchean, not Khmer, and the PRK
constitutionally recognized the equality of all nationalities and their right to maintain
their languages, literature, and cultures. In practice, there was little or no political
discrimination against upland people and Cham. However, like the Sihanouk regime,
the PRK expected and encouraged them to learn and speak Khmer and – in a broader
sense – to be ‘Khmer’, so their gradual Khmerization continued (Vickery 1986). The
PRK policy toward Chinese who had survived Pol Pot’s DK regime, by contrast, was
the most hostile of any previous regime except that of DK itself. This followed the
Vietnamese Communist attitude of the time. It was justiWed by reference to Beijing’s
support for insurgencies Wghting the PRK within Cambodia and to the supposedly
upper class and therefore exploitative historical class characteristics of local Chinese.
Chinese language instruction continued underground, although Xuency in Chinese,
spoken and written, continued to drop and Chinese strategies to avoid discrimination
led to further intermarriage and assimilation.
Meanwhile, with oYcial Vietnamese encouragement, but over the objections of
some senior PRK cadres, perhaps 100,000–250,000 Vietnamese civilians took up
residence in Cambodia and came to enjoy protection and favouritism from Vietnam-
ese political and military personnel in the PRK (Gottesman 2002). The presence of
these Vietnamese returnees and new arrivals had little eVect on the overall cultural
situation in the PRK (aside from the spread of Vietnamese terms in urban Khmer
 Cambodia 305

slang), but gross exaggerations about the size of the Vietnamese presence served to
justify nationalist attacks against the PRK government by insurgent forces, including
Pol Pot remnant communists, resurgent royalists and former republicans, who jointly
insisted in their three diVerent political dialects of Khmer that only liberal democracy
and an end to Vietnamese domination would make it possible for there to be real
progress in Cambodia.

13.8 A UN Protectorate and Restored Kingdom of Cambodia,

1991–Present
Fighting between government and insurgent forces continued until 1991, when the
Paris Agreements on Cambodia were reached, providing for an end to warfare, UN
neutralization of Cambodia’s political environment, the organization of free and fair
elections, and the transformation of the country into a multiparty democracy with a
market economy. Since this time and the occurrence of elections in 1993, Cambodia
has again become a monarchy under Sihanouk and then his son, Sihamoni, but has
been largely dominated by the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), led by Hun Sen, a
former member of the CPK, Wrst as part of a coalition government with a regenerated
royalist party, FUNCINPEC, and later in full control of political power, after violent
sidelining of the royalists in 1997.
In the period since 1991 Cambodia has undergone unprecedented socio-economic
transformation, largely driven by Southeast and East Asian capital in the context of a
spectacular internationalization of the country. CPP policy has made Cambodia the
most open country in Asia to foreign capital and is proudly turning it into an open
economic crossroads between China, Vietnam, and Thailand. Further cosmopolitan-
ism is provided by the presence of a plethora of foreign governmental, UN, intergov-
ernmental and international non-governmental organizations (Trannin 2005). Against
such a background, Hun Sen’s CPP remains the primary champion of linguistic
Khmerization. The hegemony of Khmer in its internal communications and with
the population is overwhelming and unchallenged. Still closely linked to the Viet-
namese, now economically and diplomatically dependent on China and mindful of
the power of the United States, the CPP hardly has a nationalist Other. As the UN
levelled the electoral playing Weld to the CPP’s disadvantage in 1993 and has criticized
its human rights record since, Hun Sen occasionally uses the United Nations as a
nationalist whipping boy. He has also sometimes sniped at Thailand, but after this
provoked riots in 2003 that severely damaged Thai investment, this theme was
dropped to attract Thai money back.
Linguistically, CPP co-optation of the royalist party FUNCINPEC since 1998 has
helped revive royal- and aristocracy-speak, which conWrms and reinforces the elevated
social status of the parvenu CPP ruling class around Hun Sen, who is styled a samdech
(‘prince’). These strata demand a kind of re-feudalized linguistic respect and mostly get it
when those of the lower social order address them to their faces. More generally, the
306 S. Heder

Khmer spoken by elite and masses alike now includes much communist terminology
and even a few republicanisms. The resulting Khmer transcends twentieth-century
political dialects.
It is in this fused Khmer that the CPP dominates the media. After a period following
the UN’s implementation of the Paris Agreements when all political sides freely
published newspapers critical of others, opposition print media have now again
become politically tame and operate under constant threat. In the present climate
where serious political criticism risks repression, freedom of the press has often been a
licence for a bribery-driven gutter journalism, and there is no serious, independent
Khmer-language news periodical. This leaves the Weld open for the pro-CPP tabloid
Reaksamei Kampuchea, which has print runs of almost 20,000 daily.
Printed materials indeed still touch a very limited readership, being much surpassed
by radio and now television. By 2003, television reached 52 per cent of all Cambodians,
radio 38 per cent and newspapers only 9 per cent. As ever, this promotes oral over
written culture, albeit in new ways. In one sense, the main successor to the previous
oral literary tradition is in the lyrics of the booming music market, overwhelmingly
sung in Khmer, although contemporary music is an eclectic mix of traditional melodies
and inXuences from Asia and the West. Well aware of such shifts, the CPP has exercised
tighter control over radio and television than the marginal newspaper sector, and has
its own stable of pop stars. Television channels are entirely or predominantly pro-CPP,
as are radio stations with the greatest range, although a few smaller, privately-owned
or NGO-operated stations air programming critical of the government.
Meanwhile, with heavy foreign funding and involvement, the government has
extended the Sangkum and PRK policies of expanding free basic education in
Khmer, with signiWcant but as yet very incomplete success. Despite recent increases,
per capita public spending on education is well below what is needed to ensure basic
education for all or reach adults who never learned to read or have forgotten
how. Only 36 per cent of the population over 15 years is functionally literate. Of the
remainder, 37 per cent are totally illiterate and 27 per cent are semi-literate. A claimed
70 per cent literacy rate thus masks much lower rates among older Cambodians,
females, poor rural people, upland minorities, and people living in areas where
armed conXict ended relatively recently. Cambodia remains behind – often greatly
behind – almost all the rest of Asia in terms of school-going, literacy, and teaching
professionalism. Figures from 2003 indicate that 80 to 90 per cent of children began
primary school, but at best 20 per cent made it into secondary school and only 8 or 9
per cent Wnished this level. Nevertheless, enrolment is increasing, and government
policy aims at doubling the number of those continuing on to the secondary level by
2008, having all children in primary school by 2015, and reducing adult illiteracy by 50
per cent by the same year. The achievement of these goals may however be diYcult.
Khmer is the medium of state instruction at the primary and secondary levels,
making textbook production the largest sector of Khmer-language publishing, albeit
one very much bankrolled and inXuenced by international personnel, and many
 Cambodia 307

textbooks are being translated from foreign works or modelled upon them. Reintro-
duction of English and French as required subjects in the state system – desired by
parents – is foreseen by the government. In the meantime, language schools teaching
English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Thai, and Korean have sprung up everywhere.
A few are subsidized by foreign governments, but most are run by private Cambodian
entrepreneurs. There is also a growing number of private ‘international’ schools
teaching entirely or predominantly in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or French,
catering to foreign youngsters and the children of the Cambodian elite, whose parents
are anxious to send them for further education abroad.
Despite a formal commitment to Khmerization at the tertiary level, use of foreign
languages and reliance on international involvement is even more prevalent at the
educational summit. Foreign governments, UN agencies, and international NGOs
play key roles in curriculum design and even teaching, and many university-level texts
are in English or French. There are now the same number of public secular and
Buddhist universities as in the Sangkum period, plus two public higher education
institutions oVering postgraduate degrees. However, since the government author-
ized private and public–private universities, higher education has been driven largely
by the needs of a market created and dominated by international capital, with highly
mixed results in terms of educational quality. By 2005, thirty-one private universities
had appeared, and the number of higher education students had shot up to 48,729, the
overwhelming majority in private study. There are even more numerous private
‘institutes’, ‘centres’, and ‘colleges’, particularly for business, technical, and computer
courses. However, Cambodian degrees generally do not qualify their holders for
postgraduate study abroad, either in Asia or elsewhere, even though public higher
education requires facility in English or French. Private universities are even more
foreign-language oriented. They have many foreign faculty members and run at least
some and sometimes most courses in English. This is certain to have a signiWcant
impact on the future of higher education, because government plans to have 90,000
students at this level by 2008 foresee that 52,000 will be in private institutions. The
habit of reliance on English for intellectual and professional discourse is likely to be
further enhanced because many training programmes for Cambodians working in
the huge NGO sector are largely or entirely in English.
This is very much related to the limited world of print. Given the paucity of serious
journalism in Khmer, especially on sensitive domestic topics, those in search of
reasonably reliable, unbiased information instead read the English and French press,
while those interested in economic developments rely to a signiWcant extent on the
Chinese publications. These sources are also sought after for international news,
together with BBC and Radio France International, which transmit via FM in English
and French, and television channels from all over the world, available via satellite.
The situation is somewhat diVerent as regards lighter reading, as there is a growing
number of glossy magazines in Khmer with articles on pop stars, cars, and computers
catering to popular urban youth culture and the beginnings of a middle class. They
308 S. Heder

have bigger circulations than newspapers. A new generation of novelists and poets
has also emerged, many publishing their works via newspaper serialization, as well as
in popular magazines and book form. However, the most popular Khmer novels by
far are those written in the colonial and Sangkum periods, in part because of political
limits on what can be published. As for non-Wction and particularly sophisticated
academic writing, such intellectually serious Khmer publishing is in some ways
at a lower ebb than in the early 1960s and early 1970s, and the general lack of
Khmer language publications continues to have severe negative eVects on the Xow
of intellectual knowledge in all Welds, including Cambodian history, politics, and
culture, as most books on these subjects are written by foreign scholars in English
or French and published abroad.
As for translations of foreign texts, with a few recent exceptions, the quality
of translation is poor. The standard of Khmer taught in Cambodia’s schools is now
so low as to be inadequate to equip Cambodians to write Khmer well, much less
translate into it Xuently. Moreover, along with re-feudalization in honour of ‘Sam-
dech’ Hun Sen et al. has come a new avalanche of neologisms translating English
terms, largely coined following historical practice of relying heavily on Pali–Sanskrit
roots and manufactured helter-skelter as Cambodians working for diVerent govern-
ment, UN, NGO, and intergovernmental agencies come up with their own ad hoc
solutions to vexing translation problems. On top of this, the hegemony of English is
such that Khmer syntax is being mangled to conform to English usage. The net eVect
is not only that some translations are practically unintelligible. A new and widening
gap is opening up between the few urban and elite Cambodians who can fathom the
new Khmer and ordinary Cambodians who cannot. This deters them from making
the eVort to read and write books in Khmer and inclines them to read English and
other foreign languages instead (Antelme 2004/5). Under these circumstances, it is
not surprising that the best-selling books in Cambodia are materials for learning and
using English. And despite the shoddiness of translation work, translation of English
books on business and technical subjects is the most active private book production
activity in Cambodia.
It is also not surprising that some Cambodian nationalist intellectuals – surviving
and new – see Cambodia as in cultural crisis, suVering from two great ruptures with
its traditional heritage, that of the post-Angkorian decline and that following 1970
(Ebihara et al. 1994). The fact is, in contemporary Cambodia, the word ‘traditional’ is
often used to refer to practices of the Sihanouk period, with some allusions to those of
earlier periods, above all Angkor. In reality, substantive connections to the pre-1950
period are tenuous, due to a lack of written materials and living memories, and even
thinner to the pre-colonial period.
There is evidence of a dying out of the rich, earthy Khmer vocabulary of country
folk for dealing with their environment (Antelme 2001). The fonts of digitalized Khmer,
popularized via freeware accessed by the computer literate, simplify its orthography in
ways that cut it oV further from its literary past (Antelme 2004/5). In such contemporary
 Cambodia 309

works as are being written, there is little reference to the period from 1970 until the end
of the century, almost as if it did not happen. Similarly, with regard to Buddhism,
although there has been a vibrant revival, there has also arguably been an irreparable
institutional and ethical break with colonial and post-colonial religion (Hansen 2003:
109). Some maintain that whereas through the 1960s, a sense of living in a moral
community existed in the minds of many Cambodians, the country is now aZicted by
ethical paralysis, leaving historical virtue a residual phenomenon. It is under assault by
the lures of mindless consumerism, get-rich-quick schemes, rampant corruption, the
drug trade, and the sex industry, all of which corrode a government that is thus
uninterested in seriously supporting Buddhism as a corrective ethical compass. They
note that the traditional Franco-Khmer culture of the colonial period is fast vanishing,
and see a trend according to which anything that is seen as old but not deemed to reXect
the magniWcence of Angkor is considered inferior to the modern (Chy and Prak 2004).
Although culture in the form of Angkor is a huge money-maker for the international and
semi-governmental tourist industries, broader and deeper cultural preservation is starved
for funds (Beng 2003/4). The most pessimistic argue that much of what now passes for
Cambodian culture has ‘no roots, no substance, no spirit’, because an obsession with
money is squelching possibilities for a revival of the creative hybridity of the 1950s and
1960s (Chheng 2001: 112–13).
Nationalist feelings of loss are exacerbated by the return of Chinese-ness and
Vietnamese to the Cambodian scene. Since the 1990s, a massive regeneration of
Chinese cultural identity has been taking place across the country, with the re-
emergence of national, local, and dialect-based Chinese associations, schools, temples,
circulation of Chinese materials from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia,
and local publication of Chinese newspapers, newsletters, and magazines. This has been
stimulated by an enormous inXux of Chinese capital and the key role played by Beijing as
a backer and bankroller of the Hun Sen regime and is being enhanced by the arrival in
Cambodia of large numbers of Chinese newcomers from China and Taiwan. Surviving
local Chinese and Sino-Khmer have been re-Sinicizing themselves and their children on
an extraordinarily large scale, though this supplements and does not obliterate the
retention of a signiWcant degree of Khmerization resulting from Khmer Republic,
CPK, and People’s Republic policies. The resurgent Chinese-ness therefore has a great
degree of ethno-linguistic hybridity. Cultural interpenetration facilitates love-match and
arranged marriages, especially among the children of the CPP elite and rising Chinese
business and commercial families. Along with all this has also come a resurgence of anti-
Chinese stereotyping, especially among poor Khmer who see the Chinese as part of a
rapacious, aggressive, exploitative, and oppressive juggernaut of power and money.
The contemporary Vietnamese community includes former residents of Cambodia
(and their oVspring) who returned from Vietnam at some point after 1979, many of
whom consider Cambodia their ancestral home and who speak Khmer, plus large
numbers of people with no previous connection to Cambodia, many of whom speak
little Khmer and Xow into Cambodia with CPP collusion. Their presence may be
310 S. Heder

having a re-Vietnamizing impact on those who consider themselves ‘Cambodians

of Vietnamese origin’ (Bertrand 1995). Negative Khmer stereotyping of Vietnamese
(and vice versa) abounds, even if it is not universal, and intermarriage remains unusual.
Popular relations may well be worse than before 1970. In places with concentrations
of Vietnamese, Vietnamese schools – some supported by the Vietnamese Embassy –
provide a primary education in Vietnamese, although many Vietnamese children also
go to Khmer schools, and this creates tendencies toward assimilation. The barrier to
this comes from the Khmer side, because for many Khmer, Vietnamese can no more be
Cambodian than they can be Khmer, and the notion that only ‘Khmer citizens’ can be
Cambodian is enshrined in the Constitution to help prevent assimilation (Leonard 1995).
Even so, Vietnamese – like Chinese – is having a renewed inXuence on colloquial
Khmer, along with English, especially but not only among urban youth. Like the elite,
they relish sprinkling their speech with foreign vocabulary, to demonstrate their
worldly sophistication.
Less threatening to nationalists but still potentially a source of nationalist concern
about a drift towards oYcially-sanctioned multiculturalism is the situation with regard
to uplanders and Cham. International NGOs have launched a process leading to an
unprecedented programme of bilingual primary education for uplanders, in which
children initially study in their mother tongue before they go on to study Khmer, so
that they become literate in both languages. This innovation has been endorsed by
Hun Sen, and the government stresses it is in line with constitutional guarantees of
multi-ethnic equality. The government has also allowed restoration of Cham and
Arabic language teaching and establishment of Qur’anic schools, many of them with
international Islamic support.
Cambodian concern to recover, recreate, and reinvent the Cambodian nation through
preservation of Khmer culture and tradition and promoting the development and use of
Khmer, particularly in literature and scholarly writing, can be seen as a nationalist
reaction to the Asianization and globalization of Cambodia, and some Cambodian
intellectuals are suspicious of cosmopolitanism. However, foreign involvement in such
eVorts is not only considerable, it is greater and more multi-faceted than under the
French protectorate or Vietnamese projects of the Issarak and PRK periods. Foreign
funding and personalities, multilingual Cambodian exiles returning from abroad, and
metis Cambodians are crucial to a variety of programmes and institutions dedicated to
rescuing and reviving Khmer-ness and Cambodia as a nation. Although not backed by
the same military presence and force employed by the French and the Vietnamese, they
are embedded in – even if they are sometimes very critical of – the economic power of
Asian and world aid, trade, and investment, which is much more penetrative, pervasive,
and seductive than troop deployments.
Unlike under the French, however, foreign champions of Khmeritude do not aim to
cordon it oV from Thailand or Vietnam, but advocate building up cultural and intellec-
tual links with these and other Asian countries, as well as the West. They and the
Cambodians they support see multilingualism as a must for reviving and disseminating
 Cambodia 311

Khmer studies, encourage critical reconsideration of ethnic stereotypes, and tend to call
for making Cambodia not into a Khmeria but a Kampuchea, that is, a culturally plural
society in which non-Khmer are neither assimilated nor transformed into artiWcially
maintained ethno-linguistic museum pieces. In some ways, this seems like a return to
pre-colonial and thus pre-national practices and imaginings of community and in that
sense may be more deeply traditional than twentieth-century eVorts at constructing and
imposing an exclusivist and monolithic Khmer nation. Advocates of persevering in such
eVorts may be Wghting a losing battle, or they may eventually beneWt from a nationalist
backlash arising out of the most recent contradictions inherent in foreign involvement in
remaking Cambodia, including the ways in which it both promotes and marginalizes the
use of Khmer.
 14
Indonesia
Andrew Simpson

14.1 Introduction
Indonesia is a developing nation with a massive population of over 200 million people
distributed across a wide, east-west archipelago of many thousands of islands. Having
been formed as a territorial unit only under Dutch colonial rule in fairly recent times,
and being made up of hundreds of diVerent ethnic groups speaking well over 200
distinct languages, Indonesia faced the enormous challenge of building a stable and
coherent nation when it won its independence from the Dutch shortly after the
conclusion of the Second World War. A signiWcant component of twentieth-century
attempts to create an over-arching Indonesian national identity has been the devel-
opment and promotion of a unifying national language which would simultaneously
bind the population together and serve as an eVective tool for use in all oYcial
domains and education, though not necessarily displace the use of other mother
tongues in more informal areas of communication. The results of many decades of
eVort to achieve these goals are commonly acknowledged as having been highly
successful, and have led to the knowledge and acceptance of ‘Indonesian’ as the
national language becoming progressively more widespread in the country, creating
new generations of speakers who employ the language regularly in all formal domains
of life and as a means of inter-ethnic communication, while making use of a second,
regional or minority language for other, informal occurrences of speech. This chapter
considers how the national language Indonesian/Bahasa Indonesia came into
being and has been developed as a shared, modern, sophisticated vehicle of commu-
nication and potential symbol of emerging Indonesian identity, increasingly function-
ing as an important link among the population through the range of challenges and
threats to the stability and unity of the state occurring since independence in 1949. In
order to understand how the national language grew from an earlier pidgin-like
lingua franca and mother tongue of a comparatively small ethnic group, and was
accorded new, national importance and precedence over other prominent languages
such as Javanese and Dutch, the chapter goes back to the origins of Indonesian
in earlier periods and charts how a predecessor form of the language came to acquire
 Indonesia 313

the attributes that would later single it out as the nationalists’ uniWed choice for
use as national and oYcial language of Indonesia. Section 14.2 begins with an
overview of the development of the largely divided territory of Indonesia in earlier
times and the rise and fall of regional kingdoms prior to the arrival of the Dutch.
Section 14.3 then describes the gradual uniWcation of modern Indonesia as the
Netherlands East Indies during colonial times, and how language use evolved under
Dutch occupation. Section 14.4 focuses more closely on the early twentieth-century
period of nationalist activity and the issue of selection of a national language for a
future, independent Indonesia. How Indonesia subsequently achieved and managed
independence and set about the process of nation-building is the topic of sections
14.5–7. Finally, section 14.8 considers Indonesia in the present and attempts to assess
how eVective language policy has been both in the establishment of Indonesian
identity and the maintenance of the structure of the country as a uniWed, new,
multi-ethnic nation.

14.2 Patterns of Development and Growth in Pre-colonial Times

The ethnic composition of the population of Indonesia was broadly determined by two
early waves of migration bringing two rather diVerent groups of people into the area of

Indonesia
314 A. Simpson

modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. From the east, the Wrst arrivals
were Melanesian people. Later on, from around 2000 BC there were large-scale
migrations of Austronesian people moving from southern China via Taiwan down
through the Philippines and into the area of Indonesia and Malaysia, occupying all of
this territory and displacing or absorbing the early Melanesian groups in many of the
places originally settled by the latter. In the current era, it is only the large eastern
island of Papua within Indonesia that still has a clear Melanesian population, and all
Indonesia’s major islands to the west of Papua have for a long time been principally
inhabited and dominated by Austronesian people. The pattern of settlement across the
many islands of the Indonesian archipelago has additionally been uneven, due to
variation in the availability of resources and the suitability of land for agriculture.
The central island of Java, for example, has particularly fertile soil partly due to the
presence of volcanic activity on the island, and though it is smaller in size than certain
other islands in Indonesia (e.g. Sumatra, Borneo), it currently accommodates over
60 per cent of the country’s population, densely packed together. Other islands with
less easily accessible resources and interiors, such as Borneo, have been occupied much
less intensely and may exhibit a much higher degree of ethno-linguistic diversity due
to the separation and sometimes isolation of diVerent ethnic groups. Though
Java houses more than half of the country’s population, it only accounts for 3 per
cent of Indonesia’s languages, and the islands of Papua and Maluku with only 2 per cent
of the national population hold 54 per cent of its total languages (Emmerson 2005: 23).
The languages spoken by the majority Austronesian peoples of Indonesia are mem-
bers of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian which also includes languages
such as Tagalog, Hawaiian, and Malagasy. The Austronesian settlers themselves in
Indonesia and Malaysia are sometimes referred to with the broad ethnic term ‘Malay’,
and the area they inhabit (including the Philippines) as the Malay archipelago. This use
of the term Malay is potentially confusing, as ‘Malay’ also has a more restricted use
picking out a particular ethnic group which for much of its history has occupied eastern
parts of the island of Sumatra and the southern part of today’s Malaysia, speaking the
language commonly known as Malay. In order to avoid the occurrence of misunder-
standing, this chapter will only make use of the word ‘Malay’ in its more restricted
designation, referring to the speciWc ethnic group of Malays in eastern Sumatra and its
environs and the language which arose from this group, which in modiWed form would
eventually become the national language of both Indonesia and Malaysia.1
Having settled in coastal and inland areas of the Indonesian islands, by the seventh
century ad various groups of Austronesians had organized themselves in larger
social and economic structures and began to develop both maritime trading states
and kingdoms based on the control of resources in the interiors of the more
penetrable islands such as Java. The most signiWcant of the former, coastal states

1
For interesting discussion of the diVerent reference values of the term ‘Malay’, see Asmah Haji Omar
(2005).
 Indonesia 315

was known as Srivijaya, situated in southern Sumatra in a strategically important

position where it was able to control, service, and generally proWt from the growing
trade which passed through the Straits of Malacca (the stretch of water between
Sumatra and present-day Malaysia), carrying goods between China and Japan to the
east and South Asia and Europe to the west. From inscriptions created in the seventh
century and onwards and found locally in Sumatra and further away in Java, it is
known that the language of Srivijaya was an early form of Malay, referred to now as
Old Malay, and that Srivijaya’s inXuential position at the centre of both east–west
trade and more localized trade within the Indonesian archipelago had the important
result of initiating and then reinforcing the spread of Malay along the coastal areas of
the archipelago as the principal lingua franca of commerce between diVerent linguis-
tic groups. Srivijaya Xourished as a major force in the area, and also as an important
centre of Buddhist learning (Robson 2001: 9) from the seventh century through
until the thirteenth century when a new and more powerful kingdom arose further
east on the island of Java.
Founded in 1294 and widely dominant within the Indonesian archipelago until the
sixteenth century, the kingdom of Majapahit was well positioned in the east of Java
to take advantage of the growth in the trade of spices produced in Maluku in the east
of the archipelago and increasingly sought after by Europeans as well as Chinese. In
the extension of its control further westwards over the rest of Java and Sumatra,
where pepper was being produced as a lucrative new trading commodity, Majapahit
was instrumental in forcing the relocation of the Sumatran Malay kingdom of
Tumasik to Malacca, on what is today the Malaysian peninsula (Abas 1987: 26).
Here the latter Malay-speaking kingdom was able to embed itself and prosper well
for a hundred years, maintaining control over the Straits of Malacca and the variety of
trade that passed through this important shipping route. SigniWcantly during this
period, Islam emerged as an important new regional inXuence. As the majority of
traders carrying spices and other goods through the archipelago were Muslims from
India and Arabic areas further west, local Malay traders often adopted Islam as a
means to facilitate their commercial links (Brown 2003). Furthermore, in the Wfteenth
century the ruler of Malacca converted to Islam causing many of the ports and coastal
areas under the inXuence of Malacca as far as the spice islands in the east to follow
suit and exchange Buddhism and Hinduism for the new religion. As Malacca func-
tioned as the centre of the spread of Islam throughout the archipelago, this propaga-
tion of Islam also took the Malay language of Malacca with it and was important in
entrenching Malay further as a lingua franca known widely in coastal areas of the
Indonesian islands and present-day Malaysia, the language now being written down
with a version of Arabic script known as Jawi, replacing the earlier representation of
Malay via the Pallava script of southern India (Robson 2001: 8).
Although Malacca eventually fell to the Portuguese in 1511, the position of Malay at
the centre of the diVusion of Islam continued, Wrst from the Riau islands (between
Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula) and then later from Johor (north of the Straits
316 A. Simpson

of Malacca on the Malaysian peninsula), and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
saw the thriving production of literature inXuenced by Islam in a high variety of Malay
referred to as Classical Malay, the language of the court and regional correspondence
and diplomacy (Moeliono 1986: 51).
Meanwhile, further east in the archipelago, incursions from Europeans seeking
direct access to the spice trade became progressively more serious and would eventu-
ally lead to a transformation of life and adaptation of traditional power structures.

14.3 Colonization and the Establishment of the Netherlands

East Indies
While the Portuguese were the Wrst Europeans to occupy part of the Indonesian
archipelago, seizing signiWcant portions of territory in both the east and west in
the early sixteenth century, a longer-lasting and more extensive presence was estab-
lished by the Dutch, who arrived at the end of the sixteenth century, initially in the
form of a number of independent trading companies. Banded together as a consor-
tium with the name Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) (United East India
Company) from 1602 onwards, the Dutch ousted the Portuguese from Malacca and
proceeded to extend their control further over the ‘Indies’. When the high proWt-
ability of the spice trade decreased as spices became available from a wider variety of
sources, the focus of Dutch attention was drawn to the development of large-scale
plantations and agriculture Wrst of all in Java, and later on in Sumatra. Through a
combination of military and naval force, the support of local rulers against their
neighbours in return for territorial and other concessions, and the negotiation of
treaties, the Dutch established control over most of Java, parts of Sumatra, and also
Borneo by the end of the eighteenth century, and maintained this hold on the core of
modern Indonesia with a mixture of direct and indirect rule, the latter making use of
indigenous rulers to carry out much of the routine administration of the people, in as
many as 280 individual states (Cribb and Brown 1995: 5). The system of indirect rule
allowed the Dutch to extract an increasingly large proWt from an extensive area while
minimizing the need for direct contact with the majority of the population, and also
satisWed the traditional elites’ desire to maintain their authority and position. Those
who suVered in a serious way from the imposition of Dutch indirect (and direct) rule
were, inevitably, the peasants, who, during the nineteenth century, were both taxed
and forced to work for a portion of their time on Dutch-owned crops under the
‘Cultivation System’ (1830–1870) (Drakely 2005: 39).
In their interactions with members of the aristocratic class who ruled for the Dutch
on the island of Java, there were initial attempts by the Dutch to learn and use Javanese.
However, the complexities of the language present in its system of honoriWc and
deferential forms led to the abandonment of trying to master Javanese by the middle
of the nineteenth century and a global switch to the use of a simpliWed form of
 Indonesia 317

Malay which came to be know as dienstmaleisch ‘service Malay’ (Errington 1998). In

their explorations of the Indonesian archipelago, the Dutch had found that Malay was
widely understood by speakers of diVerent languages and extended in its coverage as
far as the southernmost border regions of Siam (Thailand). With Dutch expansion
in the area now being conducted as a national endeavour establishing the colony of
the Netherlands East Indies (following bankruptcy of the private VOC in 1799), the
obvious usefulness of Malay as an easy-to-learn lingua franca with a broad potential
for use was formally recognized in 1865, when Malay was adopted as the second
oYcial language of the colonial government’s administration (alongside Dutch), and
the language which was eVectively used in the vast majority of dealings with the
indigenous population (Abas 1987: 31).
During the course of the general nineteenth-century enlargement of the Nether-
lands East Indies, a signiWcant limit on the occurrence of expansion in a northerly
direction was imposed by competition with British military forces in the western
part of the archipelago. Having occupied the Malay-speaking peninsula area on the
mainland of Southeast Asia north of Sumatra and south of Siam, the British con-
cluded the Treaty of London with the government of the Netherlands in 1824,
establishing the Malay peninsula as part of British sovereign territory and an
important division of ethnic Malay lands into two – British-governed in the area
north of the Straits of Malacca, and Dutch-ruled south of the Straits on Sumatra.
Prior to this externally-imposed division of the region, both sides of the Straits of
Malacca and the hinterlands to the north and south had been regularly part of the
same Malay homeland, ruled over by a common leadership at least since the times of
Srivijaya. Now this major ethnic group was administratively separated into two
distinct Malay populations and destined to be incorporated into two diVerent post-
colonial states, Indonesia for the southern half of the Malay group of people and
Malaysia for those who lived across the Straits to the north.
While Dutch expansion northwards into mainland Southeast Asia was therefore
halted by treaty with the British, the Netherlands Indies nevertheless grew in other
directions, consolidating its comprehensive hold over Sumatra in the west by
1905, and in the east pushing its borders into the western half of the island of New
Guinea, as well as seizing control over Sulawesi. By the end of the Wrst decade of
the twentieth century the Wnal shape of the Indies and what would later become
Indonesia had been completed, bringing together under a single, over-arching admin-
istration a wide and diverse collection of ethno-linguistic groups which had never
previously been united in such a way.
With the development of the colony in the nineteenth century, both Dutch
and indigenous language education was introduced, but in a very limited way,
initially being restricted to the oVspring of the local ruling elites who co-operated
with the Dutch, as well as the children of the Dutch themselves. Towards the end of
the century, however, there was a signiWcant expansion in the availability of and
access to basic education. The numbers of students attending primary schools rose
318 A. Simpson

from 40,000 in 1882 to 150,000 in 1900 and then to 265,000 in 1907 (Cribb and Brown
1995: 103–8). Such an increase nevertheless still left the Indies much behind other
Asian colonies in its provision of education for the masses, and only a very small
proportion of indigenous families succeeded in securing places at schools for their
children (Moeliono 1986: 37). In terms of medium of education, there were regular
disagreements among the Dutch at the turn of the century as to whether Dutch,
Malay, or other local languages should be used in the schooling of indigenous
students. Some, including the director of the Department of Education from
1900 to 1905 J. H. Abendanon wanted to spread Western education in Dutch
among the indigenous inhabitants of the Indies as a means to establish a larger
educated elite that would be culturally more oriented towards Europe and more
compliant and loyal to Dutch rule (it was hoped), taking over much of the routine
work of the civil service and reducing the numbers of Dutch necessary for the
administration of the colony (Ricklefs 2001). Others, including the governor general
of the time, thought that local languages should be the vehicle of an increase in basic
education. Ultimately neither approach was extensively developed due to a critical
lack of funds and the presence of a huge indigenous population. However, in 1891
Abendanon was able to open up entrance to Dutch-medium lower schools to selected
children of lower-income families, and thus expand the range of the indigenous youth
that would receive its schooling in Dutch and the resulting possibility to continue on
to secondary and tertiary education, where knowledge of Dutch was necessary.
Previously only the children of the indigenous traditional aristocracy had been
able to aVord the high costs of such education, but now the higher-level Dutch-
medium schools received a certain (still quite restricted) number of promising
students from other socio-economic backgrounds (Ricklefs 2001: 200). In order to
prevent any potential over-crowding of the European schools with their attraction of
the teaching of instrumentally useful Dutch, Dutch was also introduced Wrst as a
subject and then, from 1914, as a medium of education in other non-European
primary schools. University-level institutions of tertiary education were additionally
established in the Indies allowing for an increased number of indigenous students to
continue with their education, in Dutch, after the secondary level. For the great
majority of the young population, however, there was no chance of education, and
even well into the twentieth century in 1930 only 8 per cent of those of school-going
age actually attended some form of schooling (Dardjowidjojo 1998: 46). For a sign-
iWcant proportion of those who did gain access to education, this was furthermore
provided via either Malay or a local language, and knowledge of Dutch continued to
remain considerably restricted among the population at large.
Outside the domain of education, the Wnal decades of the nineteenth century
saw the beginnings of a new growth in popular Malay language literature (Oetomo
1984: 286). Much of this was written in a colloquial form of the language, ‘Low
Malay’, rather than the High Malay that had previously been used for the creation
of religious and other classical Malay literature, and was aimed at a broad new
 Indonesia 319

readership spread throughout the archipelago. For the Wrst time, Malay was also
written with Roman characters, though in rather inconsistent ways, and used
to produce contemporary stories as well as translations of classical Chinese texts,
made available in aVordable forms to all sections of society, with the result that
literature and reading no longer remained the preserve of just an aristocratic elite
(Robson 2001: 28).
As the Netherlands Indies reached the twentieth century, the ingredients for
important future changes were beginning to be assembled. First of all, though
the educational lot of the majority of the indigenous population had not been
advanced to a signiWcant degree, for a fortunate few from regular, non-aristocratic
walks of life there was now a new opportunity to gain access to higher education
through the learning of Dutch and to attend tertiary institutions of education
conferring university-level qualiWcations either within the Indies itself or, for some,
in Europe in the various cities of the Netherlands. This process formed a new, young,
indigenous elite exposed to Western liberal ideas and ways of thinking, with
high expectations of winning equality of treatment and suitable compensation for
its high level of educational achievement. When such expectations were subsequently
not satisWed and the new generation of graduates found that they were often held back
in their careers and not allowed to accede to higher level positions, reserved as before
by the Dutch for themselves, heavy frustration and resentment set in, leading to the
organization of political resistance to the Dutch and the advent of a nationalist
movement. Second, amongst the wide variety of languages and ethnic groups
present in the archipelago and rather artiWcially assembled as a single administrative
entity by the Dutch, a single language which had already functioned as a lingua franca
along coastal areas for many centuries was becoming understood and regularly
used by an increasing proportion of the population through its use as a common
medium of education in small expansions of lower-level education and growth in
the publishing of popular literature. This language, Malay, and the new nationalists-to-
be would soon come together in an obvious partnership as opposition to Dutch
rule became more conWdent and vocal in the twentieth century.

14.4 The Rise, Peak, and Demise of Pre-war Nationalism

In the expanding civil service administration of the Dutch East Indies, educated and
able members of the indigenous population came to form as much as 90 per cent of
the workforce, but regularly found that even a university degree and full proWciency in
Dutch would not allow access to senior level positions, universally occupied by Dutch
nationals (Cribb and Brown 1995: 8). Furthermore, wherever middle-level positions
became available, preference was automatically given to Dutch applicants, so that
educated Javanese, Sundanese, and Minangkabaus constantly had to work in positions
lower than those they were actually qualiWed for (Lamoureux 2003: 9). Even such
lower-level clerical positions were sometimes diYcult to Wnd.
320 A. Simpson

Stimulated by discontent and annoyance at the discrimination they experienced in

securing both equal employment opportunities and access to other domains of
modern life enjoyed by the Dutch (for example, facilities such as swimming pools
and social clubs, kept exclusively by the Dutch for themselves and other Europeans),
the new indigenous Western-educated elite began to organize itself in a number
of political and semi-political groups in order to campaign for the furtherance of
its interests and those of associated sections of the local population. These groups
initially often had a speciWc focus and aimed to mobilize a particular section of
the indigenous population. For example, Budi Utomo (‘Beautiful Endeavour’), formed
in 1908, was heavily Javanese in orientation and principally aimed to improve the
socio-economic status of the Javanese population, while Sarekat Islam was established
in 1912 with the goal of strengthening the position of Islamic merchants on Java in
the face of increased competition from Chinese traders. The Communist Party of
Indonesia, formed in 1920, and the Indische Partij (‘Indies Party’) had a broader
targeted membership, but the latter did not succeed in attracting a large following
and the former, like Budi Utomo and Sarekat Islam, had a speciWc focus (socialism)
which restricted its universal appeal. Amongst the various new groups, the Muslims
and the communists clashed on ideological grounds, and the Muslims were them-
selves split into traditional and modernist camps, with Sarekat Islam and Muhamme-
diyah (‘the Way of Muhammad’) representing these two diVerent factions. Other
Javanese-focused ‘nationalists’ took the pre-Islamic empire of Majapahit as an inspir-
ation, and nationalistically emphasized the achievements of this period as the golden
era and high point of Javanese civilization in the core of the Indies archipelago
(Ricklefs 2001: 221–2). The early period of growth of nationalist and proto-nationalist
groups up to 1925 was therefore characterized by a distinct lack of unity and the
presence of clear factionalism, with no shared vision of a broad nationalism to
supersede narrower ethnic, religious, political, and regional concerns. A further,
divisive background tension also existed relating to the Chinese presence in the Indies.
Following the 1911 toppling of the Manchu imperial dynasty in China and its replace-
ment with a new republic, an increased reorientation of interest and perhaps loyalty
towards China was perceived among the Chinese population in the Indies, which had
grown up during the course of several centuries of settlement in the archipelago, and
showed diVerent degrees of integration with the indigenous (or rather earlier-arrived)
Austronesian people. Added to the existence of a major economic gulf separating
many successful Chinese from their poorer indigenous neighbours, the questionable
nationalist identity of the Chinese now served to further increase feelings of envy and
mistrust towards this ethnic group and heighten the complexity of general ethnic
mobilization during the early part of the twentieth century.
As the number of activist groups and their memberships grew, the Dutch authorities
looked on carefully, stepping in to curb the activities of groups and the distribution
of their propaganda when these seemed to pose a potential threat to the
established colonial order. This happened in a signiWcant way in 1925 when
 Indonesia 321

the communist party Wrst organized strikes and then open revolt on Java in 1926 and in
Sumatra in 1927 (Cribb and Brown 1995: 122). The Dutch moved quickly to contain the
disturbances and suppressed the communist party with the arrest of 13,000 of its
members, signalling clearly that disruptive, anti-government incitement of the masses
would not be tolerated by the Dutch.
As the beginnings of a much splintered and unco-ordinated nationalism experi-
enced its ups and downs during the Wrst quarter of the twentieth century, the presence
of the Malay language in the Indies archipelago was becoming more robust, with
further signiWcant progress being made particularly in the domain of the written
word. In 1901 a new well-designed Romanized spelling system for Malay was pro-
posed by a Dutchman, Charles van Ophuijsen, as part of a broader grammatical
description of the language. This was subsequently made use of in the production of
new Malay literature sponsored by the colonial government through its Commissie
voor de Inlandsche School- en Volkslectuur (‘Commission for the Literature of Native
Schools and Popular Literature’), established in 1908. The Commission was set up in
order to direct the creation and publication of writings in Malay (and also certain
other regional languages) to ideologically acceptable, non-subversive topics, as a
means to provide alternative Malay reading material to the many new anti-colonial
Malay publications circulating in the territory. In 1917 the Commission was renamed
the Balai Pustaka (‘Literature OYce’) and kept up a steady and important output of
Malay translations of Western novels by authors such as Mark Twain, Jules Verne, and
Rudyard Kipling (Abas 1987: 117), the publication of well-known stories and classical
works of literature from the Indies archipelago itself, and, perhaps most signiWcantly,
new works in Malay focused on contemporary themes and problems of daily life in an
evolving new society. It is widely recognized that the genesis and successful spread of
the modern Indonesian novel was most probably due to the sponsorship of the Balai
Pustaka and its establishment of libraries where the public could access new reading
materials in Romanized Malay (Ricklefs 2001: 233). Malay language newspapers also
experienced a major pattern of growth in the Wrst quarter of the twentieth century,
with a rise from the production of just over thirty diVerent papers at the turn of the
century to about 200 by 1925 (Cribb and Brown 1995). Finally, various of the new
political organizations and pressure groups that came into being during this time
(amongst which Budi Utomo and Sarekat Islam) adopted Malay as their working and
oYcial languages, increasing the status and occurrence of Malay in the domain of
activist discourse.
Just as it may have seemed that these organizations were however pulling them-
selves rather disastrously in diVerent directions and failing to generate a united
nationalist movement that could win concessions from the Dutch and also make
progress towards the conceptualization of a new post-colonial nation, a dynamic
young new leader emerged on the scene, and within a fairly short period of time
managed to unite the various nationalist groups in a pan-ethnic coalition focused
directly on achieving independence. Later to become the Wrst president of the
322 A. Simpson

country in 1949, in 1925 Sukarno was a student of engineering in Bandung and

organized Wrst a political club, and then in 1927 a political party called the Indonesian
National Association, later changing the name of the party to the Indonesian
Nationalist Party. Arguing that the then divided set of nationalist parties should put
aside their diVerences and shelve their orientations towards speciWc sub-national
constituencies for the sake of achieving the broader shared goal of attaining inde-
pendence, by the end of 1927 Sukarno succeeded in creating an umbrella group of
nationalist organizations which became known as the Federation of Indonesian
Nationalist Movements (Permufakatan Perhimpunan-Perhimpunan Politik Kebang-
saan Indonesia) (Abas 1987: 37). For the Wrst time since the beginning of nationalist
activities in the Indies, the leaders of diVerent nationalist factions saw the import-
ance of embracing a truly broad notion of (targeted) national identity, one which
did not exclude any indigenous groups on the grounds of ethnicity, language, or
religion, and which could be used to build up a strong sense of loyalty and belonging
to a single nation (Brown 2003: 126).
In 1928, the momentum of new unity and co-operation among the nationa-
list movement led on to a historic declaration of commitment to the development
of an Indonesian nation. The word ‘Indonesia’ was in fact Wrst coined in the nine-
teenth century by a British geographer named James Logan, literally meaning
‘Indian/Indies islands’ (from the Greek nesos ‘island’ – Brown 2003: 2). It was only
in the twentieth century, however, that the word came to be known more widely
outside academic circles, when nationalists in the Indies archipelago adopted the term
as a way of referring, in a distinctive, new way, to the full territory of islands that
the Dutch called the Netherlands Indies, and by important extension, also to the
indigenous inhabitants of this territory – the ‘Indonesians’ (referred to as ‘inlanders’,
i.e. ‘natives’, by the Dutch). Because of the strong potential unifying power of the
words Indonesia and Indonesian(s), terms whose ‘ownership’ the nationalists felt lay
with the indigenous anti-colonial movement which had brought them into common
circulation, the Dutch consistently refused to recognize the use of the designation
‘Indonesia’ in any form right up until 1948, and suggested that it was a meaning-
less term (Brown 2003: 2). On 28 October 1928, however, thousands of young
people gathered in Jakarta (then Batavia) at a Youth Congress and pledged an oath of
allegiance to ‘Indonesia’, sang a new national anthem, and raised a new national Xag.
The Pledge of the Youth speciWed three important personal beliefs: (a) that those
present and also all indigenous peoples in ‘Indonesia’ shared a common
homeland, (b) that all indigenous peoples of Indonesia belonged to a single people,
regardless of other ethnic group aYliations, and (c) that a language of unity existed
among the Indonesian nation and should be further supported, this language then
being identiWed in the pledge as ‘Indonesian’ (Bahasa Indonesia ‘language of
Indonesia’) in a formal and highly signiWcant renaming of Malay (Melayu) as
Indonesian:
 Indonesia 323

