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Article published In: Meaning Making in the Periphery:
Edited by Luiz Paulo Moita-Lopes and Mike Baynham
[AILA Review 30] 2017
► pp. 96–119

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Traces of old and new center-periphery dynamics in language-in-education policy and practice

Insights from a linguistic ethnographic study in Timor-Leste

 | University of Birmingham, England
 | University of Birmingham, England
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 15 January 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00005.dac
Abstract
This article reveals how center-periphery relations have unfolded, over time, in language policy processes in one nation – Timor-Leste – on the global periphery. We take a longue durée perspective on the language policy processes at work in this historical context, showing how different regimes of language were imposed, in the past, by colonisers from distant centers – in Portugal and then in Java, Indonesia. Then, turning to the post-independence period, we show how a new order of indexicality, forged within the Resistance to the Indonesian occupation, formed the basis for current language policy in Timor-Leste, with Portuguese and Tetum as co-official languages. We also demonstrate that this agentive policy move, from the global periphery, oriented Timor-Leste to new and more complex center-periphery relations, to a ‘lusophone’ world, with Portugal and Brazil as key players. Our account of contemporary policy discourses in Timor-Leste, and of the consequences for language policy implementation, on different scales (national and local), draws on recent research of an ethnographic and multi-scalar nature conducted in Timor-Leste (Da Costa Cabral, I. (2015). Multilingual talk, classroom textbooks and language values: A linguistic ethnographic study in Timor-Leste. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham, UK.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar).
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Changing center-periphery relations, changing discourses about language and changes in language-in-education policy and practice
    • The eastern region of the island of Timor: Imposition of a colonial order (1514–1974)
  • The Indonesian occupation, the imposition of a new center and the East Timorese Resistance (1975–1999)
  • A new nation developing language policy in a global age: The political and discursive challenges for Timor-Leste
  • A linguistic ethnographic study in Timor-Leste
  • Policy discourses: National and global perspectives
  • The year 6 classroom and teacher Dalia
  • Talk around the textbook: Linking different ‘lusophone’ worlds
  • Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (34)
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