‘The big ones swallow the small ones’. Or do they? Language-in-education policy and ethnic minority education in the Lao PDR

Abstract

The Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse nations in Southeast Asia. The post-1975 government's policies regarding ethnic minority peoples are often considered to represent an ideological shift from earlier monocultural orientations to a discourse of interethnic equality and solidarity. Yet a deeper reading of official policies, combined with an examination of planning measures, reveals a persistent discourse of ethnic Lao centrality.

This paper first examines the apparently contradictory official discourses on language, ethnic minorities and education in Laos, and how these discourses are reproduced, adapted or contested on the ground by teachers and students in ethnic minority classrooms. I first present a discourse analysis of selected policy documents, supported by interviews with key policy-makers followed by an analysis of teacher code choice in three ethnic minority classrooms together with data from teacher interviews. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Nalae district, Luang Nam Tha Province and five years of experience working in education development in the Lao PDR.

Keywords:

• code choice
• ethnic minorities
• language policy
• minority education
• discourse analysis
• Lao PDR

Notes

1. The classification of ethnolinguistic groups is a complex matter fraught with practical and theoretical difficulties. The government of Laos officially recognises 49 ethnic groups, while the ADB's 2001 Participatory Poverty Assessment notes that there may be up to 230 languages spoken in Laos. It is clear, however, that the linguistic families represented in Laos are Tai-Kadai, Mon-Khmer, Hmong-Mien and Tibeto-Burman.

2. This paper is based on a doctoral research project.

3. Additional texts were studied as part of the larger research project.

4. This is especially true of women and children, although in the more remote villages or those recently relocated adult men may have very low Lao language proficiency too.

5. Although identities are becoming increasingly complex in the district centre, where people from several groups have come together, ethnic identity in Nalae remains relatively fixed: most of the highland villages are monoethnic and their residents are emically and etically identified by their physical appearance, mother tongue, costume, and cultural and livelihood practices as belonging to one or another ethnicity. In the district centre, which has a population of about 1000, known genealogies and places of origin contribute to similarly stable identities.

6. Teachers’ real names are not used here.