First: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia acknowledge that we have one birthplace,
the Land of Indonesia. (Tanah Air Indonesia)
Second: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia acknowledge that we belong to one
people, the People of Indonesia (Bangsa Indonesia)
Third: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia uphold the language of unity, the
Language of Indonesia (i.e. Indonesian) (Bahasa Indonesia)
(Pledge of the Youth, translated by Cumming 1991: 13)
The central assertion of the pledge ‘One nation, one people, one language’ was set to
become widely invoked, ‘almost like a mantra’ (Emmerson 2005: 17), and established
the Indonesian language as one of the signature properties of the nation and a
language that all Indonesians should learn and give their support to as members of
the nation. Importantly, the commitment to Indonesian as a unifying national lan-
guage did not bring with it any suggestion that other indigenous languages be
displaced from common use among their associated ethnic groups and somehow
fully replaced by Indonesian. Rather, the nationalists saw the acquisition and use of
Indonesian as a targeted expansion and enrichment of many individuals’ existing
linguistic repertoires added on to their knowledge of Javanese, Balinese, Buginese,
etc., and that Indonesian would be a language that would allow the many ethnic
groups in Indonesia to communicate more eVectively with each other and grow
together as a single people, sharing and evolving a new national identity.
The decision by the nationalist movement to select Malay rather than any
other language for promotion and development as the (potential) future national
language of Indonesia was motivated by a number of very sound reasons which have
been well described and discussed in the literature. First of all, as has been noted in
earlier sections, Malay was widely known in much of the archipelago, though in
diVerent ways and formats. It was the Wrst language of a proportionately small but
nevertheless still sizeable ethnic group living in Sumatra (and also north of Sumatra in
British Malaya). It was more extensively distributed along coastal areas as a simpliWed
lingua franca due to hundreds of years of trading activities and the dissemination of
Islam. Finally, the language had been introduced in schools as the medium of
education in many parts of the territory of Indonesia, used in government adminis-
tration, and more recently reinforced in its global presence in Indonesia through a
signiWcant rise in publications in the language. Thanks to this widespread knowledge
of Malay, however basic in certain instances, it had the clear potential to be used fairly
immediately and eVectively for the spread of nationalist propaganda and the building
up of a united population. A second major advantage enjoyed by Malay as a potential
national language of Indonesia was that the proportionately small size of the Malay
ethnic group in Sumatra – when compared with the rest of the population of the
Indies/Indonesia – meant that adoption of Malay as the national language would not
appear to confer unfair native language advantages on any major, numerically dom-
inant ethnic group in the archipelago. In this regard, Malay appeared to be a far better
and fairer choice for promotion as a common language representative of all the
324 A. Simpson

Indonesian people than another possible candidate that was also an indigenous
language – Javanese. Javanese was the mother tongue of approximately 45 per cent
of the total population and hence very well known by almost half of all Indonesians,
located in the very central core of the territory. It also enjoyed much prestige from the
existence of a long tradition of literature. However, the selection of Javanese as the
‘language of Indonesia’ would most probably have been disastrous for the future of
the nation, according a hugely unfair linguistic advantage to a particular ethnic group
(which was furthermore already dominant in certain other ways), and would have
generated feelings among other groups of being encouraged to assimilate to a
Javanese rather than a new, all-Indonesian identity. There were also practical linguistic
reasons why the selection of Javanese as the language of Indonesia would have been
unwise. Javanese is a language which makes use of a complex system of deference and
honoriWc marking which is diYcult for outsiders to master well (hence the Dutch
abandoned their eVorts to learn the language in the nineteenth century, as noted in
section 14.3), thus decreasing its suitability for use as the second language of other
groups. In strong contrast to this, a third pair of reasons why Malay appeared very
suitable for development as the Indonesian nation’s common language was that it
was: (a) felt to be an easy language to learn, and (b) a language that does not encode
social hierarchical relations in any marked or complex way, or emphasize other
specialized aspects of culture that might not be compatible with a wide population
composed of diVerent ethnic groups. Because of the latter properties, Malay seemed
particularly attractive to the nationalists, who were inspired by ideas of democracy,
equality, and modernity (Brown 2003: 107). Due to the perceived neutrality of the
language, it was also felt that people could make use of the language as they wished
and even shape its future character (B. Anderson 1990: 140). Finally, it should be noted
that although many of the educated nationalists knew and used Dutch in conversation
with each other, Dutch was never considered a potential choice for development
as the representative, common language of the Indonesian nation, for the simple
reasons that it was not an indigenous language (hence would not be broadly symbolic
of languages of the indigenous inhabitants of the archipelago, unlike Malay,
an Austronesian language, which could perform this function), it was negatively
associated with the colonial rulers of Indonesia, and was known by only a very small
percentage of the total population. As an Indo-European language it was also not
as easy to learn for speakers of Austronesian languages as another Austronesian
language, such as Malay. Unlike various other countries in Asia such as India, Malaysia,
and the Philippines, in Indonesia the colonial language therefore was never
considered to be a serious contender for widespread post-independence use.
If one now asks which of the various incarnations of Malay in use within the
archipelago was to become the national language and be oYcially credited as its
source, the answer is in fact still not fully clear. The nationalists themselves are
commonly described as speaking a form of Low Malay in the 1920s (Cumming
1991: 15), which was also the language of many new novels and other publications,
 Indonesia 325

though not those of the inXuential Balai Pustaka, which were in High Malay,
elsewhere the language of Islam. Other forms of Malay noted to exist were the service
Malay used in government administration, school Malay spread in education, and
‘working Malay’, increasingly used as a lingua franca in towns and ports with mixed
populations (Errington 1998). Often it is suggested that the roots of modern
Indonesian lie in Riau Malay, the language of the Malay ethnic group in eastern
Sumatra. However, (current) Riau Malay and modern standard Indonesian exhibit
various clear diVerences, and there is no complete correspondence between the two
forms of language. Most probably, Bahasa Indonesia evolved (and was sometimes
deliberately moulded, more so in later years) from a variety of forms, developing
into a hybrid, dynamic mixture of the range of diVerent varieties of Malay
present in Indonesia (Robson 2001: 32). This process of evolution was set to take
many more decades, however, before any clearly identiWable standard would be
arrived at, as the people of Indonesia experienced a challenging sequence of upheavals,
foreign occupation, war, independence, and domestic insurrection threatening the
integrity of the nation.
In the late 1920s, though, the Indonesian nationalist movement was at its height,
with an energized leadership and an optimistic following all focused on the creation
of a new national entity. The consensus of opinion had been reached that the
new nation should be built as a composite of all the diVerent ethno-linguistic
groups present in the territory assembled by the Dutch as the Netherlands Indies,
that Indonesian national identity should not be based on any notion of existing
ethnicity but rather shared cohabitation of the land of Indonesia, and that it should
have the Indonesian language at its core as an important link and symbol of unity
among the population.
Just a few years after this buoyant expression of conWdence in an independent
future, however, the nationalist movement unexpectedly suVered a major collapse
and quickly went into a dramatic decline. The major initial trigger for this was the
arrest and imprisonment of Sukarno in 1929, which robbed the movement of its most
charismatic leader and major source of direction. Following this, in 1931–2 worldwide
Wnancial depression hit Indonesia creating widespread misery and despair, and was
accompanied by a signiWcant increase in Dutch authoritarian control over political
activities to prevent the nationalists from making use of public discontent to mobilize
the masses (Ricklefs 2001: 236–7). After release from his Wrst, shorter period of
detention, Sukarno was again arrested in 1933 and imprisoned until the 1940s, as
were many other nationalist leaders, causing the nationalist movement to largely
implode amid deep, general discouragement, heightened by the observation of a clear
change in Dutch attitude towards the indigenous people – replacing the earlier
liberalism of the turn of the century was a new racial determinism and a dismissal
of the ‘inlanders’ as being so essentially diVerent from Europeans that no amount of
education and modernization would be able to bridge the gap between the native
population and their colonial rulers (Ricklefs 2001: 230).
326 A. Simpson

What remained of the nationalist movement after its crash in the early 1930s,
tolerated by the Dutch, was a number of moderate ‘co-operative’ nationalists who
were permitted to join the sessions of the Volksraad (People’s Council), oVer
their input to discussions of governmental policies and public expenditure and
occasionally present petitions requesting change (Drakely 2005: 66–8). Most of the
latter, including a petition for the recognition and use of the term ‘Indonesian’ in place
of ‘inlander’ to refer to indigenous people, were not granted (Brown 2003: 137), and
even the most optimistic among the nationalists had doubts that they would be able
to eVect any signiWcant change, let alone achieve independence. The Dutch seemed
to be intent on remaining in the Indies, and in full control of their sizeable colony, for
all of the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, Malay/Indonesian continued to spread throughout the territory.
Newspaper production increased to the level of 400 diVerent papers in the late
1930s (Ricklefs 2001: 231), and literature produced in the language carried on adding
character and shape to an emerging, shared identity of those who jointly suVered
the frustrations of Dutch colonial rule throughout the islands of the Indies. In 1933 a
new and important literary journal came into production – the Pujangga Baru (New
Poet) – and the Balai Pustaka maintained its important output of high quality new
novels written in Malay/Indonesian (Abas 1987: 38–9).
What was needed for the budding idea of an Indonesian nation to really take a
hold of the population, however, was independence and the chance to develop ties
among the diVerent indigenous peoples living in the archipelago without the con-
straints imposed by the presence of the Dutch. In the mid-1930s the possibility that
the Dutch would somehow disappear from the Indies seemed to be highly unlikely
and to many almost unimaginable. The invasion of the Indies and rapid removal of
the Dutch by the Japanese army in 1942 therefore came as a considerable shock to
both the Dutch and the indigenous population, and opened the way for major
changes in the territory.

14.5 The Japanese Period, 1942–1945

Having successfully occupied the Netherlands Indies in 1942 and crushed all Dutch
resistance within a fairly short period of time, the Japanese replaced all of the
Dutch administration with educated indigenous workers at all levels of government,
in many instances promoting Indonesians into senior positions they had previously
not been able to access. At Wrst, the displacement of the Dutch and the increase in
opportunities for local people created favourable impressions of the Japanese on the
indigenous population. However, after some time it became apparent that the
Japanese were intent on exploiting the Indies and its population and introduced a
harsher and more repressive rule than had been experienced under the Dutch, with
Indonesians being forced to work for the Japanese in frequently very poor conditions
both on plantations and mines in the Indies and overseas in military projects servicing
 Indonesia 327

Japanese expansion in Southeast Asia. Initial positive attitudes to the arrival of the
Japanese therefore quickly changed to feelings of oppression and abuse instigated
by the Japanese push to extract the mineral and agricultural wealth of Indonesia
for the support of its military and naval campaign in the PaciWc and mainland Asia.
Concerning language policy, the Japanese made the signiWcant move of completely
banning the use of Dutch, both in public domains and also in private (Brown
2003: 141). The long-term aim of the Japanese was that Indonesians would learn
and use Japanese, and they accordingly introduced the teaching of Japanese in
schools and colleges of higher education (Moeliono 1986: 37), alongside a programme
of ‘cultural Japanization’ to attempt to inculcate positive attitudes and loyalty
towards Japanese rule (Cribb and Brown 1995: 15). However, it was also clear to the
Japanese that adequate mastery of the Japanese language for use in administration and
other formal domains would take several years to acquire, and having removed Dutch
from its occurrence and use in the civil service (especially in written communica-
tions), in higher education and in many previously Dutch-medium schools, there
was a pressing need for some other language to now substitute for Dutch in all these
areas of Indies life. The natural and fully global choice made by the Japanese was
Malay (which they continuously declined to call Indonesian until 1945 and the end of
their occupation of the Indies).2 Malay/Indonesian therefore came to be required
overnight in a wide range of domains where it had not previously been used, causing
an immediate and very signiWcant need for new Malay words to express technical,
administrative, and educational concepts where these did not already exist, and for
the rapid writing (or translation) of new textbooks in Malay for use in higher
education. Abas (1987: 42) comments that this sudden mandatory switch to Malay/
Indonesian came as a considerable shock to those directly aVected in education and
the civil service, and had more of a revolutionary, immediate eVect on people’s
language use than the later declaration of Indonesian as the national/oYcial language
of Indonesia in 1945. Abas (1987: 43) also notes that the resulting spread of Malay, used
by the Japanese in interactions with local people throughout the archipelago and
increasingly by Indonesians themselves in formal areas of life, caused a clear strength-
ening of shared Indonesian identity: ‘As the war continued, and the number of
Indonesians speaking Indonesian rose, a feeling of mutual solidarity took deeper
and stronger roots. Indonesian became a symbol of Indonesian unity in the real
sense of the word.’
The four years of Japanese control of the Indies was therefore linguistically a
frenetic period in which government and educational organizations scrabbled to
cope with the need to carry out all of their tasks and communication in Malay,
and the language underwent a rapid but not uniformly guided expansion of its
2
Kuipers (1998: 136) notes that textbooks designed by missionaries for the teaching of local languages
in schools were destroyed by the Japanese, who told people that the use of local languages in education
was part of a deliberate divide-and-rule strategy of the Dutch. Malay was then enforced everywhere as the
medium of education.
328 A. Simpson

vocabulary, coined wherever necessary on a daily basis with some attempt at co-
ordination from a central commission on language, but ultimately involving much
independent linguistic invention which would have to be brought into line in later
years, when the expansion of Indonesian continued. The shared experience of
hardships under the Japanese from 1942 to 1945 also gave those in the Indies an
increasing feeling of being connected to each other and belonging to a single
repressed people, reinforcing inter-ethnic connections that had been initiated by
Dutch formation of the Indies as a single entity. Coupled with the conWdence
gained from having seen how quickly the Dutch had been defeated by the Japanese
military, and four years of successful indigenous management of all levels of the
administration of the Indies, this would give the Indonesians the boldness of spirit
to declare independence in 1945 as the Japanese surrendered to the Allies, and to
Wght for this independence further when the Dutch returned to claim back owner-
ship of their pre-war colony.

14.6 Independence and the Sukarno Years

Following the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945,
full Japanese surrender to the Allies occurred on 15 August. On 17 August the
independence of Indonesia was subsequently declared by a small group of nationalists
led by Sukarno, who had been released from his imprisonment by the Japanese at
the beginning of the period of occupation and had been considerably active from 1942
to 1945 raising national consciousness throughout the Indies. Not long after the
declaration of independence, however, the Dutch arrived back in force in the Indies
to re-establish their control over the territory. The failure of any negotiations to
satisfy both nationalist and Dutch sides led to four years of armed conXict, ending
only when US pressure on the Netherlands encouraged the Dutch to terminate their
reoccupation of the Indies and end the perpetual drain on national resources needed
to sustain their military and bureaucratic presence in the Indies for what increasingly
seemed like comparatively little progress and return.
Having achieved its formal independence in 1949, Indonesia experienced a period
of eight initial chaotic years in which a number of regional separatist movements
incited rebellions against the government and the economy failed to provide suYcient
resources to fuel the building up of infrastructure that was now widely expected by
the country’s liberated population. To outside observers in the West, it seemed quite
possible that Indonesia might rapidly fragment and break apart due to its great
inherent ethnic diversity and the occurrence of multiple active secessionist move-
ments (Leifer 2000: 51). In 1957, Sukarno, who had been made president in 1945 but
not given any extensive powers, declared martial law in the country and instituted an
authoritarian mode of government which he named ‘Guided Democracy’ (1957–65).
By the early 1960s, there was a return to greater stability in Indonesia, and the
various rebellions had been ended. Nationalism was once again promoted by Sukarno
 Indonesia 329

as a means to strengthen unity among the people of Indonesia, and the concept
of ‘revolution’ was now added in as an important aspect of nationalist propaganda –
revolution here referring to the co-operation that had resulted in Indonesia being ‘the
Wrst Asian nation to proclaim its independence, and the Wrst to successfully defend that
independence in the face of armed resistance by the former colonial power’ (Brown
2003: 169). Indonesians became intensely proud of the fact that they had achieved their
independence through armed struggle against a Western power, and emphasis on the
need for sustained revolution and all-Indonesian co-operation against both external
and internal forces opposed to the continued unity of the country was regularly
invoked by Sukarno as a way to stimulate the integrity of the nation, and also distract
attention from the poor state of the economy. As part of Sukarno’s vigorous new
deWance of forces perceived to be hostile to Indonesia, Western New Guinea (renamed
Irian Jaya in 1962) was retrieved from the control of the Dutch, who had managed to
retain the territory in 1949, and ‘confrontation’ was initiated against Malaysia, disput-
ing the automatic inclusion of the territories of Sarawak and Sabah on Borneo in the
formation of the independent new state in 1962, and leading to low-level military
action in Borneo.
Concerning the development of language in the immediate post-independence
years, in 1945 Indonesian had been declared the language of the new state and
came to be used extensively in formal public activities and all political and adminis-
trative communications addressed to the nation as a whole. Dutch did not reappear in
these or other formal domains after its dismissal by the Japanese in 1942, and Indonesia
consequently had a diVerent experience of post-independence linguistic development
from other countries in Asia where former colonial languages were retained after
independence for potential use in government and administration, this absence of
an oYcial European language in Indonesia arguably simplifying the development of
the national language in various respects (Abas 1987: 141).
In this there was indeed still much work to be done by language committees set up by
the government, with a continued need for both the development of technical vocabu-
lary in Indonesian, and agreement on which of many competing terms, often from
diVerent regions of the country, should be used for items of more everyday life in
the standard language. In 1949 a long-prepared grammatical description of Indonesian
was Wnally published by the linguist S. T. Alisjahbana, modelled on the contemporary
speech of twenty prominent, respected speakers, and remained the most inXuential
grammar of the language for a further twenty years (Abas 1987: 112).
In the area of education, Indonesian was widely used at both primary and second-
ary levels, though use of a regional language as medium of instruction was also
permitted for the Wrst three years in primary schools in areas with uniform ethnic
populations. This practical concession to early schooling through the mother tongue
was fully in line with general policy towards the continued use and support of
regional languages established in the constitution of 1945, which records that all the
330 A. Simpson

indigenous languages of Indonesia have a right to existence and development and are
considered assets of the nation (Dardjowidjojo 1998: 44).
No similar guarantees of protection and positive valuation were given to the non-
indigenous minority language Chinese, however, spoken by a sizeable population
distributed throughout the archipelago. In 1957, as worries about regional rebellions
triggered the nationwide introduction of martial law, the loyalty of Indonesia’s
Chinese population also came under question and resulted in sharper controls on
Chinese schools including a new requirement that teaching staV be proWcient in
Indonesian and that Indonesian and Indonesian geography and history be taught in
all Chinese-medium schools (Oetomo 1984: 388). As a consequence of the new
regulations, the nationwide enrolment of 425,000 students in Chinese schools in
1957 quickly dropped to 150,000 and further still in 1958 as more regional unrest
occurred (Suryadinata 2005: 137). In 1958 it was furthermore announced that news-
papers could only publish in either Roman or Arabic script, causing the closure of
all Chinese newspapers until 1963, when the restriction was lifted by the government.
Before long, heavy government control over Chinese language activities would
again be imposed as a reaction to political events in Indonesia. However, this time it
would come as part of a major upheaval aVecting all of the nation’s population and
leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians throughout the
country.

14.7 The Suharto Years: Development, Corruption, and Crash

On 30 September 1965 a coup was attempted in which several army generals were
kidnapped and subsequently killed. Although it is still not known for sure who was
responsible for the coup attempt, the army immediately blamed the communists,
and after order had been quickly restored by troops under General Suharto, com-
mander of the strategic reserve, engaged in a bloody six-month-long pursuit of
communists throughout the country resulting in the deaths of up to half a million
Indonesians. In the aftermath of the failed coup, General Suharto also took the step of
removing Sukarno from power and in 1968 became president himself. While Sukarno
had been preoccupied with espousing revolution, non-alignment, rejection of the
West, and confrontation with Malaysia, the economy had been failing terribly, with an
annual inXation rate of 1,000 per cent reached by mid-1965 (Brown 2003: 218).
Determined to rebuild the country, Suharto adopted a quite opposite approach to
Sukarno and deliberately solicited foreign investment, aid, and Wnancial guidance,
and rapidly managed to improve the country’s economy, assisted by the beneWts of a
sharp rise in the price of oil. This allowed for many of the roads, hospitals, and schools
that the country so badly needed to Wnally be built, and the quality of simple,
everyday life improved for much of the Indonesian population. Politically, in place
of Sukarno’s combative nationalism, Suharto’s ‘New Order’ government prioritized
stability at home and peaceful relations with its neighbours and the West for the dual
 Indonesia 331

purposes of development and modernization, key concepts held throughout the

New Order’s thirty years of power.
As the economy improved and more infrastructure was created in all parts of
the country, further development occurred in the area of language, and knowledge
of Indonesian spread considerably, as more and more young people gained access
to education and instruction in the national language. By 1990 it is estimated that
there was 91 per cent attendance of primary school, up from approximately 60 per
cent in 1970 (Lamoureux 2003: 123). Over the same period there was an even more
dramatic rise in the numbers of people able to speak Indonesian – from 40.5 per cent
in 1971, rising to 60.8 per cent in 1980, and reaching 82.8 per cent in 1990 (Emmerson
2005: 25). Furthermore, even though only 40.5 per cent had a proWciency in Indones-
ian in 1970, a study carried out in 1971 indicated that a much higher proportion of
the population thought that people throughout the country should know Indonesian,
signalling a widespread acceptance of the positive values of the language (Abas
1987: 152). People also became more critical of others’ command of Indonesian and
keen to see adherence to the rules of a standard form of the language, in a way that
is typical of societies with an advanced awareness of a shared standard language.
Through the 1980s there were regular publications complaining about the correctness
of Indonesian heard in daily life, and campaigns responding to these criticisms
which promoted better teaching of Indonesian in the country’s schools (Heryanto
1995: 49). In 1990, a further achievement of Indonesia’s educational system during the
Suharto era was that the literacy rate reached 85 per cent, a huge improvement on
earlier times. Language development also continued in the form of expanding and
standardizing the vocabulary of Indonesian, with work being co-ordinated by the
government Centre for Language Development and Cultivation. Not all of the many
thousands of newly coined words came to be accepted and used by the general public
or the media, but with the increase in its available lexical materials, Indonesian
reached the stage where it was able to function well in all domains of life including
university-level education and science and technology.
Co-operation with Malaysia on the planned development of the two countries’
national languages was Wnally implemented from 1972 onwards through the estab-
lishment of a Language Council of Indonesia–Malaysia, work on the agreement on a
shared system of spelling for Indonesian/Malay having been planned since 1959 but
held up by the occurrence of hostilities between the two countries. Malay had been
declared the oYcial national language of Malaysia in 1957 and diVered from Indones-
ian mainly just in matters of vocabulary and spelling convention, hence there were
obvious advantages to be had in keeping the two national languages mutually
intelligible. In 1972 agreement was reached on a standard system of spelling and
since the 1970s there has continued to be co-operation on other matters of language.
A more negative aspect of oYcial language ‘planning’ in the early Suharto years
was again the control of Chinese in Indonesia. In 1965, mainland China was accused by
the military of having supported the failed coup attributed to the communists in
332 A. Simpson

Indonesia, and ethnic Chinese within the country were encouraged to assimilate and
declare their loyalty to the Indonesian nation. Chinese-medium schools were univer-
sally shut down by the government along with all Chinese-language newspapers, with
the exception of the government-controlled Yindunixiya Ribao (Indonesian Daily
News) (Suryadinata 2005: 36). New regulations additionally outlawed the use of
Chinese in both written and spoken form in the economy, book-keeping, and tele-
communications, Chinese language being linked to communist threats to national
security (Oetomo 1984: 392–5). Finally, restrictions on the occurrence of written
Chinese during New Order Indonesia were further increased in 1978 with the whole-
sale banning of the import of publications in Chinese.
Three decades of authoritarian rule under Suharto ultimately came to an abrupt
end in the late 1990s, occasioned by the Asian Wnancial crisis which hit Indonesia
particularly hard in 1997. As the currency plummeted from 2,000 rupiah to the dollar
to 10,000 to the dollar and prices of everyday commodities rocketed, severe austerity
measures had to be agreed with the IMF in order to attempt to restore order to the
economy. Increasingly a major part of the blame for the widely experienced hardships
was placed on Suharto and his regime, which had long been known to be highly corrupt.
While the enrichment of those close to Suharto had been overlooked by most during
the country’s sustained economic growth, the middle and lower classes were now
suVering badly and learned that the corruption of the Suharto regime was a principal
reason why foreign investment came to be so quickly withdrawn from the country,
causing the collapse of the economy. Following widespread public demonstrations and
the outbreak of civil unrest, Suharto resigned as president in 1998, bringing the New
Order to a close and opening the way for a new era of democracy and public discus-
sion for the Wrst time free from censorship and heavy government control.

14.8 Indonesia Today: Language and National Identity

In attempting to assess the success of language policy in the process of nation-building
both in the present and since independence, it is essential to bear in mind that
Indonesia is a country which has arisen in its present form as the result of earlier
colonial expansion grouping together a very large number of diverse peoples
rather arbitrarily and artiWcially within a single administrative territory. Due to the
ensuing highly heterogeneous nature of the population, the challenges of nation-
building have been maximized in Indonesia and the achievement of some form or
level of over-arching common, national identity has been seen to be essential for the
continued unity of the state. Not surprisingly, Indonesia has experienced certain
occurrences of ethnic unrest and conXict, both in the immediate post-independence
period, when the break-up of the country was predicted by outside observers, and
in more recent years, in Aceh in the north of Sumatra, on Borneo, where Dayaks have
clashed with Madurese resettled there by the government, and in Maluku and Sulawesi
where Muslims and Christians have come into extended conXict. However, Indonesia
 Indonesia 333

has successfully hung together throughout its nearly sixty years of independent
existence and is perhaps more striking as a multi-ethnic country for the comparative
absence of more signiWcant and disastrous ethnic disturbances within its borders.3
Much credit for the instrumental nurturing and reinforcement of feelings of
belonging to an Indonesian nation must go to the binding presence of the national
language in many important domains of everyday life in Indonesia. Bahasa Indonesia
is now the language of business, government administration, education at all levels,
political debate, most of Indonesia’s television, cinema, and newspapers, and is also
widely used for inter-ethnic communication. Notwithstanding its widespread know-
ledge and use in modern Indonesia, for the vast majority of the population Indonesian
is nevertheless still acquired as a second language in school, and some other regional
language is commonly learned before Indonesian and regularly used in the home,
with family, friends, and members of the local community. Only in eastern Sumatra
and in certain large cities does Indonesian occur as the mother tongue and household
language of speakers, the combined numbers of these native speakers making
up approximately just 10 per cent of the population (Ethnologue 2006).4 Indonesian
has consequently not displaced the regional languages of diVerent ethnic groups from
their use in informal domains, and there has never been any attempt to impose
the national language on speakers in their private life and everyday informal com-
munication. Indonesian has instead been promoted as an addition to individuals’
linguistic repertoires to enhance their access to education, government, broader
employment and business opportunities, and the general modernization of the
country as this has expanded in the hands of the Indonesians themselves. Such a
deliberate hands-oV approach, not attempting to interfere with the use of local
languages in traditional and more informal areas of interaction, is commonly seen
as one of the principal reasons why there has been such successful widespread
acceptance and adoption of Indonesian as the national language (Bertrand 2003;
Emmerson 2005). Indonesian and regional languages are not in any confrontation
with each other and do not compete for use in the same areas of life, but exist in a
generally stable complementarity of distribution. The broad archipelago-wide spread
of the national language during the last six decades has, because of this pattern of
complementary distribution, not triggered any major negative reactions from the
indigenous population – no linguistic riots or cries of oppression through the impos-
ition of language.5 Emmerson (2005: 28) remarks that: ‘Fortunately for Indonesian
3
This chapter does not include coverage of the separation of East Timor from Indonesia in 2002,
following a vote on independence which took place in 1999. For useful discussion of the role of language
as a symbol of resistance and the violence which accompanied the departure of East Timor from
Indonesia, see Bertrand (2003).
4
<http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name¼Indonesia>.
5
As noted in previous sections, the Chinese community in Indonesia has suVered the repression of its
language in the areas of education, the media, and commerce, with the forced use of Indonesian in these
areas by default. At the present time, however, there is a renewed presence of Chinese language in
Indonesia, with Chinese publications, television, radio, and language schools appearing and being
tolerated again (Drakely 2005: 168).
334 A. Simpson

unity, over the rest of the century the national language was publicized but not
privatized, and thus remained distinctively national.’ In Indonesia today, the regional
languages therefore remain very much alive and have positive associations for their
speakers, being the languages of intimacy, local culture, and regional pride.6 They
may also inXuence the form of Indonesian produced in diVerent areas, and standard
Indonesian as codiWed and taught in schools is often adapted and blended with
properties of local languages when used in everyday speech.
Bahasa Indonesia has been able to reach its present position as the primary
language of national-level and formal activities so eVectively not only because this
ascendance has not harmed the use of the regional languages but also because
Indonesian faced no threat from the continued presence of a colonial language
following independence. As noted in sections 14.5 and 14.6, Dutch was banned
from use by the Japanese in 1942 and did not come back into use during the four
years of conXict with the Dutch from 1945 to 1949. When full, internationally
recognized independence was achieved in 1949, Dutch remained absent, and attempts
to construct an Indonesian nation began without the shadow of a colonial language
maintained as an oYcial language, potentially tempting people away from use of
the national language in formal domains. The sudden, forced discontinuation of
the use of Dutch in 1942 was furthermore managed without catastrophe as know-
ledge of Dutch was not as widely spread in Indonesia as the occurrence of English or
French in various other Asian colonies. The ‘useful’ absence of Dutch from 1942
onwards therefore obliged Indonesian to grow into an oYcial–national language
which could be used in all domains of national life and was accepted by all as the
only obvious candidate for such a role. Currently, Indonesia is still a country without
the signiWcant presence of any Western language, and neither Dutch nor English nor
French is well known among the general population or the more educated elite. This
continued absence of a sophisticated competitor to the national language is clearly
beneWcial for the position and prestige of Indonesian as the language through which
modernity is accessed and development achieved, though it has also been noted that
the lack of a suYcient knowledge of English among those in higher education
impedes their understanding and use of new materials published in English on science
and technology (Dardjowidjojo 1998: 45).
Fully established and dominant as the language in which all formal communica-
tions are eVected in the country, Indonesian has also become positively valued as the
primary shared component of the country’s emerging national identity. Heryanto
(1995: 40) notes that Indonesian is the most clearly deWned and regularly experienced
aspect of Indonesian national culture, adding that: ‘The Indonesian elite repeatedly

6
Although Indonesian is often used as a vehicle of inter-ethnic communication, when knowledge of a
single regional language is shared between speakers of diVerent ethnic groups, it has been observed that
the regional language rather than Indonesian may be preferred for use in informal contexts, expressing
greater potential warmth and closeness than the national language, which is still more clearly connected
with formal domains of life (Goebel 2002).
 Indonesia 335

take pride in saying that their nation is unique and superior to other formerly
colonised, multi-ethnic, and multilingual communities in respect of the attainment
and consensual acceptance of a non-European language as a national language.’ As a
symbol of distinctly Indonesian national identity, Bahasa Indonesia is also signiWcantly
felt to be diVerent from neighbouring Bahasa Malaysia/Malaysian and Singaporean
Malay (Moeliono 1986: 67). Though Indonesian and Malaysian are mutually intelli-
gible, and diVer largely only in the occurrence of more Dutch and Javanese loanwords
in the former as opposed to more English loans in the latter, along with certain
diVerences in pronunciation, the perception among Indonesians that Indonesian is
a diVerent language from Malaysian and hence nationally distinctive is certainly
important for its symbolic role in supporting a national identity, in a way that is
similar to perceptions held among Urdu and Hindi speakers in Pakistan and India of
their respective varieties as diVerent languages. The fact that Bahasa Malaysia was
established and developed as a national language later than Indonesian may have
helped in the creation of this perception in Indonesia, with Indonesian even felt to
have exerted certain inXuence over the development of Bahasa Malaysia (for example,
in the area of the building of new styles of modern literature).
In general then, and particularly when viewed against the multi-ethnic, multi-
lingual background present in Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia has done exceedingly
well in establishing itself as an ethnically neutral, fully modernized, indigenous new
national language which is felt to be distinctive and well able to function in all
domains of life without the need for a European language in an oYcial supporting
role. Given that this national development of Indonesian has come about with-
out inciting conXict or serious contention and that the language has helped in a
considerable way in the kindling of feelings of an all-Indonesian identity without
stiXing the enjoyment of regional linguistic culture, Indonesian can most probably
be said to have fulWlled all the goals that might have realistically been imagined for it
back in the 1920s, though the challenging goal of nation-building as a whole in
Indonesia is still very much a process with a lot remaining to achieve.
What of the future? Concerning the evolving shape of Indonesian itself, there are
two clear pressures on the language at the current time, inXuencing its development
mostly in the area of vocabulary – Javanese and the Jakarta dialect (of Malay/
Indonesian). The capital of Indonesia is considerably prominent in the way that
modern culture from Jakarta becomes a model for many elsewhere in the archipelago,
seen in television and cinema, and then adopted by young people in particular in
other cities and regions of Indonesia. Where aspects of the Jakartan dialect occur
frequently repeated in the speech of television and Wlm stars, these may become part
of common, more widely spoken Indonesian and direct its development in the same
way that the increased borrowing of Javanese words into the speech of various
important public Wgures might seem to some to threaten its neutral character.
There are censures and checks on this spontaneous incorporation of new words
into Indonesian, however, as when President Megawati Sukarnoputri was publicly
336 A. Simpson

criticized in 2003 for an overuse of Javanese words in her Indonesian speeches

(Emmerson 2005: 23). What is described and taught as standard Indonesian may
also become inXuenced and perhaps redirected by the form of Indonesian commonly
used in the media and emerging new literature, where a set of norms that is
somewhat diVerent from oYcial, standard Indonesian have become widely adopted
(Moeliono 1986: 54).
As for the position of Indonesian in the structure of society and relative to other
regional languages, a consideration of both the recent past and current sociolinguistic
patterns would seem to suggest that the stable complementarity of use of Indonesian
and other indigenous languages in formal and informal domains is likely to continue
for the foreseeable future. There are no obvious signs that there will be a signiWcant
increase in the number of people who will learn Indonesian as their mother
tongue and potentially become monolingual Indonesian speakers, as the major
regional languages seem to be quite secure and well passed on to and used by new
generations. Indonesian itself is also very well embedded among the population and
unlikely to lose its dominant position in the more formal areas of life. Though there
is currently an emphasis on the decentralization of certain decision-making and a
focus on increasing the participation of regional authorities in local forms of govern-
ment as a way to begin to address regional inequalities and tensions, it seems unlikely
that this will lead to the rejection of Indonesian as the language locally used in
administration, education, technology, and the media, and the substitution of regional
languages in these domains. The amount of time and eVort required to develop a
language for fully eVective use in education, law, and government is considerable, and
in the absence of any political secession from Indonesia, it would seem improbable
that any region would attempt to undertake this. The current division of linguistic
labour among Indonesian and the regional languages in formal and informal areas of
life instead appears to work well and be quite happily accepted by most of the
country’s large population, suggesting it will continue on in this way for quite some
time to come. Assuming such a steady multilingual future, as the years go by, it can be
expected that increased general feelings of being part of a single new nation will be
accompanied by a deeper embedding of the national language in areas which fall
between those of strictly formal and informal family and home life, in the spread of
a broadly familiar national literature and cinema, so that Indonesian comes to
function in the way of standard national languages in other, often largely monolingual
countries. If it does hold on to its present position and even consolidates this further,
Indonesian will continue to stand out as one of the great success stories of a local,
national language surviving the decolonization process in Asia and a prime example
of the clear viability of a single, indigenous national language in a heavily multi-
ethnic nation.
 15
Malaysia and Brunei
Asmah Haji Omar

15.1 Introduction
The two Muslim nations of Malaysia and Brunei have many similarities in their
demographic, linguistic, and socio-cultural traits and have undergone processes of
change and development in the course of their history of civilization which appear to
be related to or a reXection of one another. With this background, they appeared to
have a similar ethos in their Wght for nationalism and independence from British rule,
and thence in their eVort towards building a modern nation-state.
Malaysia consists of two geographical territories, separated from each other by 400
miles of South China Sea: one is Peninsular Malaysia and the islands to its east and
west, and the other comprises Sabah and Sarawak situated on Borneo Island, and the
islands along their coasts. The total land area is 329,749 square kilometres, or 127,316
square miles. The population of 25 million consists of 62 per cent indigenous people,
24 per cent Chinese, 7 per cent Indian, and the remaining are those who are non-
citizens from the neighbouring countries as well as from other parts of the world. Of
the indigenous people 58 per cent are Malays, and the rest belong to more than Wfty
ethno-linguistic groups which are closely related to the Malays in terms of language
and primordial culture. In the indigenous group, according to the national census,
are also those of Portuguese descent who have been in Malaysia, speciWcally Melaka,
since 1511, as well as the Thais, known as Siamese, who live in the northern states of
Perlis, Kedah, and Kelantan, bordering Thailand. The Chinese belong to a number of
dialect groups with Hokkien, Khek, and Cantonese being in the majority, while the
others are Teochew, Hokchiu, Hainanese, and Kwongsai, and a few smaller groups. As
for the Indians, they include not only the northern and the southern Indians but also
the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis, and the Sri Lankans, showing a higher level of
heterogeneity compared to the Chinese, with the Tamil-speaking being the major
group.
Brunei is not only a close neighbour of Malaysia but is nestled within the expanse of
land wherein lies the Malaysian state of Sarawak. It consists of a land area of 5,765
square kilometres, and has a population of about a quarter million people, about
338 A. H. Omar

Malaysia

70 per cent of whom are Malays. There are indigenous communities, some of which
are also found in the neighbouring Sabah and Sarawak, and they form about 6 per cent
of the total population of the country. The Chinese comprise 15 per cent of the
population, and the rest consist of foreign settlers like the Indians and the Europeans.

15.2 Early History, Occupation, and Independence

15.2.1 Malay Empires, Islam, and Malay Identity
Both Malaysia and Brunei had a glorious history of being rulers of insular Southeast
Asia from the early centuries of the Christian era. Both became the centres for the
spread of Hinduism and Buddhism which came from India, especially from the
seventh to the fourteenth century, during which time the region as a whole grew
not only as a thriving trade centre but also as a meeting point for religious scholars,
especially of Buddhism, from India and China.
It was only with the adoption of Islam and the development of the already existing
Malay civilization into one that can be called a Malay-Muslim civilization that the
empires centred on the Malay Peninsula and Brunei grew to a height which brought
them fame to the east and west as great commercial hubs and centres of the Wnest in
 Malaysia and Brunei 339

culture. While the Malays had their own indigenous writing systems, these were at
best rudimentary and were mainly the tools of shamans; it was the Indians who
introduced a ‘proper’ system of codes to write their language, the Pallava script from
South India. However, knowledge and acquisition of the script was conWned to a
handful of people close to the rulers who were the ‘gurus’ to the rulers, while the
rulers may have regularly been illiterate, as were all their other subjects.
Literacy came to the Malays, regardless of the social class they belonged to, with the
coming of Islam and the conversion of the Malays to Islam in the fourteenth century.
To be Muslims they had to read the Qur’an in the Arabic script, although they did not
understand the meaning of the text. Recognizing the matching of symbols and sounds
in Arabic led them to adopting and adapting the Arabic writing system for their
language. This was the beginning of the great Malay literary tradition, which can be
seen in the production of a large number of literary romances and the recording of
the oral traditions of the pre-Islamic era in Arabic script (which for the purpose of
indigenization has been termed the ‘Jawi’ script). Literacy through Islam also made it
possible for the Malays to codify their laws and statutes in the governing of the land,
which to all intents and purposes from that time was based on the laws of Islam.
Literacy became a right for every Muslim Malay and was not conWned to the small
elite which held the reins of power in the land. The way it spread was in the form of
informal teaching of religion in the homes of chieftains, mosques, and village religious
schools which were known as pondok. These schools were privately funded by
villagers through the payment of tithes and small donations, and teachers were paid
from the tithes. The pondok schools were the earliest institution to provide formal
education to the Malays, and they continued to function as an educational institution
well into the second half of the twentieth century when their place was taken over by
government schools which included religious studies and Arabic in their curriculum.
By the time the Wrst Europeans (the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch and the
British) visited the Malay Archipelago in the sixteenth century, the Malay empires
were already well-established polities with their own systems of government. The
Malay language, while being the lingua franca in the ports in the archipelago, was also
the language of diplomacy in the region, and was the language used by the European
powers in their communication with rulers in the region. Letters between the royal
Malay courts and the courts of St. James, Paris, and Portugal were written in Malay
and at this time Malay epistolary became developed into a Wne art, not only in the
style of writing a text but also in calligraphy and the art form which was a necessary
characteristic of the scroll or the leaXet that was sent (Gallop 1994).

