Thursday, November 19, 2009

This Gift of English - review

My brief review of Alok Mukherjee's This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India appears in the current issue of the literary magazine Muse India. The review ends with a plea for more cross-fertilization of ideas between literary studies people and sociolinguists.

Net resources for my references include E. Annamalai's paper on "nativization" of English in India: here is the abstract; the full text can be requested here.

Robert Phillipson has written extensively on education and language policy in the European Union and elsewhere. Indeed in the subtitle of a paper, he asks: "English as an EU lingua franca or lingua frankensteinia?" His webpage links to much that feeds into his new book, Linguistic Imperialism Continued (Orient Blackswan and Routledge).

Likewise, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas has a rich website full of material that argues powerfully for linguistic human rights, and the crucial role education plays in securing (and more often, violating) these rights. I recently blogged about her presentation on mother-tongue medium education.

Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson co-edited with Ajit Mohanty and Minati Panda the excellent collection of essays on mother-tongue based multilingual education (which comes in two slightly differing versions from Orient Blackswan and Multilingual Matters). My recent blog on language and apartheid in South Africa drew upon one of those essays.