Class,Ethnicity, and Language Rights: An Analysis of British Colonial Policy in Lesotho and Sri Lanka and Some Implications for Language Policy

This study examines language policy in two British colonies, Basutoland (Lesotho) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It finds that mother tongue education and the concomitant restriction of the teaching of English for the working classes in these colonial contexts constituted a form of industrial education. On the basis of these data, a critique is offered of some of the problematic assumptions of the language rights literature, which tends to reduce language rights to those that have reference to national, national minority, and ethnic group affiliations. There is, therefore, a tendency to treat language users as carriers of national (or national minority) rights and to abstract from their membership in other types of sociological groups, most prominently, socioeconomic class. Such assumptions are problematic because they abstractly identify the interests of national (or minority or ethnic group) members as identical or at least as nonantagonistic. This article also discusses some problematic notions of constructing language identity on the basis of ethnicity and suggests that when the lines of ethnolinguistic identity become blurred-as is now happening throughout the world-notions such as "mother tongue" and "language group" lose their meaningfulness as guideposts to language policy.