15.2.2 British Rule and Education for the Malays

Although the Portuguese came to rule in the sixteenth century and the Dutch in the
seventeenth century, there was no attempt to teach their respective languages to the
populace. The British who Wrst arrived in the form of the East India Company in 1786
340 A. H. Omar

stayed longer than the Portuguese, and perhaps on the basis of their political and
commercial pragmatism established schools using Malay as medium of instruction as
well as schools using only English. This development not only introduced English as a
language through which the Malays and all other groups could attain literacy and
a formal education, it also brought the use of the Roman script as an addition to Jawi
in the writing of Malay.
The Wrst Malay school of a secular nature was established by the colonial govern-
ment as a branch of the English-medium school, Penang Free School, in 1816, in
Penang, the place where the British Wrst set foot on Malay soil. Other Malay schools
that followed were mostly built in the rural areas to suit the location of the greater
population of the Malays. These schools were meant to teach the ‘three Rs’ (Reading,
Writing, and ’Rithmetic), basic agricultural skill, basketry, and weaving to the children
of the peasants so that they could become better farmers, Wshermen, and craftsmen
than their fathers. Education for Malay girls, besides the core syllabus of the ‘three Rs’
was focused on giving them skills in needlework, nursing, cookery, and domestic
economy. With the purposes mentioned above, education in the Malay schools never
proceeded beyond Standard VI of primary school. Similar schools were set up in
Singapore and in Borneo in Brunei, Sabah, and Sarawak, where the British also had
commercial interests.
Even at the primary level teachers needed to be trained and the colonial govern-
ment started teacher training programmes in 1878, but it was only in 1922 that a male
teachers’ training college was established, the Sultan Idris Training College (SITC) in
Tanjong Malim, Perak, where boys who had undergone six-year primary education
were sent to be trained as teachers for the Malay schools. Boys with a similar career
orientation were also brought in from Singapore and the Borneo territories to be
trained at the college. A parallel college for women, the Malay Women Teachers’
Training College, was set up in 1935, in tandem with the increase in the population of
girls attending Malay schools.
The curriculum of the SITC was little more than that of a secondary school.
However, what the trainees developed into were not just people who were literate
in their own language but people who became more aware of the socio-political
situation of their country, and saw a potential threat to the Malay ‘sons of the soil’
from the inXux of immigrants from China and India, allowed and supported by British
rulers. The college became an important nursery in the cultivation of a Malay ethnic
identity which glued together the Malays of the Peninsula, Singapore, Brunei, Sabah,
and Sarawak. Among those who fought for the Malayan (1957), and then Malaysian
(1963), independence were graduates of the SITC. Regardless of which British colony
they came from, the college gave them an opportunity to see the Malays in a broader
perspective, beyond the borders of their individual states, and stretching as far as
Indonesia. The idea of uniting the whole, widespread Malay people was already being
nurtured, with the relevant identity factors being a package consisting of ethnicity
(Malay descent), religion (Islam), and language (the Malay language).
 Malaysia and Brunei 341

15.2.3 Arrival of the Chinese and the Indians: A Change in

the Malayan Demography
Although there were Chinese and Indians who came to settle in the Malay Peninsula
from the fourteenth century onwards, these were relatively insigniWcant in number. It
was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that immigrants from China and
India arrived in large numbers attracted by the growth of the tin mines and the rubber
plantations, causing the Malay Peninsula, or Malaya as it was also known (which then
included Singapore), to undergo a changing demography, in which the three main
races of Malay, Chinese, and Indian found themselves concentrated in diVerent
geographical niches: the Malays in the rural areas taking care of their rice farms
and traditional fruit lands, the Chinese in the tin mine areas turning themselves into
wealthy miners and in the urban centres where they dominated as merchant traders,
and the Indians mainly in the rubber estates and along the railway routes where they
worked as labourers. Each community carried on with its own socio-economic
pursuits, and practised their own ethnic cultures, communicated in their own lan-
guages, and built their own schools using their own languages, without much
interference from the others. The perpetuation of such separate identities was
furthermore endorsed and encouraged by the British rulers of Malaya through a
deliberate policy of divide and rule.
Quite generally, while the Malays are homogeneous in terms of their identity
factors, the same cannot be said categorically of the Chinese and Indians present in
Malaya/Malaysia. Though the Chinese may be homogeneous in one sense, in terms
of ethnically belonging to the people commonly known as ‘Chinese’, the Chinese
‘language’ subsumes a wide range of dialects which are not mutually intelligible and
which separate speakers into diVerent language communities. The Chinese are also
not homogeneous in terms of religious adherence, as while most Chinese may be
Buddhists and Taoists, there are also those who are Christians and Muslims. As for
those referred to broadly as the ‘Indians’, this label links up many subgroups which
diVer from one another not only in terms of linguistic aYliation but also in terms of
culture and religion. Although the Malaysian Indians originate from all over the
Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka, it is the southern Indians which predominate in
the Indian population in Malaysia. The Malaysian Indian Congress which has been a
partner to the Malay political party, the United Malays National Organization
(UMNO), and the Chinese political party the Malaysian Chinese Association, in ruling
Malaysia from the time of independence from the British in 1957, is overwhelmingly
Tamil in terms of its membership.

15.2.4 Education System: An Emphasis on Separate Identities

The colonial policy of divide and rule was also reXected in the education system. As
mentioned earlier, the Malays were given village-based vernacular schools up to but
not beyond six-year primary education. Funding for these schools was wholly taken
342 A. H. Omar

care of by the government and even pondok schools were given (small) subsidies for
their existence, indicating that the government of the day felt a clear commitment to
the indigenous Malay population.
The Indians in Malaya were also given their own schools by the colonial govern-
ment, and these schools were built where the majority of the Indians were, namely on
the rubber estates. The medium of instruction was Tamil, and the objective was to
give Indian children the ‘three Rs’ skills as in the Malay vernacular schools. All funding
for the establishment and the maintenance of these schools became the responsibility
of the colonial government. As explained in the colonial papers of the time, the
government felt it was their obligation to the Indian community to provide an
education for their children because these people were brought in by the Calcutta-
headquartered British East India Company to work on the rubber estates (Omar 1976).
No similar obligation was felt towards the Chinese, as this group had arrived of its
own accord, attracted by the wealth that was awaiting them in the form of thick layers
of tin ores that ran throughout Central Malaya. Accordingly, not even subsidies were
granted by the government to the Chinese schools, it being rationalized by the
government that the Chinese community could itself easily get Wnancial help from
its own wealthy Chinese merchants and guilds. The Chinese community therefore
went on to build schools in places where there were large groups of Chinese, notably in
the tin-mining areas and in major towns. Having the freedom to form their own
curriculum, the language chosen as medium of instruction was commonly Mandarin
Chinese, though this was actually not the mother tongue of any of the Chinese groups.
The Chinese schools provided an education beyond the primary level up to middle and
high school (similar to the level of lower and upper secondary school today), and had
a clear orientation towards China. Those students who passed out of a Chinese high
school could directly enter universities in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Later on, when
Singapore set up its own Chinese university, the Nanyang University, in 1956, this
added a further channel for Malaysian Chinese to pursue a tertiary education.
By way of contrast, there was no opportunity whatsoever for Malays and Indians
who had attended vernacular schools to enter into secondary education, let alone
tertiary education anywhere, not even in Indonesia or India itself. Malay and Indian
children could hope to continue their education to higher levels only if they entered
English-medium schools.

15.2.5 The English School: A Gateway to a Higher Socio-economic Status

The idea of providing education in English was to train Malayans to work in the
government service, mostly as clerks and general administrators. With proWciency in
English they were able to interpret government policies to the people.
More and more English schools were built following the Wrst one in Penang, both
by the government as well as by Christian missionaries. Although run by diVerent
bodies and missions, these schools had common core syllabuses for both the primary
 Malaysia and Brunei 343

(six years) and secondary (Wve years) levels, and all these schools provided teaching in
science and arts subjects. At the end of the Wfth year of their secondary schooling,
students had to sit for a standard set of examinations designed and assessed by the
Cambridge body known as the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. A good
pass in the Senior Cambridge Examinations (as it was known) would allow students to
enter a two-year pre-university programme, at the end of which they had to sit for the
Higher Cambridge Examinations which would take them to tertiary education in the
United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries.
Tertiary education in Malaya and Singapore only saw its beginning in 1948 with
the establishment of the King Edward VII College of Medicine and Dentistry in
Singapore, a university college of the University of London. It was only in 1952 that
this college, together with other faculties added to it, became a full university, known
as the University of Malaya. The university provided another place, and this one closer
to home, for students who had had the privilege of attending the English schools to
pursue a higher education. In 1956 a second branch of this university was built in
Kuala Lumpur, and in 1962 the two branches separated, the one in Kuala Lumpur
remaining as the University of Malaya while that in Singapore became known as the
National University of Singapore.
As the English school was not to be identiWed with any racial group, it was supposed
to be a common mixing ground for all the races present in Malaya. However, the idea
of a free mingling of all races in the English schools was not to be achieved, as
enrolment in such schools was in the majority (85 per cent) Chinese. The main reasons
for this were the location of the schools and the costly subscriptions they entailed. The
town areas where the schools were built were not convenient for ordinary Malay
peasants to send their children to, and this was also the plight of the poor Indian rubber
estate workers. Furthermore, these schools were not free of charge as were the Malay
and the vernacular Indian schools. As a result, only children of the very few wealthy
Malays and Indians were ultimately able to set foot in these schools.
In an eVort to increase the number of Malay children in the English schools, bright
Malay children were subsequently taken from Malay schools at the end of Primary IV
to enter a programme known as the Special Malay Class in the English schools. This
was a two-year programme in which the students were immersed in a curriculum
which was totally run in English. At the end of the two years they were promoted to
Form I of the secondary school where for the Wrst time in their life they saw
themselves sitting with children of other racial groups.
The obligation that the British felt towards the ‘sons of the soil’ (i.e. the indigenous
Malays) motivated the British to establish a boarding school in 1925 based on Eton in
England and intended for the sons of the Sultans, the Malay aristocrats and chieftains.
This was the Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK) which produced some of the
earliest English-educated Malay elite, who were then channelled to universities in the
United Kingdom, including Oxford and Cambridge. In 1948, a parallel school was
built for the girls in Kuala Lumpur, known as the Malay Girls’ College.
344 A. H. Omar

It should be added that all these educational ‘innovations’ in the life of the Malays
were localized in the Malay Peninsula, but served those who were in Singapore and
the British territories in Borneo including Brunei. Just as common people in Brunei
were given the opportunity to join the SITC in Tanjong Malim, so members of the
Brunei royalty were given places in the MCKK and in the other well-placed English
schools. This made it possible for the British colonial government to set up a single
core syllabus for all the territories, with direction from Kuala Lumpur. The same was
also true for the training of oYce administrators, with a common system set up by the
central government in Kuala Lumpur.

15.3 Language and Identity Issues

15.3.1 Awareness of Group Identity
It was not by any design that the three major racial groups of Malays, Chinese, and
Indians were worlds apart from one another in terms of language, belief, and value
systems. Each had its own traditions and was rooted within those traditions before
their members came in contact with one another on the Malayan soil. The divide and
rule cum divide and educate policy of the British colonial government however
emphasized the division.
In the early days of the settlement of the Peninsula by immigrant groups, each
group went its own way without causing discomfort to the other. To the native
Malays, the presence of others had never been a problem, as long as their simple socio-
economic life as farmers, Wshermen, and craftsmen was not disturbed, and there was
no threat to their possession of their land. The Malay language did not contain
derogatory labels or negative metaphors used to disparage other ethnic groups, and
the actual concept of identity itself did not exist in the language prior to the 1960s
when Malay Wnally borrowed the term from English. Following this, in the 1990s
Indonesia coined the term jati diri, a combination of jati (Sanskrit, meaning ‘genuine’)
and diri (Malay, meaning ‘self ’), which is now used as a synonym to identity.
However, during the twentieth century accentuation and highlighting of the
diVerences among Malaya’s ethnic groups began to gradually engender feelings of
‘us’ against ‘them’, and this fomented inter-group animosity, particularly between the
Malays and the Chinese. Seeds of this animosity initially began to grow from the 1930s
with the formation of Malay nationalistic movements, many of which registered
themselves as language and literary associations as well as Islamic associations,
warning Malays of the danger of being displaced by the immigrant population if
they did not improve their socio-economic status and Wght their cause.
The search for a bigger group of ‘us’ subsequently spread to and found inspiration
from neighbouring Indonesia. The rise of nationalism in Indonesia and the success of
the Indonesians in uniting all the islands hitherto under Dutch rule gave the Malays an
encouragement to ‘recapture’ their own motherland, which seemed to be slipping
 Malaysia and Brunei 345

away from under their eyes. The earliest stimulus in the Malays’ awareness of
themselves as a political, not just a racial group came when Soekarno (later President
Soekarno of Indonesia) and his colleagues succeeded in bringing members of the
nationalist movements of the Indonesian islands to take the pledge known as Sumpah
Pemuda (Youths’ Pledge) on 28 October 1928, in Jakarta. It was a three-pronged pledge
which in essence was an assertion from those who made it that they belonged to one
people – the Indonesian people (bangsa Indonesia), with one motherland – Indonesia
(tanah air Indonesia), and that they spoke one language of unity (bahasa persatuan) –
bahasa Indonesia (the Indonesian language). Although the Malays before this were
never fanatical about their language, the Indonesian Sumpah Pemuda gave them an
idea of the role that language could play in forging them as a strongly coherent group
as well as in giving an identity to a new Malaya, where all the races could be united
through a single language. The Malays were also intrigued by Indonesia’s selection of
bazaar Malay as their language of unity, because this Indonesian variety of Malay was
essentially a pidginized one (see Simpson, this volume, chapter 14). The great Malay
linguist, Zainal Abidin bin Ahmad, better known by his pen-name Za’ba, who had
been writing since the early part of the twentieth century had continually warned the
Malays not to adopt the ‘market Malay’ of the Indonesians, but to stick to their
tradition of using reWned Malay.
A common targeted identity factor for the Malays was therefore found, and this was
that Malays should habitually speak the Malay language. This property of habitually
speaking Malay (applicable also for those who did not necessarily have Malay as their
mother tongue or primary language), coupled with professing the religion of Islam
and leading a Malay way of life (which people Wnd diYcult to deWne) became the
necessary ingredients in the deWnition of the Malay (people) in the formulation of the
Federation of Malaya Constitution in 1956, just before independence on 31 August
1957 (Omar 1979, 2003, 2004a). When Malaysia was formed in 1963, this deWnition
was maintained, and has been so maintained ever since. This means that to be a Malay
and to be protected by the constitution in terms of preserving Malay rights (such as in
land ownership, qualifying for scholarships for further studies, etc.), one has to
manifest all the three identity factors enshrined in the constitution. By this deWnition,
the term Malay in modern-day Malaya/Malaysia is more of a cultural rather than an
ethnic concept. Malay as a category now is an open group which admits anyone from
any other group (Chinese, Indian, European, etc.) as long as he or she displays all
three critical identity factors. The other indigenous groups of Malaysia such as those
in Sabah and Sarawak are not automatically considered as Malays, unless they are seen
as having the three key properties referred to in the deWnition of the Malay in the
country’s constitution.1

1
However, all the indigenous groups of Malaysia including the aborigines and the Malays are
automatically grouped together in a larger category known as bumiputera (sons and daughters of the
land) which also includes inhabitants of Malaysia of early Portuguese and Siamese descent.
346 A. H. Omar

The Malaysian deWnition of the Malay is not shared by Brunei, where all the
indigenous groups present in the state are deWned as belonging to the Malay race.
The majority of these are indeed Muslim Malays like those in Malaysia, and these are
deWned as Muslim Malays to diVerentiate them from non-Muslim indigenous peoples.
All Brunei’s public policies are guided by its philosophy of governance known as
Melayu-Islam-Beraja (abbreviated as MIB), literally Malay-Islam-Monarchy, meaning
that it is an Islamic Malay monarchy. What is meant by Malay in MIB is a Malay
person who speaks the Malay language, professes Islam, and leads a Malay way of life,
hence a deWnition identical with that of the Malay in the Malaysian constitution. In
Singapore, the Malays are deWned according to ethnicity and language, without any
reference to religion.

15.3.2 The Quest for National Identity: The Great Bargain

Before British intervention in the Malay Peninsula, the Malays lived in their separate
little kingdoms owing allegiance to their Sultans, and there were nine of these
altogether, ruling with their circles of lords and tribal chiefs. Over the centuries the
British managed to draw the Malay territories under their inXuence, engaging with
the sultan of each state separately. In 1948 this culminated in the formation of the
Federation of Malaya, with each state maintaining its own government but subject to
the policies determined by the Federal Government with its headquarters in Kuala
Lumpur. The uniWcation of the Malay states in 1948 for the Wrst time at the oYcial
level proved motivation enough for the Malays to subsequently Wght for independence
as a nation, and as history records, the Malays sought the co-operation of the Chinese
and the Indians to Wght for this as a common cause.
The winning of Malayan independence turned out to be a triumph of negotiation,
not armed conXict. In the new nation, the Malays wanted to see their native rights
preserved: landownership, their religion, the rule of Malay monarchy through their
sultans, Malay language and custom. While the Malays wanted the non-Malays to
recognize all this, and at the same time preserve their own primordial heritage be it
from China or India, they also wanted the latter to co-operate in giving the country
the image of a Malay nation. The Malays were not willing to forge a nation which
reXected anything other than being part of the Malay world, and such an image was
Wrmly embedded in language, namely the Malay language, which had already been
used as a lingua franca by all the groups in Malaysia.
Malay was therefore chosen as the one and only national language, but not without
signiWcant bargaining. The non-Malays had their own ideas about the choice, and
were not in favour of a monolingual national language policy. Non-Malay groups
suggested having four oYcial languages, Malay, English, Mandarin, and Tamil, each
with its own script, a practice that they were already familiar with in their dealings
with the colonial government. Others suggested that the choice be narrowed down to
only two: Malay and English. A major fear among the non-Malays in accepting Malay
 Malaysia and Brunei 347

as the one and only national language was that they would be automatically
disadvantaged in certain important domains of communication, knowledge of
Malay among non-Malays being widely restricted to a basic competence in pidgi-
n(ized) Malay at the time of independence. For the Malays, however, the designation
of a language as the national language of Malaysia was seen as a highly important,
symbolic act, expressing the sovereignty of the newly independent nation, and there
was no question of having any other language imported from outside their native
world to be placed on a par with the language of their choice, let alone usurp its
position. If that happened, Malaya in their eyes would no longer retain its position as a
Malay nation. Potentially putting English side by side with Malay on an equal national
language footing was also unacceptable for the simple reason that it was a colonial
language with negative associations in addition to having a foreign origin. An
exoglossic choice for national language was therefore out of the question for the
Malay population.2
Malay also appeared to be the natural choice for national language for various
reasons other than being the mother tongue of the Malays. First of all, the language
projected a sense of history from within the land itself and was not a language
transported from outside. Secondly and connected to the Wrst factor was that Malay
had had a long tradition of being the language of the successful empires that had ruled
insular Southeast Asia, and a wealth of Wne literature.
As negotiations continued, unending squabbles between Malaya’s racial groups
ended up delaying the granting of independence by the British government, until
UMNO, the Malay political party which had spearheaded the Wght for independence,
oVered a solution in what is now commonly known as ‘the Bargain’, an agreement
which related to the granting of citizenship to non-Malays in the country. It was noted
that for the Wrst Wfty years of the twentieth century approximately a million new
immigrants had entered the country, but less than 10 per cent of the total immigrant
population were actually citizens in the years leading up to independence. To qualify
as a citizen, an immigrant settler had to furnish proof of his residence in the country,
provide proof of his good conduct, and pass a simple Malay language test. While most
of the non-Malays could get through the Wrst two provisions, they found the language
test a real obstacle, hence a great majority had to content themselves with remaining
as non-citizens. The Bargain outlined by UMNO was that of the principle of jus soli,
citizenship by birth. According to this principle, all non-Malays born in Malaya on or
after the date of independence would automatically become Malayan citizens. This
was an oVer made by the Malay leadership to non-Malays on condition that the latter
accept Malay as the national language and recognize the special rights and privileges
of the Malays as natives of the land. The oVer and its acceptance in turn facilitated
the writing of the National Language Act, Article 152, in the Constitution of the
2
As was, also, the possibility of designating the pidginized variety of Malay as the national language,
despite the fact that this was understood all over the country. Only non-pidginized Malay was seen as
being qualiWed to fulWl the symbolic role of serving as the country’s national language.
348 A. H. Omar

Federation of Malaya. When the Borneo British territories, Sabah and Sarawak,
became part of Malaysia in 1963, the National Language Act was amended accord-
ingly to include them.
Independence and the oVer of citizenship by birth for recognition of the central
place of the Malay language in Malaya reXected a critical way of thinking in the minds
of the Malays: that language was their soul and the soul of the nation as contained in
their slogan Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa (language is the soul of the nation). This slogan has
since become the motto of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of National
Language), established in 1956, a year before independence, to implement all policies
concerning the development, use, and usage of the national language. The import-
ance of the national language as a symbol of the sovereignty of the nation is echoed in
many other slogans to the same eVect. It has become part of the belief system of the
Malays that they have to uphold the language come what may, because in it rests their
whole ethos and standing as a race and as a nation. It is believed that if language
progresses, so will the people.
The stance of the Brunei Malays with regard to the Malay language has always been
similar to that of their counterparts in Malaysia. However, they did not Wnd them-
selves in the position of needing to negotiate with a signiWcant non-Malay population
when making their choice of national language at independence in 1985, and there has
never been a principle akin to that of jus soli in Brunei.

15.3.3 Allocation of Language Use: Accommodation and Preservation

of Ethnic Identity
A monolingual national language policy is widely considered as important for the
forging of a united nation. This is tied to the belief that speaking in one and the same
language has the potential to bind a multiracial population together, a belief which in
Malaya/Malaysia has been more Wrmly held among the Malays than among the
country’s other ethnic groups. The situation in neighbouring Indonesia, in which all
the country’s ethnic groups have accepted Malay as the national language without
protest has been cited as the ideal goal that Malaysians themselves should have tried to
aim for. However, apart from Malaysia and Indonesia having an indigenous popula-
tion with the same basic ethnic origins, every other aspect in the demography and the
social, economic, and political life of the Indonesians and Malaysians was quite
dissimilar. Consequently, the ‘idolization’ of Indonesia among Malays in Malaysia
only went as far as admiration of the success Indonesia enjoyed with its selection of
Malay as the country’s national language.
While Malay became established as the national language of Malaysia, there has
been (and still is) also signiWcant recognition of the importance of English, and to a
lesser extent, of the other languages of Malaysia. In the Constitution of 1957, where
Malay was enshrined as the national language, Malay together with English were
simultaneously recognized as the two oYcial languages of Malaya for a period of ten
 Malaysia and Brunei 349

years following independence, after which it was planned that English would be
phased out as an oYcial language, leaving Malay as the only national and oYcial
language. This provision relating to English was maintained when the constitution
was further revised with the formation of Malaysia in 1963.
In Malaysia, as in various other countries, a clear distinction is made between the
roles of a national and an oYcial language. A national language is seen as one that
gives identity to the country as a sovereign nation and is the language of the national
anthem, while an oYcial language is one that is designated for use in oYcial
situations, such as oYcial ceremonies of the government, in debates in Parliament
and the Senate as well as in the state legislative assemblies, and is used as the language
of administration in government departments and statutory bodies. The ‘grace
period’ for the use of English as an oYcial language ended in Peninsular Malaysia
in 1967. However, a dispensation was made for the continued use of English in the law
courts in the interest of justice. This arose from the fact that the judges and the
lawyers were trained in the United Kingdom and were more capable of conducting
trials in English than in Malay, and had to use interpreters when clients could not
understand English. It was only in 1982, twenty-Wve years after independence, that the
Lower Courts started to hold their trials in Malay. The High Courts took a slower
pace, and English still seems to be the preferred language of trials in these courts.
The use of English as an oYcial language alongside Malay for ten years after
independence was also incorporated in the constitution when the states of Sabah
and Sarawak on the island of Borneo joined Malaya in the Federation of Malaysia.
Sabah was able to conform to the provision of the constitution such that from
September 1973, the situation as far as oYcial language use was concerned was in
line with that of Peninsular Malaysia. Sarawak through its Legislative Council man-
aged to postpone the implementation of the oYcial language policy using Malay in all
oYcial situations until 1985, that is, twenty-two years after independence within
Malaysia.
Considering the situation in the law courts and the drafting of Malaysian laws and
regulations, English has never really been phased out as an oYcial language. Although
towards the end of 1990s, more and more laws and regulations began to be drafted in
Malay, there has always been the requirement that all important government docu-
ments have to have an English language version as well. And this special position of
English is more accentuated in private businesses, especially in the Wnancial sector, as
well as in the professions such as engineering, medicine, dentistry, etc. (Omar 1992,
1995, 1996; Said and Ng 1997).
At the same time, the other languages of Malaysia have continued to function
within their own speciWc communities. For example, Chinese merchants and shop-
keepers continue to use Chinese in carrying out their business, and Tamil-speaking
Indians do likewise with Tamil.
Earlier, during the colonial period, all government circulars to the people and all
the notice boards used to be written in four languages, using four diVerent scripts:
350 A. H. Omar

English with its Roman script, Malay with its Jawi script, and Chinese and Tamil with
their own separate scripts. When Malay became the national and oYcial language, the
script chosen for it was the Roman script, and this has been incorporated in the
constitution. SacriWcing the Jawi script which has been part of the Malay identity
since the fourteenth century was seen as a step towards accommodating non-Malays
in the country, so that they would Wnd the language easier to learn and accept it as the
national language of the whole country. The Jawi script with its special calligraphy
now remains as a cultural trait speciWc only to the Malays, and is not used as a
medium for public writing of the national language when directed at all citizens of the
nation.
Despite the fact that Malay is now the only oYcial language of the country, English,
Mandarin, and Tamil are freely permitted for use on signboards in commercial centres
and in advertisements, though there is a rule which states that prominence in terms of
size of the script made use of should be given to the national language. All the four
languages furthermore have their own newspapers, and the government channels in
Radio and Television Malaysia provide programming in all four languages.

15.3.4 Planning for National Identity Through Language in Education

It had been realized even before independence that for a national language policy to
succeed as an instrument in the forging of a national identity, it was necessary for it to
be used as a medium of instruction in educational programmes attended by all groups
of the population. In 1956 a committee known as the Committee for Education was
set up to recommend a system of education for independent Malaya. This committee
was more popularly known as the Razak Committee after its chairman, Abdul Razak
Hussain, who was to become Malaysia’s second Prime Minister. A signiWcant recom-
mendation of this Committee was the setting up of a national system of education
which would use Malay as the main medium of instruction, and also make use of a
common core syllabus. As a start it recommended the extension of Malay-medium
schools to secondary-level education. At the same time the Report of the Committee
for Education stressed the fact that the changes to the existing system should be
eVected gradually, bearing in mind the sensitivities of the non-Malay groups, who
would continue to enjoy the right of using their own ethnic languages.
Beginning from 1957 there existed two streams of education using a common core
syllabus from the primary to the Higher School CertiWcate level, one using English
(the already existing English schools) and the other using Malay. The schools using
Malay were named ‘national schools’, and all other schools came to be known as
‘national-type schools’, hence, national-type English schools, national-type Chinese
schools, and national-type Tamil schools.
Adjustment in the medium of instruction also had to be made in universities to
accommodate Malay-medium students whose only opportunity for a full tertiary
education in the national language was previously in a Malay Studies programme. For
 Malaysia and Brunei 351

other subjects, especially in the sciences, they still had to grapple with English which
they learned as a subject while in school.
In the period following independence, the forging of a national identity through
the attempted strengthening of the use of the national language in education still
seemed far from being achieved, however. The Malay-medium stream was almost
wholly populated by just Malays, and the populations of the English schools and of the
other national-type schools remained as they were in the days before independence. It
was obvious that the national education policy was doing very little to bring the races
together, and acceptance of the national language was seen only in getting a pass in
the diVerent levels of proWciency required for promotion to certain ranks in the
government service.

15.3.5 Racial Riots, the Sedition Act, and Renaming the National Language
While the Malay population in the 1960s seemed to believe in and be striving towards
the creation of a national identity facilitated by a common national language, such a
commitment was not obviously shared by the non-Malays. In debates over national
policies whether among politicians or academics, the special rights and privileges of
the Malays as well as the use of the national language were regularly brought up as
topics of discussion and complaint, and these two themes were perennially major
bones of contention among non-Malays. On the other hand, the Malays themselves
appeared very despondent over their socio-economic inferiority when compared to
the non-Malays, especially the Chinese. Mistrust towards one another led to conXicts
in the market places and in May 1969 this gave rise to the most serious ever racial
conXict in the country’s history, beginning on 13 May, and lasting for over a week. The
communal violence which is now referred to as the May 13 Incident led to the
suspension of Parliament and for twenty-one months Malaysia was ruled by a
committee known as the National Operations Council (NOC) chaired by the Deputy
Prime Minister, Tun Abdul Razak Hussain.
It was during the rule of the NOC that the important New Economic Policy was
formulated with a two-pronged objective: to eradicate poverty and to restructure
society in the country. The Sedition Act was also amended in a signiWcant way to
make it illegal to criticize constitutional clauses relating to Malay special rights, the
national language, the Sultanate, and the citizenship rights of the non-Malay com-
munities (T. A. Rahman 1984: 8). It was additionally during the administration of the
NOC that the nomenclature of the national language was changed to bahasa Malaysia
(language of Malaysia) from bahasa Melayu (language of the Malays). The idea behind
such a change was to give the language a more ‘national Xavour’, as it had been
argued by dissenters that the national language was really just the language of the
Malays, not of the Malaysians in general. In connection with this name change, there
was the local precedent of Indonesia which had taken (a form of ) Malay and renamed
it bahasa Indonesia (language of Indonesia), thereby apparently winning greater
352 A. H. Omar

acceptance for it as the national language of Indonesia. By renaming the national

language in Malaysia it was hoped that parties hitherto averse to accepting bahasa
Melayu as the national language would Wnd it easier to identify themselves with bahasa
Malaysia as the language of the whole country/the Malaysians, and not just the
Malays. This name change was never incorporated into the constitution, however,
and the oYcial name as far as the constitution goes has always been Malay (bahasa
Melayu). It can also be noted that thirty years after the May 13 Incident, when the
position of the national language had become fully stable as oYcial language as well as
the main language medium in education, the term Malay (bahasa Melayu) has
resurfaced, spearheaded by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, with the argument that
the oYcial name as recognized by the constitution was indeed bahasa Melayu, not
bahasa Malaysia. So far there has not been any protest against the renewed use of the
term Malay/bahasa Melayu.

15.3.6 New Education Policy and Wider Use of National Language

In time it became obvious that extension of the Malay-medium schools to a full
programme of primary followed by secondary education paralleling that of English-
medium education did not do much to bring the children of the diVerent races
together. The disparity in academic achievement between students attending the
English stream of education and those attending the Malay stream was most apparent.
A solution had to be found to bridge the gap, and what was attempted was a phasing
out of the English schools to become (Malay-medium) national schools. This was
done very gradually beginning with the Wrst school year in 1971, which saw the
teaching of all Primary I subjects through Malay in all English-medium schools.
A schedule for the change in the language medium according to subjects and class
levels was carefully laid out by the Ministry of Education and a programme in the
retraining of teachers was also mounted at the same time. At the end of 1976, students
in the arts stream had to sit for the Malaysian CertiWcate of Education Examinations
fully in Malay. The science stream was two years behind in the full use of Malay in the
teaching of its courses.
In converting the English schools to Malay-medium national schools, the original
national goal of having schools with a common core syllabus and a common language
of instruction was Wnally realized. Students in the schools and the universities from all
ethnic backgrounds now became immersed in the national language together and
used Malay as a common means of inter-ethnic communication, and competition for
jobs among graduates was no longer related to whether they were from English or
Malay-medium schools but simply on their performance after undergoing the same
strand of education.
The English schools were chosen for conversion into national schools for two
reasons. Firstly, from the primary right to the higher secondary level they followed the
curriculum provided by the Ministry of Education in the same way as the national
 Malaysia and Brunei 353

schools, and there was a continuity for them at the tertiary level. Secondly, the English
schools were not formally identiWed with any particular ethno-linguistic community
(though a great majority of their students were in fact Chinese), so the issue of
disadvantaging any speciWc ethnic group by their discontinuance did not really arise.
The other two groups of national-type schools, the Chinese and the Tamil, were
left undisturbed in their use of Chinese/Tamil in the teaching of their school subjects,
though the curriculum of each has to conform to that prescribed by the Ministry of
Education. In this way, the ethnic rights of the Chinese and the Tamils were seen to be
safeguarded, and there was no hindrance to these groups perpetuating their ethnic
identity through educational means.
The national language also received much important government support for its
development as a language of academia. A rigorous corpus planning programme was
mounted in 1972 with the setting up of the Language Council of Malaysia and
Indonesia (Majlis Bahasa Indonesia-Malaysia or MBIM for short, Omar 2004b), because
from the policy makers’ point of view the development of the Malay language to
suit its role as a language of the sciences in the years to come had to be in tandem with
the growth and development of bahasa Indonesia. Prior to the setting up of the
Council, there had been very little exchange of scholarly materials between Malaysia
and Indonesia, mainly due to the language barrier that existed at this level. The
Malaysian academicians had been using English, while the Indonesians used bahasa
Indonesia. And when the Malaysians had come round to writing in Malay, the terms
they used were based on English sources while those used by the Indonesians were
based on Dutch and on new coinages which had a heavy inXuence from Sanskrit.
The MBIM subsequently worked to bridge the information and the conceptual-
cognitive gap between Malaysian and Indonesian academicians and professionals.
Their Wrst achievement was in the standardization of the spelling systems in use in
the two countries, as each country had previously followed the tradition of spelling
taught by their diVerent colonial occupiers. Since 1972 there has now been a common
system for the writing of the shared national languages of Indonesia and Malaysia.3
With a revised system of spelling in place, the Council moved on to working on
guidelines for the coining and borrowing of technical terms, the compiling of
dictionaries of technical terms, and other related projects. Time-tested traditions
and also the need to preserve national identity have always been important factors
in discussions between Malaysia and Indonesia on the standardization of technical
vocabulary. However, this was to a certain extent assisted in the early days of détente
between Malaysia and Indonesia by the latter’s willingness to use English sources for
technical terms, rather than Dutch ones.

3
Though it was not possible to achieve complete uniformity as each side wished to preserve certain
aspects of its own history of traditions and identity. However, diVerences in the spelling of bahasa Malaysia
and bahasa Indonesia were reduced to so few that this no longer hinders close linguistic co-operation
between the two countries.
354 A. H. Omar

In 1985, after having obtained independence from British rule, Brunei Darussalam
joined the Language Council, which motivated its renaming as Majlis Bahasa
Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia (MABBIM), that is, Language Council of Brunei
Darussalam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. With its use of Malay as a language of govern-
ance alongside English, and its similar approach to language use in education,
Brunei’s presence in MABBIM did not add a new stance in the planning of technical
terms and related issues, and in many aspects of corpus planning Brunei is able to
identify itself closely with Malaysia. The coming together of the three Malay nations
in developing their common language has therefore been an important landmark in
the social history of the Malay language.

15.3.7 Losing English and the Recovery Procedure

With the New Education Policy, the role of English in Malaysia is placed in a clearer
framework in the life of the nation. No longer an oYcial language in government
administration, although to a certain extent used oYcially in courts of law and
widely in the professions, English has now been given the role of ‘second most
important language’, second only to the national language. In reality it had always
been playing this role, but the role had never previously been explicitly stated in
formal circles in view of the sensitivities relating to the position of the national
language.
With the demise of the English schools, English in the education system came to be
taught only as a subject, and as such was no longer seen as a rival to the national
language in education. Recognizing and highlighting its continued de facto role in daily
life in Malaysia in the 1970s was in a way a desensitization and distancing of its colonial
past. And with the continued importance of English duly spelt out, all schools in
Malaysia no matter what category they belong to now have to teach English as a
compulsory subject, and students have to take examinations in English. This means
that in the national schools students have to deal with two languages, Malay and
English. On the other hand, those in the national-type schools are faced with three
languages: Mandarin or Tamil (as primary medium of instruction), and Malay and
English as compulsory school subjects.
The label ‘second most important language’ has now been truncated to ‘second
language’, an act which confuses applied linguists because English had never been
treated as a second language in the school curriculum, that is, in being a medium of
teaching some of the school subjects, and has instead just been taught as a subject on a
par with other subjects such as history, geography, etc. Applied linguists would be
more likely to refer to English in Malaysia as a foreign language, similar to its status in
Indonesia and Thailand. However, such a way of referring to English did not sit well
with Malaysians, who may feel oVended to be identiWed as inhabitants of an EFL
(English as Foreign Language) country. To most Malaysians Malaysia has always been
an ESL (English as a Second Language) country.
 Malaysia and Brunei 355

At the same time that the national language policy was being successfully imple-
mented in the schools and universities and students of all ethnic backgrounds were
becoming more proWcient in Malay, a linguistic deWcit also appeared in the form of a
decline in proWciency in the English language. A majority of Malaysian university
graduates were found to be unable to express themselves in English, and the private
sector, especially the multinational Wrms, became reluctant to employ them. A
popular remark on the subject was that a whole generation of Malaysians had lost
the English language. However, this is actually a misrepresentation of the situation.
The generation that could speak English well before English was ‘lost’ due to the
national language policy consisted for the greater part of non-Malays. The generation
that has experienced, as it were, a loss of (or failure to acquire) the English language
consists of all Malaysia’s ethnic groups.
At the beginning, the attempted ‘recovery’ of the English language was a procedure
that was not in any way detrimental to the interests of the national language as a
medium of instruction. English language teachers and teacher trainers were brought
in from the United Kingdom to help recover proWciency in English among the
Malaysian population, and English language campaigns were held, reminiscent
of the national language campaigns in the early days of independence. In 1990,
Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who had been Prime Minister since 1982, announced to
the people his public philosophy for Malaysia in a paper entitled The Way Forward,
originally a speech given to the Malaysian Business Council, and then to academics.
The speech contained his vision for a prosperous and united Malaysia. According to
his vision, Malaysia would become a fully industrialized nation by the year 2020
(Mahathir’s ‘Vision 2020’). Malaysia should not remain a consumer of the world’s
technology and great discovery, but should also be a contributor to the scientiWc and
technological civilization of the future. In his belief that for the Malaysians to be
good scientists they should be Xuent in English, in December 1993 Dr. Mahathir
announced the Malaysian Cabinet’s decision to allow universities to teach mathemat-
ics and science as well as science-based courses in English.4 This caused a mixed
reaction among Malaysia’s academics: although the professors were well able to
deliver their lectures in English, there were doubts in the ability of the students in
general to understand lectures given in English. The policy was nevertheless imple-
mented. However, because progress did not reach the level that had been expected
and hoped for, at the close of 2002 Dr. Mahathir announced a major change in the
language policy in schools, declaring that with the opening of the school year 2003, all
schools in Malaysia, national and national-type, primary and secondary, would teach
all their science and mathematics subjects through the medium of English. In making
such a dramatic switch there was no step-by-step or year-by-year changeover schedule
as was the case when the English schools were converted into Malay-medium national

4
Mahathir’s stand on the importance of English for Malaysia was actually Wrst made known before he
became a minister in the government, and has been consistent ever since (Mahathir 1994).
356 A. H. Omar

schools. Nor was there any warning given to teachers, parents, textbook writers, and
publishers on the change that was suddenly to come. Teachers instead experienced
hands-on on-the-job training in teaching these subjects in English and retired teachers
Xuent in English were brought back to teach in the schools. Textbooks were written as
the teaching proceeded.
As the result of such a policy, there is now no longer any single-language-medium
school in Malaysia. All the national schools are bilingual, and all the national-type
schools are trilingual. At the time of the initial change, there were protests from all
sides. The most vehement came from the Chinese, especially the Chinese Teachers’
Association. Their protests were based on the belief that Chinese culture was being
eroded and this was set to be heightened further by the new language policy
in education. At Wrst the Chinese stand was supported by one of the political
parties, the Gerakan, which is a component in the National Front, the big umbrella
party that comprises almost every ethnic group in Malaysia, and which has ruled
Malaysia since independence. The argument put forward was that to the Chinese
mathematics is understood better in the Chinese language with their tradition of
using the abacus. However, the protestations came to no avail.5 To the Indians, the
policy was greeted as a positive development for the national-type Tamil schools
which were and still are undergoing a decline in number of students as a majority
of Indians prefer to go to the national schools.
The Malays registered their unhappiness over the policy as it went against what
they had fought for from the time of preparing the country for independence through
subsequent eVorts to develop the language as a universal medium of instruction in the
national education system. However, the protests were localized; they were centred in
the precincts of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the guardian of the Malay language.
The populace at large seemed to accept the assurances given by the government that
the policy was for the good of everybody, especially the Malays. If in the past the
Malay slogan was Hidup Bahasa, Hidup Bangsa (If the language thrives, so will the
nation), Dr. Mahathir’s solution was Hidup Bangsa, Hidup Bahasa (If the nation thrives,
so will its language). The latter continually stressed that the Malaysian nation and the
Malay race would only survive if they equipped themselves with modern knowledge
and this could only realistically be achieved through attaining a higher level of
proWciency in English.6 Furthermore, the survival of the Malays as a signiWcant

5
With regard to the idea of whether Chinese culture has undergone erosion over the years in Malaysia,
it can be noted that many urban Chinese and particularly those living in Kuala Lumpur have now adopted
English as their Wrst language, with this having natural eVects on the maintenance of traditional Chinese
culture.
6
With the use of English as a medium of instruction in the universities, Malaysia has also been able to
attract students from all over the world to study in its universities, and branches of foreign universities
have been set up in Malaysia to cater to students from the Asian region. Among these are branches of
the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom), Monash University (Australia), and Curtin University
(Australia).
 Malaysia and Brunei 357

power in the country through improvement of their socio-economic status would in

turn also ensure the continued existence of their language as the national and oYcial
language.

15.3.8 The Brunei Language Policy

Brunei’s history as a Muslim Malay Sultanate dates back to the fourteenth century
when it occupied more geographical space than it does now. Part of its empire which
was present-day Sarawak was given to a British adventurer of fortune, Charles Brooke,
in the nineteenth century in return for the latter’s help to ward oV piracy along the
coastal areas of the region. In 1906, Brunei became a British protectorate, just like the
other sultanates in the Malay Peninsula.
As mentioned earlier, with British intervention in Brunei, the institution of school
education there became almost a carbon copy of that found in Malaya. In 1959, when
Brunei was still a British protectorate, it had its Wrst ever written constitution, which
speciWed Malay as its national language. Brunei’s eVort to develop the Malay language
along the same lines as in Malaysia were manifested in the establishment of a
language development agency in 1961, now known as Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka,
after the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in Kuala Lumpur. From that time, Malay became
a language of administration in Brunei side by side with English, with eVorts made to
gradually replace English in this domain.
In the education system during British rule, there were Malay and English schools
and also one or two Chinese schools. However, young males of noble families and
those with scholarships were sent to Malaya for their education. In Brunei itself,
English-medium education was available to children who had undergone six years of
primary education in Malay. English schools were built by the private sector in the
1930s after the development of the oilWelds, and the Wrst government English school
was constructed only in 1952.
In 1959, the Brunei government commissioned two Malayan education experts to
re-examine the education policy and to make recommendations on the content of
education in Brunei schools. These two, Aminuddin Baki and Paul Chang, came up
with the Report of the Education Commission, also known as the Aminuddin Baki–
Paul Chang Report, which recommended, among other things, the setting up of a
national system of education for children of all races in Brunei, which would use
Malay as the main medium of instruction. This recommendation was reminiscent of
the Malayan Razak Report of 1956. However, the recommendations in the Aminuddin
Baki–Paul Chang Report were never implemented. In 1972, another Education
Commission was set up, and the recommendations in terms of language allocation
were more speciWc: it was suggested that Malay should be made the main medium of
instruction in national primary and secondary schools as soon as possible in line with
the requirements of the constitution, and that the standard of English in the primary
and secondary schools should be raised (Jumat 1992).
358 A. H. Omar

Brunei achieved her full independence from Britain on 1 January 1984, and a new
education policy was instituted at the beginning of 1985, in the form of the Education
System of Negara Brunei Darussalam, which has been in implementation to this day.
The policy provides for a single system of education in which Malay and English are
languages of instruction for all schools. The provision of this system is that in the Wrst
three years of primary education, instruction in all the subjects is given in Malay,
except for the English language class. From Primary IV right through to the A-Level,
subjects are taught in English and Malay with the following allocation: English
language and all the academic subjects comprising mathematics, science, history,
geography, economics, principles of accounts, and any technical subjects are taught
in English; Malay as a medium of instruction is used in teaching the Malay language,
Malay literature, Islamic knowledge, civics, arts and handicraft, and physical educa-
tion. This allocation of language use is also reXected in the university, Universiti
Brunei Darussalam, the only university in the country. Degrees in Malay and Islamic
Studies can be taken wholly in Malay, but for all other programmes the language of
instruction and examination is English ( Jones 1992, Ozog 1992).
When Brunei instituted its bilingual policy in education in 1985 this was not well
received by hard-core nationalists who had wanted Malay to be the main medium of
education. However, the government emphasized that Brunei as a small country
could not aVord to isolate itself from the rest of the world through not encouraging
a knowledge of English among its citizens. The use of English in Brunei is therefore
conceived of as primarily instrumental in nature, and is not felt to deprive Bruneians
of the emotion and love that they feel for their country. It is widely accepted that the
importance of Malay should never be seen to be compromised by the encroachment
of other languages, as encapsulated in the country’s public philosophy of Melayu Islam
Beraja (Malay–Islam–Monarchy), the three pillars of the Brunei nation.
Historically, Brunei has had the advantage of watching and studying the policies of
its neighbours, especially Malaysia, in the choice of language in the education of its
people. Although in the early days Brunei shared a common ethos with Malaysia, it
was fortunate in being able to identify the steps that Malaysia had taken that might
not beneWt the Brunei people. This led Brunei into embarking on a full-swing
bilingual policy right from the beginning of its independence. Another ‘pitfall’ that
Brunei has been able to avoid concerns avoiding the loss of the traditional Jawi script
for Malay. In Brunei this has been retained as one of the two oYcial scripts for writing
the national language, the other one being the Roman script.

