Study of Language Use and Language Planning in Education in the South Asian Multilingual Context from the Point of View of Educational Linguistics

Language Problems of multilingual countries, especially those in South Asia differ only in quantity rather than quality (Ferguson etal, 1969). Due to the heavy impact of colonization and political power imperialism of the colonial powers – the role of languages in these nations starting from the 15 -16th centuries showed drastic changes especially in the areas  of education and that too in the use of languages as media of instruction.

            Though there were a number of problem due to language use in general, the problems in the domain of education were considered as more crucial and needed to be tackled in order to achieve literacy standard, formal schooling and still later higher and technical education.

            Most of the nations in this region are multilingual on the hand and termed as developing nations on the other. Languages like English due to the power and dominance started playing a major role at the national / international though they were bilingual or multilingual in actual practice, there existed only a monolingual supremacy in education.

In many of these nations local / nature languages were not given any importance at the national international. They were treated under the banner ‘vernacular languages’, and never used as first languages or medium of instruction even at the international level of school education. This kind of dominance controlled the uses of native languages in education and thus the natural choice was only the colonial languages of power and supremacy. Even after the independence of these nations, the situation prevailed then favored the colonial languages like English.