A herder guards the Mongolian script (Image credit: Ayin)
As the danger of life-threatening Covid-19 has subsided, Mongols in Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China, have faced a new threat: losing their bilingual schools. In the words of a community member: “in Spring we were afraid that we would die from Covid-19, now Autumn comes and we are afraid that we may become extinct”.
Two forms of bilingual education
To understand these fears, one needs to understand bilingual education in Inner Mongolia.
In brief, there are two different modes of bilingual education in Inner Mongolia. The established mode of bilingual education over the last 73 years has been: school subjects taught in Mongolian; plus a Chinese language and literacy course from Grade 2; plus an English language and literacy course from Grade 3. What worries Mongols is the new mode of bilingual education, which involves the gradual replacement of Mongolian-medium teaching with Chinese-medium teaching across all school subjects. In the new mode, this Chinese-medium education will be complemented by a Mongolian language and literature course. This is dubbed a second type of bilingual education but it is, in essence, monolingual, Chinese-medium education.
According to a document released on August 26, 2020, from this September the Chinese language and literacy textbook used in Inner Mongolia’s bilingual schools is going to be replaced with the national Chinese language textbook. It’s also going to be introduced a year earlier, from Grade 1. This national textbook is also used in Chinese-medium schools and is much more demanding than the one currently used in Mongolian schools. This means that children whose mother tongue is Mongolian have to learn the same content as their Chinese-mother-tongue peers, and will be evaluated in direct comparison to them.
Another subtle change is in the course name: the Chinese language and literature textbook (in Chinese: 汉语文) assumes a new name, Language and Literature (in Chinese: “语文”) while the new Mongolian language and literature textbook is “Mongolian Language and Literature” (in Mongolian “mongol hel bichig”), whereas it was previously simply called Language and Literature (in Mongolian “hel bichig”) in Mongolian schools. That is, the marked version is now the Mongolian course, no longer the Chinese course.
Some Mongols have compared this name swapping to “the step-father taking the place of the father.”
The new model jeopardizes Mongolian educational achievement
This reform poses several problems.
The famous Mongolian poem “I am a Mongol” is written on a blackboard (Source: WeChat post reminiscing and mourning the impending loss of the mother tongue)
First, are Mongolian-mother-tongue children able to learn the new, and much more difficult, Chinese language and literature syllabus at this new pace, while they simultaneously learn to read and write their own language, Mongolian, from Grade 1? How will the reform increase students’ study load?
Second, what kind of national university entrance exam will be designed for those Mongolian students?
Here let me explain briefly how students from Mongolian high schools currently participate in the national university entrance exams. Broadly speaking, the national exams across subjects are written and administered in Chinese, but the exams are also translated into Mongolian for Mongolian test-takers. For instance, maths, history, politics or chemistry are examined across the nation using the same tests, except that they are translated into Mongolian for students coming from Inner Mongolia’s bilingual high schools. There is also provision in the rules for these tests to be translated into five other official minority languages, e.g. Korean, depending on demand.
Every year around 12,000 students from Mongolian bilingual schools sit translated national university entrance tests in Inner Mongolia.
There is a compulsory language component of the university entrance exam across the nation, and what differs most for Inner Mongolia’s Mongolian exam takers is this component. Their ‘foreign language’, i.e. Chinese language and literature, comprises 70% of the score, and their English language test result counts for 30%.
So what kind of Chinese language test is now going to be used for minority Mongolian students’ university entrance exam? The announcements and documents so far do not answer this important question. Surely, Mongolian students cannot compete with Chinese-mother-tongue students and the imposition of the same Chinese language test will further disadvantage Mongolian students.
Language shift in education will push Mongolian to the brink
The Mongolian language is already fragile and has entered the early stages of endangerment. In today’s Inner Mongolia, less than 40% of Mongol parents choose Mongolian bilingual schools for their children; the rest enroll their children in mainstream Chinese schools. In such circumstances, this reform pushes already emaciated Mongolian language and culture further towards the abyss of extinction within the Chinese borders.
“Save the Mother Tongue!” Protest sign against the reform on a delivery bike
Language shift in education is known around the world, and elsewhere in China, to be a major push in a wider shift away from using a minority language at home or transmitting it to younger generations at all.
The nourishment of bilingual education
Personally, I have been nourished by the well-established bilingual education system in Inner Mongolia. When I was in Grade 4, my parents sent me to a boarding school which was around three hours’ drive from my home, over a muddy, pebble-paved country road. Even though I was intimidated by the new environment when I first arrived – most people on the street and in other public spaces spoke Chinese – this bilingual school, with its Mongolian-speaking teachers, classmates and dorm mates acted as a safe haven.
This bilingual school was the mediator for the ten-year old me to transition to new urban settings and to be socialized as both an ethnic Mongol and Chinese citizen. The importance of local, co-ethnic teachers and educational environments for the well-being of minority or Indigenous children has been proven in many studies around the world.