15.4 Conclusion
Concern for identity exists at all levels of the society, and this concern often surfaces
when a particular group feels its existence threatened by others. In the Malaysian
situation, national identity had its origins within the Malay ethnic group when the
Malays belonging to separate little kingdoms on the Malay peninsula began to think
 Malaysia and Brunei 359

of themselves as belonging to a single ethnic group collectively dominated by a foreign

colonial power, the British. And this stance and the nurturing of a sense of belonging
together with those who share the same distinctive ethnicity had an infectious eVect;
it Xowed on to the other ethnic groups present in Malaya, later Malaysia.
OYcial Malaysian government policy has never strived to obstruct the growth and
development of ethnic identity. In fact considerable assistance is given by the govern-
ment for the diVerent racial groups to nurture and perpetuate their separate cultural
traits, including their linguistic heritage. Cultural diversity is considered a signiWcant
asset to the country. Whilst supporting such diversity at the sub-national level, the
overall identity of the nation and the identiWcation of all racial groups with a single
national image has been promoted through oYcial endorsement of one common
language as the main medium of everyday communication in the nation. This was the
idealized picture and goal right from the beginning, stemming from the Malay belief
that a national language is the soul of the nation, and that the growth of a shared
national language is possible only in the common use of a single language, unopposed
by other languages at the level of national communication. Socio-economic develop-
ments in the country and processes of globalization especially in the area of education
and technology subsequently motivated a change in mindset and it came to be
believed that the national language, Malay, could maintain its critical position as the
single most important symbolic embodiment of national identity, even if certain
linguistic space was ceded to another language for use in various oYcial and formal
domains, notably English. The acceptance of English as a language having pragmatic
usefulness in formal domains has subsequently been made in Malaysia, paralleling the
situation in Brunei.
The concept of national identity and its construction and maintenance is important
not only for the value it has in potentially giving a sense of belonging to diVerent
racial groups in multi-ethnic nations such as Malaysia, but also for the projection of
the image of a nation relative to other nations. In Malaysia there is a feeling that the
nation has to show to her southern neighbour Indonesia that she too has a sense of
pride in a linguistic identity that is indigenous to the land. Upholding Malay is a
manifestation of this sense of pride, especially in the face of criticisms from Indonesia
in the early days of the implementation of the national language policy that Malaysia’s
progress was over-slow. According the status of ‘second most important language’ to
English and converting national schools into bilingual schools did not come to pass
without brotherly, though unsavoury comments from Indonesia. However, Malaysia,
like Brunei, is in full control of what she wants for her people, and national identity
receives its deWnition and direction from the people of a nation themselves, not from
others.
 16
The Philippines
Andrew Gonzalez, FSC

16.1 Introduction: a National Language in Search of a Nation

The Director of the Philippines Institute of National Language from 1955 to 1969,
Jose Villa Panganiban, a person who had dedicated his entire life to the development
of the national language of his country, is recorded to have lamented, as he lay dying,
that Pilipino (the name of the national language at the time) was ‘a language in
search of a people (or a nation)’.1 In more prosaic language, what the late director
was lamenting was the fact that it seemed that in spite of decades of work by the
Institute of National Language (the oYcial development agency for the selection,
standardization, propagation, and cultivation of the national language), the national
language had not yet been accepted by the people of the Philippines at large
(Gonzalez 1980).
As a more general observation on societal patterns in the Philippines the journalist
James Fallows (1987: 49–52) has described the Philippines as suVering from ‘a dam-
aged culture’, a collocation not much appreciated by educated Filipinos who read the
account, but expressing a view which has been echoed elsewhere, in much of its
basics, in other broad characterizations of life in the Philippines, as, for example, the
Japanese anthropologist Yasushi Kikuchi’s less direct and more diplomatic (1991)
description of the Philippines as a country not having attained ‘a crystallized culture’.
It seems that in trying to understand the Philippines and the slow rate of develop-
ment it has achieved in spite of its natural resources and the educational level and
personalism of its people, one route of explanation is to try to relate this to a lack of
cohesion in the country as a political body, and to call attention to internal divisions
and the absence of a strong sense of communal unity and nationhood. This lack of
cohesion manifests itself in various ways in everyday life and surfaces widely in the
general occurrence of individualism, a lack of trust in the government, graft and tax
evasion, corruption within the government, a common ambivalence towards the

1
This recollection comes from former Institute of National Language Assistant Director Fe Aldave
Yap.
 The Philippines 361

national language, and a lack of pride in forming a nation, resulting in attention being
more frequently called to negative attributes of the country than to its accomplish-
ments. Hence, since we have won precious few battles in our history, we tend
to commemorate our defeats rather than our victories: the Fall of Bataan, the Fall
of Corregidor, and the Cry of Balintawak (ending in an aborted revolution). The
people’s clear ambivalence towards their national language is manifest in the con-
tinuation of the dominant use of English in their educational system, the low
readership of the print medium in Filipino, the emphasis on English in the public
domain, and the slow, unenthusiastic spread and adoption of the national language.
Quite broadly, then, the Philippines is a country where the promotion of a common,
‘national’ language has (thus far) not been particularly successful as a means to mould
and strengthen a national identity linking up the population in a clearly positive way,
and in this contrasts with the stronger unifying force of national language in other
Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Thailand. How this situation has
developed in the Philippines, and how the very mixed population of the country
presently relates to diVerent forms of language will now be examined in more detail,
beginning with a consideration of historical factors underlying the present sociolin-
guistic situation.

The Philippines
362 A. Gonzalez

16.2 History as a Means of Understanding the Philippine

Sociolinguistic Situation
Prior to the Spanish colonization of the Philippines in 1565 there are no written
records of the islands that make up the modern-day Philippines. Though the ancient
inhabitants of the islands had a syllabic form of writing derived from South India
(Francisco 1973), no written records of chronological events recorded in the script are
still extant, and knowledge of the prehistory of the Philippines therefore depends on
realia (jars, bone, stone and metal instruments) and on the comparison of languages
currently present in the archipelago. Using such resources, various careful attempts
have been made to reconstruct the prehistory of the islands (Beyer 1935: 476–7, 483,
515–17; Jocano 1975; Solheim 1981: 17–83; Concepcion and Fox 1967), suggesting the
following pattern of development. As far as can be established, the earliest inhabitants
of the islands, commonly referred to as the ‘Negritos’, came to the Philippines many
thousands of years ago via land bridges that connected the Philippines with mainland
Asia. Such land bridges later disappeared due to the melting of the ice at the end of the
last Glacial Period, and subsequent waves of settlers all arrived by boat, from various
parts of east and southeast Asia. One group coming from southern China by-passed
Taiwan and settled in northern Luzon (the main island of the Philippines, in the
north). Another group is assumed to have travelled from mainland Asia through
the Malay Peninsula and modern-day Indonesia to Melanesia, intermixing there with
the predecessors or relatives of the Aborigines in Australia, before eventually arriving
in the Philippine archipelago. A third group (or series of groups) from Borneo and Java
moved north to what are now called the Eastern Visayas (the central Philippine
islands) and from there moved north to southern Luzon, while still others occupied
the western Visayan islands and parts of Mindanao in the south of the Philippines,
including Sulu. Thus the Philippine cultural communities, characterized by the
languages they speak, were created by diVerent patterns of settlement from a variety
of sources within mainland and island Southeast Asia. Currently it is calculated that
there are as many as 120 mutually unintelligible language varieties still present in the
Philippines, all having a common Austronesian base of the West Indonesian variety,
but divided into two main groups, Northern and Central, with twelve of the larger
languages having over a million speakers (out of a total nationwide population of 88
million).2 The present-day population of the Philippines therefore incorporates a very
high degree of ethno-linguistic diversity spread across the archipelago of over 7,000
islands. The division among what are now called the Philippine-type languages
(likewise found in Indonesia and Taiwan) most likely took place about 2,000 years
ago, but the early migrations from southern China seem to be traceable back to
between 4500 and 5000 BC, according to present reconstructions.
2
In terms of broad ethnic divisions, the population of the Philippines is now estimated to be 95 per
cent Austronesian/Malay, 3 per cent Chinese, and 2 per cent ‘mestizo’ (mixed Chinese, Spanish, and
Austronesian). Less than 1 per cent are constituted by the earliest Negrito inhabitants of the islands.
 The Philippines 363

It is necessary to give some prehistory so as to make an important point. As the

foremost prose writer in the Philippines has repeatedly stated over the years, perhaps
the single biggest contribution of Spanish colonization, which dominated the
Philippines for nearly 400 years, was to (indirectly) bring about the beginnings of a
uniWcation of the very many distinct cultural communities on the islands, causing
these diverse groups to begin to think of themselves jointly as ‘Filipinos’ during the
nationalist period which occurred in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This
resulted in the banding together of the Wrst ‘Filipinos’ who then rebelled against Spain
and established the Wrst Malolos Republic in 1898, before being recolonized by the
United States in 1902 ( Joaquin 1943: 42–8; 1977: 22–39). It was an express intention of
the Malolos constitutionalists two years after the initial revolt against Spain to include
Filipinos from all ethnic communities in the government of the country, although the
core was in fact from the eight provinces directly around Manila, and there was a
deliberate attempt to have representation from the Visayas and from the Islamic
communities in Mindanao.
There thus emerged among the educated of the elites during that period (the
‘ilustrados’) a consciousness that they were participating in a historic event as one
people, a nation, determining for themselves their form of government and electing
their national leaders. Hitherto the term ‘Filipino’ had actually been used by the
Spanish to signify those of Spanish stock who had been born and had settled in
the Philippines – ‘insulares’, as opposed to ‘peninsulares’.3 They were the Filipinos in
the mind of the Spanish Crown, the rest of the population being simply ‘Indios’. Local
nationalists, however, now arrogated to themselves the attribute of Filipino as the
genuine, rightful inhabitants and owners of the islands. Leon Ma. Guerrero (1963),
one of the biographers of the national hero and martyr Jose Rizal, referred to him as
‘the Wrst Filipino’ under this new meaning. And it was this growing consciousness
among the ilustrados gathered at Malolos that constituted the beginnings of the
Philippine nation born of the nationalistic consciousness among these elites during
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, beginning with the execution of the three
priest nationalists, Jose Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora (see Schumacher 1973).
The ilustrados, educated for the most part by Spaniards (especially the Jesuits of the
Ateneo), and including many who had studied in Spain and been inXuenced by the
liberal ideas current at the time, knew their political theory well and were intent on
proving to the world that they were ready for self-government and eventually
independence. Thus in 1898 when Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence from
Spain on June 12, he had Julian Felipe compose a Marcha Nacional, with lyrics later
being added by Jose Palma, and Gregoria de Jesus, the widow of the nationalist Andres
Bonifacio, together with other ladies, sewed together the Wrst Xag. However, as
Gonzalez (1980) narrates, the question of adopting a national language based on a
local language was not entertained by the framers of the Constitution of Biak na Bato

3
Note that the Philippines were originally named after King Philip II of Spain, las Islas Felipinas.
364 A. Gonzalez

in 1897 and the Malolos Constitution in 1898, and instead the existing, inherited
linguistic situation was simply allowed to continue, using Spanish for formal matters,
and keeping local languages for informal communication. It was not until the 1930s
that the question of selecting and promoting an indigenous language as a national
language of the Philippines was seriously considered and then put into action. In the
meantime, however, another foreign power had begun to exert its inXuence over the
development of the Philippines, and the Treaty of Paris ending the rebellion and war
against the Spanish in 1898 awarded control over the Philippines to the United States,
which had played a signiWcant military role in the defeat of the Spanish forces. Despite
subsequent, prolonged armed resistance to American rule, the Philippines thereafter
remained a colony under U.S. occupation until 1946, when full independence was
eventually gained following the end of the Second World War.
In the mid-1930s, however, independence at some point in the future seemed to be
likely, and in 1935 the oYcial status of the Philippines was changed to that of a self-
governing U.S. Commonwealth. In preparation for ultimate independence and more
immediately the switch to Commonwealth status, the fundamental law of the land
mandated a future legislature to begin the search for a national language based on one
of the indigenous existing languages. This formal direction to select and promote just
one of the many languages of the Philippines as the country’s national language did
not in fact reXect the thinking of most of those in the National Assembly at the time,
who instead had the desire for a common national language to be built out of a range
of Philippino languages. However, the wishes of other members of the Assembly were
overruled by the strong will of Manuel Quezon, the president of the new government,
who ordered the stylists who drew up the Wrst draft of the new constitution to
make the national language based on one language alone. Following such an instruc-
tion, the National Language Institute, established by the Commonwealth Congress in
1936, selected Tagalog to be the basis of the national language in 1937, and in 1939
Tagalog was oYcially proclaimed the national language of the Philippines by Quezon,
much to the disappointment of the Bisayans in the central part of the Philippines and
especially the Cebuanos. Though Tagalog had more speakers than other languages in
the Philippines, approximately 12 million, it was not so far ahead of Cebuano, which
had 10 million speakers, and there were also other languages with signiWcant popu-
lations, such as Ilocano, with 5 million speakers. The choice of Tagalog as the
exclusive base for the national language therefore seemed to confer an unfair advan-
tage on those in the north of the country, and simultaneously disadvantage speakers of
other languages in the Philippines, whose future proWciency in the national language
looked set to signiWcantly lag behind that of native Tagalog speakers. In a weak
attempt to make the selected language more acceptable it was then called Wikang
Pambansa, ‘the national language’, in 1940 when it was Wrst taught in colleges and high
schools, and in 1959, again as a public relations move, the Secretary of Education Jose
Romero renamed it Pilipino, yet such moves failed to dispel the common view of the
national language as being simply Tagalog masquerading under a diVerent name.
 The Philippines 365

Considerably later on, in the 1971 Constitutional Convention which Wnally drafted the
1973 Constitution, the issue of the composition and base of the national language was
taken up again, this time with more pluralist intentions. The new constitution set out
a demand and goal for the establishment by a future language academy of a new
common national language to be based not just on a single, regional language, but on
all the major languages of the Philippines. Such a language, when created, was to be
known as ‘Filipino’ and should replace Tagalog-based Pilipino. In the 1980s, Filipino
was still very much a work in progress, but in the atmosphere of heightened
nationalism and ‘people power’ at the beginning of the Aquino regime, following
the momentous toppling of the Marcos regime, the 1986 constitutional commis-
sioners took it for granted that Filipino already existed, and enthusiastically named it
as the ‘new’ national language of the Philippines. By legislation among constitutional
commissioners, what was supposed to be still in the process of formation became
accepted as reality and adopted as the national language of the Philippines.
Due to this ‘premature’ oYcial proclamation of Filipino, however, the new national
language turned out to still be heavily based on Tagalog and in fact not radically
diVerent from its predecessor Pilipino, though incorporating certain lexical items not
used in Tagalog. Filipino has furthermore essentially remained in this basic mould
through until the present day, and continues to be strongly linked to Tagalog, as
spoken in the country’s capital, Manila.4
Nevertheless, as a result of the formal propagation of Tagalog-based Pilipino now
Filipino, twenty years later most in the country have now de facto accepted Filipino as
the national language of the Philippines, and also pragmatically as a lingua franca and
(perhaps) as an oYcial language. The major exception to this is some remaining
opposition on the part of the Cebuanos. The latter continue to point out and argue
that Filipino/Pilipino is not really diVerent from Tagalog and therefore not an impar-
tial language form that can be equally shared and acquired by all of the nation (see
Gonzalez 1991: 111–29). The problem is therefore still one of selection and legitim-
ation of Filipino as a truly national language, and, compounded with the roughshod
nature of its attempted legitimation, this has caused a clear ambivalence and lack of
universal loyalty towards it as a symbol of linguistic unity and national identity. Such a
situation existing back in 1970 triggered Jose Villa Panganiban’s lament that Pilipino
remained a language in search of a nation (paraphrasing the title of Pirandello’s play).
Thirty-Wve years after his passing away, it has to be conceded that Panganiban’s
characterization of the national language still retains much of its original validity.
Such a somewhat pessimistic assessment of the unifying power of the national
language and its lacklustre adoption as an emotive symbol of the state can be framed

4
As noted in the Wikipedia entry for Filipino language <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Filipino_language>, people in the Philippines may more frequently ask strangers whether they speak
Tagalog rather than Filipino, indicating that the common, national language is essentially seen as Tagalog
rather than any separate linguistic entity, Filipino.
366 A. Gonzalez

against a general pattern of behaviour discernible in the modern history of the

Philippines and its people. It seems that Filipinos, usually divided, get together only
in the face of a common enemy or in a deWning moment of their history. Thus, having
risen up against Spanish colonial rule at the end of the nineteenth century, we see the
members of the Malolos Constitution making their Wrst brave attempts as a national
legislative body establishing the basic law of the land and organizing the Wrst general
election of government oYcials. The next deWning moment for the country was the
Constitutional Convention of 1935 prior to the declaration of the Commonwealth
Government, and then, seven years further on, one Wnds the nation united in
resistance against the Japanese, Wrst in Bataan together with American forces, and
then in a guerrilla war waged against the Japanese. Shortly thereafter was the all-
important, self-deWning moment of the Philippine nation in its declaration of inde-
pendence from the United States in 1946. Four decades on, another point in modern
history when the people of the Philippines signiWcantly came together was to assist in
the dramatic change of government from Marcos to Aquino in the EDSA revolution
of 1986, and then once again at EDSA II when public protest against Joseph Estrada
built up to such a pitch that it was able to bring Vice-President Gloria Macapagal
Arroyo to power. What seems to be a defect in the Filipino psyche is a critical lack of
sustainability of such moments, which could carry the Filipino through a genuine
reform of personal and social life and push the country towards real development. For,
in the face of slow progress and the seeming inability of diVerent administrations to
eVect genuine prosperity and reform against graft, the Filipino regularly grows weary,
becomes cynical, and loses hope, taking positive steps only when conditions become
so bad that they have to be changed by extra-legal means. The construction and
continued maintenance of a positive national unity therefore seems to regularly elude
the members of this very mixed nation, and presents a diYcult challenge to the
success of really bonded, communal organization both in broader socio-political life
and in and through the use of language.

16.3 The Interfering Variable of the English Language

Having seen how the national language oYcially came into existence, and was
intended to be a positive indigenous resource linking up the population of the
Philippines linguistically as a nation, we will now consider how a foreign language,
English, has played a major complicating role in the development of such a process.
When the First Philippine Commission was sent to the Philippines in 1901 by
President McKinley (of the United States), one of his instructions was that local
language should be used as the primary means of education, and English as a
means of instructing the newly-colonized locals in the ways of democracy and good
government. This was repeated once more by the Second Philippine Commission and
the Secretary of War, Elihu Root, under whom the colonized territories were placed
in what was subsequently called the Bureau of Insular AVairs.
 The Philippines 367

In the initial expansion of education during American rule, the Wrst teachers were in
fact American soldiers under a Catholic army chaplain named William McKinnon.
Subsequently, the Organic Act of 1902 was passed by the Second Philippine Commis-
sion under William Howard Taft and established a Department of Public Instruction.
Through the Bureau of Insular AVairs of the Department of War in Washington, DC,
teachers were then recruited from diVerent parts of the United States to come to the
Philippines to staV the new schools. The largest and Wrst group of teachers (600)
arrived via the USS Thomas, and the name ‘Thomasites’ has gone down in Philippine
history as a general name for the American teachers who came to the Philippines to
initially help in the education of Filipino youth.
The Wrst batch of teaching recruits were highly educated, some with MAs and
PhDs, and almost all had at least a bachelor’s degree from one of the leading colleges
and universities in the United States. However, faced with a signiWcant language
barrier, the exhortations of the First and Second Philippine Commissions concerning
use of local language as teaching medium were not implemented, as no single lan-
guage was considered widespread enough and developed enough to serve as the
common language of instruction in schools. This was consequently the beginning of
the exclusive use of English as the medium of instruction in schools. However, the
materials used for teaching were American and intended for native speakers, and the
teachers had no training in second language methodology. In the Wrst years they
furthermore made quite unsuccessful use of the ‘direct method’ of language teaching,
and only later switched to the more traditional grammar-analysis method which went
on to dominate the teaching of English for many years.5 From the beginning,
however, the American teachers attempted to improve the results of instruction by
recruiting the help of their most able students as teachers, especially those who had
qualiWed for the equivalent of Grade 7 (the end of the elementary years, as established
by the Bureau of Public Instruction).
In all, approximately just 2,000 Thomasites arrived to serve the educational system
during the period 1901 to 1920, when the bureaucracy for practical purposes became
fully Filipino except for the top-level administrators.6 For the most part, then, after the
initial years of ad hoc teaching and apprenticeship, day-to-day instruction came to be
carried out by Filipino teachers and middle-level administrators. Based on Sibayan’s
(1999) observations, the beginnings of Philippine English also occurred at this time, as
well as the creation of the Wrst Filipino-made textbooks (from 1919 onwards, with the
Osias readers).
As the years of American colonial rule continued and the gradual granting of
experience in democracy began with the creation of the National Assembly in 1907,

5
See Alberca (1978) for an account of these earlier years, Alberca (1994: 53–74) for a study of the
Thomasites and language teaching, and Gonzalez (2001: 51–62) for a critique of this from the viewpoint of
contemporary language-teaching methodology.
6
The Bureau of Public Instruction in fact had American administrators almost until the beginning of
the Japanese Occupation.
368 A. Gonzalez

the establishment of a representative legislature in 1916, and then the Commonwealth

in 1935, for both Filipinos and Americans the presupposed given in Philippine
education was that English would continue to be the language of the schools. This
was in fact stipulated by the Tydings–McDuYe Act in 1934 establishing the Com-
monwealth in 1935 and subsequently the Republic in 1945.
As discussed in the previous section, the 1935 Constitution also established a
mandate for the establishment of a National Language Institute to select one of the
Philippine languages as the basis of the Philippine language, and this resulted in the
choice of Tagalog for this purpose, despite much opposition from the Cebuanos.
Tagalog was then made the national language in 1939 and supported by the creation
of a grammar and a dictionary,7 satisfying preconditions which had been imposed
on the declaration of a national language. A Presidential Act mandated the teaching
of Tagalog in fourth-year high school and as a course in the Teacher Education
Program beginning in 1940. Subsequently Tagalog became an oYcial language during
the Japanese Period, although English continued to be used even by the Japanese
Occupation Administrators. When independence was Wnally attained on 4 July 1946,
Tagalog was taught as a subject at all levels of elementary and secondary schools, but
English continued to be the language of instruction for all subjects except the Tagalog
class.8
Renamed Pilipino in 1959 by the then Secretary of Education Jose Romero, the
national language was in time mandated by the Department of Education to be taught
as a subject not only in the ten years of basic schooling but for one year at the tertiary
level. The period of intense student nationalism beginning in 1969, which was cut
short by the declaration of Martial Law in 1972, also saw the expansion of Pilipino as a
medium of instruction at the university level in some universities (largely at the
University of the Philippines, the centre of student activism and nationalism in
the country). In recognition of this clamour, the Department of Education under
the martial-law regime of Ferdinand Marcos established a bilingual scheme for schools
whereby English would be used for mathematics and science while continuing to be
taught as a subject; the other subjects (mostly social studies/social science subjects)
were to be taught in Filipino. This policy was established in 1974 and has continued on
into the twenty-Wrst century.
Even today, though, there is much ambivalence with regard to this aspect of
language policy, as made evident and discussed in various evaluations of the bilingual
scheme that have been completed (Gonzalez 1984, Gonzalez and Sibayan 1988).
Considering Wrst the use and teaching of the national language, on the one hand,
outside the area of education, it can be noted that the use of Filipino has become quite
widespread in much of the country at least for social discourse of an informal nature,
7
This was actually an English–Tagalog bilingual wordlist.
8
In fact, English was sometimes used in Tagalog language classes too. At least in the Wrst decade of
teaching Tagalog, English was used as the metalanguage of instruction for class management and
explanations, and exercises were prescribed for translation from Tagalog to English and vice versa.
 The Philippines 369

and the mass media have now largely turned to Filipino with only the print medium
still predominantly in English (Media Factbook 2000). However, on the other hand, at
the level of basic education, there have been steps backwards rather than forwards. In
Region VII, Cebu and Central Visayas, social studies is now taught in English rather
than Filipino, and the dominance of English is once more reasserting itself in the
system, going back to the period preceding 1974, the declaration of the bilingual
scheme. While there were also initiatives to use Filipino as the medium of instruction
in many subjects at the tertiary level (Bautista and Gonzalez 1988: 111–62) these
initiatives are currently no longer operative and the whole system of tertiary educa-
tion is practically all in English except for Filipino Language courses.
In the meantime, standards of English are also perceived to have ‘deteriorated’, and
the main popular target of blame for this is the bilingual education scheme. Here
it should be added that this perception that bilingual education is failing to produce
competent speakers of English may be widespread among the public, but it is in
fact most probably not warranted, and not supported by empirical data. In a study
carried out on levels of English and Filipino in a range of schools in 1986, it was found
that well-run schools actually performed extremely highly in the teaching of both
languages, while poorly-run schools did not do a good job of either. Hence, the
predominant factors in language-teaching success in the Philippine education system
were found to be socio-economic, with the quality of teaching in more aZuent
schools being higher due to the presence of more competent teachers, and success
in language teaching was consequently not directly linked to the bilingual education
scheme itself.
As changes have continued, there is now mass education in the Philippines. Almost
all children begin schooling, but unfortunately many drop out after only one or two
years, with some more dropping out at the higher grades, and estimates made in
2001/2002 indicate that out of 100 Wrst-grade students who begin school, only about
67 Wnish Grade 6. As a result of the wider availability of public education, the
percentage of the population with some knowledge of English is continuing to
increase. Though oYcial data on numbers of second-language speakers of English
has not been recently collected and made available, a small commissioned survey in
1994 found that 56 per cent of Filipinos claim (by self-report) to be able to speak
English, 74 per cent claim to understand English, 73 per cent claim to read English,
and 50 per cent claim to be able to write English (see Gonzalez 2000: 1–9). Since there
were no measures of English achievement prior to nationwide testing which began in
1973, it is diYcult to say whether or not overall real mastery of the language has
generally been on the increase or the decrease, but the testimony of teachers and
administrators and the poor showing of applicants for employment in tests of English
(especially in writing and speaking) seem to indicate a large percentage of people
whose competence is less than adequate for academic learning. What is furthermore
disconcerting about the situation is that many instructors who teach in English and
others who teach English as a subject seem themselves to have poor reading skills and
370 A. Gonzalez

even poorer writing skills, and hence fail to serve as appropriate role models for the
acquisition of English competence (Gonzalez 1998: 487–525).
In spite of this, however, there is a clamour for more English, and for Wnding means
to teach the subject better, rather than a call to think in terms of a diVerent kind of
language-teaching paradigm, where for the sake of improving and maximizing
content achievement children might be taught in a language they are more familiar
with, rather than having to learn a second language on the Wrst day of school. Such an
alternative approach to language in early education was present in initiatives in 1998–
2001 to use the dominant vernaculars and lingua francas as bridging languages (a
policy which had earlier been undertaken from 1957 to 1974) and to use Filipino for
content instruction in the lower grades, with English being taught as a subject after
initial literacy and then used as a medium of instruction in a bilingual scheme from
Grade 3 or 4 on. Presently, however, emphasis seems to remain on the increased, early
acquisition of English in the educational system, even though this may be diYcult for
students to succeed in.
The general dominance of English (in certain areas of life) has continued over the
post-independence years under manifestly pro-English Chief Executives of the coun-
try beginning with Marcos, followed by Aquino, Ramos, and Estrada, and now under
Macapagal, and the constitution of 1987 recognizes English as one of the two oYcial
languages of the Philippines, alongside Filipino, which also has the symbolically
signiWcant status of national language. The desire for all socio-economic levels to
attain English competence for their children has additionally become even more
dramatic with the encouragement, beginning during the Estrada Administration,
for workers from the Philippines to go abroad, aided in their marketability to a
signiWcant extent by their ability to speak English, to easily communicate with others,
and to receive technical instruction in a language of wider communication. As of 2002,
the resulting annual income passing through government channels from overseas
workers has been oYcially recorded to be as much as US$8 billion, and certainly
amounts to even more when one factors in other informal channels for sending
foreign exchange to relatives and family. This source of foreign currency consequently
ranks as higher than that from any other signiWcant ‘export’ from the Philippines and
has assumed a critical importance for the economy of the country.
Thus, while Filipino is the national language and while Filipinos generally now
accept it as such (except for the die-hard Cebuanos conWned mostly in Cebu Province,
and this partially for political advantage by local Cebuano politicians), the Filipino’s
Wrst priority in language learning for life is English, not Filipino, for Filipino is only
used for political campaigning and as a national-level lingua franca, whereas it is the
local vernacular that the Filipino commonly uses for his everyday familial communi-
cation, for worship, and as a local/regional lingua franca to carry on communication
at an informal level, and English that he switches to for higher-order cognitive
activities, for university studies, for diplomacy, and as a language of wider communi-
cation in any international dealings. It is also English that critically provides him
 The Philippines 371

access to better opportunities of employment (and signals the likely attainment of

higher socio-economic status).
The motivation for language use and learning in a situation like this is one of
pragmatism; languages in Philippine society are in complementary distribution
according to functions and needs. If the educated Filipino elite feels more comfortable
using English rather than Filipino even for communication in the family,9 and if he
uses Filipino only to communicate with people at a lower socio-economic level and
for informal communications, is there really a feeling of identity with the language
and with the aspiration that Filipino is the linguistic symbol of unity and national
identity? And is this lack of loyalty to a language of identity a symbolic indicator of the
kind of ‘damaged culture’ that Fallows (1987) speaks of or the lack of ‘a crystallized
nationalism’ that Kikuchi (1991) describes?
What is evident in the Philippines, as borne out by empirical evidence from various
surveys, is that the Filipino does not equate nationalism and love of country with
loyalty to a language but takes a pragmatic view of the utility of language in his life.
He considers symbols of nationhood such as the national language, a national Xower,
a national costume, a national cuisine, a national anthem, and its music as important,
but he does not consider these signiWcant enough to be traded for an asset that he
considers essential for commercial and educational success.
On the other hand, in deWning moments of the existence of the body politic, the
Filipino has shown clear unity and identiWcation with a larger social and political body
beyond himself, as in the Malolos Congress of 1898, the Philippine–American War of
1899–1901, his united opposition to Japanese Occupation from 1942 to 1945, the majority
consensus against the continuation of American military bases (subsequently made a
reality in 1992), the glorious moment of the EDSA Revolution of 22–25 February 1986,
the euphoria with the Aquino government in the initial post-Marcos period, and the
united opposition to Estrada on the charges of graft and corruption in 2001.
If there is a generalization that the sympathetic (rather than scathing) outside
observer can legitimately oVer about the Philippine situation here, it is that this
consciousness of unity and identity at speciWc points in time is ultimately just not
sustained enough (up to present) for nationalism and its symbols to create the kind of
development of the country as a whole that the Philippines still needs to generate, and
that so many of our neighbours in Southeast Asia seem to be well on the way to
attaining.

16.4 Final Theoretical Considerations

In the social scientist’s generalizations about concepts such as nation, state, nation-
state, and the indicators of these diVerent types of social units as manifested by certain

9
See Gonzalez (1989: 359–73) for a putative computation of the (small) percentage of Filipino families
that use English for their family communications.
372 A. Gonzalez

symbols and certain behavioural indicators, the prevailing paradigm seems to be that
there are clear stages in the evolution of the nation-state and its uniWcation and
identity. Initially, diVerent tribes exist as individual cultural communities. Through
living together, aided perhaps by a common habitable space, proximity, commonal-
ities in religion, a common enemy (an occupier or a colonial power or a conqueror),
and a common historical experience, these individual tribes and cultural communities
may act together and generate a spirit of unity against a common enemy. Subse-
quently such groups may merge into a larger unit, through various means constitute
themselves into a state, choosing a basic charter, a structure of government, and, if
aVected by ideas of democracy and contemporary government, electing representa-
tive oYcials. Very much depending on how eVective the latter are, and how far they
can create a feeling of oneness among the people, manage their tribal self-interests,
balance their desires, and above all, manage success for the populace, the state may
develop more and more into a nation, a political entity with a population having a
perception of itself as a common, uniWed people. Symbols may be chosen to
strengthen this unity and create a clearer identity, such as a common language
(which may have to be selected from a range of possible options), a national anthem,
other minor symbols such as a Xag, cuisine, costume, and subsequent studies about
the roots and self-identity of the people (this being the function of a university and a
centre of culture).
What has been shown by experience and accepted in the paradigm is that nation-
states can fail in the sense that the uniWcation of various groups of people is seen as a
purely legal and technical structuring, and does not establish a genuine feeling and
perception of unity. There may be a lack of identiWcation with a distinct identity, and
divisions within the body politic which prevent it from becoming a full nation-state, or
even lead to its collapse and a deterioration into a situation where there is no longer
any real central government and instead a return to a state of mixed tribes and
warlords. The symbols then become inoperative and lose their meaningfulness.
In the interests of maintaining unity, however, compromises can be made which in
eVect depart from the existing model. For example, there can be a federation with
autonomy for each tribe, or there can be a national feeling of identity but a weak
central government (such as some claim for Japan), or an ideal merging of state and
nation (as in France), or a strong central government without genuine nationhood (as
in the artiWcial state of Yugoslavia that Marshal Tito put together). In less than ideal
conditions, the symbols of nationhood and identity may become weaker and less
signiWcant. In the case of Singapore, although the national language is Malay and is
used for symbolic purposes, the operative languages are English and now Mandarin
(instead of the former dialects or separate languages that the Singaporeans spoke,
Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese – Simpson, this volume, chapter 17). There can also be
compromise and the development of a multilingual state such as Switzerland and its
cantons, or the larger, almost continent-like state of India, where a trilingual policy is
encouraged by the government – Hindi for the nation-state, English as a special
 The Philippines 373

language of wider communication, and a variant, regional language for everyday local
communication (Amritavalli and Jayaseelan, this volume, chapter 3). The situation is
quite similar in the Philippines, where in eVect there is a de facto trilingual linguistic
situation: the local vernaculars (regional languages) are used in the home, the
neighbourhood and even the province, Filipino occurs as the national lingua franca,
and English is present as the language of wider communication, the language of
economic mobility and employment, and the language of an elite who have not really
fully merged with the masses in terms of their feelings of identity.
Perhaps one should not fault the Filipino for his lack of monolithic cultural identity
and his regular use of languages identiWed with diVerent cultures. Perhaps one should
accept the reality that, in the same way that anthropologists see languages as
eVectively manifesting many aspects of pidginization, so also all cultures are never
pure, unless isolated for many generations, and cultures are in eVect amalgams of
diVerent subcultures, with some constituting cultures more diVerent than others in
the proximate space. What we have in many world situations are pidgins which
become creolized and cultural mixing which sooner or later acquires an identity of its
own. In this regard, some societies are open and porous to outside inXuences, while
others are much more closed. A good example of the latter is pre-modern Japan, an
example of the former the Philippines.
Philippine cultural life is a visible, thorough mix. Filipinos are themselves a broad
mixture of Malay, Chinese, Spanish, and American, and likewise their culture is a
mixture of the cultures of all of these groups. Linguistically, too, there were earlier
mixed pidgins in the Philippines such as Bago in Northern Luzon and Chabacano in
Spanish settlements and perhaps, in the future, a Filipino English pidgin,10 but right
now the situation is one of multilingualism with a complementarity of functions. The
Filipino has chosen Tagalog-based (Pilipino) Filipino as his targeted linguistic symbol
of unity and national identity for reasons of legal and symbolic convenience, but
across a broad range of domains in everyday life he chooses to be multilingual rather
than monolingual, and hence adopts a mixed linguistic life. Very similar are also his
cuisine, his lifestyle, his art, his music, and his other expressions of nationhood – each
a mixture rather than a pure entity. This pidginization explains the Filipino’s roots.
Does it also explain his lack of success in the management of his politics, his
government, and his economic aVairs? Does it explain his general ability to function
outside but not inside the body politic? If it does not, then the diYculty remains to
Wnd some more reWned and sensitive way to predict his regular individual success but
common social failure, and Wnd roots for this phenomenon in matters other than
culture and language and symbols of nationhood and identity.

10
Code-mixing of English and Filipino is an increasing trend, especially among members of the
younger generations.
 17
Singapore
Andrew Simpson

17.1 Introduction
Singapore is a small island state located at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula
which has undergone tremendous economic growth and modernization since 1965,
resulting in a per capita income which is second only to that of Japan within Asia.
During the course of its recent dramatic development, Singapore has also had to face
up to and deal with important challenges to its national coherence which are present
because of two simple facts about the country. First of all, Singapore is a very new
state, with no sense of collective identity among its inhabitants existing prior to the
establishment of full independence in 1965. Secondly, the population of Singapore is
highly mixed, being composed of the descendants of immigrants into Singapore from
(primarily) southern China, India, and Malaya. Confronted with the problem of how to
accommodate such a broad ethnic mix in a single society and also build up a national
identity, the post-independence government of Singapore made the signiWcant decision
to attempt to maintain cultural and linguistic pluralism within Singapore at the same
time as building up an overarching Singaporean identity based on broad, traditional
Asian values, and supported by increased prosperity.
In the government’s development of such a multi-ethnic, independent Singapore, one
particularly critical component of its approach has been a strong, sustained programme
of language management and planning, and a highly-publicized, cornerstone policy of
multilingualism in society and advanced bilingualism in individuals. Such a policy has
had signiWcant and sometimes controversial consequences for the structuring of educa-
tion in Singapore, and has also led to regular attempts by the government to direct and
change the everyday language habits of the population in quite fundamental ways.
Throughout this moulding of the linguistic and national identity of Singapore, the
government has beneWted from having greater Wnancial resources at its disposal than
most other Asian nations, and this has allowed for freer experimentation in the design of
its education system and more materials being made available for the promotion of
extra-educational language programmes. Post-WWII Singapore can therefore generally
be described as the interesting story of how successful an ethnically mixed, economically
 Singapore 375

Singapore

developed, modern new state can be in the planned development of multilingualism, the
maintenance of multi-ethnicity, and the (simultaneous) construction of a new national
identity. In what follows, the chapter discusses the problems, tensions, and challenges
which have been thrown up by these goals, beginning with a description of the general
background to the oYcial introduction of multilingualism in 1965 in section 17.2, an
examination of how the policy of multilingualism subsequently unfolded in section 17.3,
and an assessment of the present state of Singapore and the developing relation of
language and national identity in the country in section 17.4.

