The Fiji Minister of Education, Dr. Mahendra Reddy, has put languages back in the newspapers this month, this time arguing for the importance of teaching the vernacular, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. However, it is interesting to see how a chain of responses to the original article that appear to be supporting the same viewpoint actually draw on a range of different logics.
The Fiji Teachers Union general secretary, Agni Deo Singh, is quoted as supporting Reddy on the grounds that knowledge of the languages of Fiji will enable the country to fully embrace what it truly means to be Fijian. He explains how iTaukei students used to learn conversational Hindi in the 1970s while Fijians of Indian descent used to learn the iTaukei language, but laments the fact that this programme has languished over the years leaving people only able to understand each other at a very superficial level. Meanwhile, the response by Nishant Singh focuses on Reddy’s point that Fiji’s languages will become extinct if they continue to be excluded from domains such as parliament and if they are still barred (explicitly or implicitly) from schools. Kiniviliame Keteca then adds that restricting the use of certain languages serves to restrict our communication since there are terms in the iTaukei language, for example, that lack equivalents in English, making it discriminatory to prevent Fijians speaking in their own vernacular. My colleague Paul Geraghty supports the points made by Singh regarding the exclusion of vernaculars from parliament and formal education, before reminding us that proficiency in the mother tongue actually assists the learning of second languages such as English. The response that comes closest to rejecting Reddy’s view is a letter by Joan McGoon, who argues that English serves to unify all Fijians (and Pacific islanders), without excluding those who speak one vernacular or the other. However, another of my colleagues, Rajendra Prasad, responds by arguing that it is also rude or exclusionary when non-vernacular speakers insist on speaking English in a gathering dominated by one language group or another. He argues that the two major vernaculars of Fiji have always worked as a unifying factor in the country, bringing us back to Agni Deo Singh’s point about the need to promote the teaching of conversational languages. The Minister of Education started this flurry of correspondence by advocating a firmer place for the vernacular languages in Fiji’s education system. Responses are on the one hand positive by affirming this general sentiment. However, they also demonstrate a very fractured support base for the initiative, since there are a myriad different reasons for including the vernaculars (linguistic, nationalist and pedagogical) that may serve to divide the different groups of supporters who may not realise the value of collaborating for the same goal.
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March 2019
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