By contrast, the poignancy and tragedy of how a mainstream educational system can fail children from non-mainstream language backgrounds, from the start, is nowhere more heart-wrenchingly illustrated than in the documentary “In My Blood It Runs” about Indigenous children at school in Australia’s Northern Territory. If the original bilingual education system is smoldered and buried underground we will see the birth of numerous minority children who follow in the footsteps of 10-year old Arrernte boy, Dujuan – the main character in the above documentary – and totter precariously on the edge of two worlds.
Established Mongolian bilingual education has proved itself
The 73-year-journey traversed by the established bilingual education system, where all classes are taught in the medium of Mongolian, and alongside that Chinese and English are taught as single subjects, has proved that this is a mature system and suitable to the situation of bilingual Mongols in Inner Mongolia.
Numerous scientists, writers, artists, translators, teachers, other essential workers and “model citizens” have grown and blossomed thanks to the environment of bilingual education. Moreover, this year, several Mongolian bilingual high school graduates gained admission to top universities such as Beijing University and Tongji University, and they outperformed their Chinese-medium-education peers in Inner Mongolia.
In addition, the current bilingual mode of education in Inner Mongolia has facilitated inter-ethnic relations and the unity of the multi-ethnic people on the northern frontier of China. But once the established mode of bilingual education in Inner Mongolia is destroyed, the change will be irreversible. This is already clear from a historical analogy: Buryat Mongols (a Mongolian minority within the Soviet Union) failed in their attempt to revive their schools and language in the 1980s, even with the backing of Soviet policy-makers who had realized their mistakes in eradicating bilingual education the 1960s (Chakars 2014).
A dark future for China’s minorities based on the Western model
If history and political education/morality subjects are taught through the medium of Chinese from 2021 onward in Mongolian schools, the rest of the curriculum will soon shift too. Then in a few years’ time Mongolian teachers, textbook translators, publishers, writers and a host of others who are involved in industries related to Mongolian language, culture, and education will lose their livelihoods. I anticipate that this will be followed by the shrinkage and eventual disappearance of Mongolian media such as TV and digital media, which are currently thriving.
If all the courses shift to Chinese-medium instruction, the university entrance exam will soon follow suite and policy makers will simply adopt nation-wide Chinese tests for all Mongolian students in a few years. If this happens, Mongolian students cannot compete against millions of Chinese high school graduates in the world’s most competitive university entrance test, which will certainly further marginalize and systemically exclude young Mongols from higher education and the job market. It will exclude them in a way similar to the exclusion of minorities in the West, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia. As such, the internal colonization of ethnic Mongols will reach its epitome and Mongolian language and culture will be wiped out in China.
Mongolian teachers’ protest sign against the education reform in central Inner Mongolia, 28 August, 2020
Concomitantly the production of large numbers of unemployed, poor, institutionally discriminated and marginalized minorities including Mongols in coming decades will plague China with many unforeseen sociopolitical and economic problems. This dire consequence has obviously been brushed aside by the group of eminent Chinese scholars Ma Rong, Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe, who boldly proposed a Second Generation of Ethnic Policies (第二代民族政策) to solve ethnic “problems” by aggressively assimilating minorities (Leibold 2012). They envisioned the “melting pot” (大熔炉) formula of the West, in particular USA, as the ultimate “solution” to the ethnic “problems” of China, even though China’s native minorities are drastically different from diasporic immigrants in America (for further details, see Elliott 2015).
China’s ethnic policies have certainly taken a drastic turn in recent years, and this has sent shock waves through the “less-famous” ethnic minorities such as the Mongols, Koreans, and those in less visible areas such as Gansu, Jilin, Liaoning, and Qinghai. What are the consequences of bringing such tribulations onto the very groups that China has held up as “model minorities”, including the Mongols? Who gains most from this rash move? Indeed, up until now, many Mongolian speakers have identified as Chinese people, and there is no need to suppress a non-existent ethnic separatism by abolishing bilingual schooling. What is the point of destroying the Mongolian language and culture that is already staggering toward the brink of extinction and to whose speakers barely anyone pays any attention?
Opposing the new medium of instruction
At present, despite their tenuous position, Mongols are fighting against the reform. In particular, they were devastated by the secret implementation of the second category of “bilingual” education mode, which violates the national Constitution, Ethnic Minority Law and Education Law as well as the Mongolian Language Act and its Regulations.