17.2 The Creation of a New Nation and Policies

of Accommodation
Prior to 1824 when Singapore was purchased by the British East India Company for its
potential strategic value guarding the sea route between India and China, Singapore
had been a largely undeveloped island with a very small local population. Following
the arrival of the British, however, the island soon grew into an important inter-
national trading port and attracted a sizeable new workforce of immigrants from
China, India, and southeast Asia. These early settlers came to Singapore with the idea
376 A. Simpson

of making money and then returning to their homelands, and there was little mixing
and cohesion amongst the various ethnic groups, and no development of any long-
term allegiance to the territory of Singapore, right up until the end of World War II,
when the realistic prospect of independence from the British began to loom on the
horizon.
At this point, questions about the future shape of Singapore were considered for the
Wrst time, and the need arose to imagine how Singapore could eVectively function as a
uniWed society with a post-colonial identity of its own. In 1958 when self-government
was achieved, it was very clear that it would not be easy to forge a national identity
for the new state. Not only was there little common, binding history that could be
called on to ground the new state in a positive and useful way, the composition
and complexity of the population was such that there was no single ethnic group
in Singapore whose language and culture could be realistically promoted as represen-
tative of the identity of the emerging new state. The Chinese were in the clear
numerical majority in Singapore, making up approximately 75 per cent of the
population, but the government realized that it would be highly unwise to attempt
to develop an oYcial Chinese identity for Singapore. Not only would this be resisted
by the remaining 25 per cent of the population, it would also have been internationally
unwise to promote a new Chinese state in the middle of the Malay-speaking world
formed by surrounding Malaya and Indonesia. The Malay population, though having
a locally ‘appropriate’ language and culture, were only 17 per cent of the population
of Singapore, and so it did not seem realistic to attempt to develop a uniquely Malay
state in Singapore either. The third signiWcantly large ethnic group in the territory,
those of Indian descent, were less in number than the Malays, and so similarly
unrealistic as a choice for the primary foundation of a new national identity. In such
a situation, the government decided on a policy of multiracialism and the guarantee of
equality and oYcial representation for all the three main ethnic communities in
Singapore – the Chinese, the Malays, and the Indians. It was declared that Chinese,
Malay, and Tamil (as representative of the Indian community) would all be registered
as oYcial languages of the new state, and that English would be added as a fourth
oYcial language for pragmatic reasons, English being the established language of
government and administration and also being commonly used as a language of inter-
group communication, alongside another lingua franca, Bazaar Malay. Furthermore,
because it was widely anticipated that Singapore would be closely linked with Malaya
at some point in the near future, the government declared that Malay would be
recognized as the National Language of Singapore, in addition to being an oYcial
language.
As a result of the government’s support for four oYcial languages in Singapore
rather than just one, schools were able to continue to teach in (Mandarin) Chinese,
Malay, Tamil, and English, but students and the general public were additionally
encouraged to acquire a new/better knowledge of Malay, there being an expectation
that Malay would in time take over from English as the common language of
 Singapore 377

administration and government aVairs and indeed also function as a common langu-
age in all Welds of everyday life (de Souza 1980). In 1963 the anticipated linking with
Malaya then became a political reality, and the Federation of Malaysia was formed
from the union of Malaya, Singapore, and the north Borneo states of Sarawak and
Sabah. However, after only two years, Singapore was forced to leave the Federation of
Malaysia, as negative feelings and mistrust which had quickly emerged between the
Malay majority in the Federation and the Chinese threatened to spiral out of control.
The former suspected the Singapore Chinese of conspiring with Chinese in other
parts of the Federation to increase their power and control of the state, while the non-
Malay population in Singapore had become worried by the picture of a heavily Malay-
dominated Malaysia which they felt was being promoted by certain leading Malay
politicians.
The separation of Singapore from Malaysia was seen as a disaster by many in
Singapore, as there was a strong belief that Singapore was simply too small in size to
be able to prosper alone, and therefore needed to be part of a bigger political unit.
There were also worries that Singapore would suVer commercially from anti-Chinese
feelings assumed to be present among the inhabitants of its natural local trading
partners, neighbouring Malaysia and Indonesia. The government therefore realized
that it needed to rapidly rethink its plans both relating to the economy and the
national identity of a Singapore not incorporated into Malaysia, and despite the
problems of initial high unemployment and the loss of revenue from support of
the British military presence in Singapore, the government was very successful in
attracting foreign investment and getting the Singapore economy moving in a positive
direction again.
Concerning the development of a national identity, because there was no long
history associated with Singapore, nor any recent history of a people engaged in a
joint struggle for independence, the natural historical means to construct a shared
identity was not available to the government. As it was also not appropriate to
promote a common identity based on the heritage of any of the major racial groups
in Singapore by itself, the government instead used the vulnerability of Singapore and
the need for survival of the nation in the face of economic challenges as a means of
creating a common, binding identity. The government maintained its previous strong
commitment to Singapore as a multiracial nation-state and then stressed the goals of
economic growth and equal rights and opportunities as uniting Singapore (Kiong and
Pakir 1996). Such themes have continued to be emphasized during Singapore’s
development and have acted as an eVective substitute for the lack of other cultural
and historic symbols that could immediately be used to build up a sense of shared
identity.
In the area of language policy, the government also reconWrmed its commitment
to multilingualism and its earlier decision not to attempt to make one language the
sole promoted, oYcial language of the state. Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and
English therefore remained the four joint oYcial languages of Singapore, and were
378 A. Simpson

guaranteed equal treatment in education, government administration, the media,

and other areas of public life. The system put in place in 1958 to cope with the
mixed ethnic population of Singapore and minimize confrontation arising from
linguistic issues was therefore retained in 1965 as a key element of the new, fully
independent nation, and the government saw its future goal as the building of an over-
arching national identity which would include the various ethno-linguistic, cultural
identities of its inhabitants, rather than displace these. Concerning Malay, this was
maintained as the National Language of Singapore, primarily as a political measure, to
demonstrate to its neighbours that Singapore willingly recognized it was located in the
Malay-speaking part of Southeast Asia. When it became clear that Singapore was going
to be permanently separated from Malaysia, however, earlier plans to develop Malay as
a more widely used language of inter-group communication and government admin-
istration were discontinued, and the role of Malay as National Language has since been
largely symbolic and restricted to ceremonial use (e.g. occurring in the national
anthem).
By way of contrast, English came to assume an increasingly greater importance in
post-1965 Singapore, though technically being of the same oYcial language status as
Malay, Tamil, and Chinese. The inclusion of English as an oYcial language was
originally justiWed on the grounds that it was already widely used in the areas of
commerce, industry, politics, and law, and was the lingua franca of the Common-
wealth union of nations that Singapore was joining. It was also vigorously argued by
leading members of the government that knowledge of English was necessary for
the access it provided to advances in science and technology critically important
for the development of Singapore’s economy. Furthermore, English had come to be
quite widely used as a lingua franca within Singapore already by 1965 and allowed for
Singaporeans of diVerent ethnic backgrounds to communicate with each other
without favouring any particular group. Such arguments were suggested to outweigh
objections that English should not be an oYcial language of Singapore due to having
been the language of the earlier colonial power, and very much set the stage for the
further growth of English through the 1970s.
In the education system, in an eVort to improve communication between the
diVerent ethnic groups of Singapore, mandatory bilingual education was introduced
by the government, commencing in 1966. Previously, schools had all predominantly
provided education via a single language medium, Chinese, Malay, Tamil, or English.
From 1966 onwards this situation changed and schools were obliged to provide the
teaching of various subjects in the other three oYcial languages of the nation as well.
Students at all levels were required to select two of the four oYcial languages, and
designate one of these as their Wrst language (L1), and the other as their second
language (L2). They were then taught via both languages as mediums of instruction,
with more subjects being taught in the Wrst language and fewer in the second
language (an approximate L1 to L2 ratio of 60 per cent to 40 per cent: Bokhorst-
Heng 1998). Choice of the L1 also normally determined the particular school that the
 Singapore 379

student attended, with students nominating Malay as their Wrst language going to one
of the more specialized Malay-medium schools (which now also had to provide
teaching in the other three languages), and students selecting Chinese as L1 going
to a more heavily focused Chinese-medium school (where they would get classes in
their designated L2 as well).
Within the new bilingual education system, Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil
were also commonly referred to as the ‘mother tongue’ languages of students, and it
was anticipated that students would select their stronger ‘mother tongue’ as L1 and
then a second oYcial language as L2. However, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil were
actually not real mother tongues for the vast majority of students (89 per cent,
according to Kuo 1980), in the sense of being languages acquired with native-speaker
skill from an early age, and children in Singapore mostly grew up speaking other,
related languages in the home. For example, amongst the Chinese community,
Mandarin was a native language for only 0.1 per cent of Chinese-speaking people
at the time of independence (Kuo 1980), whereas other mutually unintelligible
varieties of Chinese were the real mother tongues of people in Singapore, particularly
Hokkien (30 per cent), Teochew (17 per cent), Cantonese (15 per cent). Similarly
among the Indian community, although Tamil-speakers were in a signiWcant majority,
there were also speakers of Punjabi, Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi, and Gujarati.
The ‘Malay’ group furthermore included speakers of other Austronesian languages
such as Buginese, Javanese, Banjarese, and Baweanese. The establishment of four
oYcial languages for Singapore therefore partially concealed a much greater under-
lying linguistic variation, and relates to a general simpliWcation in the way that
divisions between races were (and still are) conceptualized by the government in
Singapore. All citizens of Singapore are oYcially categorized as belonging to one of
four racial types: Chinese, Malay, Indian, or ‘Other’, with this information being
formally included on the identiWcation cards which need to be carried by individuals,
and being used for a whole range of statistical and administrative purposes relating to
the oYcial insurance of equality amongst the diVerent races of Singapore. Though
such categorization of related subgroups into larger ethnic categories tends to ignore
and smooth over possibly signiWcant diVerences between members of the four racial
types, it is also clear that it has practical advantages for the monitoring of equal
opportunities among the population and provides a more powerful representative
voice for each major racial group than if these groups had remained fragmented. In
the area of language-learning and education, however, the rather deceptive use of the
term ‘mother tongue’ for languages which are often not the mother tongues of
ethnically Chinese and Indian students tends to cover up the size of the language-
learning task facing students in bilingual education in Singapore. For the clear
majority of students during the Wrst decade of the bilingual education programme,
there was a need not only to acquire the designated second language when starting
school, but also to acquire the actual ‘mother tongue’ as another largely unfamiliar
language.
380 A. Simpson

A further unexpected complication in the initial development of bilingual edu-

cation was the selection patterns of L1 and L2 which occurred. Although it was
anticipated that students would mostly select the language closest to their native
language as the dominant L1 in school, and another language as the less demanding
L2, a growing number of Chinese, Indian, and Malay students were encouraged by
their parents to select English as their L1, and then Chinese, Tamil, and Malay as the
L2. It was widely perceived that achieving proWciency in English was important and
even necessary for securing a well-paid job and because of this, enrolment in the
English-medium schools climbed dramatically, reaching 91 per cent in 1979 (Bokhorst-
Heng 1998). Many parents also reasoned that there was not much to lose in sending
their oVspring to predominantly English-medium schools, as they would still receive
around 40 per cent of their education in Chinese, Malay, or Tamil. For the students
themselves, though, this further increased the amount of eVort which needed to be
applied to actual language-learning in schools, and added to the diYcult task of
achieving and maintaining a high level of bilingualism. On a more positive note,
however, the increasing attraction of students from Chinese, Indian, and Malay
families into the same English-medium schools did result in far more mixing and
integration of students of diVerent ethnic backgrounds than in previous times when
students were sent much more regularly to Chinese-/Tamil-/Malay-medium schools
and did not meet and mingle with students from the other ethnic groups.
A general increase in understanding of the cultural background of the various
ethnic groups and their integration in Singapore was also assisted by the introduction
of newly written textbooks in Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and English. Previously, school
textbooks were imported from China, India, Malaya, and Britain, and described only
the history and culture of their country of origin/production, hence students in
Chinese-medium schools would read about Chinese history and culture but learn
nothing about Malay or Indian traditions. The new textbooks produced in Singapore
had a uniform content whether written in Chinese, Tamil, Malay, or English and
portrayed aspects of the culture of all four racial groups in Singapore. Consequently,
students began to learn increasingly more about the cultural background and tradi-
tions of classmates who came from other racial groups, whichever language this was
studied in. The textbooks also signiWcantly stressed identiWcation with Singapore, and
provided descriptions of the history, geography, and general make-up of the nation.

17.3 Further Developments in Multilingualism

From the late 1960s onwards, the economy of Singapore grew tremendously with a
sustained double-digit rate of growth. This was a remarkable achievement given that
Singapore had no real natural resources aside from its location and its population, and
was in large measure due to the direct involvement of the government in carefully
planning and developing the economy. The population began to prosper, and ben-
eWted considerably from the provision of new housing constructed by the government
 Singapore 381

to replace previously widespread substandard accommodation. Relocation of the

population out of ethnically uniform ghettos and into the new housing estates also
resulted in a greater racial integration of the population, with the government
ensuring that the new housing estates were ethnically well mixed and balanced.
The 1970s, however, also saw certain language-related problems arising out of the
bilingual education policy and the government’s promotion of four diVerent lan-
guages in Singapore. The Wrst of these problems related to the sizeable Chinese
community who were unhappy with the way that the linguistic situation was devel-
oping to the apparent, increasing disadvantage of Chinese. It was claimed that with
the government-stimulated growth of English, there was an increasing neglect of
Chinese, and that Chinese-educated Singaporeans could not get the same kind of
employment that English-educated Singaporeans could. When the government had
come to power in 1958, it had indeed deliberately downplayed the importance of
Chinese in its construction of the new state due to pragmatic political pressures. The
subsequent emphasis on English had (by the 1970s) the side-eVect of reducing the
relative value of Chinese in the eyes of parents and employers (Tan 2002), so that it
was genuinely more diYcult to get well-paid employment without a good knowledge
of English, and higher-level qualiWcations in Chinese were often not considered as
valuable as even mid-level ability in English. Arising from within the Chinese com-
munity, there was also a highly visible elite which had received its education in English
prior to independence (due to having had the money to attend private English-
medium schools) and which following independence held much political power and
inXuence in Singapore – ‘the English-educated Chinese’. The existence of such an
elite, many of whom were only weakly proWcient in Chinese, only served to underline
the apparent diVerence in the valuation of English and Chinese in Singapore, and
increased the discontent of many of the non-English-speaking Chinese population.
Furthermore, in 1980 the Wrst and only Chinese-speaking university in Southeast Asia,
Nanyang University, was converted into an English-speaking university by the gov-
ernment in a merger operation which formed the new National University of
Singapore. Members of the Chinese community collectively saw this as another
worrying sign that Chinese language was being increasingly devalued.
The second general language-related problem to surface in the late 1970s was a
common perception that the linguistic ability of the young had actually fallen rather
than increased following the introduction of compulsory bilingual education. This
was formally investigated by the Ministry of Education in 1978 and resulted in the
Goh Report, which candidly admitted that language standards had indeed fallen and
that the policy of bilingual education had not been successful in the ways originally
hoped for, by quite a signiWcant margin. The report revealed that less than 40 per cent
of students had reached the minimum competency level in two languages targeted by
the government, and that the ability in language which students attained at school was
also frequently being lost when the latter left school and became part of the
workforce. The report added that too much was being expected of students in
382 A. Simpson

terms of language learning, and that action was therefore needed to improve and
facilitate bilingualism both at school and elsewhere in daily life in Singapore. One of
the key factors which the government investigation identiWed as hindering the
achievement of successful bilingualism amongst students was the use of a home
language which was not one of the two languages being learned in school. Such a
problem was noted as being particularly chronic amongst the Chinese population,
where dialects other than Mandarin were commonly used at home. Because of this, as
many as 85 per cent of students from Chinese families were eVectively having to learn
two new languages at school, and this heavy learning burden was argued to be
signiWcantly hindering the intended progress of students in bilingualism.
Attempting to address the problems highlighted by the Goh Report and the
discontent of many of the Chinese community, the government announced an
important new initiative and two changes to the organization of bilingual education.
The Wrst of these was the Speak Mandarin Campaign, a programme which encour-
aged (and in some domains required) members of the Chinese population to switch
from using dialects such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew to using only Mandarin
Chinese. The reasons given for this strong promotion of Mandarin were various in
number. First of all, the Prime Minister suggested that continued extensive use of the
various dialects in Singapore was keeping the Chinese community fragmented and
that use of a single form of Chinese would pull the community together and
strengthen it, adding the warning that if Mandarin was not taken up and adopted
English might ironically come to be the inter-group language of the Chinese. Sec-
ondly, concerning education, it was argued that the continued use of dialects in the
home was holding children back in their studies and that there were even surveys to
show that children who spoke Mandarin at home did better in their studies than
children who spoke dialects with their family. Finally, it was suggested that Mandarin
Chinese increased an individual’s access to Chinese literature and culture, and would
also have growing value for business as mainland China became more open to trade
with countries in the outside world.
Concerning the actual implementation of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, because
Mandarin was an important variety of Chinese in both mainland China and Taiwan, it
was in fact already quite widely understood in Singapore. In order to help Chinese
Singaporeans improve (or initiate) their ability in Mandarin and come to speak it more
in everyday life, the government provided free of charge a variety of classes (including
phone-in and radio sessions), books, tapes, and various other materials, and also
decreed that those in certain public-area professions such as taxi-drivers, bus conduct-
ors, and hawkers would have to pass exams in Mandarin Chinese. Civil servants and
those employed by the government (e.g. in hospitals) were furthermore instructed to
use Mandarin with all (Chinese) members of the public, except those over the age of
60 (Gopinathan 1980). Each year during the campaign the government set out to
target new domains for the spread of Mandarin and replacement of the dialects,
starting with pressure on parents to use only Mandarin with their children in the
 Singapore 383

home, and then later pushing for increased use of Mandarin in the workplace, in cafes,
restaurants, and markets. Over time, television and radio programmes in Chinese
dialects were also reduced and Wnally fully replaced by programming in Mandarin.
Most recently, the government has set its sights on the English-educated section of the
Chinese community, attempting to increase the amount of Mandarin spoken by this
particular group.
In addition to simply consolidating the Mandarin linguistic ability of the Chinese in
Singapore, the Speak Mandarin Campaign also importantly reassured the Chinese
that the government was concerned with maintaining and strengthening their col-
lective cultural identity and wanted to promote Chinese language and Chinese
heritage rather than simply abandon it to the continual advance of English. The
campaign (which still continues) therefore partly allayed the worries of the Chinese
which had been growing in the 1970s.
The second important step taken by the government in direct response to the Goh
Report was the introduction of streaming in schools. Confronted with the failure of
many students to reach the original targeted levels of competence in two languages,
the government conceded that it was perhaps unrealistic to expect that all students
would be able to become fully bilingual in the intended way. It was therefore decided
to adjust and set the goals of language attainment for students according to the way
they performed in early language classes and exams. Those showing a good ability to
cope with instruction in two languages would continue to learn via two mediums of
instruction, whereas those experiencing diYculties with their chosen languages would
be taught with either a reduced amount of the L2 or alternatively only via a single
language (English). The streaming of students into diVerent schools and modes of
learning therefore regulated the amount of language they studied and attempted to
make them ‘as bilingual as they could be’ (Bokhorst-Heng 1998), and students were no
longer expected to reach the same challengingly high levels of bilingualism.
The third technical measure which the government took in the years following the
Goh Report was the conversion of all schools in Singapore to English-medium
education. Although this might have seemed like an unfair promotion of English
over Chinese, Tamil, and Malay, it was in fact simply a measure which formally
recognized the reality of the situation which had evolved in Singapore. In 1983 it was
noticed that less than 1 per cent of children had enrolled in a Chinese-medium
primary school and that no children had enrolled for Tamil- and Malay-medium
schooling. Parents of all racial groups had consequently been sending their children to
English-medium schools (both at primary and secondary level) in such large numbers
that it was no longer realistic to operate the non-English-medium schools, and these
were therefore simply converted into new English-medium schools. Symbolically,
though, this seemed to many members of the Chinese community to signal the end
of Chinese education in Singapore (taken along with the closure of Nanyang Univer-
sity), despite the fact that Chinese was widely available as the L2 in the English-
medium schools, and there were signiWcant protests to the government by many who
384 A. Simpson

were convinced it would result in a seriously reduced knowledge of Chinese lan-

guage and culture. Partly in response to this, the government reacted by promis-
ing to establish a new series of elite schools (Special Assistance Programs) which
would allow for gifted students to reach very high levels of bilingualism in both
English and Chinese, and this reduced the level of protest emanating from the Chinese
community.
Considering the eVects of the government’s language initiatives on each of the
major language groups in Singapore, surveys indicate that the Speak Mandarin
Campaign has been a success, and that Mandarin has now displaced the use of
other varieties of Chinese as the dominant language of the home. In 1980, 80 per
cent of households reported using dialects as the main language of the home, but this
subsequently dropped to 31 per cent in 2000, and there has been an accompanying rise
in the use of Mandarin from 10 per cent in 1980 to 45 per cent in 2000. Use of English
as the dominant language of the home amongst ethnically Chinese families also rose
during the same period to 25 per cent, further displacing the presence of non-
Mandarin dialects in domestic environments. The use of Mandarin is therefore clearly
rising year by year, both in the home and also in the workplace, and the next target of
the Speak Mandarin Campaign is to try to increase the amount of Mandarin used
socially outside the home. This impressive and perhaps surprising success of the Speak
Mandarin Campaign is commonly attributed to the trust that the population of
Singapore generally has in its government and its advice, believing that if the
government Wrmly recommends a path of action, it is likely to be for good, well-
thought-out reasons. Interestingly, Mandarin is now also highly rated as a language of
solidarity and cross-dialect communication amongst the Chinese, as well as being
considered valuable for acquiring Chinese culture and for expressing a Chinese
Singaporean identity (Xu et al. 1998). The increase in use of Mandarin has conse-
quently been accompanied by strong, positive attitudes to the language.
It is also clear from statistics on the current use of Chinese that the dialects have not
disappeared from Singapore, and although in clear decline, they continue to have a
signiWcant presence in Singapore. Kong (2002) reports that use of the dialects remains
common amongst those who have lower incomes and poorer accommodation, as
well as among the elderly, and that retention of the dialects is therefore now partly
associated with lack of economic advancement. It is this lower-income group which is
furthermore most likely to be at the core of protests against the promotion of English
and make demands for increased protection for Chinese language and culture, having
beneWted the least from the government’s policies on language.
Turning to the present status of English, as compared with 1958, due to sustained
governmental support for English since independence and its promotion for largely
utilitarian reasons, English has now become the dominant lingua franca of Singapore
and has made substantial gains in use in a wide range of domains of life in Singapore,
from increased use in the home in parts of the Chinese and Indian communities to
dominant public use in business, industry, law, politics, and education. English has
 Singapore 385

therefore changed from being the erstwhile language of a privileged, wealthy group to
become a broadly shared language spoken with enthusiasm by much of the younger
generation, and is seen to be so essential to employment opportunities and other
aspects of daily life that its across-the-board usefulness may well pose a future threat
to the maintenance of other languages in Singapore.
Considering the fate of Malay over the past forty years, it is interesting to note
that there has been little change or decline in the use of Malay since independence
and the Malay community continues to maintain its language very well, with 95 per
cent of households reporting that Malay was used as the dominant language of the
home in 1990. Although English has been acquired by the rising generations, this
does not seem to have signiWcantly aVected the continued regular use of Malay,
and the language is commonly perceived both as an important symbol of Malay
identity and as critical for the transmission of traditional Malay culture (Kamsiah and
Ayyub 1998).
By way of contrast, the Indian community has been struggling with a number of
diYculties in the maintenance of Tamil as its representative, unifying racial language,
and although Tamil continues to be accorded equal rights in education, the media,
and government administration, the amount of Tamil spoken in Singapore is seriously
decreasing. It can be observed that there are two fundamental problems associated
with the support of Tamil as a major racial language in Singapore. The Wrst of these is
that there are actually two distinct forms of Tamil, a high literary form which is taught
in schools and used in all media broadcasting in Singapore, and a low colloquial form
which is the language form people actually use at home and in normal conversation.
The colloquial form is however perceived in a very negative way and associated with
low-paid manual labourers (Saravanan 1998). Consequently, people may actively avoid
the use of this form of Tamil in public, so as not to be perceived as from the lower
classes, and if they have not mastered the diYcult, high literary form of Tamil, this
results in a common switch to the use of English (or sometimes to Malay). Generally,
then, Tamil children are being taught a complex form of Tamil (the literary form)
which they are unable to master because it is not being reinforced in the home in
practical everyday-life situations, and the colloquial form which is used in these
situations is so negatively valued that it is not accepted as being appropriate for
wider use and is largely absent from television and radio broadcasts in Tamil. In
addition to this, it is widely perceived that Tamil has no practical use for obtaining
employment and so there is not much pragmatic motivation to learn the language.
The second basic problem aVecting Tamil as the representative language of the
Indian community is that only 60 per cent of the Indian community are actually
ethnically Tamil and the remaining 40 per cent come from a range of diVerent ethno-
linguistic groups which may speak north Indian Indo-Aryan languages such as
Punjabi, Hindi, and Bengali. These are quite unrelated to Tamil, which is a south
Indian Dravidian language, and much more diVerent from Tamil than the Chinese
‘dialects’ are from Mandarin. Consequently Tamil is both diYcult to learn for much of
386 A. Simpson

the Indian community, and not really felt to bind the community together in a
genuinely representative way. In the 1990s, protests from non-Tamil Indian groups
have led to the government actually allowing for Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi, and
Bengali to be studied as mother tongues and to satisfy the mother tongue language
requirements necessary in education. The Indian community in Singapore is therefore
not really bound by the use of a common language, there is increasing language shift
into both English and Malay (as the result of intermarriage), and there are those
among the community who see the government’s division of the population into four
distinct racial categories as actually being disadvantageous for the Indian community,
and not having the beneWts which it creates for the other major ethnic groups.
In addition to the non-trivial impact that the growth of English has had on the
learning and use of other languages in Singapore, there are two further issues relating
to English and national identity which require mention here. The Wrst of these is
essentially very simple, but also highly important for the future development of
Singapore and its targeted identity. The government has in recent years repeatedly
emphasized that as Singaporeans’ knowledge of English increases, so does their
exposure to liberal Western ideas, and this potentially brings in to Singapore Western
values and attitudes which may not be beneWcial for the kind of society that the
government thinks should be developed in Singapore, (in the government’s eyes)
incorporating excessive individualism and unwillingness to make personal sacriWce for
the good of the community, as well as potential decadence. The government has
therefore strongly urged the population to guard its traditional, common Asian
values, which are described in the national ideology as including the idea of nation
before community, society above self, and family as the basic unit of society. The
learning of English is presented as a pragmatic necessity for the technological and
economic development of Singapore, but the upkeep of the mother tongues is also
argued to be of supreme importance for the way the latter provide access to and assist
the maintenance of traditional Asian culture and values, which in turn serve as critical
foundations against the destabilizing eVects of rapid modernization (Gopinathan
1998). The government is therefore strongly committed to the preservation of the
three diVerent, oYcial Asian languages for the sake of ongoing and future social
stability. Such a commitment, however, highlights the fundamental dilemma facing
the development of national identity in Singapore. On the one hand the upkeep of the
diVerent Malay, Chinese, and Indian languages and cultures is deemed necessary to
ward oV the encroachment of undesired Western values (and maintain oYcial
equality among the diVerent racial groups), yet on the other hand the establishment
of an all-encompassing national identity is hampered by the diversity expressed by the
mother tongues and their associated diVerent cultures. The development of national
identity in Singapore therefore has to contend with the two opposing forces of
apparently necessary diversity paired against the desire for overarching unity, this
requiring a highly delicate, continually adjusted balancing act on behalf of the
government, and a slow, step-by-step easing towards a possible unifying identity
 Singapore 387

rather than the instantaneous, dramatic construction of a national image designed to

incorporate and subsume all of the country’s population.
A second issue relating to English which has come to the fore in recent years is a
worry by the government that despite its attempts to stimulate the learning of English
for its practical use in accessing technology and establishing Singapore as an inter-
national centre of commerce, the English which is being spoken by Singaporeans may
frequently be of non-standard quality and not comprehensible to non-Singaporeans.
Currently there are in fact two general forms of English regularly used in Singapore.
The Wrst is a form of standard (British) English which is learned in school and
pronounced with a local, distinctive Singaporean accent, known as Standard Singa-
porean English (SSE). The second is a vernacular learned at home and generally
restricted to informal situations. This predominantly spoken form is referred to as
Colloquial Singaporean English (CSE) or as ‘Singlish’, and has incorporated many
non-standard English grammatical features from Bazaar Malay and locally spoken
Chinese dialects such as Hokkien. Below is an example of the colloquial form paired
with its equivalent in standard English (from AlsagoV and Ho 1998: 129):
Singlish/Colloquial Singapore English
Eh, better do properly, lah. Anyhow do, wait kena scolding. And then, you always ask her
for favour, and still don’t want to do properly. Must lah. Like that do cannot.
Standard English
You had better do this properly. If you don’t, you may get told oV. And since you are
always asking her for favours, you should at least do this properly for her. You should! You
cannot do it like this.

CSE has now been spoken in Singapore for approximately thirty years, and much of
the population has developed an ability to switch between CSE and SSE depending on
the speech situation. The use of CSE/Singlish did not attract the criticism of the
government until the 1990s, however, when it came to be used in several very popular
television shows. This turned Singlish into an issue of much public debate, with
diVerent opinions being aired over whether use of CSE should be encouraged by its
presentation in the media. Ultimately it was the government which oYcially decided
the issue, banning Singlish from television and radio and categorizing it as ‘ungram-
matical English spoken by those with a poor command of the language’.
What is ironic in the oYcial discouragement of Singlish is that CSE was gradually
but surely becoming a useful informal symbol of a race-neutral, general Singaporean
identity, hence just the kind of distinctive, universal language form that the govern-
ment has been in need of to unite the four racial groups in Singapore in an unbiased
way. Singlish also has a signiWcant number of grammatical features common to Malay
and Chinese, such as tense omission, ellipsis of subjects and objects, and sentential
mood particles, which make it feel considerably more like a Southeast Asian language
and so potentially easier to accept as a symbol of local identity than, for example,
Standard English. SpeciWcally because of the presence of these local grammatical
388 A. Simpson

features, however, CSE is unacceptable to the government and cannot be promoted as

a national language, and in the year 2000 the government initiated the Speak Good
English Movement with the deliberate goal of decreasing the use of CSE and ensuring
that the English spoken in Singapore would be intelligible to people from other
countries.
Concerning SSE, to a lesser extent this also functions as an expression of Singapor-
ean identity. It is not associated with a particular race in Singapore (and is also no
longer mentally associated directly with the former colonial power, Britain), it is
widely spoken and understood, and its pronunciation is clearly identiWable and
distinct from other world forms of English such as Hong Kong English, Indian
English, Australian English, etc. Whether SSE may some time come to serve as a
really successful symbol of national identity and be spread throughout the econom-
ically poorer levels of society where CSE is more common is however an interesting
question for the future, and a linguistic issue which, like many other questions of
language in Singapore, is likely to be at least partly decided by government policy and
support.

17.4 Multilingualism and the Emergence of National Identity

Having seen how Singapore’s policy of oYcial multilingualism and individual bilin-
gualism has unfolded since its initiation at the time of independence, we can now step
back and highlight what the policy achieves and how it supports the creation of
national identity in Singapore.
The declaration that Singapore would have four co-oYcial languages and pursue a
policy of broad multilingualism in education and public life was made as part of a
wider attempt to maintain social stability among Singapore’s ethnically mixed popu-
lation and create the sense of being equal partners in a single nation. As a means to
achieve and maintain harmony in a densely populated, racially mixed Xedgling state,
Singapore’s multilingualism has been considerably eVective, paired up with guaran-
tees of equal rights for the four ethno-linguistic groups in other areas of daily life. If
one examines the policy and its implementation in a critical way, however, it becomes
apparent that one of the oYcial languages, English, is privileged by the government in
ways that the other three languages are not, with this being clearest in the area of
education where English now has to be studied by all students in Singapore, and is the
sole medium of instruction at university level. Because students are constrained to
pick English as one of the two languages involved in their bilingual education, this
furthermore means that they are generally not learning the languages of the other
racial groups in Singapore, as the second language selected is almost always the
(language closest to the) mother tongue of students. The potential for the policy of
multilingualism to increase understanding of the diVerent cultures of the three major
racial groups in Singapore by having students from one group learn the language of
 Singapore 389

a diVerent racial group is therefore not being taken advantage of, and students are
instead learning the neutral, ‘international’ language, English. However, by other
means, Singaporeans are coming to learn about the culture and traditions of the
diVerent ethnic groups which make up the population, in schools via the use of new
general textbooks which describe Chinese, Malay, and Indian culture, and in daily life
via the media and promotion of the three major cultures during public festivities.
What can therefore be concluded about the Singaporean policy of multilingualism
is that although it does not directly bring about integration and the growth of a single
national identity, it nevertheless is responsible, in signiWcant part, for creating the
stability which does allow for a collective identity to evolve which is actually not
centred on a single traditional language or culture. The signs of such an emergent
national identity in Singapore are in fact quite positive, and recent surveys of public
opinion indicate that there is a high degree of identiWcation with Singapore as a nation
and a homeland which people both have an allegiance to and a strong desire to
continue to live in. There appears to be a strong sense of the need to work together for
the good of the country and continued prosperity, and a common pride in the way
that Singapore has both survived in the face of initial adversity and become a highly
successful modernized nation.
As part of the government’s general policies of equal treatment for the three major
racial groups in Singapore, the support of multilingualism is, however, also recognized
as potentially impeding the development of a single national identity, as any attention
drawn to the diversity of the population in the country can distract from the goal of
forging unity. As multilingualism is seen to be absolutely necessary for the mainten-
ance of harmony in Singapore, what is therefore required from the government is
constant, careful attention to the balancing of multingualism, progress in the econ-
omy, and the needs and fears of diVerent sections of the population. One further
example of how delicate this balancing act often is concerns the government’s deep
desire for students to obtain a high level of bilingual proWciency. In the 1980s the initial
hope that all students would become bilingual had to be scaled down in the light of
the Goh Report and streaming resulted in certain less able students attaining a
signiWcantly reduced level of bilingualism. At the higher end of education, elevated
standards of bilingualism were still demanded, however, and entrance into university
in Singapore required students to pass advanced-level exams in their mother tongue as
well as English. Such a requirement has proved to be unpopular with many in the
population whose children experience diYculties in learning language but are other-
wise academically suited for university study, and signiWcant numbers of gifted
students have chosen to study in overseas universities in order to avoid the mother
tongue language entry requirement. As this situation has become more chronic, and
competition to attract good students has grown, the government has (in 2004) made
moves to relax the L2 university entry requirements and indicated that certain grades
lower than pass-level would also be acceptable, believing such a change to be in the
interests of the general population. This however immediately provoked a strong
390 A. Simpson

reaction from sections of the Chinese community who expressed alarm that it might
allow for standards of Chinese to fall to very low levels. The government had to
quickly assure the Chinese that this would not be the case and it would seek to
compensate by adding new courses on Chinese history, economy, and society into the
school curriculum to increase coverage of things Chinese and would make new eVorts
to protect the learning of Chinese and the other mother tongues. It can therefore be
seen that each step taken in language policy in Singapore has potentially important
associated consequences and the issue of language in Singapore is continually highly
charged with emotion and concern.
As for what the future may hold for Singapore, this is clearly diYcult to predict;
however, three issues in particular can be signalled as having a likely signiWcance for
the development of Singapore in the twenty-Wrst century. The Wrst of these is the
economy. In the absence of obvious historical or cultural symbols of unity at
independence, the government has used economic survival and progress as goals to
unite and bind the nation, and the spectacular achievements made in the economy
over the last few decades have come to function as an important part of Singaporean
national identity. Consequently, continued stability and coherence as a nation may
depend on the ability of the government to sustain high economic growth as a symbol
binding the nation together. A second important question for the future is the degree
to which rising generations will continue to accept the paternalistic, heavy involve-
ment of the government in everyday life, which has been so characteristic of the last
forty years. Until now, this has been relatively well tolerated by the population as
many feel it has assisted Singapore in its ongoing development. However, those who
have no memory of the hardships of life before independence and the struggle for
modernization may be less willing than previous generations to accept the continu-
ation of restrictions on the press and personal and public freedom imposed by the
government, and this could lead to new divisive confrontation between state and
population. Finally, the economic rise of China predicted for the next Wfty years is
bound to have increasing eVects on Singapore and cause new interactions between
English and Chinese as potentially dominant regional languages, possibly reducing the
importance of English and making Chinese a more marketable commodity, with clear
consequences for policies on bilingualism and education. How all these and other
tensions in multiracial, multilingual modern Singapore play out in the century to
come will certainly be interesting to follow.
 18
Thailand and Laos
Andrew Simpson and Noi Thammasathien

18.1 Introduction
This chapter examines language and national identity issues in Thailand and also
Laos. These two neighbouring states are grouped together here for the reason that
both contain heavily dominant ‘Tai’ populations and have a long history of interaction
with each other. The term ‘Tai’ itself refers to a particular group of languages which
form a language family distinct from other major language families of east and
southeast Asia such as the surrounding Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian
groups. Speakers of the Tai group of languages originated in southeast China but
migrated far and wide during the seventh to thirteenth centuries, reaching Assam in
the west, northern Vietnam in the south, and modern-day Thailand and Laos in the
southwest, where the greatest concentration of Tai speakers is still to be found, with
57 million in Thailand (90 per cent of the population), and 4 million in Laos (66 per
cent of the population). The term ‘Thai’ (pronounced with an aspiration on the initial
consonant which is absent from the pronunciation of ‘Tai’) is normally used to refer
just to the inhabitants of Thailand, both as formal citizens of the country and as
members of a single ethnic group identiWed by a largely shared language and culture.
It is also frequently used to refer to the standardized variety of speech which has been
strongly promoted within Thailand – Standard Thai. The term ‘Lao’ performs a
similar function within the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, being used to
refer to citizens of the country and also to the particular sub-variety of Tai language
and culture which is found throughout signiWcant parts of the country. As will later be
seen, both the terms ‘Thai’ and ‘Lao’ have been of considerable importance in
attempts to mould national identities within the two countries.
As the chapter will note, modern Thailand stands out in southeast Asia as a country
which seems to be remarkably homogeneous from a linguistic and ethnic point of
view, yet the obvious dominance of Thai language and culture in the country actually
overlays a complex patchwork of some sixty other languages which are regularly used
by the inhabitants of Thailand, generally without the occurrence of major language/
ethnic group-related disturbances. Such apparent ‘unity amongst diversity’ which
392 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

distinguishes Thailand from various other countries in the region has been commen-
ted on in many works (Keyes 1989, Smalley 1994, Reynolds 1991b) and is the clear
result of a hundred years of state-controlled language-planning initiatives in conjunc-
tion with sustained and highly successful eVorts at nation-building. Thailand is also
remarkable for being one of the few Asian countries not to have experienced the
traumas of colonization by a Western power. By way of contrast, Thailand’s neigh-
bour to the northeast, Laos, was indeed subjected to Western colonization, and
formally came into being as the result of unnatural borders being created by treaties
between the colonizing power, France, and other countries in the region. One
particularly signiWcant eVect of such treaties was to strand almost 80 per cent of the
total ethnic Lao population within the borders of the northeast of Thailand, a
situation which remains to this day and which adds to the complexity of national
identity issues in both Thailand and Laos. Due to severe diYculties in internal
communication in Laos caused by mountainous terrain, as well as the presence of
substantial numbers of non-Tai ethno-linguistic groups in the country and the chaos
of a protracted post-colonial civil war, the development of national identity in Laos
has faced quite diVerent challenges to those in Thailand, and the success of establish-
ing a language-related unifying national identity is considerably less apparent than in
Laos’ larger neighbour to the southwest. Both countries, however, raise interesting

Thailand and Laos

 Thailand and Laos 393

and diVerent questions about the use of language in the process of nation-building and
the degree to which linguistic pluralism may or may not be possible within linguis-
tically diverse populations.
The structure of the chapter is as follows. Because an understanding of the present
linguistic situation in Thailand and Laos requires an appreciation of how these polities
initially evolved and were then deliberately formed as nation-states, section 18.2 begins
with a consideration of the development of the early Tai kingdoms into modern
nations, with a particular focus on the period of intense nationalism which occurred
in Thailand in the Wrst half of the twentieth century. Section 18.3 then concentrates on
the current situation of language–state relations in Thailand and the relation of Standard
Thai to the many other languages spoken in the country, as well as noting certain
changes which are beginning to manifest themselves. Finally section 18.4 returns to
Laos and focuses both on its recent colonial and post-colonial past, and the way that the
country has attempted to unify its many diVerent linguistic groups as a single nation.

18.2 Nation-building and the Construction of National Identity

18.2.1 From Muangs to Kingdoms
When the Tais initially migrated out of southern China and into the areas of modern
Thailand and Laos, they organized themselves in small groups of fortiWed villages
known as muang, which served as social, economic, and defensive units of organiza-
tion characteristic of Tai groups wherever these have settled. Later on in the thir-
teenth century, however, a number of larger kingdoms emerged, which connected up
the territories of the smaller, scattered muang. In the area corresponding to the north
of modern Thailand the kingdom of Lan Na (‘a million rice-Welds’) developed around
the centre of Chiang Mai, and to the east, in the area of modern Laos, the kingdom of
Lan Xang (‘a million elephants’) began to build together a signiWcant amount of
connected territory. To the south of Lan Na, a further, third kingdom appeared in the
large plain of central Thailand, and was known as Sukhotai. Although this latter
kingdom did not have a long existence, it is commonly portrayed as marking the real
beginning of the history of Thailand, and is described as being an important, golden
age in which the arts and culture Xourished, and the system of writing Thai was
signiWcantly invented.
Following the decline of Sukhotai, a much longer-lasting kingdom then arose to its
south, Ayudhya, and came to dominate the central plains area right up until the
eighteenth century. The kingdom of Ayudhya was particularly important because it
was here that a Tai social and political culture and population emerged which was
clearly diVerent from those in the other Tai kingdoms further to the north and east.
The Tai of Ayudhya adopted and adapted many sophisticated ideas concerning the
organization of state and society from systems developed in the powerful Khmer
kingdom of Angkor to the southeast. The kingdom of Ayudhya also had a more
394 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

cosmopolitan make-up than Lan Na and Lan Xang, and incorporated many people of
Mon, Khmer, and Chinese descent as well as the dominant Tai. The blending of these
peoples within a highly structured society inXuenced by Khmer and Indic principles of
government led to a distinctive and ambitious Tai kingdom which neighbouring
powers began to refer to as ‘Siam’, introducing a name for the kingdoms of this
central plains area that would continue to be used (primarily by outsiders) until 1939.
Elsewhere, to the northeast of Ayudhya, the kingdom of Lan Xang also experienced
considerable development and a golden age in the seventeenth century, encompassing
most of the area of modern Laos and more. In the eighteenth century, however, Lan
Xang disastrously split up into three rival kingdoms, Luang Prabang in the north,
Vientiane in the centre, and Champassak in the south, and remained troubled by
Wghting and competition between the three kingdoms right up until colonization of
large amounts of Lao territory by the French in the twentieth century. For much of
the last three centuries, the areas inhabited by Lao–Tai people have therefore suVered
from being disunited and have also been subject to periodic and regular subordination
by more powerful neighbours and invaders.
In its turn, Ayudhya also fell and was completely destroyed by the Burmese in 1767.
Out of the ashes of Ayudhya, however, quickly grew a new Siamese kingdom which
remarkably brought under its control more territory than had been governed by
Ayudhya, including Lan Na to the north, the Lao kingdoms of Luang Prabang,
Vientiane, and Champassak, Cambodia to the east, and various Malay states in the
south. With a new capital city founded in Bangkok and an aggressive policy of
expansion, the territory under Siam’s control subsequently came to take on more
of the administrative form of an empire rather than a kingdom, with the relation of
subordinate territories to the centre of power changing as the distance from Bangkok
increased. Those areas furthest away from Bangkok were less integrated in the
Siamese world and functioned simply as vassal states submitting annual tribute to
Bangkok. Other regions closer in and more closely bound to Siam also submitted
manpower for defence and construction works but were nevertheless still directly
ruled over on a day-to-day basis by local powerful elites. The important picture that
emerges then in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is of a powerful
Siam governing an extremely diverse population, in which local rulers play an
important part in the hierarchical structure of the empire, and there is no uniform
sense of culture or identity/belonging within the widespread territories of the empire.

