Mark Turin Speaks About Mother Tongues, Linguistic Heritage and Ethnic Identity in Sikkim

From September 2005 to November 2006, under the auspices of the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology and in close partnership with the Government of Sikkim, India, Mark Turin, Associate Research Scientist at Yale University and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, directed the first phase of a modern linguistic survey of the state.  In his talk, “Meddling Mother Tongues: Language and Belonging in the State of Sikkim”, Mark reflects on a noticeable gulf between survey respondents stated mother tongues and their actual competence in these languages in the Indian state of Sikkim.

4.30pm • February 22 • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

During the survey process, the research team visited 105 government and private secondary schools across Sikkim to administer an extensive questionnaire on language use to students in classes 8-12.  The results of these 17,000 completed survey forms offer insights into the process of language shift from indigenous mother tongues to regional vernaculars, the growing importance of linguistic heritage and feelings of group belonging over actual spoken ability in specific languages, and the symbolic and practical steps taken by the state government to support linguistic diversity in Sikkim.

In this talk, Mark will present the preliminary results of the survey in a manner that stimulates debate over the broader role of minority languages in India’s schools and public administration and reflect on the increasingly strident positions made by Sikkim’s scheduled communities.  In light of Nepal’s ongoing constitution-writing process, the recently promulgated Constitution of Bhutan (2008) and claims for ethnolinguistic recognition and autonomy across the region, the complex interlinkage of linguistic belonging, heritage and performative competence in languages that are increasingly endangered is an important South Asian issue and one that will speak to a wide, interdisciplinary audience.

Mark is an anthropologist and linguist trained in the UK and the Netherlands.  His scholarly focus is on the Himalayan region, in particular Nepal, northern India, Bhutan and cultural Tibet. His current research focuses on initiatives that seek to document endangered languages and map global cultural diversity; research on linguistic policy and language activism with relation to the role of mother tongue instruction in education; and issues relating to the access and ownership of anthropological materials from ethnographic museums when they circulate online or are returned to source communities in digital form.  Mark is a core member of the Yale Himalaya Initiative, and he teaches at Cambridge and Yale universities, where he also direct two international research projects, Digital Himalaya and the World Oral Literature Project. He has authored and edited numerous books and articles.  His most recent monograph is A Grammar of Thangmi with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and their Culture(Brill, 2012).