It is this surreptitious and illegal way of implementing reform that spurred Mongols in Inner Mongolia, but also outside China in Japan and Europe, to protest against it within the framework of law. In fact, from June this year the “rumor” of cancelling the first category of bilingual education surfaced and has been simmering in Inner Mongolia, yet many Mongols didn’t take it seriously as there were no official documents. It was only a week before the commencement of the new semester on Sept 1, that documents were released by the Inner Mongolia Education Bureau. Now, Mongolian parents have been actively campaigning against the reform and are refusing to send their children back to school. However, teachers and public servants are silenced and threatened with the possibility of losing their jobs if they were to speak out. For other Mongols the phantasmagoric memory of the Cultural Revolution is revisiting them and has locked their tongue. Yet others take their mourning and frustration to social media spaces despite the constant disappearance of what they post.
The goal of the on-going protests in Inner Mongolia is not to reject the content of the new national curriculum, rather it is to abort the attempt to teach it all through the medium of Chinese. Mongols hope to translate the new textbooks into Mongolian and teach them in the medium of their own language, as they have been doing for the last 73 years. Thus, our aim is to maintain the original bilingual model of education, which ensures the maintenance of the Mongolian language and facilitates the multi-ethnic Chinese nation’s progress and stability in the long-term.
References
Chakars, Melissa. 2014. The socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia. Budapest: Central European University Press.
Elliott, Mark. 2015. The Case of the Missing Indigene: Debate Over a “Second-Generation” Ethnic Policy. The China Journal (73): 186-213,308.
Leibold, James. 2012. Toward A Second Generation of Ethnic Policies? China Brief 12 (13)
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This work is licensed under a
For the two million strong diaspora of Esperantists in 100 plus countries an on-theme thread appeared today under this rubric:
“Lingva diverseco en Tibeto kaj Interna Mongolio” (Language diversity in Tibet and Inner Mongolia)
My intro and a link to a 24-page essay composed by two outstanding professors are provided here entirely in English:
https://www.academia.edu/26351333/Tibetan_Chinese_Bilingual_Education?email_work_card=title
Given recent observations (and certain complaints) aired by various mass media organisations re reduced instruction in Inner Mongolian schools in the primary local language, i.e. the Mongolian tongue, it is important that a professional analysis appeared 4 years ago on language diversity in Tibet
Profesors Chunlin Yao and our own Ghil’ad Zuckermann, respectively from (1) The North China University of Science and Technology and (2) The University of Adelaide published in their splendid collaboration a synopsis in Esperanto which I’m happy to provide in English on request.
THE AUTHORS IN QUESTION:
Yao Chunlin School of Foreign Languages North China University of Science and Technology No. 46 Xinhuaxidao Tangshan, Heibei PRC 063009 [email protected]; [email protected]
Ghil‘ad Zuckermann 918 Napier Building Adelaide, SA 5005 Australia [email protected]
Yao Chunlin is an Associate Professor in North China University of Science and Technology and a postdoctoral researcher in Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His research areas include sociolinguistics and endangered languages.
Ghil ‘ad Zuckermann,
DPhil (Oxon), PhD (Cantab) (titular), is Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages, a tenured Full Professor (Level E, the highest rank), at the University of Adelaide. He is a leading expert of (1) revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation (e.g., Barngarla), revitalization (e.g., Adnyamathanha) and reinvigoration (e.g., Irish), (2) multiple causation, cross-fertilization and horizontal gene transfer in languages, (3) sources of lexical expansion and camouflaged borrowing, (4) contact linguistics, and (5) the study of language, culture and identity.
while reading this i realised the subtly transformation of the thought process and culture of the region can be done through language change. If the language gets replaced the whole community gets replaced . The mongol fear of getting extinct with the replacement of language is real and it must be addressed. The situation os somewhat similar to my country . We have one national language Urdu ,which is the spoken by the people of Karachi, one of the cities in Pakistan, while the rest of 5 states have different regional languages , yet there is no space in national curriculum for the mother tongues. So the students from regional areas first learn the national language side by side with English. The complication goes further and further and end up losing both the ends. However, in regional Pakistan, most of the pedagogical practices are done in first languages in some states/provinces. Seeing the situation of Mongolian Language , i believe national curriculum must be linguistically diverse.
Hello Ingrid and everyone,
Thank you Gegentuul bringing this up. As Mongolian, it so heartbreaking to see what is happening in Inner Mongolia. I am truly thankful and proud of Inner Mongolians for keeping our culture alive. Mongolia has such a rich culture and history. Mongolian traditional script is such a unique (top-bottom) and it is definitely a huge part of our history and culture. As outer Mongolia, we use both Cyrillic and traditional script. But these days, Cyrillic has been used mainly. I had a chance to learn our traditional script when I was in high school. Personally, I feel quite sad that our kids will be grown up without knowing this traditional Mongolian script. Also is quite sad knowing that language with its unique script which only used by Inner Mongolians planned to be wiped out by the Chinese government. There are hundreds of people and organizations fighting against this reform in both Mongolia and Inner Mongolia to save our language. Inner Mongolia is such a small ethnic group in China but they are standing strong and some of people took their own precious lives already to let the world know how important for them keep their language and culture.