18.2.2 From Kingdoms/Empire to Modern State and Nation

Into this picture in the mid-nineteenth century then came a highly signiWcant new
pressure on Siam in the form of the advancing forces of the West, and the expansion of
British control in Burma and the Malay states to the south, and French expansion in
Indochina. Concerned that Britain and France might try to colonize Siam as well,
King Mongkut and later King Chulalongkorn responded with an eVective programme
 Thailand and Laos 395

of diplomatic accommodation in which new treaties both facilitated and improved

trading access for the Western powers and also conceded large amounts of peripheral
Siamese territory demanded by Britain and France. King Chulalongkorn began
reforming and modernizing the country in many ways, so as to project the image
of a civilized, stable modern state that the West could safely and proWtably conduct
business with without the need for colonization. In the process, Siam actually lost half
of the total territory it had previously controlled, but successfully avoided any
attempts by Britain and France at colonization of the heartland of Siam itself. This
loss of territory combined with Chulalongkorn’s dramatic reform of state bureaucracy
then had an important eVect on the way that Siam was internally governed. By
replacing the authority of local rulers with a new system of government ministries
with country-wide powers, Chulalongkorn eVected a tremendous centralization of
power, and from an empire-like situation in which the population of outer regions felt
constrained to give their allegiance to local ruling families, there emerged a new
modern state run by bureaucrats from Bangkok in which all of the population felt
governed by the same central state apparatus. Such a centralization of power would
not have been possible within the sprawling, vast, uneven territory of Siam prior to
the treaties, and now for the Wrst time established a modernized state with the
potential for country-wide uniformity and a new feeling of belonging to a single
national body. However, as noted in Bunbongkarn (1983), at that time: ‘National
consciousness, a psychological force which uniWes diVerent segments into a nation did
not prevail among the Thais in remote provinces although they were not ethnically
and culturally diVerent from those in the central plains.’ In order to consolidate the
new state of Siam and to legitimize centralized rule from Bangkok, it became
apparent that the notion of a shared national culture was now necessary.
The individual who spearheaded and championed Siam’s transformation from a
state into a nation, at least at the level of the growing new elite, was the new king
Vajiravudh, the Wrst monarch to have been educated in the West, where he had gained
considerable exposure to Western ideas of nationalism. Vajiravudh vigorously pro-
moted the idea of the Thai nation and indicated that the three most important
concepts to be upheld by inhabitants of the country were the Nation, Religion, and
the Monarch. Underlying Vajiravudh’s nationalism was a clear secondary desire to
protect and strengthen his own position as king. However, there also seemed to be a
genuine wish to generate a greater sense of unity and collective identity in the nation.
Potentially challenging such unity of identity, and another motivation for the new
calls for nationalism, was the identiWcation of an increasing Chinese ‘problem’ within
Siam, and two of Vajiravudh’s writings, ‘The Jews of the Orient’ and ‘Wake Up Siam’
were criticisms of the Chinese dominance of the economy in Siam. Prior to the 1920s,
large-scale Chinese immigration into Siam had not been perceived as particularly
disruptive or divisive, as the majority of the Chinese males who immigrated as
labourers subsequently married local Thai women and assimilated into Siamese
society. However, in the 1920s more and more Chinese women also immigrated
396 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

into Siam and the incidence of assimilation became less and less. As the economic
power of the Chinese rose dramatically (to the point of controlling 80 per cent of
commerce within Siam), the non-integration of this sizeable foreign group, which had
grown to over 10 per cent of the population, came to be seen as a considerable
potential threat to the new unity of Siam, and so became a regular target of nationalist
speeches made by Vajiravudh.
Elsewhere Vajiravudh began the implementation of a drive towards a new, hom-
ogenized national identity with the introduction of schooling in a standardized form
of Thai based on the elite-spoken dialect in Bangkok. Literacy was taught through this
Standard Thai and signiWcantly it came to be used in place of other local scripts and
dialects. Vajiravudh was also keenly aware that the method of presentation of the
nationalist idée was critical for its wide success and depended on the careful manipu-
lation of language adapted for widespread consumption. He therefore ensured that
the language of his speeches and his plays was simple and easy to understand, so that
they allowed for eVective, large-scale dissemination to a broad nationwide audience.
The nationalist programme initiated by Vajiravudh was continued with increased
vigour by others in the 1930s. In 1932, aspirations for greater democracy amongst the
growing Western-educated elite led to the overthrow of the absolute monarchy and
the conversion of the country into a constitutional monarchy in which the king had
much reduced powers. In the decade that followed this, two individuals played a
particularly important role in the further development of nationalism and national
identity in Siam: Phibun Songkhram, a military oYcer who became prime minister in
1938, and Luang Wichit Wathakan, a writer and academic. The latter became the
Director General of the Fine Arts Department and used this institution to produce
and disseminate a mass of nationalist propaganda building up the myth of a single
Thai people with a long, uniWed history. This took the form of stirring historical plays,
songs, and musical dramas which were widely broadcast on the radio and performed
throughout the country by a new national acting and dance troupe established by
the Fine Arts Department. The dramatic increase of published materials available in the
1930s also assisted greatly in the spread of Wichit’s nationalist propaganda, as did the
growth and availability of compulsory education, which was critically transmitted by
the use of Standard Thai alone. School children throughout the land consequently
received the same curriculum of ‘national’ history and culture in the same ‘national’
language, and furthermore had to adopt that language in order to proceed through
the educational system. Through the 1930s the public, young and old, were therefore
constantly exposed to the idea of a Thai national identity in a far more extensive way
than in Vajiravudh’s reign, and the government-endorsed promotion of a unifying
national culture successfully embedded the idea of a single Siamese/Thai nation
among signiWcant numbers of people in the country.
From 1939 on, the government led by Phibun then issued a series of State
Conventions (Barmé 1993: 144–60, Wyatt 1984: 252–6) which both announced oYcial
new ‘national’ policies and also urged various changes in behaviour by the public in
 Thailand and Laos 397

relation to common national objects and the national image. In the Wrst State
Convention announced by Phibun on National Day 1939, it was declared that the
name of the country was oYcially being changed from Siam to Thailand (in Thai from
prathet Sayam to prathet Thai). The word ‘Thai’ had long been in use to refer to the Tai
people living in Siam, but ‘Siam’ had been conventionalized as the name of the country
in treaties and other dealings with foreign countries. The motivations ascribed to the
change in oYcial name were that Wrst of all it emphasized that the Tai, and not the
economically dominant Chinese, were the real owners of the country, and secondly it
highlighted the common Tai linking between the inhabitants of Siam and the ethnic-
ally Tai peoples in neighbouring countries, in particular French-occupied Laos. Ever
since the ‘annexation’ by France of Lao territories previously controlled by Siam, there
had been a desire to seize back these ‘lost provinces’, and with the accelerated rise of
nationalism in the late 1930s, Wichit, Phibun, and others began to imagine a new pan-
Tai empire led by Thailand, uniting Tai peoples in Laos, Burma, and possibly even
further aWeld. It was also publicly noted that the word ‘Thai’ had the additional
meaning ‘free/independent’ and that this well matched the fact that Siam/Thailand
was the only non-colonized/independent country in eastern Asia apart from Japan.
Following on from the change of the name of the country from Siam to Thailand,
the government proclaimed in a second State Convention that all the inhabitants
of Thailand would now be referred to as Thai (people), however they may have
previously called/identiWed themselves. Long-standing ethnic identity labels were
therefore replaced by ‘a new, oYcially sanctioned historical-cultural identity’
(Barmé 1993: 151), and it was even ordered by Wichit that ethnic terms such as
‘Lao’ and ‘Shan’ should be replaced in current and traditional popular songs by the
word ‘Thai’. The fourth State Convention also discouraged the use of any regional or
ethnic/religious modiWer of the word ‘Thai’, so that terms such as ‘southern Thais’,
‘northeastern Thais’, and ‘Islamic Thais’ should not be used, and instead all inhabit-
ants of the country should be simply referred to as ‘Thais’ in a fully uniform way.
In 1940 the government then proclaimed a State Convention on Language, and
announced that: ‘All Thais must consider their Wrst duty as good citizens is to study the
Thai language, so that at least they must be able to read and write. . . . Thais are not to
give undue consideration to their particular place of residence or their birth-place or to
the diVerence in accent of the language as indicative of separation. Everyone must
consider that he is born Thai, he naturally possesses Thai blood and talks Thai
irrespective of birth-place or pronunciation.’ (Quoted in Barmé 1993: 155.) This
particularly targeted groups which spoke non-Tai languages, such as the Chinese and
the Malay-speakers in the south. It also essentially instructed speakers of Lao and other
Tai-varieties that they had a civic duty to learn Standard Thai and that they should
consider themselves to be bound to the nation by their knowledge of and ability in Thai.
In their push for a new national unity, what many of the Conventions eVectively did
was to promote the culture and language of the most powerful ethnic group in
Thailand, the Thais living in the central area of the country, and there was a clear
398 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

attempt to smother (or at least fail to acknowledge as signiWcant) the existence of

other cultures and languages within the country. Reacting in particular to the
perceived ‘threat’ to national identity posed by the Chinese, who were seen to be
increasingly sympathetic to the growing nationalism in China (heightened by the
invasion of China by Japan in 1937), the Thai government closed down large numbers
of Chinese schools and stopped the printing of Chinese newspapers, considerably
impeding the successful transmission of Chinese to the younger generation, and
triggering a long-term process of language shift from Chinese into Thai (Morita 2004).
Further State Conventions aimed at modernizing the public image of Thailand, by
calling upon people to dress in a civilized way (with men encouraged to wear coats,
shirts, and ties, and women hats and gloves), and at instilling respect for symbols of
the nation such as the national Xag and the national anthem (with citizens being
required to stand at attention in public places whenever the Xag was raised or lowered
to the playing of the national anthem).
Finally, the irredentist movement reached its peak in 1940/41, when Thailand went
to war with France to retrieve the lost provinces of Tai speakers in Laos that had
belonged to Siam in the nineteenth century. During this period of high nationalist
fervour which received wide and ardent support from the public, the Thai Depart-
ment of Defence even went as far as to assert that Laotians, Khmers, and Vietnamese
were ‘of the same nationality’ as the Thai and were distant (younger) siblings being
rescued from the oppressive colonial domination of France (Reynolds 1991b).

18.2.3 From World War II to the Present: Defending the National Identity
Following the end of World War II and a brief period of occupation by Japanese forces,
the Thai government continued on with its programme of promotion of the ‘national’
identity through the advancement of central Thai language and culture. Phibun
initiated a fresh campaign against the Chinese, with new restrictions on Chinese
participation in the economy, further reduction of the possibility of use of Chinese
within education, and a near halt on immigration from China. In the south of
Thailand, the army and the air force were called in to put down resistance from
Muslim Malay speakers to the imposition of the State Conventions on language and
behaviour, and education in Malay came to be forbidden. Later on, in the 1960s and
1970s the country experienced further internal unrest in a period of insurgency which
was centred in the northeast of the country and associated with communists and
foreign support from Indochina. All throughout this time, the notion of a uniWed
national culture was strongly transmitted by the government through education and
the media, and ‘traditional’ values and institutions were championed as being of great
necessary importance for the country and its people. Though internal resistance to
the state homogenization of language and culture did occur in parts (e.g. in the far
south and for a time in the northeast), generally there was passive acceptance of the
state’s promotion of a national Thai image and identity, and also much enthusiasm for
 Thailand and Laos 399

it in certain areas, especially when the monarch was reintroduced and vigorously
promoted as a major symbol of national unity from the 1960s onwards. Critical in the
post-WWII (further) state engineering of a national Thai identity and its acceptance
by the population was the fact that Thailand underwent an economic boom from the
mid-1960s until the 1990s and stood out as the modernizing success story of southeast
Asia, fuelled by much US aid and military presence during the Vietnam war years. The
inhabitants of Thailand therefore came to experience a certain collective pride in the
progress of their country when compared with that of their neighbours, and this was
continually bolstered by the observation that Thailand had maintained its independ-
ence when all those around it had succumbed to Western colonization. The idea of
belonging to a single, successful nation was therefore easier to instil amongst the still
varied population as Thailand indeed seemed to be a nation which was prospering like
other ‘real nations’ elsewhere in the world.
Considered as a whole, the history of Thailand can be seen as the incremental
consolidation of a modern nation through a series of fairly discrete, segmentable
stages. Out of an initial period in which the area of modern Thailand and Laos was
occupied by numerous small, disconnected muang there emerged a number of
diVerent Tai kingdoms with a more clearly deWned, broader area of domination.
Amongst these, the kingdom of Ayudhya developed a particular sophistication in its
internal structure when adopting organizational principles from neighbouring Angkor
and the Khmers, and handed these on to the Thonburi/early Bangkok kings who
subsequently expanded the kingdom into an empire Wlled with many, diVerent
peoples. Governed directly by local rulers, there was little collective feeling amongst
such peoples or loyalty to the centre. Pressure from the West, however, forced a
reduction of territory in the empire and an eVective redeWnition of the internal
structure of the core of Siam as a modernizing state with strong centralized control
and elimination of the power of local rulers, but still no coherence as a nation with a
common identity. This identity as a nation has now been carefully forged and
constructed over the last hundred years by elite-driven policies focusing on the
advancement of central Thai language and culture, and a downplaying of regional
and other ethno-religious diVerences present in the country. The current results of
this process of the promotion of a dominant language and national identity and the
present status of Standard Thai and the many other languages which continue to be
heard in the country are now considered in section 18.3, postponing an examination
of the rather diVerent development of the linguistic situation in Laos to section 18.4.

18.3 Language and National Identity in Contemporary Thailand

18.3.1 The Dominance of Standard Thai
Since King Vajiravudh’s initial directives that Standard Thai should be used in school-
ing throughout the country, eighty years of eVorts in national language promotion
400 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

have resulted in Standard Thai coming to hold an extremely prominent and dominant
position within Thailand. Standard Thai is a form of Central Thai based on the variety
of Thai spoken earlier by the elite of the court, and now by the educated middle and
upper classes in Bangkok. It incorporates many words of Pali and Sanskrit origin
(which are still used as source languages for the creation of new terminology), was
standardized in grammar books in the nineteenth century, and spread dramatically
from the 1930s onwards, when public education became much more widespread and
available.
Currently, Standard Thai is widely understood, primarily due to its dominance in
various areas of life. In the domain of education, it is oYcially decreed that all public
schooling has to be provided via the medium of Standard Thai, throughout the
country. Standard Thai also dominates the media, with the vast majority of television
and radio programmes being broadcast in Standard Thai, reinforcing its national
presence. It is also the oYcial language of government business, public speaking, and
functions as the language of economic advancement and social prestige (Diller 1991).
Finally, it is associated with a written form which has a long history and literature and
which is extremely visible throughout Thailand, having fully displaced other regional
forms of writing used until the mid-twentieth century. Because of its dominant
presence and continual promotion through the media and education, Standard Thai
is also perceived as an important national symbol, and alongside Theravada Buddhism
and the King is suggested to be one of the strongest symbols of national identity
present in the country, even for speakers who rarely use it in everyday life (Smalley
1994: 14).

18.3.2 Regional Tai Languages

While Standard Thai is indeed heavily dominant in education, the media, commerce,
and oYcialdom, many other languages are also widely spoken in Thailand in other
domains of daily life. These can be usefully divided into the major regional languages,
which are also Tai languages, and various other non-Tai languages spoken by about 10
per cent of the population in more scattered areas.
Standard Thai being a language which is primarily learned in school (or via the
television/radio), the vast majority of the population actually grow up speaking some
other language at home, and for nearly 90 per cent, this will be a form of one of
the four main regional languages. These are Central Thai, spoken in the area of the
central plains (including Bangkok), Northern Thai (also known as Kammuang, the
language of the old kingdom of Lan Na), Northeastern Thai (also known as Isan or
Lao), and Southern Thai (also known as Paktay). In their grammar, pronunciation,
and lexicon, these four varieties are about as diVerent from each other as members of
the Romance or Germanic family of languages, and are not mutually intelligible,
though speakers of one variety will feel that the other varieties are certainly related to
it and are not foreign languages in the way that Chinese or English are. The closeness
 Thailand and Laos 401

of the regional languages to Standard Thai is furthermore suYcient for texts written
in Standard Thai to be read aloud with the distinctive phonology of the regional
languages. Due to the general prominence of Standard Thai, more and more words
are being borrowed from Standard Thai into the other languages, especially by the
young, who are more competent in Standard Thai, and also when new technical
vocabulary has Wrst been coined in Standard Thai.
Amongst the four regional languages, a special word needs to be said about
Northeastern Thai/Isan. Historically, the northeast part of Thailand, which is
known as Isan, was Wrst part of the successful Lao kingdom of Lan Xang, and then
part of the smaller Lao kingdom of Luang Prabang. It was only one hundred years ago
that Isan actually became an oYcial part of Siam as the result of treaties signed with
the French which incorporated this ethnically Lao area into Siam. For the majority of
its history, therefore, Isan has been a Lao area more closely connected with the
population in modern Laos than with the Thais/Siamese. Although Thai and Lao
language and culture have much in common, the people of Isan are nevertheless
closer in their sub-variety of Tai language and culture with the inhabitants of modern
Laos, and the language which the people of Isan speak is indeed referred to as either
Isan or Lao, with the Thai government often dispreferring the latter term as it stresses
the potential link between the people of Isan and the modern state of Laos. This
ethnic and linguistic aYnity of the people of Isan with the Laos across the border
raises questions about loyalties and national identity which we will return to in
section 18.4.2. It should also be noted that the number of Isan/Lao speakers in
northeast Thailand is substantial and as much as a third of the total Thai population.
The balance of Lao speakers in Thailand and Laos is also quite uneven and perhaps
the opposite to what one might expect, with only 20 per cent of the total number of
Lao speakers living in Laos, and the remaining 80 per cent all being resident in Isan
(an indication of the arbitrariness of the borders of Laos established by the French
with the Siamese government).

18.3.3 Non-Tai Languages in Thailand

In addition to the Tai majority population (90 per cent), a large number of non-Tai
languages are spoken by the remaining 10 per cent of the population of Thailand. These
can be divided into two basic groups deWned in terms of the amount of time their
speakers have been present in the country: (a) ‘early residents’, and (b) ‘late arrivals’.
When the Tai people originally migrated into the area of modern Thailand, there
were already there scattered groups of speakers of Mon-Khmer languages, and
speakers of these languages continue to be present in the country. Many of these
groups descended from early residents of Thailand are now considerably small in size
and assimilating to the dominant Thai culture, with accompanying full loss of the
original language and cultural identity (Premsrirat 2001).
402 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

The second group of ‘late arrivals’ into Thailand are speakers of a broad range of
Sino-Tibetan and Hmong-Mien languages (amongst which Karen, Akha, Lahu, Yao,
and Hmong) who migrated into north and northwest Thailand from the middle of
the nineteenth century. Because these people generally live at higher altitudes than
the Thai lowlanders, they have come to be referred to as the Hill Peoples/Tribes.
Traditionally, they tend to live by swidden farming which results in a migratory
pattern of life and the necessary search for new farming land every few years. Many
of them now also engage in the cultivation of opium as a cash-crop.
Because of the growth of the population in the upland areas and the reduction in
the amount of land available for swidden-style agriculture, these peoples have recently
had increasing contact with the lowland Thais and a number of them are coming to
acquire a secondary competence in either Standard or Northern Thai. Though
comparatively small in total number (650,000), the hill people are considerably visible
in Thailand, due in part to use of the ethnic diversity of the hill peoples in the
promotion of international tourism in Thailand, and also due to regular television
news footage of the king touring the area of the hill people. The king has been
concerned with alleviation of the poverty of the hill people and Wnding ways to
improve their income without the cultivation of opium. Generally, it is felt that the hill
peoples have not integrated themselves with the majority Thai culture, and there are
frequent negative attitudes towards the hill peoples as outsiders who are destroying
the forests of Thailand in order to produce opium.

18.3.4 The Chinese and the Sino-Thai

Two further non-Tai language groups residing in Thailand which deserve special
mention because of their links to (non-)assimilation and identity issues are the mainly
urban Chinese and the southern Malay-speakers.
As noted in section 18.2.2, both king Vajiravudh and Phibun saw the growing
identity of the economically dominant Chinese population with nationalism in China
rather than Siam as a potential threat to national unity, and moved to force greater
integration of the Chinese into the emerging Thai nation. This was essentially
achieved in two ways, Wrst, and most immediately, by economic measures which
made it signiWcantly more diYcult and costly for non-Thais to engage in commerce in
Thailand, and second through the eVective control of Chinese language in education,
a longer-term but nevertheless highly eVective means of stimulating integration.
Following the decree that all schools follow a standard Thai curriculum, there was
mass closure of private Chinese schools in the Phibun era, and new generations of
ethnically Chinese children began to experience their daily education in Standard
Thai, being presented with images of Thai culture and history rather than learning
Chinese language, culture, and history.
The result of so much sustained pressure on the Chinese community has been a
dramatic assimilation of the Chinese into Thai society. From the Phibun era onwards
 Thailand and Laos 403

there was increased intermarriage of Chinese men with Thai women, this producing
oVspring who grew up hearing and learning more Thai than Chinese. In order to
maintain their prominence in business, many Chinese also adopted Thai names and
Thai manners. Now, nearly seventy years since the economic and educational meas-
ures to encourage integration were put in place, the Chinese in Thailand have evolved
into a much more blurred community referred to as Sino-Thai, with 15–20 per cent of
the total Thai population being estimated to have signiWcant Chinese heritage. The
Sino-Thai are for the most part people who have a memory of being partly Chinese,
but whose daily life may involve Thai language and culture signiWcantly more than
Chinese, and there has been a signiWcant and clear loss in the ability of younger
generations to speak Chinese (Morita 2004). In comparative terms, the ‘Chinese’ in
Thailand are commonly described as showing the highest degree of assimilation that a
Chinese community has undergone anywhere in southeast Asia.

18.3.5 The Malay-speaking Muslims of the South

A strong contrast to the extensive assimilation of the Chinese is represented by
the weakly-integrated status of the Malay-speaking Muslim population living in
Thailand’s four southernmost provinces near the border with Malaysia. Numbering
approximately one million, these Malay speakers inhabit a set of territories which
were previously independent Malay states and which were fully incorporated into
Siam only in the nineteenth century. Being ethnically, historically, and linguistically
Malay rather than Tai, and by religion Muslim rather than Buddhist, the population
here continues to be signiWcantly distinct in many ways from that of the rest of
Thailand, and many amongst the Malay speakers feel that they have much more in
common with the inhabitants of Malaysia to the south than with the Thais to the
north.
Being very much aware of the obvious diVerences between the Malay-speaking
population of the south and the national identity promoted elsewhere in the country,
the Thai government of the Phibun era made vigorous, heavy-handed attempts to
assimilate the Malay speakers during the 1940s and 1950s. This, however, was met
with strong resistance and little success, unlike the successful assimilation of the
Chinese. Since the 1960s a more sensitive approach to the Malay-speaking south has
been adopted, but there has nevertheless been continual government pressure on
both language and schooling in the region, and a refusal to accept the existence of the
term ‘Malay’ as an ethno-linguistic label for reference to this group, oYcially replacing
the term ‘Malay-Thai’ with ‘Muslim-Thai’ as a designation of the population there.
Paralleling their approach to private Chinese schools, the government also insisted
that education in the Malay-speaking area be carried out in Standard Thai by teachers
with state-recognized teaching qualiWcations. Because most of the traditional Malay
teachers in the religious schools did not have the necessary state qualiWcations and
were also not proWcient in Thai, this resulted in their forced replacement by other
404 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

Thai instructors, and the face of education in the Malay-speaking south changed
considerably, with the younger generation coming to be taught in Thai and exposed
to the national Thai culture on a much more regular daily basis than before.
However, despite the institutionalization of the Thai language in the Malay areas,
there has been only mixed success in the government’s hoped-for integration of the
Malay-speaking population, this occurring largely in the western provinces of Nar-
athiwat, Yala, and Sathun. In the eastern province of Pattani, there is still a widespread
feeling of not properly belonging to the Thai nation and its dominant culture, and
there is also resentment at the attempts of the government to control the use of Malay
in schools, Malay language being perceived by the inhabitants of the area as an
important component of their identity, alongside Islam and a Malay ethnic social
structuring diVerent from that of Thai society. Since the 1960s there has also been
periodic terrorist activity in the south, carried out by groups demanding independ-
ence for the Malay provinces. Though this has not attracted much in the way of broad
support from the population and has been sporadic in nature, in 2004 there was a
worrisome increase in the violence, and currently, the situation is quite volatile again.
Although there had been signs that more of the younger generation were beginning to
develop less negative attitudes towards Thai language and culture than in the past,
presently there is still a considerable feeling amongst much of the Malay-speaking
population that they are generally not treated as equal partners in the Thai nation and
its ongoing development, and are discriminated against on the basis of their language,
culture, and religion. Such perceptions are exacerbated by the poverty and under-
development of the region, and an increased Islamic revival on both sides of the
border of Thailand and Malaysia has also served to heighten the feeling of diVerence
between the Muslim Malay speakers and the predominantly Buddhist Thais further
north. The situation in the borderlands of the far south of Thailand therefore
continues to pose a challenge to the promotion and portrayal of a uniWed Thai
identity based on language, religion, and culture.

18.3.6 The Overall Picture

Considering the broad patterning of language use in Thailand, and abstracting away
from the special case of Malay described above, the general picture which emerges is
that of a single heavily dominant language (Standard Thai) occurring alongside an
array of other languages in a stable, diglossic-type situation: Standard Thai is used for
H-type functions, and either regional Tai languages or non-Tai minority languages are
used for everyday L-functions. What is often held to be remarkable about this
situation and Thailand in general is the surprising absence of resistance and protest
against the public dominance of Standard Thai. In other multilingual countries where
a single language has come to be dominant in such a way, there have frequently been
strong negative reactions and violent opposition by speakers of languages which have
been marginalized in the process, yet with the exception of unrest in the Malay south,
 Thailand and Laos 405

this does not seem to have happened in Thailand. The interesting question is therefore
why this might be.
The answers which can be given here are many and various and it is commonly
assumed that a conspiracy of factors has resulted in the current, generally unchal-
lenged position of Standard Thai. First, there has been no attempt to fully suppress
other languages in Thailand, and though Thailand is not a linguistically pluralistic
society in the way that Switzerland, Belgium, and Singapore are, it has always allowed
for the free use of Thailand’s ‘other’ languages in daily life. Second, a signiWcant 90 per
cent of the population actually speak a Tai language as their Wrst and home language,
and speakers of regional forms of Thai feel that their languages are clearly related to
Standard Thai. The latter is therefore not some foreign imposition or the language of
an obviously diVerent ethnic group. Third, the nationalist programme of promotion
of a national identity has in many ways been successful and instilled a clear sense of
national pride and belonging among the population of Thailand, and Standard Thai is
one (important) manifestation of this national identity. Fourth, the complications
introduced by the presence of a Western colonial language have not aVected Thailand,
and this has made it easier to promote a local variety of language as a national
standardized form. Fifth, for the ethnically non-Tai 10 per cent of the population,
there are clear pragmatic incentives for accepting the national dominance of Thai
language and culture, and Smalley (1994) reports that most minorities living along
Thailand’s borders see their future as economically brighter within Thailand than
within a neighbouring or independent new state (hence, Thailand’s Khmer popula-
tion show no signs of wishing to be absorbed into neighbouring Cambodia, and the
Shans in the north of the country have not joined those in Myanmar in their calls for
an independent Shan state). Finally, it is also sometimes suggested (Premsrirat 2001)
that people in Thailand accept the dominance of Standard Thai because hierarchical
relations of dominance are generally common within Thai society and control a range
of aspects of life in the country.
It can furthermore be noted that the general absence of language-related problems
in Thailand and the acceptance of some kind of national identity requires one to
understand that ‘national identity’ in Thailand may be adopted in two rather broad
ways. The Wrst can be characterized as self-identiWcation as Thai, through having the
prototypical properties ascribed to members of the Thai nation – speaking a form of
Thai, being Buddhist, conforming to Thai culture, and respecting the monarchy, etc.
This form of national identity permits a potentially strong and deep loyalty to the
nation, and is the kind of feeling deliberately fostered by the nationalist programme.
A second form of national identity, however, which is a weaker and potentially
more temporary form of allegiance is the identiWcation of Thailand as one’s appro-
priate homeland, and the feeling that Thailand is the place where one belongs, where
one can best be happy and prosper. The Wrst form of national identity is more easily
open to and adopted by those who are ethnically Tai in the country, and is bolstered
by feelings of pride that Thailand has been more successful than its immediate
406 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

neighbours in recent economic development and international standing. The second

more pragmatically driven form of national identity is more regularly characteristic of
the non-Tai minorities in Thailand, who possess less of the typical properties of Thai
culture. Both types of allegiance to the country importantly underlie the relative
stability of Thailand in the present age and have led commentators such as Smalley
(1994) to talk of striking ‘national unity amongst linguistic diversity’.

18.3.7 Signs of Change in Recent Times

It is fairly clear that from the 1930s through until at least the 1970s the issue of national
identity has been closely linked with that of national security (Reynolds 1991b: 9).
UniWcation of the country via a shared language and culture was seen as a means to
ward oV the possibility of separatism and fragmentation of the state. The government
therefore spent much time and energy in setting up oYcial organizations such as the
Ministry of Culture and the National Identity Board to stimulate the growth of a Thai
national identity. In recent years, there has been a signiWcant reduction in potential
challenges to national security, yet the level of concern about Thai national identity
remains very high and there is constant public discussion of identity issues. This now
raises the question of why this should be so, and what there is in the modern climate
which should continue to make national identity a topical, hot issue in Thailand. In
addition to this, it is possible to note that there are many changes which are occurring
in relation to the perception and status of previously non-prestige languages and
culture. Here we will Wrst look at what these changes are, and then discuss why they
may be occurring, as well as how this relates to issues of national identity.
The interesting new development that has become more and more visible in the
last ten years is that there is a clear regrowth of interest in regional language and
culture, as well as Chinese, and a revival of languages that previously were sidelined
during the promotion of the national language. In the north of Thailand, for example,
people have been starting to learn how to write Kammuang again in the Lan Na
kingdom script form which was eliminated by the oYcial spread of Standard Thai.
This new ability to write the regional language in its original script complements the
ability of people to speak Kammuang and is being acquired in schools, language clubs,
and via private tuition. In the northeast of Thailand, a new pride in Isan/Lao is
appearing, and the language is now being taught as a subject in various schools and at
university level, together with courses on Isan literature and Isan dialects (Draper and
Chantao 2004). Elsewhere other local languages are starting to be taught in schools
where there are motivated teaching staV and this receives the approval of the school’s
director. Consequently, though Standard Thai was until quite recently the only
language permitted in education, now there is a clear relaxation of government policy
in allowing the teaching of other languages (though basically as subjects not as the
medium of instruction in state-run schools), and there is also an obvious new interest
in the learning of local/regional languages.
 Thailand and Laos 407

In addition to a revival of interest and pride in regional/local languages, there has

been renewed interest in learning Chinese and appreciating Chinese culture. Chinese
is now oVered as a subject in government schools and universities, and is being
promoted as a language useful for business, as contact and trade with China increases.
In terms of public image, the learning of Chinese is also well endorsed by the fact that
the Thai crown princess has sponsored a centre dedicated to the study of Chinese
language and culture at Mae Fa Luang University and herself has studied Chinese
language, calligraphy, and music, and even written books about China.
Quite generally, government politicians are also now publicly seen adding their
support to new initiatives promoting the teaching and use of local languages, and this
is reported in the media and shown on television. In the north of Thailand, local
authorities have encouraged people to use Kammuang both in everyday life and
sometimes in public speaking/broadcasts where Standard Thai would previously only
have been used (for example, public broadcasting in Kammuang was encouraged
during the traditional new year festival in Chiang Mai). On television and public
billboards too there is a clear increase in the variety of local language and dialects that
are used in commercials and the advertising of local products.
A Wrst question about these new developments is what is allowing for these
changes to occur, particularly within the educational system which has all along
been so closely guarded and directed by the government? The important oYcial
change has been that a new constitution introduced in 1997 has resulted in less
direct, centralized control of various aspects of life within Thailand, and allowed for
the development of decentralized local approaches to education and other issues via
the use of ‘local wisdom’. This change in government attitude which now allows for
and even encourages the preservation of cultural diversity for the beneWts it may
bring to the nation has technically permitted the introduction of regional and local
languages into schools within the new ‘local wisdom/local culture’ part of the
curriculum.
As to why these changes are occurring, the fundamental cause seems to relate to
the issue of identity in a changing, modernizing, and more aZuent Thailand. Both
the populace and the government are showing themselves to be seriously concerned
by the eVects of modernization, globalization, and Western inXuence on the life-
styles of the young and the growing, more aZuent middle class. The latter have been
seen to be adopting more commercially available symbols of a Western identity and
critics from both the public and the government have warned that many within
Thailand are in danger of losing their Thai identity. Such concerns rather than issues
of national security have resulted in the continued public discussion of national
identity in recent years, and the regrowth of local culture and language (‘local
wisdom’) seems to be occurring as a response to the cultural threat posed by
modernization and globalization. It can also be noted that the economic crisis of
1997 resulted in certain anti-Western sentiment among parts of the population, as
the crisis was perceived to have been precipitated by the West. The hardships and
408 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

confusion which ensued led to considerable soul searching in Thailand and a back-
to-Thai/Asian-basics attitude incorporating the idea that Thailand would best be
served by not depending on outsiders and the West. There was much discussion of
achieving sustained development, of reviving traditional knowledge, and the country
saw a wide revival of much earlier culture and practices. Thailand therefore redis-
covered much of the cultural diversity which had been ignored for many years.
The new freedom allowed by the constitution of 1997 consequently arrived at a very
opportune time, allowing people to indulge their desires in promoting, learning, and
using traditional language and culture, which was signiWcantly permitted to be
regional rather than just oYcial national language and culture. Chinese language
and culture were also seen as representing valuable Asian values which were
potential alternatives to Western culture, and there have appeared numerous recent
writings by Sino-Thais which exhibit a new-found pride in Chinese ancestry and
connections.
In addition to the above, various other perceived beneWts of the new revival of local
language and culture have stimulated its regrowth and visibility. Jory (2000) notes that
local politicians are beginning to make use of the expression of a regional identity to
win regional votes, that regional language and culture is being increasingly used in
advertising and seen to be an eVective marketing tool (because there are consumers
newly proud of their regional heritage), and that those involved in the tourist trade are
promoting regional diVerences in culture in order to attract both international and
(more and more) domestic tourists. Finally, it can be suggested that Thailand is
consciously following a global trend present amongst economically developed coun-
tries to protect and encourage indigenous minorities as sources of national cultural
richness, and that members of the government feel that Thailand will accrue a certain
esteem at the international level by participating in such egalitarian, liberal policies,
which are regularly associated with advanced economies.
Generally the fact that the government is prepared to let local languages grow
within the educational system and elsewhere is both a healthy and positive sign, and
also a clear indication of the conWdence that the government has in the basic strength
of the national identity. After years of careful promotion and reinforcement the latter
is now really very solidly grounded within Thailand (even if certain of the younger
generation do adopt Western fads and fashions), and expected to survive even when
placed alongside other revived local forms of language and culture. It should also be
noted that the current growth of interest in regional symbols of identity is not
perceived as a direct threat to national identity, as there are no obvious attempts
being made to replace the latter with new regional identities, and current changes are
rather moves to enrich the basic Thai national identity with additional local resources.
Certainly for the moment, national and regional identity are operating on diVerent
levels of hierarchical structure and are not in direct competition with each other. The
way this new relationship further unfolds and develops in the future will be interest-
ing to observe.
 Thailand and Laos 409

18.4 Laos in the Twentieth Century

18.4.1 The Development of Modern Laos and its Linguistic Groups
As noted in section 18.2.1, the Lao people in early and pre-modern times experienced
periods of both unity and division: initially being part of a single Lao Kingdom, Lan
Xang, from 1353–1694, the Lao later found themselves divided into three separate
rival kingdoms for two hundred years, until the arrival of the French, who established
the country’s modern borders in the twentieth century. The French originally arrived
in the area of Laos with the hope of Wnding a valuable new trading route to China, but
then seemed to lose interest in Laos’ potential and did not develop the country as they
did other colonies and protectorates. Following the end of World War II, Laos was
declared formally independent, but French military forces nevertheless remained, and
retained control of Lao foreign policy until 1954. The post-WWII period until 1975
was a time of continued internal division, with an armed leftist revolt against the new
government of Laos leading to civil war. This culminated in 1975 with victory by the
communist Pathet Lao forces and the creation of a new socialist state. Due to the
ensuing unpopular introduction of collective farms, the conWscation of property from
the wealthy, and a declining economy, as much as 10 per cent of the population then
Xed the country as refugees, including most of the country’s educated and skilled
workers. In more recent years, however, the government has turned to a more relaxed
policy of pragmatic socialism and replaced its close links with Vietnam and the Soviet
Union with a rather diVerent orientation towards trading partners such as Australia,
Japan, and Thailand.
Currently, the population of Laos stands at 6 million, making it the least populated
country in the region, and also the most sparsely populated southeast Asian country,
with its inhabitants spread far and wide over a large area of mountains, forest, and
plains. Despite its comparatively small population, Laos is estimated as having one of
the largest numbers of diVerent ethnic groups in Southeast Asia. Formally, these are
classiWed as belonging to one of three basic groups whose naming reXects the type of
geographical terrain generally inhabited by members of the group – either the
lowland areas, the middle slopes of hills and mountains, or the highlands (hence
Lowland Lao, Midland Lao, and Upland Lao). The three-way categorization also
correlates with two other properties of the diVerent groups: (a) the language family
which the group belongs to, and (b) the time of arrival into the country of the group.
The Lowland Lao (Lao Lum) make up 65 per cent of the population and are Tai by
descent, having migrated into the area of modern Laos some time between the
seventh and thirteenth centuries. The Lao Lum have dominated the area of Laos
for most of its history and still continue to do so, and commonly refer to themselves
simply as ‘Lao’. The second group, comprising 25 per cent of the population, known
as the Midland Lao (Lao Theung) inhabit the middle slopes of Laos’ hills and valleys.
The Midland Lao are assumed to be the original inhabitants of the area and speak
410 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

a large number of diVerent Mon-Khmer languages, with a total of thirty-seven

diVerent ethnic groups being categorized as belonging to this Midland Lao group.
The Midland Lao have often been looked down upon by the Lowland Lao and were
formally known as Kha ‘slaves’. The third division of the population is referred to as
the Upland Lao (Lao Soung), living mostly in the hills. Although the Upland Lao are
only 10 per cent of the total population, they are ethnically more distinct from each
other than the members of the other two groups, and consist in at least six ethnic
groups which migrated into Laos from China during the last 250 years. Speaking a
range of Sino-Tibetan languages (e.g. Hmong, Akha, Yao), they are strongly inde-
pendent people and are reported to feel themselves superior to the Lowland Lao, this
causing diYculties for national integration of the two groups.

