what was the debate in the constitutional assembly over the issue of linguistic states
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Constituent assembly debates on language
Article
Feb 2015Economic and political weekly
R.K. Agnihotri
Even though India's Constituent Assembly debates were informed by remarkable seriousness, scholarship, and integrity, most of the linguistic decisions taken by the Constituent Assembly, in many cases insightful, were located in consensual democracy and the domination of the elites in that body. The multilingual and multicultural ethos that is constitutive of Indian society was ignored. The focus was so much on containing the existing political safeguards available to the religious and backward minorities that the rights of linguistic minorities were compromised. In trying to prepare a blueprint for a liberal and secular democracy, the makers of the Constitution were forced to reconcile several contradictions.
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Multilinguality, education and harmony
Article
Jun 2014International Journal of Multilingualism
Rama Kant Agnihotri
Language conceptualised as multilinguality is constitutive of being human and may be a potential site for negotiating conflict and exploring paths of harmony in education. In various domains of activity, most people would rather see ‘a language’ as a homogeneous, pure and standard pairing of a lexicon and syntax. There is substantial evidence to show that human linguistic behaviour is marked by fluidity rather than rigid compartmentalisation. More and more scholars working on the interface between language, education and social justice have started looking at the fluid nature of language. In recent years, several proposals have also been made for pedagogies rooted in multilinguality. This paper attempts to contribute to the discourse of conceptualising ‘language’ and ‘multilingualism’ in alternative ways; it also examines how this alternative conceptualisation can become a resource in education.
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Labov's Concept of the Vernacular Speech: The Site of Language Structure, Acquisition and Change
Article
Jan 2013
Rama Kant Agnihotri
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... It is also not surprising given the very different circumstances of linguistic diversity around the world that there will be different, contextually specific interpretations of these terms. The reason why this is valuable is not because there is an intrinsic difference between how systematic use of CS has been used elsewhere by other scholars, and how it is used by almost every teacher in Africa, and in many contexts of S and SE Asia and the Pacific to achieve successful learning ( Agnihotri, 1995Agnihotri, , 2007Agnihotri, , 2014Heugh, 2017). It is because the term CS and practice in many southern contexts has been stigmatised in (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish) second language or foreign language pedagogies exported from Europe to these parts of the world from the 1960s. ...A close examination of Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD) on language brings out the 'half-hearted compromise' over Hindi and its standard form (Austin 2009). Considerable atten- tion has also been drawn to the political circumstances in the wake of partition and communal politics in which the standard form of Hindi, based on Sanskrit and distant from Urdu, came to be agreed upon (Agnihotri 2015). In CAD, questions were raised regard- ing the extent to which Hindi could claim legitimacy in a federal structure and the minimum time frame needed for its adoption by non-Hindi-speaking federal units
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