I really hope this protest against this heartless act will help Chinese official to change their decisions and allow Inner Mongolian children right to have equal education.
Thank you, Ingrid and Gegentuul for sharing this knowledge with us. It is extremely helpful for a minority language to have a space like schools to exist. I’ve read an article on the challenges of preserving minority languages written by Jonty Yamisha. He stated that “understanding what language means to both a person and a culture…to one’s sense of identity…is key to inspiring people to want to step in and save the language”. Therefore, encouraging governments, schools, and neighborhoods to embrace the minority language is vital in any language preservation effort. In addition, family plays a vital role in preserving a minority language. As some scholars said “in fact, the rights of the language use can’t ensure the survival of the language, it ultimately depends on the mother tongue’s user’s decision. It definitely confuses the institution, because it beyond their control.” Today, when society is more and more developed and integrated, many children of ethnic minority groups no longer understand their mother tongues. I have an old classmate who is an ethnic minority student, she once told me that her generation barely writes or even talks in the minority language; only their grandparents talk to each other using their language. If parents do not have a sense of preserving the language and maintaining its daily use, no one can help them to revive their own languages. I hope that Mongol people can find their way to preserve and develop their language so that the death of language will not occur.
Thank you Enkhzaya for your comments! Yes the language and culture itself is precious, yet I worry more about the people who speak this language than about the language itself. The question of how minority Mongolians is marginalised and how they are excluded from broader social participation due to the loss of bilingual schooling is much more pressing than the continued existence of language, (more accurately the script), itself.
Hi Ingrid!
This blog post and the book chapter have reminded me of code-switching (CS), the use of the students’ mother tongue (L1) in English language teaching. While some researchers advocate the exclusive use of English in the classroom, others consider switching to L1 as a crucial tool facilitating the teaching and learning of English. In the Vietnamese context, there has been no official national policy on classroom language use. Therefore, Vietnamese teachers are likely to be using Vietnamese in their teaching in a multitude of ways for both pedagogical and affective purposes. The results of the studies conducted by Grant and Nguyen (2017) and Nguyen and Vu (2019) showed that the teachers switched to L1 to clarify, cover and emphasize the teaching content, build rapport, save time and manage the classroom. In these studies, the teachers stated that the amount of L1 use was dependent on the students’ English proficiency, which is somehow in line with the Statutory Framework’s four foundational principles mentioned in the reading. In my point of view, apart from the pedagogical benefits, CS is emotionally beneficial to the students as they can be more open to their teachers who have the same identity. They do not feel lost or lonely in the learning process. More importantly, the students can learn to value their mother tongue that is also helpful in the English acquisition and get “the best of both worlds” (Piller, 2016, p. 125).
References
Grant, L. E., & Nguyen, T. H. (2017). Code-switching in Vietnamese university EFL teachers’ classroom instruction: a pedagogical focus. Language Awareness, 26(3), 244-259.
Nguyen, N. C., & Vu, D. V. (2019). An exploratory study on perspectives of Vietnamese experienced teachers and student teachers toward teachers’ code-switching. Cambridge Open-Review Educational Research e-Journal, 6, 66-79.
Thanks, Banie, for this informative comment! Clearly lots of advantages when students and teachers share a common language!
Thanks Banie for pointing out the importance of teachers’ personal linguistic pedagogy. So far Mongolian teachers’ mandatory use of particular language in classrooms is not stipulated in official paper. I hope the type of code-switching you mentioned can enhance Mongolian kids’ learning despite some Mongolian translated textbooks’ shift to Chinese ones.
Thanks Audrey!
Language awareness, institutional support and family language policies are all important in preserving minority/indigenous languages. Actually institutional regulation and implementation are vital to facilitate linguistic justice and equality.
Hi Ingrid, thank you for providing a fascinating theme for the happening in Inner Mongolia in this week’s posting. Actually, it’s quite an interesting topic for me because I didn’t know about the educational issues in Inner Mongolia. I read an article about bilingual education in the past, and it said bilingual education fosters important cognitive abilities such as critical thinking and problem-solving to learners. This is because it trains learners’ brains and makes them think about how to express and effectively communicate their thoughts with the vocabulary they have in each language. I only remembered its advantages through that article, but I could get new knowledge thanks to your posting. It was very interesting that minority languages, including the case of Inner Mongolia, were under pressure from the government. It was also good to get to know many other cases through comments from other peers. I hope the people of Inner Mongolia will find an effective point of contact with the government and resolve this difficult situation as soon as possible.
Thanks, Subin! The more languages you know, the better. No doubt about that. But some of the more general claims about the advantages of bilingualism are probably exaggerated and/or taken out of context …
Thank you, Gegentuul, for this insight into changes coming to the education system in Inner Mongolia. In addition to disadvantaging bi-lingual students, the implementation of these methods tends to compel families to choose ‘whatever works’ to give their next generations the best opportunities.