18.4.2 Issues of Language and National Identity

Turning now to issues of language and national identity in modern Laos, in the two
hundred years prior to the twentieth century there was very little unity in the area
occupied by the Lao and certainly no single national identity, as the area was split up
into three separate kingdoms (which furthermore served as dominated vassal states to
other more powerful neighbours). The Wrst time that eVorts were made to instil
feelings of belonging to a single nation came during the late French colonial period
during World War II when the irredentist movement in Thailand was suggesting that
Laos should be annexed into Thailand. In order to counter claims from Thailand that
the Lao were very closely related to the Thai and so should be part of an enlarged Thai
nation, the French launched a nationalist campaign to attempt to create feelings of
national unity in Laos, and an identity distinct from that of the Thais. The campaign
included performances of Lao music and dance, the promotion of Lao literature, the
production of the Wrst Lao newspaper, and frequent rallies and parades all aimed at
convincing the population that it had a single, shared, national identity which was
grounded in a common history, unique culture, and shared language. It was also
continually stressed that this identity was signiWcantly diVerent from that of the Thais,
and speciWcally Lao. What such nationalist propaganda did was eVectively to take the
culture and language of the Lowland Lao alone and present this as the ‘national’
identity, suggesting that it characterized all of the large country and bound people
together in a unique way. Though this obviously was not true, given the diversity of
the population, there was nevertheless an anticipation that members of the other
ethno-linguistic groups could somehow be assimilated to the majority Lowland Lao
identity (Ivarsson 1999). However, despite the provision of more resources than in the
past, the programme of nationalism initiated by the French had no serious time to be
implemented on a nationwide scale and the peace of the country was soon inter-
rupted by prolonged internal conXict, continuing until 1975.
When the new socialist government established itself in 1975, there were clear
renewed attempts to create a feeling of national unity and identity among the diverse,
 Thailand and Laos 411

scattered population of Laos. One of the important, formal steps taken at this point
was the introduction of the three-way classiWcation of the population of Laos into
Lowland Lao, Midland Lao, and Upland Lao. The rationale for this kind of categor-
ization was that the use of geographical terms to label and encode diVerent groups
avoided the use of potentially more divisive labels based on fundamental diVerences of
language and culture (for example, a three-way grouping of Lao vs. Mon-Khmer vs.
Sino-Tibetan, or an even Wner-grained categorization according to the names of
individual languages). Such labelling was therefore an attempt to downplay the
diVerences of the population by grouping them simply according to which part of
the geographical landscape they inhabited. The use of the preWx ‘Lao’ in Lao Lum,
Lao Theung, and Lao Soung also endeavoured to indicate that there was a single ‘Lao’
cultural-identity component present with all of the three groups and hence a shared
national identity. Such labelling has, however, not been taken kindly to by various of
the Midland and Upland Lao because it obliges them to use the ethnic term ‘Lao’ in
self-reference and groups such as the upland Hmong do not feel ethnically Lao (Evans
1999b). There is consequently a feeling of resentment amongst many that the labelling
is being used to bolster the centrality of the Lowland Lao who have always been, and
still are, the local dominant majority, and who think of themselves as simply Lao, and
that it is the identity and culture of the Lowland Lao that is unfairly being used to
characterize the country of Laos. Furthermore, the use of geographical terms to
suggest three neat divisions in the population does not really disguise the existence of
great diversity within the Midland and Upland Lao categories, and there is far from
being a shared identity even within each ‘geographical’ group.
More recently, since 1995, there has been a new move away from the description of
the people of Laos as falling into three discrete groups, and instead a public declar-
ation and even emphasis of the fact that there are as many as forty-seven ethnic groups
within Laos. One eVect of this recognition of ethnic diversity by the government
noted by Evans (1999b) is, interestingly, that it serves to further highlight the
importance of the Lowland Lao, as this single group stands out as very large when
compared to the size of the other ethnic groups, and much more prominent size-wise
than in the previous three-way classiWcation. Whether or not this is deliberate
manipulation of ethno-linguistic categorization in order to promote the centrality of
one, dominant group is not clear. However, the continued identiWcation of the name
of the country with the most populous and dominant ethnic group certainly seems to
focus attention away from the existence of the Mon-Khmer and Sino-Tibetan groups,
and suggest that national identity should be seen in ethnic Lao terms.
Generally, though, despite persistent government eVorts since 1975 to develop a
nationwide sense of shared Lao identity, the results of this are rather weak and there
has only been limited success in the stimulation of a national identity. Continually
thwarting attempts at nation-building in Laos are a number of diYcult obstacles
which relate both to the physical and the human composition of the country as well as
its location and linguistic make-up.
412 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

A Wrst hindrance to the development of national identity (which theoretically might

be overcome) is the fact that there is still no formally established and easily recogniz-
able national standard language. The obvious contender for a national language
would be a form of Lao, varieties of which are spoken natively by two thirds of the
population. However, thus far there have not been any signiWcant attempts to create
and embed a national standard language throughout the country, and energetic
promotion of a national standard language as seen in Thailand has been largely absent
from the development of Laos. Amongst the various forms of Lao spoken in the
country, there is a good level of mutual intelligibility, and the pronunciation of the
elite living in the nation’s capital Vientiane functions as an unoYcial lingua franca in
much of the country as well as occurring heavily in national television and radio
broadcasts. However, EnWeld (1999) notes that Vientiane Lao generally rates poorly as
a national language because although it is widely understood, it is not enforced as the
language of instruction within education, and is not the sole language of government
business, public announcement, or religion. Those domains of life which in other
countries are used to build and reinforce a national language are signiWcantly not
dominated by any single language in Laos, and the result is that though Vientiane Lao
may be commonly used and heard, it nevertheless fails to have the symbolic unifying
power of a real national language. The same is not necessarily true of written Lao,
which is produced in a uniform way throughout the country and is distinct in
appearance from Thai and other neighbouring scripts. However, literacy levels remain
fairly low in Laos, and the provision of education which might raise literacy (and also
promote a standard language) is sporadic in much of the countryside and also not
carried out via any uniform national curriculum. The potential unifying power of
written Lao is therefore currently not exploited to its full.
A second, important obstacle to the formation of a uniWed nation in Laos is the
simple geography of the country. A large amount of Laos is made up of mountains
and heavily forested hills which make internal communication extremely diYcult.
Due to a general lack of economic development (Laos is one of the poorest countries
in Asia), the infrastructure to support movement around the country remains very
poor. There is no railway system, an unreliable, restricted network of roads, and being
fully landlocked, very little water-borne transportation for such a large country. The
result of this is that there is little contact and communication between people in
diVerent parts of the country and not enough dynamic interaction for the spread of a
nationwide collective identity. Instead, Laos remains a strongly rural country in which
villages are largely self-reliant and there is limited regional trade and interaction. The
loyalty and identiWcation of most of the population is therefore with its particular
village and local ethnic group, and there is little regular concern with larger units such
as the state.
A third diYculty for the construction of a national identity in Laos stems from the
fact that the borders of modern Laos have been established in a highly artiWcial and
unnatural way in treaties and agreements which France entered into with Thailand
 Thailand and Laos 413

and other neighbouring powers. The result of these treaties is that many ethnic
groups have been split by the borders into two adjacent countries and that Laos
also includes a very large number of ethnically diVerent people, making for an
extremely heterogeneous population. Laos is therefore sometimes suggested to be a
‘Wction of a nation’, invented but not thought through properly by the French colonial
government. A serious consequence of the very mixed nature of the population of
Laos is that there is an important lack of available symbols that can be used to
promote a national identity. There is no longer any king of Laos, no uniform religion
(only 50 to 60 per cent Buddhist, with the remainder being animist – Savada 1995), no
standard national language, and wider cultural variation amongst ethnic groups than
in Thailand.
Related to the above is the ‘complication’ of neighbouring Isan in Thailand, and the
fact that 80 per cent of the Lao ethnic group is actually located in Thailand rather than
Laos due to the unnatural border created by the treaties between Thailand and
France. Although the label ‘Lao’ for inhabitants of the northeast of Thailand was
oYcially suppressed for a while and replaced by ‘Isan’, the Lao of Laos and those in
Isan are really one ethnic group with a single basic language form (with various
mutually intelligible dialects). The only really distinctive diVerences in language
between the two Lao groups are that those in Laos have their own, special form of
writing, and that the Lao spoken in post-1975 Laos has been simpliWed by the removal
of deferential language encoding diVerences in social hierarchy. Otherwise, the Lao of
Laos and the Lao of Isan are still very close in culture and language, and there are
regular cross-border trading contacts between the two groups. Perhaps somewhat
surprisingly though, there is actually no drive from either Lao group to integrate itself
with the other and form a united Lao state. The Isan Lao are much more oriented
towards Bangkok and Thailand than Laos, and the Lao in Laos do not show any
indication of wanting to be part of Thailand. Consequently, the split cross-border
existence of the Lao is actually not a primary area of concern for those who might
hope to further the construction of a Lao national identity within Laos. Having noted
this, the separation of the Lao into two countries nevertheless does make it harder for
the government in Vientiane to construct a national identity which will successfully
distinguish its citizens clearly from the citizens of other neighbouring states.
A Wnal factor which is now interfering with the construction of a national identity
in Laos is the inXuence of nearby Thailand and the penetration of Thai language into
Laos. As television is becoming more widely received around the country, it is Thai
language channels (received from across the border) that are frequently being watched
rather than domestic Lao programmes. This is due to the simple fact that the
production quality of the Thai channels is superior to that of the Lao programmes
and the content is also seen to be more varied and engaging. Because of the linguistic
closeness of Thai and Lao, and the frequent exposure to Thai television and radio,
signiWcant numbers of Lao people can therefore now understand Standard Thai. The
possibility for the Lao government to use television as a means to spread a national
414 A. Simpson and N. Thammasathien

form of Lao language and identity and compensate for the lack of communication
through the countryside is consequently being lost to the more attractive nature of
Thai television programming. Thai publications are also being increasingly read by
those with education and made use of (for example, to gain access to new technology)
when Lao equivalents are not available. There is consequently a signiWcant and
increasing input of Thai language into Laos and new concern as to how this may
inXuence the status of Lao over time. Concerning the previous role of French in Laos,
this did not have much signiWcant lasting inXuence on the country, perhaps because it
was never widely taught outside the few small urban centres that are present in the
country. However, as Thai can now be received into households with radios and
television sets throughout Laos on a regular, daily basis and is also much closer to the
native language of a large percentage of the population, it poses more of a potential
threat to the future development of Lao, and is an issue that may become increasingly
important in years to come.
In summary, then, the notion of a unifying national identity is only rather weak in
Laos, when compared with Thailand, despite attempts to use ethnic Lao culture as the
focal point for a broader, national identity. The limited success of eVorts to instil a
national sense of belonging is due to the range of obstacles discussed above, and Laos
very much remains a country in which local identity is dominant, relating to village
and nearby ethnic group, and there is little regular consciousness of a larger united
Lao world. Considering the possible future development of Laos, currently there is no
expectation that the traditional, rural character of the country will change radically
for some time to come. Though there is economic and intellectual/cultural develop-
ment in the capital Vientiane, this is not representative of the nation as a whole, and it
is likely that the country of Laos and the formation of its national identity will
continue to undergo development and change at a signiWcantly slower rate than its
more prosperous and dynamic neighbours Thailand, China, and Vietnam.
 19
Vietnam
Lê Minh-Hă`ng and Stephen O’Harrow

19.1 Introduction
Vietnam is a country which has lived through extended periods of foreign inXuence
and occupation, signiWcant internal conXict and upheaval, and yet emerged from this
into the late twentieth century with a distinct and vigorous national identity, and a
remarkable sense of independence. At the centre of this identity, forming one of its
critical, distinguishing components, is language, a broadly-shared national language
(Vietnamese) that is now fully widespread in all domains of formal and informal life.
This study of language and national identity in Vietnam is divided into six major
sections. Section 19.2 provides basic information on the country of Vietnam and the
languages spoken within its borders. Section 19.3 then considers language in Vietnam
from an early historical perspective and how the majority ‘Kinh’ ethnic group and the
Vietnamese language came into existence and spread throughout the territory of
modern-day Vietnam following a long period of Chinese dominance of what even-
tually became the northern and central parts of the modern country. Section 19.4
subsequently focuses on the important competition which occurred between diVer-
ent written forms of language in Vietnam during the time of French colonial rule,
and how the eventual triumph of a form of Romanized vernacular Vietnamese
known as quoc ngu over previous systems based on Chinese characters reXected the
development of nationalism in Vietnam and struggles within the country both
against the French and older Confucianist traditions and the institutions and elites
which maintained these as mechanisms of power. In section 19.5 the chapter turns to
consider the energetic development of Vietnamese in post-WWII and independent
Vietnam, and its expansion into a language that could be used in all areas of life,
while section 19.6 reXects on language policy in Vietnam towards the country’s
ethnic minority groups. The chapter is then closed in section 19.7 with a brief
overview of the status of Vietnamese and its contribution to national identity in
the present day.
416 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

Vietnam

19.2 The Country of Vietnam and its Languages

It is currently estimated that there are about 76 million people in this world whose
Wrst language is Vietnamese. These represent something on the order of 88 per cent
of the approximately 86 million people of the country of Vietnam, with the addition
of the ‘Viet Kieu’, the over 2 million members of the Vietnamese diaspora, centred
mainly in Australia, Canada, and the United States, as well as in both Eastern and
Western Europe (chieXy in France), and in Vietnam’s three neighbouring countries
of Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. It is also probable that a signiWcant percentage of
some 10 million oYcially designated ‘minority’ peoples of Vietnam speak Xuent
Vietnamese, as well as their own ethnic languages.
Vietnamese has long been classiWed by linguists as a Mon-Khmer language (Viet-
Muong branch) and more recently recognized as part of the larger Austro-Asiatic
family. Though not mutually intelligible, its closest important relative is Muong,
spoken by just over a million members of the national minority people of the same
 Vietnam 417

name,1 and the major language with which Vietnamese has the clearest historical
links is Khmer, the national language of Cambodia.
Besides the ethnic Vietnamese majority (referred to in modern times as the ‘Kinh’ or
‘capital’ people), there are some Wfty-three recognized national groups in the country,
many of them uplanders, each speaking their own language, the most numerous being
various Tai groups (about four million), Cambodians and other Mon-Khmer groups
(over 1.3 million), the Jarai, Cham, and other Austronesian groups (around 800,000), and
the primarily urban Chinese (approximately one and a quarter million).
Vietnam itself stretches for 1,800 km along the coast of the South China Sea from the
southern border of China, around the point of Ca Mau, to the Cambodian border on the
Gulf of Thailand. Most Vietnamese live either in one or the other of the two principal
plains, adjacent to the Red River in the north or to the Mekong in the south, and between
the two on the relatively narrow strip of land between the Truong Son Mountains and
the South China Sea. To the west, beyond the mountains, lie Laos and then Thailand.
The Vietnamese are traditionally a lowland rural people, but expanding urban
areas, such as Ha Noi (the capital, pop. 3 million plus) in the north, Hai Phong, the
principal northern port (well over 2 million), Da Nang (1 million) in the centre, and
Ho Chi Minh City (‘Saigon’, about 5 million) in the south, are rapidly shifting the
demographic balance, currently estimated at 21 per cent urban and 79 per cent rural.
While Vietnam has always represented a cultural and linguistic continuum, the
diYculty of maintaining the political unity of any geographically extended country in
pre-modern times is evident and Vietnam was no exception. From the sixteenth
century to the late eighteenth, three often warring seigneurial families, the Mac
followed by the Trinh and the Nguyen, eVectively divided the country into northern
and southern regions, a fact which may have contributed to future dialect variation. In
more recent times, the French colonialists divided Vietnam into three administrative
units: northern Tonkin [Tongking], central Annam, and southern Cochinchine
[Cochinchina]. And from 1954 until 1975, a brief period from the point of view of
Vietnam’s long history, the country was politically divided into the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam, with its capital in Hanoi, and the Republic of Vietnam, adminis-
tered from Saigon, oYcial reuniWcation of the country only taking eVect as of 1976.
It is often said that there are three principal dialect areas in Vietnam, the north, the
centre, and the south. While this partition is somewhat too schematic, it does convey the
emic viewpoint, noting that while all three are almost totally mutually intelligible, the
writing system most closely represents the northern dialect (the semi-oYcial radio
standard), and that the central dialect is most often said to be diYcult to follow by
uninitiated northerners and southerners. In contrast, because of recent political history,
the southern dialect predominates in the diaspora, although northern is still often heard
in certain public settings overseas, such as broadcasting and popular music. The northern
1
Rather than a distinctly separate people, the Muong may in fact have been previously seen as simply
the most distant (or countriWed) part of a broad ‘Vietnamese-speaking’ continuum until modern times
(See O’Harrow 1986, and Taylor 2001).
418 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

dialect is additionally the one almost exclusively used in teaching Vietnamese to foreign-
ers, whether in Vietnam or abroad. Despite the existence of certain dialectal variation,
however, the single most important feature of modern Vietnamese with regard to
questions of national identity remains its broad mutual intelligibility across all regions,
generations, and social classes, both at home and abroad.

19.3 Language in Early Vietnam

When one sets out to write the history of any nation or state as it is known to us in its
current form, the temptation is often the invention of a past to explain, if not to justify,
the present. Some modern historians of Vietnam, when they attempt to recast such
memories and records as do exist into a coherent form, seem to fall into the
assumption that all written texts are essentially correct unless proven otherwise, and
that the historians’ principal tasks are the cross-referencing of this undiVerentiated
mass of information and/or its correlation to theories of national uniqueness and
scientiWc inevitability. Not surprisingly, then, it is a popular nationalist trope in
modern Vietnamese historiography to regard the Wrst millennium ad as a period of
‘Chinese occupation,’ one preceded by an age, if not golden then at least gilded, in
which a group best described as proto-Vietnamese tilled the soil and cast bronze
artifacts unsullied by Sinitic ways. There may, in fact, be several grains of truth in this
view, but it does distort our conception of what followed, at least our grasp of the
relationship of language to nationalism in Vietnam today.
With this caveat in mind, we can nonetheless aYrm that the Urheimat of the people
who became the ethnic Vietnamese is recognized by most scholars to be the Red River
plain and its surrounding territory down into what is now central Vietnam. According to
the annals, this area was taken by invaders from the Chinese Han dynasty to the north
beginning in 111 bc. OYcial Chinese rule continued, expanded, and deepened, with brief
interruptions caused by a number of what are now seen as popular uprisings, until the
tenth century. With the collapse of the Tang dynasty in China, what emerged in the area
that was to become northern and north central Vietnam was an independent polity or a
series of related polities in which the product of a thousand years of Sinitic inXuence and
immigration combined with a Southeast Asian substrate of peoples, languages, and
institutions. We may never come to understand fully the cultural potpourri of this period
and attempts to construct the Wrst millenium as an era of Chinese ‘colonial’ domination
over the ‘Vietnamese’ not only beg serious questions of anachronism, but also require us
to come to some acceptable deWnition of what the term ‘Vietnamese’ could reasonably
signify at such an early date. However, we can see certain broad outlines upon which we
will begin to base our understanding of the roles played by various languages in the
development of what became modern Vietnam.
While the assurance of authenticity of archaeological evidence is normally far
greater than that of obscure texts, archaeologists have not always been successful at
explaining the how or the why of what they have found. So it is perhaps understandable
 Vietnam 419

that the standard histories, especially those of the centre and south of today’s Vietnam,
risk owing their major debt to long-accepted, albeit imperfect, written sources. In the
standard histories for the region, the inhabitants are chieXy represented based on
somewhat nebulous descriptions in Classical Chinese sources and, in the south, from
slightly later epigraphy, in Indian scripts that transcribe either Sanskrit or, occasionally,
local languages. It may be a simpliWcation but, one hopes, not too much of a distortion,
to say it now appears that in the Wrst millennium ad, three major polities arose on what is
now in large part Vietnamese territory, the Viet (or ‘Lac-Viet’) in the North, the Cham in
the centre, and the Khmer in the south.
From a linguistic perspective: the Viet are thought to have been speakers of one or
more Austro-Asiatic languages, as were the Khmer, while the second group (or at least
the elite), especially judging from today’s Chams, were most likely Austronesian
speakers. Nonetheless, it makes more sense, in view of the Xuidity of ethnic identities
over time, to speak of polities in this distant past, rather than ethnicities, both because
polities are somewhat more recognizable in the available evidence and because many
major modern ethnicities, such as Vietnamese (‘Kinh’), Cham, and Khmer, appear to
us to have most likely arisen from amalgamations that grew inside early polities.
During the approximately ten centuries of Chinese rule over the region that forms
today’s northern Vietnam, it appears that the oYcial language of administration and
the only means of written communication was Chinese (‘wen yan’), and there came
into existence a particular local form of that written language that we call ‘Sino-
Vietnamese ’ (referred to in vernacular Vietnamese as chu nho (‘scholars’ writing’ or
chu han ‘Han Chinese writing’), one that came to diVer from metropolitan wen yan
primarily in pronunciation.2 But perhaps more signiWcant was the role played by
Chinese during this early period in the formation of what was to become the
Vietnamese language itself.
How the Vietnamese language as we know it today was originally forged is not yet
entirely clear, but our knowledge of the historical context allows us to make a
reasonable conjecture. Settlers from Han Dynasty China began to arrive in the Red
River delta in considerable numbers towards the beginning of the Common Era.
Judging from both the historical and archaeological records, it would appear that the
poorer, more numerous groups of immigrants came originally in military formation,
largely composed of males seeking tillable land. There were, in addition, representa-
tives of larger wealthy families, such as those Xeeing the chaos of the Han interreg-
num (Wang Mang’s Xin dynasty of ad 9 to 22). These two groups contributed towards
the founding of a lowland mixed society, one in which originally landless ‘Chinese’
males took local wives (thus sparking a major uprising in ad 41), while the Han elite
founded latifundia, the labour for which would logically have been drawn from the
newly evolving Sino-Vietnamese peasantry.

2
For the purposes of this chapter, we will use the terms Sino-Vietnamese, chu nho, and chu han
interchangeably.
420 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

In this environment of mixed ethnic development there seems to have existed the
ideal matrix for the evolution of some kind of contact language, drawing upon both
Sinitic sources and a miscellany of whatever Austro-Asiatic, Thai, Austronesian, or
other tongues were common among the local population. In hindsight, it appears
that, of the latter, one or more Austro-Asiatic languages provided the most important,
or at least the most lasting contributions. While there has been signiWcant borrowing
of a large number of core Chinese lexical items into Vietnamese, Vietnamese main-
tains the only complete Austro-Asiatic number set extant in major language of the
Austro-Asiatic group, despite the fact that Chinese loans overwhelmed indigenous
counting systems in many other Southeast Asian languages (e.g. in Khmer and Thai).
If this surmise is correct, creolization took place at some point in history, probably
earlier rather than later, since it is fairly clear that by the beginning of the second
millennium ad, a spectrum of vernaculars one could sensibly label ‘Vietnamese’ was
being spoken broadly across the lowland territory of the country.
Direct Chinese overlordship of the Vietnamese area is traditionally periodized from
Han Wu Di’s invasion of 111 bc until the collapse of Tang and Ngo Quyen’s defeat of
the forces of the Southern Han in ad 939. Throughout this period there are recorded
episodic assertions of independence, beginning as early as the Trung Sisters’ revolt in
about ad 41 and the ad 248 uprising of Trieu Au. The Tang (618–907) instituted
administrative reforms in the area, which it dubbed the Protectorate of An Nam (or
the ‘PaciWed South’), and after the earliest indigenous movements, there appears to
have formed a Sino-Vietnamese elite,3 an amalgamated social class embodying some
consciousness of the desirability of their own political separateness from Imperial
China. Emanating from this small but growing Sino-Vietnamese elite, we may be able
see the very earliest signs of what was to become the organized consciousness of the
later, highly Sinicized but separately located, proto-national entity that was eventually
to become Vietnam as we know it, leading to the short-lived periods of declared
independence under Ly Bi in the mid-sixth century and Phung Hung in the eighth.
In the several centuries that followed the founding, in the northern half of what
became modern Vietnam, of a national entity independent of Chinese rule (oYcially
dated to ad 939), the Vietnamese monarchy slowly extended its rule southward.
Vietnam Wnally arrived at an approximation of its modern borders in the eighteenth
century. This process involved establishing Vietnamese hegemony over a mixture of
ethnic groups speaking a variety of Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic tongues. A few,
such as the Chams and Khmers, were by this time possessed of literate institutions,
but most were without a written tradition of their own. The pattern of settlement in
these more newly acquired regions was such that, while they also began to outnum-
ber other peoples, the principal strength of the Vietnamese lay in their tight social
organization and control of state power. This permitted the Vietnamese to tolerate

3
As evidence of the depth of local Confucian education, it is said that two prime ministers of the Tang
dynasty originated from An Nam during this period.
 Vietnam 421

the continued use of non-Vietnamese languages within communal boundaries, while

requiring communal representatives to use spoken Vietnamese and written Sino-
Vietnamese when dealing with the nascent state and the outside world.
While it is now seldom questioned, at least by Vietnamese historians themselves,
that there has existed a long-standing, self-consciously Vietnamese-speaking ‘Kinh’
majority in society for as long as there has been some kind of recognizable Vietnam-
ese state, say from the eleventh century, it is less than clear what such a supposed
‘Vietnamese’ language continuum may have represented and where its borders might
have been. For example, it seems quite possible that there was a broad catalogue of
dialects, intelligible at any given point on a diminishing basis the further away one
travelled and that this gamut of dialects had a geographic range which extended
southward from the Red River heartland, at any particular point in time, as far as the
Vietnamese state had successfully projected its power. And it has been suggested
(O’Harrow 1986, Taylor 2001) that some of the margins of this language continuum
furthest from the centre eventually came to form the communities now known as the
Muong ethnic minority.
There is epigraphic evidence for the transcription of a vernacular Vietnamese
language, using a modiWed system of Chinese ideographs called chu nom from as
long ago as the late eleventh century. From both the context of the earliest epigraphy
and from the comparative historical experience of other communities in the world in
similar circumstances, it appears that a primary impetus in devising this transcription
was the spread of religion; in this case: Buddhism. In view of the parallel development
of scripts for languages on the Sinitic periphery such as Japanese, Korean, and Zhuang
at about the same time, the appearance of such a demotic character system in
Vietnam is not surprising. However, the questions it raises about the consciousness
of national identity are manifold. In both the annals and in later encyclopedic work, it
is said that written works of literature were devised in a Vietnamese vernacular at least
as far back as the thirteenth century. In the brief reign of the Emperor Ho Quy Ly
(1400–7), an eVort was made to give oYcial recognition to chu nom, and from the
Wfteenth century through until the arrival of the French colonial administration four
centuries later, the chu nom system developed and expanded, leaving behind hundreds
of examples of the pre-modern vernacular used for creative purposes. However, brief
periods of royal favour aside, chu nom in fact never gained prestige status, and Sino-
Vietnamese (Classical Chinese/wen yan/chu nho) remained the language of written
administration, oYcial encomia, and ‘high’ culture throughout this long period of
time. Furthermore, Sino-Vietnamese was also the chief language form used to express
themes of national identity through until the late nineteenth century, in works which
are still held in great respect by Vietnamese patriots today. Finally, even though (short-
lived and restricted) oYcial promotion of chu nom during the late eighteenth-
century Tay Son rule of the country might perhaps be interpreted as indicating
some form of linguistic nationalism, a consideration of the actual new use to which chu
nom was due to be put – the translation of Chinese classics – suggests that, at the highest
422 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

levels of power and education, the Vietnamese still seemed to accept themselves as
sharers in a predominantly Sinitic world order and that assertions of national identity
did not require radical separation from Confucian traditions with their origins in
China.
In 1802 the Nguyen Dynasty was established, bringing with it increased Confucia-
nization of the country, now oYcially named ‘Viet Nam’. The linguistic paradox of the
nineteenth century as it initially unfolded was that, on the one hand, the court
proscribed the use of chu nom and, on the other, vernacular language romances
(often translations from Chinese) circulated widely, even amongst those at court.
The question of which form might in the end prevail, chu nho or chu nom, was,
however, soon to become moot, as a third, Romanized writing system, known as quoc
ngu and encoding everyday vernacular Vietnamese, was about to challenge both chu
nho and chu nom, and, in the hands of the French, would ultimately prove the undoing
of both the classical and vernacular ideographs. The basis of quoc ngu, a systematized
Romanization of spoken Vietnamese, had actually been developed in the seventeenth
century and was largely the work of Jesuit missionaries such as Alexandre de Rhodes
and a subsequent tradition of missionary lexicography. However, despite the much
greater simplicity of the alphabetic writing, the ease of learning and communicating it
oVered, its use seems to have remained restricted to the Catholic community in
Vietnam for the two centuries that followed its invention. This was all set to change
when France realized the potential that Vietnam had as a strategic entry point for
establishing new trade routes into China.

19.4 Language and Nationalism under French

Colonial Rule
During the second half of the nineteenth century, French naval and land units arrived
in Vietnam in force, and over a period of two and a half decades gradually brought all
of the country under French control, as a direct colony in the south, referred to as
‘Cochinchine’, and as a so-called ‘protectorate’ in the rest of the country: ‘Annam’ in
the centre and ‘Tonkin’ in the north. Commerce and raw control aside, France saw its
role in Vietnam as a ‘civilizing mission’. But exactly what ‘civilizing’ entailed from the
point of view of language policy was a matter of debate. In practical terms, the goals
were dictated by circumstance and the need to impose and maintain political control.
The chief adversaries perceived by the French were the Vietnamese elite whose
powers were threatened with extinction, the literati who had heretofore seen them-
selves as the guardians of national identity and rightful independence within a larger,
balanced Sino-centric world. If an essential key to the domestic hegemony of the
literati was their control and understanding of Sino-Vietnamese, that same medium
was now to be the object of French attack, both directly and indirectly. And the
indirect attack was, if anything, the more dangerous.
 Vietnam 423

While the French (initially) permitted a hothouse continuance of instruction and

examinations in the classical language and tradition, in practical everyday life, the
former mandarins’ power to intercede between Heaven and Earth fell increasingly to
a class of individuals in Vietnamese society who could act as intermediaries with the
French, a group referred to scathingly as ‘les interprètes’, the interpreters. These
people were not generally drawn from the social elite and were often those who
already knew the French (if not their language), notably the Vietnamese Catholic
community, whose very existence was protected by the French presence, and whose
memory of persecution at the hands of the mandarinate doubled their motivation to
substitute themselves for the latter.
Prior to the arrival of the French, the theoretical organization of Vietnamese
society, in descending order, followed the Confucian norm of ‘scholars’, ‘farmers’,
‘artisans’, and ‘merchants’. The top rung of civil society was Wlled by the literati, the
‘scholars’, and their families, oYcials and teachers who had passed the triennial
Confucian exams, and those who could reasonably aspire to do so. There was a strict
ideological Wlter for admission to this elite group: long grounding in the arduously
won mastery of the Confucian classics and the arcane Sino-Vietnamese language and
ideographic character system in which they were written. Although the popular trope
was that anyone with ‘talent’ could, with suYcient ambition and learning, aspire to a
mandarinal career, in practice the path to the top was eVectively closed oV to nearly
all but those of mandarinal family background, if only because the economics of
devoting the necessary Wfteen or twenty years to one’s books (if indeed one could gain
access to the proper books in the Wrst place) meant that learning was the almost
exclusive pursuit of a leisure class. This class, which viewed themselves as natural
rulers, not surprisingly, held fast to their privileges and to the system that determined
their social standing.
For many in the traditional scholar class, the French were not only thieves of their
land, but barbarians of the clearest sort: not literate in anything that mattered, ill-
mannered and disrespectful, devoid of moral probity, and hairy. To the French, the
literati were not exactly barbarians, but they were clearly representatives of all that
was retrograde: obscurantist, worshippers of dead men and their dead idols, fre-
quently corrupt, practisers of superstition, stubborn opponents of progress, and even
more stubborn opponents of the French ‘mission civilizatrice’ itself. Both groups were
of the opinion that the other smelled bad. The opposition between the two groups
could not have been more diametric.
In clear need of both intermediaries and civil ‘fonctionnaires’ of various sorts
amenable to their aims, once the French came into control of any particular locale,
they immediately turned to that group for whose protection they had ostensibly Wrst
come, the Catholics. Often living in communities apart, drawn from the poorest of
the poor, the Catholics were seen by the rest of Vietnamese society, most especially by
the literati, as the quintessential social parvenus, outcast devotees of a foreign god,
subversive and untrustworthy, and here was the proof, if any was needed: they
424 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

welcomed the French! But there was little wonder in this; previously the Catholics
(who had existed as a community in Vietnam since the early 1600s) had been system-
atically persecuted by their own countrymen.
In order to respond to pressing requirements for clerks and lower level fonction-
naires, from an early date the French decided to launch the formal training of
interpreters, using the quoc ngu transcription as the primary written medium. The
French deliberately turned away from the traditional bureaucracy and its Sino-
Vietnamese formation as the plan to undermine Sinitic inXuence went hand in
hand with cutting the mass of the population oV from the intransigence of the scholar
class and the institutions they represented.4
In 1864, Admiral de la Grandière, the French administrator of Cochinchina,
decreed that primary schools, teaching in Romanized Vietnamese, be established in
the principal centers of indigenous population in Cochinchina and, in the Wnal quarter
of the nineteenth century, the French slowly began to manage the training and staYng
of a functional bureaucracy. Inculcating ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘humanity’ (seen by
the French as contrary to Confucian concepts) via quoc ngu subsequently became the
focus of a sustained eVort at publication in the Vietnamese vernacular.
The path towards a clear colonial language policy was neither straight nor at all
times smooth, however. OYcial French eVorts to spread quoc ngu and education in
quoc ngu were often not supported by Frenchmen themselves resident in Indochina,
especially the colons and the military, who feared that any eVort to raise ‘Annamite’
literacy rates through quoc ngu could only lead to increased presumptuousness on the
part of the native population and, thus, to a weakening of French authority over them.
In addition to concerns that the spread of quoc ngu might ultimately give a dangerous
weapon to anti-French Vietnamese patriots, there were also arguments relating to two
quite diVerent approaches to the governing of Vietnam: ‘association’ versus ‘assimi-
lation’. Quite simply stated, this debate pitted the associationists, who favoured
allowing and even encouraging traditional Vietnamese knowledge and social struc-
tures (under strict French control and tutelage, to be sure), including chu nho and chu
nom, against the assimilationists who believed in directly ‘reforming’ the Vietnamese,
their society, and, not incidentally, their barbaric language along Gallic lines, with
some favouring the ultimate replacement of Vietnamese with French.
As French rule progressed, publication in quoc ngu was nevertheless promoted by
oYcial language policy, largely in order to achieve the objective of undercutting the
intellectual hold that the Sinicized mandarinal class exercised over the general
populace.
Meanwhile, opposition to French rule was continually being expressed in writing,
sometimes at considerable peril to the writers themselves. While a few early leaders,
4
The history of the replacement of Sino-Vietnamese by vernacular Vietnamese written in quoc ngu as
the quasi-exclusive means of written communication in Vietnam has been extensively investigated both in
Vietnam and abroad. The seminal work on this in the West is DeFrancis’s Nationalism and Language Policy
in Vietnam (1977).
 Vietnam 425

especially those with peasant followings expressed themselves in chu nom writings
designed to be read aloud to largely illiterate audiences, the most interesting aspect of
nationalist resistance writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century is that the
language in which much of it was created and read was chu nho or, in eVect, Chinese.
It is a clear measure of the hold of classical learning on Vietnamese society in general
that the most adamant supporters of Vietnamese independence during the Wrst half-
century of French rule regularly still saw chu nom vernacular writing as vulgar, and
Sino-Vietnamese writing as the principal linguistic icon of national identity.
In Southern Vietnam (Cochinchina), by way of contrast, less traditional and
simultaneously more cosmopolitan than the North, writing in quoc ngu developed
slowly without the kind of opposition it faced in the North, if only because those who
might have opposed it had either left or were politically emasculated. Consequently,
the daily content of what passed the French censors and appeared in print was
remarkably free of nationalist tinge.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, many in the Vietnamese intelligentsia,
both North and South, had begun to realize (as opposed to accept) the inevitability
of having to cope with the French for the foreseeable future. Much as an abhorrence
of foreign inXuence pervaded all national circles, it is reasonable to say that a
majority sought what they thought was a safer, more productive form of resist-
ance, long-term coping strategies that, nonetheless, would in time prepare for
independence.
It can be said that the real sea change in Vietnamese attitudes on a nationwide basis, in
particular attitudes towards the Romanized vernacular, is most fully symbolized
by the establishment of the Tonkin Free School (Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc) in March
of 1907. Founded with private Vietnamese funding in Hanoi, the Tonkin Free School
was intended as a school for Vietnamese students from elementary through pre-univer-
sity levels, teaching some 500 pupils subjects such as science and hygiene, as well as
the more traditional subjects of history, language (including quoc ngu, Sino-Vietnamese,
and French), and literature. Of salient importance here, however, was the school’s
strong advocacy and practice of using the Romanized vernacular in as many areas as
possible, including the publishing and distribution of modernizing tracts.
The school’s quoc ngu mantra subsequently spread with considerable speed as its
students fanned out in society. Already by January 1908, the French authorities
appeared to have had enough. Alarmed at the prospect of private Vietnamese
organizations freely educating their fellow countrymen, especially potential young
activists, the colonial government shut down the Tonkin Free School and repression
in general became the order of the day.
However, the French knew that, in the long term, the intellectual tinder in the
colony was drying out faster than they could wet it down, and things threatened to
ignite some day soon. To prevent combustion, they realized that a two-pronged
approach was needed. While cracking down on overt opposition, the authorities
also needed to provide at least a credible semblance of educational opportunity, one
426 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

whose content they could vet for nefarious inXuences. With the arrival of Governor-
General Albert Sarraut (1911–14), a new liberalization took place, and Vietnamese
were permitted access to secondary education. Returning for a second term (1917–19),
Sarraut followed this move with the reopening of the University of Indochina.
Meanwhile, although the secular prestige of chu nho carried on for many years even
among those who could not read it, the oYcial onslaught against Sino-Vietnamese
slowly gathered momentum. In 1906, the French established the Council for Improve-
ment of Education, promoting quoc ngu as a secondary school subject. Then in 1908, a
new Ministry of Education was created by the Imperial Court, an agency which was
also supposed to promote quoc ngu. The coup de grace was a series of imperial decrees
promulgated between 1915 (aVecting Tonkin) and 1919 (aVecting Annam) which
Wnally abolished the triennial Sino-Vietnamese examinations (long gone in Cochin-
china) which had been in use for nearly a thousand years in the recruitment of
Confucian government oYcials.
In another move to improve Franco-Vietnamese relations, in 1917, a highly
educated polyglot named Pham Quynh was persuaded to act as editor of a new
trilingual (French, Vietnamese, and Chinese) monthly, the Southern Wind Review
(Nam Phong Tap Chi). This journal was subsequently designated the oYcial organ of
the infelicitously named Association for Open-minded Moral Progress (Hoi Khai
Tri Tien Duc or AFIMA). AFIMA, just like the Southern Wind Review itself, was
supposed to serve as an organization of high-minded intellectuals seeking ways
to collaborate with France towards the common goal of forming an educated but
co-operative Vietnamese elite.
The principal object of the Southern Wind Review, from the colonial authorities’
standpoint, was to overcome a manifest lack of mutual comprehension between
‘Annamite’ and Frenchman, and to counter the malevolent inXuences the indigenous
elite was thought to be imbibing from abroad, especially from China and, via
China, from France’s arch-enemy, Germany. To eVect this end, it was proposed to
advance the image of French civilization and the substance of French modernity
through the favourable presentation, in all relevant languages, of French culture, most
particularly French literate culture.
Though in retrospect it may be tempting to perceive Pham Quynh simply as a
lackey in the service of French imperial hegemony, it is clear that Pham Quynh
actually had a mind of his own and enormous talents to put at its service. As a result,
his short-term inXuence on the course of linguistic nationalism was considerable
among the urban elite, primarily but not exclusively in the north and centre, and
despite the ultimately ill-fated collaborationist content of much of his writings, his
work was critical in establishing the principle that the vernacular Vietnamese lan-
guage in Romanized orthography was capable of expressing highly complex concepts
and that it was the only feasible long-term instrument of communication for
the future of the Vietnamese people, no matter what their ultimate political fate
might be.
 Vietnam 427

While the career of Pham Quynh is still the subject of great debate, there is little
doubt that Pham Quynh’s linking of language with the long tradition of national pride
in the creation of literary works struck a widely resonant chord. It is doubtful that any
single phenomenon in the Wrst half of the twentieth century served as a more
powerful legitimation of the quoc ngu vernacular than the ability of Vietnamese
authors to create a corpus of literature appropriate to the times in which they were
living, and this they did with great success, the output of both quoc ngu poetry and
prose rising very rapidly from the end of World War I.
Both individual writers and schools of writers appeared, slowly at Wrst in the 1920s
and then burgeoning in the 1930s, with works sometimes being produced in mono-
graphs, but more frequently appearing initially in serial format in newspapers and
small magazines. Short Wction vastly outnumbered long Wction and was created in a
number of common sub-genres, including works with romantic, realist, naturalist,
and revolutionary themes. All, signiWcantly, now wrote in some approximation of the
vernacular and all wrote in quoc ngu. Likewise, poetry was Xourishing. And again all
writers of poetry wrote in vernacular Vietnamese Romanized in quoc ngu script. The
corpus was both large and growing, and varied suYciently to constitute a genuinely
national literature written in the national language and produced in what had now
come to be regarded as the national writing system.
This forward movement in the use of Vietnamese in literary publication was
accompanied by certain progress (though at a much slower rate) in the arena of
national education. Governor-General Albert Sarraut, with his educational reforms
of 1917 aimed at reducing the perceived anti-French inXuence of the Confucian
teaching corps, introduced the école franco-indigène, the long run goal of which was
to dismantle the traditional chu nho schools which were found in regional population
centres. Initially, it was projected that French would be the medium of instruction.
However, by 1924 it became clear that this goal was essentially unattainable, if only
because there were not enough teachers to implement the decree. In addition,
textbooks for all levels had to be imported from France and Tunisia, but these proved
to be highly unsuitable, both culturally and linguistically. It was therefore decided that
in the Wrst three classes of primary schooling, Vietnamese (in quoc ngu) would have to
be the language of instruction and appropriate textbooks would be translated into
Vietnamese. French would serve from middle school onward.
In attempting to summarize the French period in relation to language and nation-
alism in Vietnam, it is important to stress that the major language-identity-related
conXict in Vietnam during this period concerned the choice and use of script rather
than spoken language. Minor skirmishes relating to French and Sino-Vietnamese
aside, there was never any serious question of which spoken form of language should
be the national language in Vietnam – Vietnamese was already dominant through-
out the country. Concerning the conXict over script, the process in which quoc ngu
was established as the deWnitive writing form of the nation is a linguistic reXection of
428 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

the important power struggles that were present in Vietnam as it became a modern
nation. The principal steps in this process can now be summarized as follows:
(1) In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there existed a situation in
which there were brieXy four diVerent available writing systems in Vietnam,
chu nho, chu nom, quoc ngu, and Romanized French.
(2) The French colonial administration attempted to make the territory of Viet-
nam and its population easier to subjugate, more governable, through various
attempts at manipulation of prestige language used in Vietnam. Thus we Wnd,
Wrst, the (limited) promotion of French and, secondly, the promotion of
Romanized writing for Vietnamese. The latter represented an attempt to shift
the educated classes and potential leaders of the Vietnamese people away from
their Chinese-inspired (or Chinese-reactive) identity (one already present in the
country) and towards a new colonial identity loyal to France.
(3) At Wrst, chu nho and chu nom were symbolically associated with resistance to the
French and use of quoc ngu was associated with collaboration. However, later
on the use of quoc ngu came to be seen as acceptable as nationalists began to
perceive the need for modernization, and the greater ease with which a
Romanized script would allow for this. Vietnamese nationalists may have Wrst
learned about concepts of democracy, socialism, romantic nationalism, and so
forth through the medium of Chinese, but they saw that their further propa-
gation would actually be better served through quoc ngu.
(4) The acceptability of quoc ngu was then further heightened by its use to translate
works of literature from Chinese and chu nom, as well as through its use to
create new literature, proving to people that quoc ngu did have the potential to
encode complex ideas and could be used for prestigious functions such as the
creation of literature.
(5) By the end of the period of colonial rule, the conXict of the scripts had most
deWnitely been won by quoc ngu, so that issues of selection of the national
language and its written representation were eVectively well decided prior to
the actual independence of Vietnam.
Such a process is a good illustration of the interaction and conXict which some-
times occurs between the symbolic and pragmatic values of language. Quoc ngu
began life with an essentially negative symbolic value for the (non-Catholic) Vietnam-
ese, being Wrmly associated with the French and collaboration. However, over time,
it came to be recognized that the Romanized transcription of the vernacular had
a strongly positive pragmatic value: it could be used for the spread of nationalist
ideas and the modernization of Vietnam much more eVectively than the
cumbersome, inconsistent character-based chu nom system of transcription could.
The pragmatic value of quoc ngu then led to its adoption by nationalists, leading to
a gradual shift in its symbolic value. From the earlier negative, pro-French value
 Vietnam 429

projected by quoc ngu, it subsequently came to be reassociated with the positive

symbolic value of modernization assisting Vietnam’s nationalist movement. If there
is any general lesson to be derived from the French period, it is perhaps that symbolic
values associated with language can undergo considerable change even in relatively
short periods of time such as the span of one generation. A ‘foreign’ language system
such as the French-developed (and promoted) Romanization of vernacular Vietnam-
ese in quoc ngu came to be ‘nativized’ in the minds of speakers over time through
increased association with domestic, national use, to the point of becoming an
important new icon of national identity and losing earlier negative associations of
foreign origin.5

19.5 Language and Nationalism in Vietnam after World War II

During World War II, the Japanese army arrived in Vietnam in signiWcant force and in
1941 installed itself as a shadow government of occupation behind a continuing
colonial administration, one now loyal to the puppet regime of Vichy France.
Towards the end of the war, however, in 1945, the Japanese made the decision to
disarm the French fully and install a Vietnamese administration in its place, interning
the French military, many French civilians, and the senior French staV of the colonial
administration. This more dramatic dismantling of French authority in the country
had the eVect of triggering a declaration of independence from France from
the Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai, and a new ‘independent’ government was formed
under the Wgurehead of Emperor Bao Dai, directly encouraged by the Japanese.
While largely symbolic, two acts of the ephemeral Tran Trong Kim government
are worth noting in connection with questions of language and nationalism. The Wrst
is the proclamation in early May 1945, of a change in the name of the country from
the three-part designation as Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, as introduced by
the French, back to ‘Vietnam’, its oYcial name under the Nguyen Dynasty after
1801. Hereafter, Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina were simply to be referred to as
Bac Bo, Trung Bo, and Nam Bo respectively, the northern, central, and southern
constituent parts of a single national ‘Vietnamese’ entity. The language itself would no
longer be referred to as tieng An nam (‘Annamese’) nor the people as nguoi An nam
(‘Annamites’), but as tieng Viet (‘Viet language’) and nguoi Viet (‘Viet people’). In fact,
5
In this regard, it is interesting to compare the acceptance of quoc ngu as a new symbol of Vietnamese
national identity with the development and change of attitudes towards a ‘foreign’ script in two other
Asian countries: Japan and Korea. In the former, the (admittedly long-term) use of Chinese characters has
resulted in Chinese characters coming to be perceived as an important and (for many) sacrosanct
component of Japanese national identity (Gottlieb, this volume, chapter 9), whereas in Korea a fully
diVerent attitude towards Chinese characters has characterized post-war developments in language, with
cries for the elimination of characters from the representation of Korean (especially in North Korea – see
Ross, this volume, chapter 10). How diVerent outcomes may result from the interaction of a foreign-
sourced script form with the pragmatic and symbolic constraints present in nation-building is an
interesting area of variation and one where the forces of language and national identity may come
strongly to the fore.
430 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

this reassertion of the unity of the nation and the use of the terms Vietnam, tieng Viet,
and nguoi Viet in large part just reXected what was already common private practice
among many Vietnamese at the time, but the government’s formal proclamation
permitted use of these terms in public discourse from that day on, and even during the
interlude of French eVorts to reassert control over Indochina (1945–54), the terms
‘Annamites/Annamese’ were seldom permitted to resurface.
The second notable change was the announced intention of the new government
of the ‘Empire of Vietnam’ to institute educational reforms. It was decided that
vernacular Vietnamese would be the universal medium of instruction and that
examinations should be held in Vietnamese written in quoc ngu.
Things changed radically once again with the end of the war and the peculiarly
chaotic situation that arose in Vietnam in the summer of 1945. The Allies had
agreed at Yalta in 1945 to split Vietnam in two at the 16th Parallel. The disarming
and repatriation of the undefeated Japanese army of occupation was assigned in the
North to Chinese forces of the Kuo Min Tang/KMT, and in the South to British units
from Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia Command. On or about 19 August 1945, in the
power vacuum created by the imminent surrender of Japan and the temporary
absence of any other credible force (the Allies had yet to land and the French were
still under Japanese lock and key), local Vietnamese forces known as the Viet Minh
rose up largely unopposed by the Japanese army in what later came to be known as
the ‘August Revolution’. The Viet Minh was an organization under crypto-communist
control that had been active in the hinterlands of Vietnam since 1941, Wghting for
Vietnamese independence. It was Wercely anti-French and had also fought the Japan-
ese with logistical support from the Allies, and in 1945 aspired to form a new post-
war government truly independent of both France and Japan.
The Viet Minh demanded and received the abdication of Emperor Bao Dai and
the dissolving of his Japanese-sponsored government. On 2 September 1945, before
a crowd of thousands of his fellow countrymen assembled in Ba Dinh square in
Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, long-time revolutionary, committed communist, and leader of
the Viet Minh, declared full independence from France and the establishment of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
The following month, with British blessing, French troops under General Leclerc
subsequently arrived back in the South ‘to restore order’ and clashed with the Viet
Minh, whose units were forced to withdraw to the hinterland once more. The North
of Vietnam also saw the return of French troops, in February 1946, after KMT forces
present there withdrew and went home in return for French concessions within
China.
Full-scale war broke out in 1946. The Viet Minh called for evacuation of the
cities and, for the next eight years, fought one of the bloodiest conXicts in modern
Southeast Asian history, a conXict which culminated in the spring of 1954 with the
massive French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The Geneva Accords concluded later that year
put a Wnal end to the French colonial period in Indochina and resulted in the de
 Vietnam 431

facto division of Vietnam at the 17th Parallel into independent entities, the northern
Democratic Republic of Vietnam (allied with the Soviet Union and China) and the
southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN, allied with the West, principally the United
States), a division that would last until eventual reuniWcation of the country in 1975–6.

