English and the Imagining of a Cosmopolitan City

Chapter 4 considers the role of English in how the Girls’ College grade 10 Tamil-medium students navigated inequalities in the school as a whole and the Tamil-medium stream and claimed status as cosmopolitan Kandy or Sri Lankan girls. The use of full English in the classroom risked making them seem uppity, but the girls skillfully used English-inflected Tamil to articulate desired identities and stake claims in the future. Despite their multilingualism, the girls’ identities as predominantly Tamil speakers shaped how they interacted in school and in their home and neighborhood settings. This chapter argues that while their representation of themselves as Kandy girls avoided ethnicity-based models of identity, inconsistent with ideologies present in the national language and education reforms, they did not view Kandy as ethnically integrated so much as associate the city with their potential for upward social mobility.

School Segregation and Language-Based Ethnic Divisions

Chapter 2 demonstrates the segregation of Sinhala- and Tamil-medium students and how linguistic, ethnic, and religious divisions were reinforced in national and local education policies and everyday practices. It looks at the implementation of the recent Sinhala-as-a-second-language (SSL), Tamil-as-a-second language (TSL), and English programs at Hindu College and Girls’ College in relation to the regimenting of language of instruction, ethnicity, and religion in school-based practices. At Hindu College, pedagogical practices and the school’s orientation as a Tamil-speaking sphere of practice prevented students from improving their skills in SSL and English. Students gained proficiency in English at Girls’ College, but the SSL and TSL programs were unevenly implemented, with Sinhala-medium students writing Tamil but refraining from speaking it. This chapter argues that while the trilingual policies were enacted to create interethnic harmony, national and local education policies and practices continue to use languages as a basis for ethnic difference, the results of which play out far beyond educational settings.

Tamil Speech and Ethnic Conflict in Public Spaces

Chapter 6 investigates the performative force of speaking Tamil in public spaces in Kandy and Colombo. It shows how Tamils used Sinhala and avoided Tamil to conceal or mitigate their ethnic identity. This chapter further analyzes the ideological weight of Tamil by looking at Sinhalas’ Tamil-as-a-second-language (TSL) practices at training programs administrators and police officers, as well as at a peacebuilding NGO that promotes trilingual communication. TSL classes provide a sphere of practice in which Sinhalas could comfortably speak Tamil, but on the street their use of Tamil was fraught because of its ideological association with Tamil ethnic identity and because it was perceived as a threat to the dominance of Sinhala. When Sinhala members of the NGO spoke Tamil, they used a mocking variety that reinforced negative stereotypes about Tamil people. This chapter demonstrates how ideologies and practices around speaking Tamil reflect and produce ethnic divisions.

Conclusion

Chapter 7 discusses the processes by which language-based models of ethnic identity in Sri Lanka spread across institutional and noninstitutional settings. Tamil and Muslim students’ identity as ethnic minorities was foregrounded in their schooling experience, but it was in the public sphere that ethnic differences around language were the most consequential. Tamil-speaking girls’ imagining of a cosmopolitan Kandy enabled them to cope with the ethnic conflict as well as to aim for a comfortable future and be open to opportunities. This chapter concludes by discussing Sri Lanka’s political landscape since the end of the war in May 2009 and the importance of language rights to the reconciliation process. It argues that despite the fluidity of Sri Lankans’ sociolinguistic identifications, the very act of speaking Tamil, Sinhala, or English in public spaces enacts and preserves power relations and historically produced inequalities.

Peer Groups and Tamil Identity inside and outside Schools

Chapter 5 examines how the Tamil girls and boys at Hindu College managed different forms of monitoring and the reproducing of ethnicity inside and outside school. In school their Tamil identities were continually reinforced in relation to their linguistic practices. Outside school they navigated a Sinhala-majority setting, where the very act of speaking Tamil could be considered inappropriate, offensive, or even a security threat. The youth moved through and created different kinds of interactional spaces to which others were not privy—in classrooms, outside school, in groups, and traveling alone. This chapter argues that studies of youth interactions look beyond more obvious school/nonschool comparisons to analyze how participant frameworks dynamically mediate linguistic and social behavior. It also shows how the Hindu College youth managed their status as lower-class ethnic minorities by building Tamil cocoons around themselves to insulate them in Sinhala-majority public spaces.

Introduction

Chapter 1 begins by asking: To what extent can trilingual education policies mitigate ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, and how do the experiences of Kandy Tamil and Muslim girls demonstrate the limits of this vision? The chapter presents the arc of the book, progressively moving from Kandy schools into the larger public sphere to demonstrate how beliefs and ideas about language and ethnic difference are reinforced and challenged in interactions in classrooms, homes, buses, and streets, and how ethnicity-based models of identity impact the way youth conceive their place in Kandy and a wider Sri Lanka. It traces the shifting linguistic, regional, religious, and ethnic/racial identities in Sri Lanka, and presents the history of Kandy as a place of retreat and a cosmopolitan center. This chapter also lays out the book’s contributions to language ideological studies, its methods, and the author’s positioning in relation to her research subjects.

Teachers and “Legitimate” Tamil in a Multilingual School

Chapter 3 focuses on how the Girls’ College Tamil-medium teachers negotiated and contested sociolinguistic hierarchies in relation to power shifts that followed the outbreak of the civil war in 1983. Consistent with language-based models of identity, the teachers mapped the differences between Jaffna Tamils (Tamils from the Jaffna Peninsula); Batticaloa Tamils (Tamils from the eastern coastal region); Up-country Tamils (descendants of plantation laborers); and Muslims onto Tamil sociolinguistic varieties. This chapter investigates teachers’ discussions and debates about which Tamil varieties are the best, as well as how they acted on those ideologies in different contexts, including subject-area classrooms, language classrooms, and Tamil oratorical performances. The incongruities within and across the teachers’ ideological assertions and practices reveal subtle dynamics in the configuration of social inequality.