I am reminded of my parents and in fact, my grandparents ensuring that English featured prominently in education and other aspects of life, so that we all have greater opportunities to succeed. This was, of course, influenced by the aftereffects of colonial rule in countries like Bangladesh and more recently, globalisation that resulted in a lot of cultural references being Western and in English. My parents submerged their children in English in every way they could because that was painted as the path to success. They imposed a strict reading and writing regime on us from a young age but I never engaged in any of those literacy practices in Bengali. I disengaged from a lot of Bengali cultural practices because I was not good at them.
I find a little sad that my great grandfather could read and write fluently and academically in three languages and I can make that claim for only one. I feel the poorer for it. It highlights for me that the destruction of cultural knowledge through linguistic imperialism is just as pernicious as geographical conquests of old.
Thanks, Tazin! You make a very important point: it’s easy to forget that multilingual literacies – like your grandfather’s ability to read and write fluently and academically in three languages – need not be as exceptional as we have made them to be in our English-centric monolingual world …
Thank you for bringing this to attention and providing a voice for the affected party. I think bilingual education (regardless of the languages) gives students the power to discover different realities that could only be understood if proficient in the language.
It is a pity to know some languages are put under systematic marginalisation on purpose for political reasons. It is also unfortunate to realise a community will be soon neglected and discriminated against just because they speak a language that does not accommodate a group of people in power…
This post reminded me of the following quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world. Because the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Thanks, Alex! One of my favorite quotes ☺️
Thanks for providing this topic. Monolingual or bilingual education is always a concerned debate. This blog reminds me of some researches. Some researchers found that if someone could be literate in two or more languages, this would make them go fast in many aspects of life. It seems like that you have a bicycle with two wheels, so you can move faster than people who only have one wheel tool, such as monocycle. However, some studies state that monolingual education can promote learners to reach a higher level of literacy than bilingual teaching. Therefore, it cannot be affirmed which mode of instructions is better. It is undoubted that every language deserves protection. How to balance the existence of monolinguals and bilinguals should be focused by Chinese government.
Thanks, Han! I used the wheel metaphor in my lecture about Literacy in Heritage Language Maintenance – an adaptation of a cartoon by Jim Cummins. The research that bilingual education has better educational outcomes for students from minority background is pretty solid.
Thank you to providing this interesting post about the bilingual education in Inner Mongolia. This reminds me of the education in my homeland, Vietnam. The Ministry of Education and Training in Viet Nam has implemented the initiative supported by UNICEF that promotes mother tongue-based bilingual education for children of minority groups. They use ethnic minority language as the main language of instruction and introduce Vietnamese, the official national language, as a second language for preschool and primary school 1st and 2nd-grade students. Vietnamese is used as a language of instruction in grade 3, together with their mother tongue. Three years from grade 3 to grade 5 are a transition period. By the end of grade 5, students are expected to have developed bilingualism and biliteracy, and meet the standards of the national curriculum. This approach has helped ethnic minority children overcome the language barrier enabling them to read and write in their mother tongue first, and then transfer these skills to Vietnamese.
Thanks, T, for this interesting comparison! Vietnam, like many countries in Asia, has been doing so well in implementing mother-tongue-based bilingual education!
There are essentially two types of bilingual education: transitional (mother-tongue based education in the early years with the aim to transition to the majority language by middle school or so) and fully bilingual (with the aim for full bilingual proficiency, including academic learning through both languages). This makes the proposal in Inner Mongolia basically a step in the wrong direction: from fully bilingual to transitional.
Thank you for providing an opportunity to know what is happening in Inner Mongolia. Discussion on monolingual education and bilingual education has continued in Japan. Recently, in Japan, early English education has been introduced so that elementary school students can learn English as one of the compulsory subjects. Although studying English early is an effective way of acquiring English skills as a second language, it might provide disadvantages for learners and social environments. For example, insufficient knowledge of using the first language, including respectful and humble expressions, can lead to social miscommunication in Japan. This is because the learners’ cognitive academic language proficiency is insufficient developed. Therefore, the debate about which education is better for children has kept. Considering the Japanese population, it can be said that the disappearing Japanese language will not occur in the next few decades, but changes in society, such as an increase in the number of signage written English characters might occur.
Thanks, Yuta, for this interesting comparison! We published a research blog post about early English in Taiwan some years ago. I think you might find it interesting. As you say, the danger is not that Japanese (or Chinese) will disappear in this scenario but, maybe even more worryingly, early English exacerbates social inequalities.
Thanks to Gegentuul for an enlightening and highly engaging post. This blog post really shows us how governments use monolingual education to enforce the myth of nationhood. This weeks reading on the plight of Székely Hungarians (Piller, 2016) was an eye opener for me and has changed how I think about nationality but this example of what is happening in Inner Mongolia has powerfully consolidated that change. It also makes us think about the future world in which we will live with a drastically reduced amount of linguistic and cultural diversity. This is a time when we should be doing everything we can to save languages and cultures from extinction, not accelerating the process.