19.5.1 The Life of the Vietnamese Language in post-WWII

Vietnam: the North
The leadership of the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the North
was intent on drawing clear cultural boundaries between itself and its friends and
former foes alike. The eVect on language policy was to attempt to increase literacy
levels throughout the population as a concomitant of post-war economic develop-
ment and to try to achieve as complete linguistic self-reliance as possible in the
Welds of national communications and education, all of which eVorts lay atop an
underlying agenda of reinforcing national unity through nativist pride.
The most signiWcant event aVecting the Vietnamese language in the DRV from
the very Wrst was the national literacy campaign. The entire population was to be
enlisted in the Wght against the lack of education; the duty of literates was to teach
illiterates, the duty of literate grandchildren to teach illiterate grandparents, and so
forth. Such campaigns were in fact begun by the Viet Minh as early as 1945 and
repeated with signiWcant success in the zones under Viet Minh control until 1954,
when the DRV began the eVective administration of the entire country north of the
17th Parallel.
It was in the Weld of education, however, where the Viet Minh seems to have
had the greatest eVect on the fate of the language as related to national aspirations, an
eVect that set the stage for the rest of the twentieth century, even after the reuniWca-
tion of the country in 1975. In addition to the literacy campaigns, which were mainly
directed towards the mass of the uneducated populace, most of whom had never
had, and would never have, signiWcant access to regular formal education at any
point in their lives, the government of the infant DRV focused its eVorts on a graded
series of goals: Wrst, the use of Vietnamese as the principal medium of teaching
from the beginning of the primary to the end of the secondary educational cycles;
second, the use of Vietnamese as the medium of instruction in the post-secondary
classroom; third, the creation of a scientiWc, cultural, and political lexicon that would
allow for the full exercise of the vernacular Vietnamese language in all spheres of
national life, from the home and the market, through the popular press, to all levels of
education and research and the operations of learned national academies.
In practice, DRV language policy, viewed as part of educational policy, led in 1946 to
a decree by the Ministry of Education that all university examinations, both oral and
written, were to be held in Vietnamese from that date on. This ukase, more
enthusiastically greeted by students than professors, was rather easier to realize in
the oral than in the written realm, but gradually it took hold. And once it came to be
432 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

widely applied, it put paid to the notion that only French was suitable for higher
education. In the process of facilitating such broad reform of the educational system
in terms of the language of its delivery, educators everywhere had to commence
writing, publishing, and distributing new school texts in Vietnamese on a large variety
of subjects, and, given the nature of the times and the active war of resistance to the
French, simply taking the old French textbooks and translating them into Vietnamese
clearly would not do; a fully new set of teaching materials for all subjects was required
for primary, secondary, and higher levels of education, supported by the creation
of a modern educational lexicon in Vietnamese. Though a monumental task, the
massive reform of education in the DRV was very eVectively driven by a practical
impetus of the strongest sort: the need for simple survival.
Elsewhere, modernization (aimed at national development) and puriWcation (aimed
at national pride and unity) were the watchwords of a series of language reform
campaigns launched in the DRV over a period of approximately thirty-Wve years
from the late 1950s to the late 1980s after uniWcation of North and South. These
goals were not necessarily easy to achieve and occasionally contradicted each other,
but the basic result was a double-barrelled campaign on the one hand to erect a set of
economic, political, and learned scientiWc lexicons that would allow Vietnam access to
the wider world of ‘progress’, and on the other to ‘maintain the purity and clarity of
the Vietnamese language’, sullied neither by excessive foreign loans nor by indulgence
in the Xourishes and locutory arcana heretofore so dear to both the French and the
Vietnamese educational mandarinates.
DRV eVorts to establish a modern lexicon for the Vietnamese language that would
permit teaching, research, and broad communication in Vietnamese relating to
the wide range of subjects needed for the modernization and industrialization of
Vietnamese society, can be said to have been highly successful in the long run, in
virtually all domains. By way of contrast, the same claims to resounding success are
somewhat less easily attached to the results of manifold campaigns in the DRV to
preserve the ‘purity’ of the Vietnamese language.
Modernization of the lexicon in the DRV is said to have been initiated during the
period of anti-French resistance prior to 1954, but came to fruition Wrst of all during
the periods of peace from 1955 until 1964, and Wnally after national reuniWcation in
1975. To achieve modernization, it was imperative to establish a broad level of
education that emphasized being able to cope with science and technology using
the national vernacular language, Vietnamese, represented in the Romanized writing
system quoc ngu.
In specifying such a goal, the Communist leadership of the DRV also insisted on
three basic features of work on the Vietnamese language: its results should be
‘national’, ‘popular’, and ‘scientiWc’. While the third element goes without saying
(and chieXy implies being systematic, while avoiding homophones and polyvalent
deWnitions), the Wrst two deserve some explanation: ‘national’ here can be understood
to mean making fullest use of lexical elements already present in Vietnamese and
 Vietnam 433

avoidance of unnecessary foreign loans. ‘Popular’ referred to accessibility and the

absence of pedantry, the latter frequently perceived to be a stereotypical feature
of mandarinal jargon in Vietnamese. In practice, ‘national’ and ‘popular’ were not
always achievable qualities and could occasionally work against each other. Further-
more, ‘national’ seems to mean words already extant in the Vietnamese lexicon that
were perceived to be ‘Vietnamese’, even though this category might actually include
a fair number of items that were borrowed from Chinese at a date early enough in
the development of Vietnamese that their pronounced forms were no longer inden-
tiWably ‘Chinese’.6
The latter issue also begged the question of using Chinese loanwords in general and
whether the importation of Sinitic vocabulary, a process that had been ongoing
in Vietnamese for more than a millennium, was actually equivalent to over-reliance
on ‘foreign’ words. In the event, a very large number of loans from the already
developed Chinese scientiWc lexicon were indeed directly imported, using the sys-
tematic Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation which is always available for such operat-
ions. However, in two areas, there were caveats. First, where vernacular words
already existed in Vietnamese, loans from modern Chinese were eschewed.7 Second,
the Vietnamese word order of [head+modiWer] usually prevailed over the Chinese
order of [modiWer+head]. As for loans from languages other than Chinese, there
were a number of questions: should simple phoneticization be applied, and, if so,
what systematic approach should be employed?8 The answer frequently seems to
have been to employ phonetic loans, but diVerent teams of linguists were not always
co-ordinated in their approaches. This latter phenomenon is not surprising when
one considers the degree to which the strictly vertical integration of Vietnamese
work-units under the communist system has long tended to discourage the kind of
free horizontal communication needed to avoid the duplication of eVort found
in nearly all spheres of oYcial life. After reuniWcation and the establishment of a
unitary government, with the birth of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) in
1976, especially after further major educational reforms of the late 1970s and early
1980s, work on creating vocabularies in various technical Welds continued, but on
a more specialized basis; vocabularies were being perfected in advanced agronomy,
nutrition, structural engineering, and the like – not subjects likely to aVect usage
in, say, the mass media. This was because the fundamental lexicons needed to
supply raw materials for national education in most popular Welds, including
medicine, had already been devised and were being thoroughly implemented. By

6
As with the word for ‘sword’, for example, where the perceived-to-be-Vietnamese vernacular word
(g32m) is actually a considerably earlier form of the word popularly considered to be Sino-Vietnamese
(kiê´m).
7
For example, vernacular Vietnamese already possessed a word for ‘airport’ (sân bay), so it was
possible to avoid borrowing the Chinese loan equivalent (phi tr3qng).
8
A useful exposé of the major issues in the creation of such vocabularies can be found in Lê Thanh
Khôi (1978: 190–205).
434 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

the 1970s, if not somewhat earlier in the North, a Vietnamese student typically went
from pre-school crèche through university entirely in Vietnamese, with the exception
of courses speciWcally designed to teach foreign languages.
Accompanying the expansion of the Vietnamese lexicon in areas of science,
technology, and other areas of modern life, Vietnam from the mid-1960s also
witnessed a major campaign to ‘maintain the purity and clarity of the Vietnamese
language’ in DRV society. The launching of this state-endorsed movement as a whole
seems to have been formally signalled in a speech given by then Prime Minister
Pham Van Dong on 7 February 1966. As with the oYcial drive to create scientiWc
vocabularies in Vietnamese, the emphasis was to render the language of instruction,
civic communications, and written publication both ‘popular’ and ‘national’. SpeciW-
cally the goals were to rid the public vernacular of obscurantism, jargon, and pedantry,
and drive out the unjustiWable use of ‘foreign words’. There is little doubt that
the proposed reforms, at a time of patriotic passion in the midst of a terrible war,
had wide appeal, not only in practical terms, but also in that they touched a deep
emotional chord amongst a community whose nationalist fervour had risen to
unprecedented heights. Interestingly, in taking aim at both pedantry and ‘foreign’
vocabulary, the net eVect of this collective eVort was largely to target and eliminate
major swathes of overtly Sinitic items. While centrally inspired campaigns of this
kind can often achieve some visible near-term results, as indeed occurred brieXy in the
DRV, important questions of simple utility (and, in the case of Vietnamese, the basic
nature of much of its lexical construction) will frequently win out in the long run.
Thus, once the North and South were reunited and as Vietnam opened itself and its
society to the wider world, the forces of utility and commerce began to interact more
and more with the desire to keep civic discourse clear and simple, resulting in a
noticeable new inXux of lexical items drawn from foreign sources, ones directly
connected by their innate usefulness to the tools of modernity, technology, travel,
and international exchange.9

19.5.2 South Vietnam prior to Reunification

Descriptions of the linguistic activity which took place south of the 17th Parallel and
of the language policies of ‘South Vietnam’, from 1954 to 1975 (the erstwhile Republic
of Vietnam/RVN, under American tutelage), form a major lacuna in the available
literature. This may be due to two factors: Wrstly, the RVN was a short-lasting political
entity that came to a bad end and its accomplishments, such as they were, either tend
to be dismissed under the ‘also rans’ chapter of history, or they were undone by events
succeeding its demise. Secondly, the maxim that ‘history is written by the winners’

9
For example, the long-existing (Chinese-derived) word in Vietnamese for ‘visa’ (thi thu’c), still
preferred in oYcial usage, now seems to have become replaced in common parlance with ˙the (French-
˙
or English-derived) term ‘visa’.
 Vietnam 435

would appear to apply at least as much to the case of Vietnam in the late twentieth
century as it has anywhere else in modern history.
Some things are known, however. The Vietnamese language, as it appeared in
print in South Vietnam, was almost totally unregulated and a great deal of experi-
mentation took place in terms of quoc ngu spellings, vocabulary introduction, and the
transliteration of foreign terms, with no clear cumulative direction emerging at any
point. On the classroom scene, there were at least two South Vietnams and
social diVerentiation led to two distinct educational streams, one for the elite, geared
towards admission to French universities, and the other, public schools for the
urban populations and a fair number of rural centres, dependent on the RVN Ministry
of Education.
At the university level, eVorts were made to encourage as much instruction in
Vietnamese as feasible but, especially in the sciences and technical subjects, in
medicine and pharmacology, both a resistance on the part of instructors who
were themselves products of the elitist French system and of the families of
students anxious to send their progeny abroad, plus a dearth of Vietnamese-language
instructional materials, meant that, in practice, instruction in Vietnamese was
mixed with instruction in French (and, to a much lesser extent, English) and not
infrequently Vietnamese took a back seat. The whole system lacked any real sense of
cohesion and functioned in an essentially disconnected way.
As time progressed through the 1960s and on into the 1970s, life in the South
was to become increasingly chaotic and uncertain as guerrilla incursions from the
North gradually escalated into full-blown civil warfare between North and South,
fought largely on territory in the South. In 1975, after many years of conXict that
is well documented in the literature, the government of South Vietnam surrendered
to the North and Vietnam was once again reassembled as a single polity, paving the
way for a new period of development of the country, particularly over the last decade
and a half of the twentieth century, following new policies of economic liberalization.
Before turning to the current stabilization of the nation and the situation of the
Vietnamese language today, we will Wrst turn to brieXy consider the place of
Vietnam’s minority groups and their languages in respect to the Kinh majority
and oYcial, government language policy. In the Wnal section of the chapter, we
then return to review the strong position that Vietnamese currently maintains in
the country, as the fundamental heritage of struggles and gains made cumulatively
during much of the twentieth century.

19.6 National Minority Languages in Post-war Vietnam

As noted in section 19.2, Vietnam is home to some Wfty-three ethnic minority groups,
constituting approximately 10 million of the country’s 86 million total population.
The minorities are scattered throughout the country, with the majority of the smaller
groups predominantly located in less accessible upland areas. With regard to the
436 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

national minorities and indigenous language education in the South of Vietnam

during the pre-1975 Republic of Vietnam period, non-Kinh peoples that already had
ancient writing systems such as the Chinese, the Khmer, and the Cham for the
most part were treated with an attitude of benign neglect. The Chinese preferred to
run their own community schools, the Khmer looked to monks in their Buddhist
temples for instruction, and the Cham to their mosques. For other Montagnard
groups such as the Gia Rai, E De, Bahnar, and Koho, the most important tasks of
documenting and creating writing systems had been carried out by the French in
earlier times, and scripts for the Sedang, Hre, Mnong, Stieng, Bru, Katu, Pacoh, and
Chru, etc. were left primarily to the eVorts of groups such as the Summer Institute
for Linguistics, a Protestant organization engaged in Bible translation and active in
the South from 1957 onward.
In surveying the literature on general, oYcial ‘language policy’ from the North –
the DRV prior to 1975 – and from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam following
that (today’s reunited Vietnam), especially in works published in Vietnamese, one
Wnds that it is actually focused for the most part on matters of oYcial policy towards
non-Kinh (i.e. ethnically non-Vietnamese) minority language communities in the
country. The consensus nowadays is that most of the important language-planning
matters of earlier concern regarding the Vietnamese language itself have now either
been largely addressed or that the path towards the major goals of earlier language
policies have been suYciently spelt out and agreed upon and are being implemented
satisfactorily. This is not the case with regard to the languages of Vietnam’s national
minorities, and hence reference to the latter tends to occur with considerable
regularity in statements of language policy.
To understand the origins and general orientation of Vietnamese policy towards
the languages of its national minorities, it is useful to appreciate whence some of
the intellectual impetus for state policy in Marxist-controlled Vietnam may have
Wrst been inspired. A critically important and inXuential Wgure in the Vietnamese
Communist Party at the time that DRV minority policy was laid out and implemen-
ted was the erstwhile leader of the Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh. Ho had spent much time
in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, at the formative time in Soviet nationalities policy
when Joseph Stalin was the Commissar of Nationalities. In the spelling out of Marxist–
Leninist doctrine, Stalin was very clear: minorities initially had to be accommodated
in the building of the socialist state but were eventually expected to ‘catch up’ to the
majority population and meld with it. In such a view, the maintenance of a separate
status and identity for minority groups was not the end goal of the state’s develop-
mental policy; such attributes were simply intermediate stages to be gone through
before Wnal integration with the whole. It is helpful to bear this approach to the
nationalities in the Soviet Union in mind when considering the various iterations
of minority language policy in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist
who saw Marxism as the most important tool for forwarding his country’s national
interests and Ho’s exposure to the treatment of minorities in the Soviet Union
 Vietnam 437

was arguably a signiWcant contributing factor behind the shaping of Vietnam’s

oYcial policies towards its own ethno-linguistic minorities.
A second signiWcant feature which is likely to have had an inXuence on language
policy decisions is the existence in Vietnam of a long-standing and widely-shared
attitude that the country is divided into a civilizing (and civilized) centre occupied
by the Kinh, and a less civilized periphery inhabited by non-Vietnamese ethnic
groups. Such an imbalanced perception of the relation of Vietnamese to non-
Vietnamese has been held by royalist and revolutionary alike in Vietnam, and is
displayed in the very words used to describe the central ethnicity, ‘Kinh’ (‘capital/
urban’) as opposed to the (now politically incorrect but long used) term ‘Thô’ ’
(‘country (bumpkin)’) which came to be applied in vulgar usage to a variety of
peoples, but which generally designated the largest (and thus most familiar) minority,
the million-plus Tày.
Quite generally, policy towards national minorities and their languages in Vietnam
in modern times has been based on two major factors: strategic political theory
and tactical utilitarianism. Political considerations have been and will continue to be
the prime movers, but practical considerations have taken control at various periods
in recent history. In terms of speciWc policies and their importance, the government
has on multiple occasions asserted that Vietnam’s minorities have the right to
maintain their languages and scripts (where these exist) and also to make use of
these at least in early schooling. However, as pointed out in Vasavakul (2003),
although there might seem to be oYcial support for the use of minority languages
and scripts, there is little in the way of resources made available to help establish
education in minority languages. There are a number of groups whose languages are
still without any means of orthographic representation, and many others which do
have scripts but who have given up on the use of these in education due to
low provision of appropriate resources. Furthermore, for a variety of reasons it
would appear that only a small proportion of children from minority groups actually
attend school where it is available. Finally, it can be noted that in 1980 the government
announced that all inhabitants of the country, Kinh and non-Kinh alike, had a duty
to learn and know Vietnamese, adding further pressure on the maintenance of
minority languages and their successful use in education. The gap between policy
declaration and practical implementation of the apparent spirit of a particular policy
has consequently sometimes been quite considerable.
In broad terms, the long-term dynamic that is taking place in the sphere of
minority language policies and the practical application of those policies in
Vietnam today is between the diametrically opposed preservationist and integrationist
tendencies. The preservationist tendencies, fuelled to some extent by pressures from
the outside world, international organizations, NGOs, the travel industry, and some
well-meaning academics, has led to eVorts to maintain, display, and perform the
cultures of the national minorities, perhaps in a rather ‘DisneyWed’ format. The
principal feature of these eVorts is that they are rather easily visible at the micro level.
438 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

The more determinative integrationist tendencies are to be apprehended at the

macro level: they have to do with the statistical performance of the Vietnamese
national and regional economies (and the role of the minorities therein), and matters
such as national defence estimates, the implementation of planning, transport,
ecological, and exploitational projects, dams, hydrology, and hydroelectricity, and
educational programmes. They also interact signiWcantly with the changing demog-
raphy of the Kinh majority and eVorts to resettle Kinh in areas of the country where
the latter have not traditionally resided, this having resulted in recent decades in
the signiWcant dilution of the population density of minorities in many areas.
But above all, language policy and policies towards minorities in general have to
do with national security as that concept is clearly understood at the most senior
levels of the Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the Communist
Party. The latter usually (but not always) supersedes the former and the latter is
informed by history and practice not only in Vietnam itself, but also as elaborated in
‘classical’ Marxism–Leninism, that is, never very far from those theories Wrst laid
out by Joseph Stalin and applied in the Soviet Union. Such theories foresee the
eventual integration, at least the political and economic integration, of the periphery
– the national minority populations – into the centre.
A growing concern of the Vietnamese government, indeed for many other govern-
ments in Southeast Asia, is the rise of evangelical missionary activity amongst minority
populations. The Vietnamese government is particularly (though quietly) alarmed
from its memories of the FULRO10 Montagnard uprisings of the late 1970s. An ongoing
anti-Vietnamese movement in the central highlands and one with roots in an earlier
time in the Republic of Vietnam, FULRO was thought to be inspired by the malevolent
inXuences of Protestant missionaries who had been working to convert minority
groups in the area for many years prior to reuniWcation. Whether or not, in reality,
the missionary factor was paramount, this perception on the part of the Vietnamese
leadership and the fact that a protracted and bloody asymmetrical conXict dragged on
for some time has led to a high level of anxiety in this regard. All the more so because,
while central highland groups might be expected to be somewhat vulnerable, eVorts to
convert members of the largest and traditionally most politically dependable groups in
the north may well be in the oYng. It needs to be emphasized that such a prospect
would be completely unacceptable to any central Vietnamese government and that the
government of the SRV can be predictably relied upon to quash such eVorts with all the
means at its disposal.
Meanwhile, with the government keeping an observant eye on developments that
might lead in undesired directions, the continued micro-level display of minority
cultures, in the forms of handicrafts, dance, music, costume, festivals, etc., as well
as governmental and private eVorts inside minority communities to maintain the

10
FULRO was an acronym for Front UniWé de Lutte des Races Opprimées (UniWed Front of Oppressed
Races).
 Vietnam 439

minimum levels needed of cultural and linguistic knowledge, will most likely continue
and even be encouraged, but eventually, apart from their entertainment value,
they will only serve to mask (and therefore enable) the much larger and more sign-
iWcant trend towards integration into the Vietnamese-speaking Kinh-majority nation
of Vietnam.

19.7 Conclusions: Language in Vietnam Today

Although it may sound like the statement of an obvious truism, the present strong status
of Vietnamese as the oYcial/national language of Vietnam in the twenty-Wrst century
and its role as a dominant and central expression of national identity is very much the
product of its history in the country and in particular earlier struggles carried out during
much of the twentieth century. Viewed synchronically, the Vietnamese language is a
strong binding force for the majority of the population and despite the existence of
diVerent dialect forms, the language is shared and broadly understood throughout the
considerable length of its uniquely shaped territory. For nearly 90 per cent of the
population, Wlling the populous areas of the coastal plains, Vietnamese pervades all
areas of daily life, both formal and informal. A standardized form of Vietnamese is
present in and dominates television and radio programming and occurs written in
newspapers, books, and magazines. Education from primary to university level makes
use of Vietnamese as the uniform medium of instruction, and all government admin-
istration and bureaucracy is eVected in Vietnamese, including the operations of the
country’s legal system. In addition to such across-the-board use of standard Vietnamese
in all the more formal domains of life, the language also occurs, in varieties not
signiWcantly diVerent from standard Vietnamese, in all informal domestic domains,
among family, friends, and with fellow workers in casual conversation. Because of this
widespread nature of the language at home and in all higher functions, and also the
symbolic function of its written form, quoc ngu, which employs a highly distinctive form
of Romanization, the Vietnamese language is a very central and strong component of
national identity in Vietnam, and is perhaps also particularly salient in this linking
function due to the lack of promotion of other potentially sharable features of national
identity such as a single religion or the reverence of the institution of royalty as in
certain other Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Malaysia.
Diachronically, as outlined in the various sections of the chapter, the current
strength of Vietnamese has come about in a series of steps and gains made in relation
to other languages in potential competition with Vietnamese. The Wrst of these
was the initial formation and subsequent incremental growth of Vietnamese as a
common vernacular accompanying the steady southwards expansion of the Vietnam-
ese state, incorporating speakers of other languages until the country assumed
its present territorial shape. SigniWcantly later came the breaking away from its
centuries-long tradition of use of Chinese script (and language) for the purposes of
writing, and the important adoption of quoc ngu and vernacular Vietnamese in all areas
440 Lê Minh-Hă`ng and S. O’Harrow

of writing. Simultaneously with the adoption of quoc ngu and colloquial Vietnamese
for formal purposes came a resistance to the adoption of French in formal domains,
not highlighted in this chapter, but nevertheless important in comparative terms,
given the retention of colonial languages such as English in formal domains in other
countries following independence or shortly thereafter (e.g. Pakistan, India, Malay-
sia). The Wnal steps ensuring the eVective embedding of Vietnamese as both a
successful oYcial language and respected linguistic embodiment of national identity
was the post-WWII development of the language for use in all formal domains of life,
involving massive lexical expansion in the areas of education, technology, law, and
many other aspects of modern life. Attempts at puriWcation of the language, though
perhaps less long-lasting in their success, nevertheless also highlighted and brought to
the attention of the public the issue and value of possessing a distinctive language, and
in this sense also contributed towards the elevation of the perceived status of
Vietnamese.
If one now speculates on the future based on past and currently observable trends
relating to language and identity in Vietnam, internally one can foresee a further
expansion of the knowledge and use of Vietnamese among those sections of
the population for whom Vietnamese is not a mother tongue and currently still not
well known, that is, Vietnam’s national minorities. If the country continues to see a
growth in its population causing a higher demand for land and other essential
resources, it is not unlikely that the historic tendency for the ethnically Vietnamese
to move into and integrate other ethnic groups will continue in the future, resulting
in closer connections between the current minorities and increased language shift
to Vietnamese rather than the development of a genuinely multilingual state
with languages other than Vietnamese being incorporated into oYcial areas of life
in the country.
Externally, now that Vietnamese is indeed very well established among the
population at all levels of interaction and there has been a general opening up of
the country to foreign investment, liberalization of the economy, détente, greater
participation in regional international aVairs, and an interest in making connections
and establishing links with other parts of the world both in Asia and beyond, there
has been a refocusing of interest in foreign languages. Within this Weld of study,
signiWcant changes have been occurring over the last Wfteen years. Earlier student
interest in learning Russian and East European languages due to former links with
the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries has plummeted in recent years. French,
once the premier foreign language, having fallen into near oblivion for some years,
has at Wrst slowly and then more rapidly made a comeback, especially with the
availability of scholarships to France and other French-speaking countries. Interest
in Chinese for commercial purposes has reappeared, added to interest in Japanese and
Korean, for similar reasons. However, head and shoulders above all other foreign
languages, interest in learning English, at Wrst the English of Great Britain and the
Commonwealth (particularly Australia) and, since 1995, that of North America, has
 Vietnam 441

dominated recent educational developments. Knowledge of English has come to be

seen as a key to a promising career in both commerce and technology to such
an extent that a majority of Vietnamese students at the very top levels aim at
Wnding some modality for study abroad in an English-speaking institution, and are
increasingly successful in doing this. Additionally, with a view towards giving their
graduates a ‘leg up in the world’, some tertiary institutions within Vietnam itself,
such as the Hanoi University of Foreign Studies (now oYcially renamed ‘Hanoi
University’), are now elaborating plans to begin delivering degrees taught entirely
in English. However, despite this increased interest in the outside world and
the concomitant, perhaps inevitable, incorporation of foreign loanwords into Viet-
namese as it grows in the twenty-Wrst century, it seems likely that Vietnamese will
remain very strong for the foreseeable future and continue to function as one of
Southeast Asia’s most successful national languages, as the region itself develops
further in economic importance. Now fully entrenched as part of Vietnamese life in
all its many facets, tieng Viet and quoc ngu would seem to be indispensable, signature
components of the country’s future as a modern nation.
This page intentionally left blank
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 Index

Ainu 13, 186, 188, 190–1, 195 Bollywood 62

Akha 267 Bombay 67
All India National Congress 36 Brahui 105,
Altaic 202 Brunei 337, 344, 346, 348, 354, 367–8
Andhra Pradesh Buddhism/Buddhist 21, 24, 25, 86, 96,
Anglo-Burmese 273 116–38, 186, 268, 271, 276 n., 285,
Angkor 290–1, 301, 309 291, 295, 309, 315, 400, 421
Annam 417, 420, 422 Buginese 379
Arabic 10, 35, 39, 103, 108, 110, 112, 291, Burma/Myanmar 5, 263–87
310, 315 Burman/Bamar 265–6
Arakanese/Rakhine 266 Burmese 263–87
Arya-Sinhala identity, the
128–9 Burushaski 105
Aryan 57, 69, 128
Assamese 57 Cambodia 13, 288–311
Asian Wnancial crisis 27, 182, 332, Cambodian/Khmer 288–311, 417
Austro-Asiatic 57, 59, 87, 148, 289, 416, 420 communist Khmer 297
Austronesian 148, 254, 291, 314, 362, 417 Khmer Kandal 293
Awami League 43, 46 Khmer Kraom 293, 297, 300
Ayudhya 393 Khmer Loe 294, 300
Khmer Issarak 297
baihuawen 145, 148 Neo-Khmerism 301
Balai Pustaka 321, 325–6 Cantonese 11, 16, 26, 143, 160, 169, 174–6,
Balochi 105 178–9, 183–5, 350, 379
Bandaranaike, S. W. R. D. 128–34 Catholic 423
Bangla 20, 21, 33–54, 57, 65 Cebuano 364
Bangladesh 5, 6, 20, 21, 22, 33–54, 100, 109 censorship 247, 273, 301
Bangla Academy 54 Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 13
Banjarese 379 Ceylonese (national) identity 126, 131
Baweanese 379 Cham 291–3, 300, 302, 310, 417, 436
Bengali (Bangla) 25, 35–54, 108–09, 379 Chaozhou 174
Bengal 102 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra 35,
Bengal, West
6, 35, 36, 51, 53, 65 Chin 267, 273
Bengal, East
36, 38, 39, 40, 51, 52 China 3, 9, 11, 18, 19, 25
bhikku 121–2 China, People’s Republic of

Bhutan 5, 6, 13, 14, 84, 86, 98–99 /PRC 141–85
Bhutto, Z. A. 110, 112 Chinese 11,19, 141–67, 186–7, 196, 202, 204,
bi-dialectalism 142, 158, 166 213, 281, 341, 349, 376, 379–81, 383, 390,
bilingualism 28, 59, 78, 80, 165, 198, 293 398, 402, 407–8, 428, 433, 440
462 Index

Chinese (cont.) English-medium (education) 74–8, 87, 98,

Chinese characters 11, 17, 145, 150–1, 155–6, 120, 125, 179–80, 340, 352, 380
186, 191, 202, 205, 210–13, 215, 330, 332, Europe 3, 58, 111, 153
Mandarin
7, 9, 11, 13, 19, 25–6, 143, 146,
169, 176, 180–1, 183–4, 243–4, 249–51, Farsi 91
253–6, 258, 290, 293, 298, 300–1, 304, February 28th Incident 242
307, 342, 354, 377, (see also putonghua) Fichte, J. G. 16, 141
Modern Written
175, 180 Filipino 8, 15, 24, 26, 27
Christian/Christianity 24, 120–1, 132, 271, Wlm 172–3, see also cinema
281, 332 French 294–5, 298, 307, 424, 427–8, 432, 440
chuch’e 214 Fujianese 251
chu han 419
chu nho 419, 422, 426 Gandhi, Mahatma 38, 63, 66, 75–7
chu nom 421–2 genocide 288, 302
cinema 252, see also Wlm globalization 26, 27, 233–4, 407
civil war 21, 137, 409 Gorkha 86, 90
Cochinchina/Cochinchine 417, 422 Gorkhaland 84, 97
Congress party, the
70 guanhua 144
Cultured Language/munhwae 213, 231 guoyu 144, 243, see also Mandarin Chinese,
Cumaratunga, Munidasa 129 putonghua
Gujarat; 65
Dai Nam 291 Gujarati 25, 57, 65, 379
D’Alwis, James 123–4 Gurmukhi/Gurumukhi 17, 73, 114
Darjeeling 84, 86, 95–97, 99
Devanagari (Nagari) 60, 62, 66, 73 Hakka 9, 144, 174, 237, 239, 253–4, 258
Dhaka 37, 42, 43, hankul 17, 207–8, 210, 221, 228
diglossia, diglossic (situation) 104, 111, 113, Haryana 72
157, 204 Hela Movement, the
128–9
digraphia 204 Herder, J. G. von 16, 141
divergence, linguistic/language
12, 19, Hindi 7, 8, 15, 17, 20, 22, 23, 29, 56–7, 60–73,
217, 229–34 77, 80, 90, 379
Dravidian 23, 57, 59, 69–70, 87, 105, 116, 118 Hindi-Urdu 56, 63
Dutch 312, 318–9, 327 Hindko 106
Dutta, Direndra Nath 40, 43 Hindu/Hinduism 36–9, 62–3, 72–3, 86,
Dzongkha 14, 84, 87, 98–99 89–90, 94, 96, 103, 107, 112, 119, 123,
136, 315
East Timor 333 n.3 Hindustani 62, 64, 66
Eighth Schedule, the
57, 60, 61, 64–5 hiragana 187, 192
English 7, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 41, Hmong 411
47–9, 60, 65, 104, 109–10, 117, 125, 131, Hmong-Mien 402
174, 178–9, 181, 186, 196, 213, 215–16, Hokkien 9, 11, 174, 251, 337, 379
227, 233, 253, 270, 272, 285, 307–8, 334, Hoklo 251
340, 342–3, 348–9, 354–5, 358, 361, 363, Hong Kong 11, 16, 168–85
365, 376–8, 370–1, 373, 377–8, 383–4, Hui 147
386, 388, 440 Hun Sen 305
 Index 463

Humboldt, W. 141 Kim Il Sung 17, 200, 211–2, 214, 224, 226, 231
hwunmin cengum 203 Kim Jong-il 17, 200, 220, 223–4, 226
Kinh 415–6
Ilocano 364 Kolkata (Calcutta) 35, 36, 51
ilustrados, the
363 Konkani 58, 61, 67
immigrant(s) 106, 169–71, 173, 237, 242, Korea 3, 5, 6, 11, 12, 17, 19, 200–34
374–5 Korean 11, 12, 17, 19, 29, 147, 186, 196,
India 6, 7, 15, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 29, 55–83, 200–34, 307
100, 103, 113 kotodama 19, 192
Indo-Aryan 35, 56, 57, 59, 86–7, 105–6, Krong Kampucheatheupatai 291–3
116, 118 Kuki-Chin 267
Indochina 293, 424, 430 Kuo Min Tang/KMT 9, 14, 235, 241–51, 254,
Indo-European 57, 102, 105, 148 256, 258
Indonesia 3, 5, 6, 9, 13, 18, 19, 26, 312–36,
348, 377 Lahu 267, 281
Indonesian/Bahasa Indonesia 9, 14, 20, 312, Lan Na 393
322–36, 345 Lan Xang 393, 401, 409
International Mother Language Day 44 Lao 24, 392, 401
Iranian 105 Lao Lum 409
Islam 24, 36, 37, 38, 102, 103, 107–11, 115, Lao Soung 410
315, 338, 345 Lao Theung 409
itwu script 202 Laos 5, 6, 13, 24, 29, 409–14
lexical adjustment 214, 226, 231
Japan 3, 5, 6, 16, 17, 19, 186–99 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE/
Japanese 11, 13, 19, 156, 186–99, 206, 208, Tamil Tigers) 136
213, 216, 227, 239–40, 242, 258, 307, 327 lingua franca 4, 6, 9, 15, 19, 41, 62, 64, 67, 88,
Javanese 9, 312, 316, 324 96, 103, 256, 279, 312, 315, 365, 370, 412
Jawi script 315, 350, 358 linguistic pluralism 374
Jinghpaw 279 Lisu 267
Jinnah, Mohammad Ali (M.A.) 38, 108–9 literacy 12, 104, 124, 150, 187, 210, 215, 284,
294, 299, 303, 306, 315, 331, 396, 431
Kachin 263, 273 loanwords 10, 49, 124, 156, 200, 213, 215–17,
Kammuang 400, 406 227–8, 232, 268, 335, 433
Kampuchea 290, 304
Kannada 57, 65, 67 Madras 66–7
Karen/Kayin 263, 272–3, 283–4 Maithili 58, 61, 68, 93
Karenni/Kayah 283–4 Malay (language) 7, 9, 15, 24, 314–15, 317,
Karnataka 65 321, 323–4, 327, 337–59, 376, 379–80,
Kashmir 100, 102 383, 385, 398, 403–4
Kashmiri 57 Bazaar Malay 345, 376–7
katakana 187–92 Old Malay 315
Khan, Liaqat Ali 41 Low Malay 318, 324,
Khan, Ayub 45, 109 High Malay 318, 325
Khari Boli 62 Classical Malay 316
Khmer see Cambodian working Malay 325
464 Index

Malayo-Polynesian 314 New Taiwanese 257

Malaysia 3, 5, 6, 15, 314, 329, 337–59, 372 Newar 90–91
Malayalam 57, 67, 379 NGOs/non-government organizations 305,
Manchu 147 307, 437
Mandarin see Chinese Nihonjinron 193–4, 198
Manipuri 58, 61
Marathi 57, 67 OYcial Languages Act, the (India) 60
media 104, 239, 252, 298, 306, 378, 387, 398 Okinawan languages 13, 186, 188, 1901, 195
medium of instruction/education 28, 74, Oriya 57,
174, 254, 266, 273, 319, 323, 350, 367–8, orthography 281, see also script
370, 427, 430–1, 433
Melanesian 314 Pakistan 5, 6, 8, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,
Miao 147, 164 100–15
Min dialect 159 Pakistan, West 21, 22, 34, 40, 41
Southern Min 237, 239, 243–4, 249–58 Pakistan, East 21, 22, 34
Minnanhua 251 Palaung 267
minority/minorities, ethnic
5, 6, 14, 18, Pallava 289, 315, 339
68, 76, 147–8, 196, 198, 263, 273, 277–86, Pali 10, 267–8, 276 n., 291, 293, 297, 400
286, 416, 435–8, 440 Panchayat, the Panchayat regime 13, 22, 84,
minority languages 50, 88, 93–5, 97, 148, 88, 92, 93
161–3, 165–6, 199, 282 Pashto 105–6
Mirpuri 107 Persian 10, 35, 62, 103–4, 110
missionary, missionaries 120, 422, 438 Perso-Arabic 62, 66, 73, 103, 107, 112–14
Mohajirs 106, 109, 112, 114 Philippines, the
3, 5, 6, 8, 15, 24, 26, 27, 28,
Mon 263, 267, 281–2 360–73
Mon-Khmer 267, 292, 401, 410, 416 Phnom Penh 291, 293
Mongolian (language) 147–8, 164 Pilipino 8, 364–5, 358
Moors, the
119, 123 Pledge of the Youth, the
322
mother tongue 6, 28, 33, 58, 248, 258, 389 pluralistic integrity 25, 161–2
mother tongue, teaching/education in pluricentricity 229

50, 67, 76, 93–4, 114, 125, 180, Pol Pot 301–2
199, 310 pop(ular) culture 172–3
Muong 416 popular music 172–3, 247, 306
multilingualism 56, 64, 79–80, 279, 281, prakrits 56,
380, 388 Punjab 72, 106,
Muslim 8, 21, 36–9, 62, 63, 73, 86, 100, Punjabi 57, 72–73, 106, 112–14, 379,
102–3, 106–9, 112, 119, 123, 291, 320, puriWcation (of language) 11, 214, 216, 227, 432
332, 403–4 putonghua 146, 156–60, 164 (see also
Muslim League 38 Mandarin Chinese)
Myanmar see Burma/Myanmar P’yŏngyang 10, 213
Myanmarization 264, 276
quoc ngu 415, 422, 424–5, 427–8, 430, 432, 439
Nehru 58, 66, 71
Nepal 13, 22, 84–95 radio 12, 28, 29, 94, 148, 247, 299, 306, 383,
Nepali 22, 58, 61, 68, 87, 89–98 387–8, 396, 400, 412–13
 Index 465

Rajasthani 68, Sukarno/Soekarno, President
322, 325,

Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur 41, 46, 109, 328, 345
refugee(s) 283 Sukhotai 393
revival, language
228 Sylheti 47, 50,
Romanization 17, 192, 217, 350, 427–8, 439
Tagalog 8, 27, 364–5, 368
Sabah 337, 345, 348–9 Tagore, Rabindranath 35, 42, 52,
Sanskrit 10, 35, 56, 57, 64, 69, 74, 91, 94, 103, Tai (languages and ethnicity) 391, 397, 401,
107, 114, 118, 269, 289, 291–2, 297, 409, 417
300, 400 Tai-Kadai 267
Sarawak 337, 345, 348–9 Taiwan 9, 11, 235–59
script 17, 55, 64 n.4, 73, 103–4, 107–8, Taiwanese 250
112–14, 148, 150–5, 186, 191–2, 201, 204, Tamil 7, 20, 22, 25, 57, 66–7, 69–70, 116–38,
210, 216, 221, 421, 427–8, 437 337, 342, 349, 354, 376–7, 379–80,
script nationalism 17, 220–2 383, 385
Sejong, King
203 Tamil Tigers see: Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Senanayake, D. S. 132 Eelam/LTTE
Seoul 12 Tamilnadu 60, 72
Shahid Minar 44, television/TV 28, 29, 148, 247, 306–7, 383,
Shan 263, 267, 272–3, 281 387–8, 400, 407, 412–13
Shanghainese/Shanghai dialect 158–9, 174 Telugu 57, 65–8, 379
Siam 3, 12, 291, 395, 397 Teochew 379
Sihanouk, King Norodom
296, Thai 29, 292, 307, 391, 396–7, 399, 405, 413
298, 300 Standard Thai 13, 14, 20, 24
Sikh 72–74, 103, 107, 113 Thailand 5, 6, 13, 19, 27, 391–408
Sikkim 84, 86, 95–97, 99 Thomasites, the
367
Sindhi 58, 104, 106, 112 three language formula, the (India) 75, 81
Singapore 7, 15, 16, 20, 27, 28, 374–90 Tibetan 147–8, 165
Singaporean English, Colloquial
/ Tibeto-Burman 57, 59, 86–7, 266
Singlish 28, 387 Tiananmen Square (incident), the

Singaporean English, Standard
387 172, 182
Sinhala 9, 11, 13, 17, 20, 24, 116–138 Tonkin 417, 422
Sinhala Maha Sabha/SMS 128 trilingualism, biliterate
181
Sino-Korean 12, 205, 207, 231 Tshangla 98
Sino-Thai 402 Tujia 147
Sino-Tibetan 148, 402, 410 Turkish 103
Sino-Vietnamese 423, 433
Siraiki 106, 114, Ueda Kazutoshi 189
Spanish 364 Uygur 147–8
Speak Good English Movement, the
388 Urdu 8, 17, 21, 36, 37, 41, 42, 45, 57, 62–64,
Speak Mandarin Campaign, the
382–4 103–4, 106–13
Sri Lanka 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 16, 17, 21, 22, 24,
116–38 Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie/
Suharto/Soeharto, President
330, 332, VOC 316
466 Index

Vietnam 18, 415–41 writing system see script

Vietnamese 293, 296, 298, 310,
415–41 xiangtu wenxue 238
Viet Minh 430–1
Yi 147, 163
Wa 267, 280–1 yuil sasang 214
wenyanwen 145, 148, 155
Wichit Wathakan, Luang
396–7 Zhuang 147, 163