Peter
Thanks, Peter! The parallels between the two cases are uncanny. Sadly, that’s because assimilation and its exclusionary consequences are the rule in minority education around the world.
Thank you for providing this interesting topic and the educational movement in Inner Mongolia. Actually, I know just only Inner Mongolia located above China, but I haven’t known about its educational system. In my opinion, bilingual learning is a good educational system for students but in the case of Inner Mongolia, they push a lot in using Chinese than Mongolia which including the university entrance exam. I think it’s not quite fair to Mongolian students that have to fight (having test) to Chinese (Native) students. Of course! that Chinese student gains more scores that Mongolian student. Same as my country, there is a bilingual class since primary school (English and Thai) but in this case when I have a test in English, I don’t have to fight with an English native speaker. I have a test with other Thais, so It’s equal. However, I feel sad to Mongolian that if they cannot fight against and have Chinese as a majority language because I believe that every language has unique and enchanting by itself. Don’t replace any language with another language! I wish that Mongolian can pass this difficult situation soon. Thank you.
Thanks, Chalermkwan! You are right that competition adds another level of complexity to bilingual education and minority empowerment.
This issue reminds me of the education in Indonesian context. Most of the Indonesian people were born as bilinguals. Indonesia has more than 700 indigenous local languages spoken across the country, yet the Indonesia language, as a national language, becomes the medium of teaching and learning in schools. The local languages are still widely used by their users in their daily life. Children are exposed to the local language since the day they were born, and they start learning the Indonesian language formally in the elementary school. It might take a long period of time for the local languages to be extinct. But the government forces every local government to provide local language subject as a compulsory single subject in schools. This policy certainly will help the local people to preserve their local languages.
Thanks, Yudha, for this valuable comparative perspective! Given that there are around 6,000 languages in the world and less than 200 states, bilingual education is a big challenge almost everywhere – yet we continue to treat it as if it were the exception rather than the rule.
Thank you for providing us an opportunity to know what is happening in Inner Mongolia. I was quite surprised by knowing how the bilingual education is being changed in the country. This change from the bilingual education to the submersion education seems to have some problems as we discussed in the lecture. For example, the Mongolian students have to learn the curriculum contents, such as maths and chemistry, as well as Chinese language at the same time. It may lead to an unfair situation for entrance examinations for universities because it is probably difficult for the Mongolian students to obtain the same amount of knowledge from the lessons as the native-Chinese students can do due to the language barrier.
Thanks, Kyohei! Indeed, bilingual education is a social justice issue!
Dear Ingrid,
This is a wonderful post to educate us about the socio-political tendency to suppress a minority language to uphold the dominant language. This is in a way the real-world situation towards bilingualism and multilingualism! This tendency is sometimes obvious in some societies with government policies and sometimes it is evident just in the attitude towards bilingualism ! In both ways it is a sad reality!! In common trend society seems not very accepting towards bilingualism although it is beneficial in international trade and commerce and in other areas. We tend to lean towards the dominant language because certain level of oral fluency and communication skill is expected in local jobs! And except the high level of proficiency in both languages it is not possible to prove one’s competency for required communication skill needed. Furthermore, it requires continuous effort, motivation, time, and attention to achieve high level of proficiency in two or more languages. Therefore , if government supports bilingual education it is easier for people to learn and utilise more than one language in real life and it keeps our heritage languages alive. My personal reflection while reading about Mongolian language and culture is that if we don’t change our attitude and don’t get explicit support from the institutions it will be very difficult to keep our heritage languages survive.
Thanks, Nusrat! You are 100% on the money: families can’t shoulder heritage language maintenance alone!
Hi Ingrid!
This is a very interesting article! It actually made me think of Poland during Partitions when it literally disappeared from the map (3 times!) but the culture and language survived. The usage of the Polish language and official education in Polish were forbidden but there were secret “flying universities”. It pretty much meant that the meeting and classes were conducted in different places, people still were trying to get the education. What was also important was that great polish authors kept writing novels, poems, songs, anything to keep the spirit high and language and culture alive. Most of all I think (that’s just my personal opinion though) the most important is using the language and educating about culture and customs within a family. That would make the greatest impact on younger generations. Just like the ability to speak parent(s) native language of any second generations nowadays in Australia (or any other country) it greatly depends on parent(s) involvement, input and contribution.
Thanks, Moni! Really interesting comparison. How to best live with big overbearing neighbors is certainly a key aspect of the dilemmas faced by minority families.
It’s always been a big debate about just this back home in Norway as well, where the majority language (Norwegian) is taught in schools as the “lingua franca” of the country, while minority languages such as the Sami languages in northern Norway are completely disregarded and purely used as a spoken language in the communities and homes in the area. This has sadly caused a lot of Samis to be completely illiterate in their first language, only being able to speak and understand the language, while their writing and reading abilities are at very basic stages. This is very similar to the situation in Inner Mongolia it seems, as Chinese is such a massive language, their own first languages will be completely overwhelmed by the need to be fluent in Mandarin, rather than Mongolian, and their need for literacy in Mongolian will be insignificant to the degree where nobody feels the need to learn how to read and write.
It’s tragic, so many beautiful languages slowly fading because of the “powerhouse” languages of the regions. Thankfully, Norway has put in a lot of effort to promote written Sami in the country, making the language co-official with Norwegian, and establishing “Sami-only” schools in areas with the highest frequency of Sami population. Hopefully, more countries will understand the importance of preserving minority cultures. Losing such important heritage and history in these parts would be incredibly sad.
Thanks, Chris, for this comparative perspective! This reminds me that one way for minority languages to survive in this day and age is through being commodified in the tourism market, as Sari Pietikainen shows in her research with Sami in Finland.
I found this blog post really interesting and educational. It seems that there is a strong tendency to move from a bilingual form of education to a monolingual form of submersion education that would disregard the Mongolian language and cultural background of many school students. This would ultimately lead to them being disadvantaged at school and when entering university. It also shows how precarious the situation is for the Mongolian language and how the shift in language focus in schools could even further destabilise it. This blog has spurred by interest in the on-going status of the Mongolian language – I’m going to find out more!
Thanks, Monica! This is a good place to start your exploration of Mongolian: https://www.languageonthemove.com/tag/mongolian/
And if you want to go further, this fascinating PhD thesis about Mongolian wedding ceremonies:
Bai, Gegentuul Hongye. 2018. Performing linguistic and cultural authenticity: Contemporary Mongolian wedding ceremonies in Inner Mongolia. Macquarie University. https://www.languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Bai_Mongolian_wedding_ceremonies.pdf
Thank Ingrid for sharing this with us. I didn’t notice the news about education reform in Inner Mongolia. As it is mentioned in the post, China is a multi-ethnic country where there are 56 nationalities, some have their own language, including writing and speaking version, but it is really hard to write. As a girl who was born in Xinjiang province where there are lots of minorities (including me), I found that many students here are not interested in learning their mother tongue which is rather hard to learn and write. That’s why some students prefer to go to a Chinese school where they speak Chinese, do homework in Chinese, and make friends with students whose mother tongue is Mandarin, they really don’t care about whether they can use their own language here.
Also, there are some schools that are designed for these minority students on, for example, developing the textbooks. And students can choose what kind of school they prefer, but as they are all Chinese so that they still need to learn Chinese as well.
Take my friend as an example, she is one of the minorities in Xinjiang and has their own language, she always takes classes in main-stream Chinese schools, and she told me that it is really hard to write in their language, and she does not worry about their language could disappear one day, because they can use the language after school with their parents or in some religious activities.
Therefore, the reform is not to push students in Inner Mongolia to give up their language but to provide an alternative to students and their parents to learn a dominant language in China. It is impossible for the government to let any language in China disappear. That is very ridiculous and not fair to any nationalities here.
Thanks, Yuan Li, for this interesting insider perspective!
A few pieces of my personal experience that would help non-Chinese better understand the bi-lingual education system in ethnic minority areas.
Mongolian is one of the 2 official languages in Inner-Mongolia. Mongolian students can choose one from 2 kind of school systems. In the first system, each subject is taught in Mongolian. All textbooks are written in Mongolian as well. The second system is based on Chinese. There is also Mongolian-based College Entry Examination, similar to HSC test, available.
I learned from the WeChat link presented in the article that the recent change was made to 3 subjects in Mongolian-based system: Chinese, history and morality. Mongolian, Maths, physics, chemistry and so on remain the same as before.
In China, ethic minority students were given extra bonus on their College Entry Examination score. I have vivid memory that one high school friend changed his official ethic identity to access the bonus months before the examination. PS: A child can follow either parent in establishing his/her own official ethic identity. I’m not sure if Han people are still being discriminated in the critical examination.
Across China, it’s a legal obligation to use and teach ethic groups’ languages in ethnic autonomous regions. My first trip to Xinjiang gave me a good shock. I was in the capital city where everything was bilingual, from signs on the shopfronts to announcements on public transportation. In comparison, I can understand all written language while in Canton despite local people are talking in a seemingly alien way. One friend in the capital, who frequented a city in southern Xinjiang, told me he had to be accompanied by a public servant friend there every time he was in the city. Otherwise, he could neither be understood by a taxi driver nor order a dish in a restaurant because there were no Chinese characters on the menu.
Thank you for explaining these dire developments in detail and also for sharing how you personally benefitted from the bilingual educational system in Inner Mongolia.
Reports in The Diplomat, among other reliable sources, are hair raising: “At 9 p.m., the school principal and local officials said parents could take their children home.” At 9:00 PM, (are you serious or delirious?) after barricading children and pepper spraying their parents for trying to retrieve their own kids because they object to having Mandarin Chinese foisted on to them in a secretive, unilateral and bureaucratic fashion! What’s next? He who must be obeyed calls Mandarin “the language of communication.” Eat your heart out, Cool Hand Luke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WUyZXhLHMk Here’s a real failure to communicate, over and over, in super abundance: Let no Mongolian, Xinjianger or Tibetan ask him to consult fairly on language, the Belt and Road Initiative (its former name was a bit of a Freudian slip: One Belt, One Road). How about discussing with the great firewall dismantled the modus operandi of Confucius Institutes on campuses, militarisation of the South China Sea, why independent experts may not investigate Corona virus in Wuhan, why your media is muzzled for deifying the state, the labelling of Australian wine, barley, meat etc as defective or dumped when the whole world acknowledges the quality and regulatory standards of Australian produce. It looks like Aussie iron ore might be used in the same unwelcome fashion as Pig Iron Bob’s. What really irks the Chinese Communist Party though is yet to be aired widely. Does God or man decide what’s right and what’s wrong? Is atheism untenable and may it too be foisted on China’s multitudes?
Dear Gegentuul, thank you for drawing LotM readers’ attention to the current education reforms in Inner Mongolia. The reform threatens Mongolian language and culture, and poses great challenges to the academic futures of non-mainstream students. Your post raises important questions around who will benefit from the reform and how. Your following point really stood out to me: “Indeed, up until now, many Mongolian speakers have identified as Chinese people, and there is no need to suppress a non-existent ethnic separatism by abolishing bilingual schooling.” The quote highlights that Mongols’ celebration of their ethnic identity is not intended to threaten Chinese national identity. I hope that your speaking out further raises awareness of the reform’s potential downfalls and consequences for students.
Urgun olon uwur mongolchuudiin ireedui iin tuluu!
Teim!
This A1 article really and truly alarms me lots and lots because I did notice while speaking for hours In English at Huhehot University to the faculty and to a cohort of English majors about the Baha’i faith’s take on the principle of a universal auxlang that everyone was happy with the status quo.
At that time, about 15 years ago, the language policies of the Chinese Communist Party actuated a sort of positive racism, so to speak, in that Mongolians enjoyed easier access to university than the Han majority! Amazingly, and to the CCP’s credit, even in the job market minorities were advantaged on paper. By law, it was at that time CCP policy that if two equally qualified candidates were applying for a job that the 10% of the Chinese population who constitute the 55 minorities were to be favoured. Wow! The point about easier access to Uni for minorities is no small matter either because in China, even nowadays I’m pretty sure, freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors often travel hither and tither all over the country to attend a Uni which they themselves have probably not chosen rather than necessarily receive tertiary education in their home town.
Not long after learning of these rather enlightened policies, which nevertheless had certain expensive issues, I found my self speaking on the same topic in Esperanto at the prestigious Genghis Khan Hotel in Ulan Bator. There it’s a story similar to that of Poland’s whose brave people find at times that it ain’t easy having a huge big brother (or two) impacting your culture. Mongolia, the country, did finally solve its problem and so has Poland.
Thank you for putting your effort to provide a logical analysis of the current situation for Mongolian schools. I went to bilingual schools as well. During my time, we started to learn Chinese in third grade and every others subjects were in Mongolian. This sudden and shocking education reform makes me worry about my little nieces and nephews, my culture, and mother tongue.
Thanks for your comments, Augyu!
Yes the Chinese language course has been progressively pushed forward over the years so does the English.
Thus the time allotted to Mongolian language and literacy is decreasing over the years too.
I share your worries and fears.
Absurd!!! 😡
Thanks so much for this important post! This is a really troubling development and I hope that your work and the work of others advocating to protect Mongolian bilingual education has a successful outcome.
Thank you Laura!
May your auspicious words be realised!
2020 is really a year of the mainland china. I don’t know what to say. I hope mogolian language survive and remain lively both spoken and written. The disappearance of a language make me think of my own country. In northern, they (because I am not from the north) have their own spoken language which are called northern dialect according to the national policy (but linguistically i think it is more than a dialect). Nowadays, northern people speak the standard dialect more than speak their own that there is a campaign for use northern dialect around 5 years back. Fortunately, nowadays people, especially from generation Y onward like myself think that being able to speak other dialect more than just the standard dialect is cool. This way I really hope my country remains diverse in dialects for as long as we can.
Thanks, Vichuda, for this comparative perspective. New communication technologies have been quite a boost for minority languages, and using them online is cool among younger people, as you say.
Because Uighur children will not speak their mother tongue.