Overcoming the language barrier and the burden of the double divide: Multilingual education in India

Mohanty, Ajit

doi:10.1075/hsld.1.16moh

In:Multilingualism and Language Diversity in Urban Areas: Acquisition, identities, space, education
Edited by Peter Siemund, Ingrid Gogolin, Monika Edith Schulz and Julia Davydova
[Hamburg Studies on Linguistic Diversity 1] 2013
► pp. 305–326

Get fulltext from our e-platform

Download Book PDF

Multilingual education in India

Overcoming the language barrier and the burden of the double divide

Ajit Mohanty

Published online: 31 May 2013

https://doi.org/10.1075/hsld.1.16moh

A double divide between English, the vernaculars or the regional dominant languages, and tribal minority languages characterizes Indian multilingualism. In India, multiple languages complement each other in meeting the communicative needs of people and, hence, education must necessarily foster multilingual proficiency in the languages of functional significance. However, the common school programs in India offer only nominal forms of multilingual education. Nature and implications of the linguistic double divide for educational failure of tribal children due to their language disadvantage in schools in a dominant language are analyzed. Recent programs of mother tongue based multilingual education in India to overcome the language barrier for the tribal mother tongue children and their limitations in rising above the linguistic discrimination are discussed.

Keywords: double divide, English-other language divide, English-vernacular divide, language and education, language policy, multilingual education, multilingualism

Cited by (13)

Cited by 13 other publications

Order by:

Kandharaja, K. M. C. & R. Vennela

2025. Enumerating hierarchies: census data and the invisible Architecture of India’s Three Language Policy. Current Issues in Language Planning ► pp. 1 ff.

Tsimpli, Ianthi M., Lina Mukhopadhyay, Anusha Balasubramanian & Jeanine Treffers-Daller

2024. Microstructural properties in the narrative retellings of young English learners in EMI schools in India. In Multifaceted Multilingualism [Studies in Bilingualism, 66], ► pp. 68 ff.

Ben Hammou, Salah & Abdelaziz Kesbi

2023. The Teaching of Science Subjects through Foreign Languages in Moroccan Secondary Schools: Science Teachers’ Perceptions and Experiences. RELC Journal 54:3 ► pp. 757 ff.

Lomas, Tim, Pablo Diego-Rosell, Koichiro Shiba, Priscilla Standridge, Matthew T. Lee, Brendan Case, Alden Yuanhong Lai & Tyler J. VanderWeele

2023. Complexifying Individualism Versus Collectivism and West Versus East: Exploring Global Diversity in Perspectives on Self and Other in the Gallup World Poll. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 54:1 ► pp. 61 ff.

Nathan, Sagi

2023. Prospects for English medium education of Indian migrant children: Multilingualism of the unequals. Asian Englishes 25:2 ► pp. 206 ff.

Gogolin, Ingrid

2021. Multilingualism: A threat to public education or a resource in public education? – European histories and realities. European Educational Research Journal 20:3 ► pp. 297 ff.

Davydova, Julia

2019. Language Ideologies, Language Policies, and English-Language Teaching in Russia. In Second Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education [Springer International Handbooks of Education, ], ► pp. 1 ff.

Davydova, Julia

2019. Language Ideologies, Language Policies, and English-Language Teaching in Russia. In Second Handbook of English Language Teaching [Springer International Handbooks of Education, ], ► pp. 135 ff.

Davydova, Julia

2019. Quotative like in the Englishes of the Outer and Expanding Circles. World Englishes 38:4 ► pp. 578 ff.

Mohanty, Ajit Kumar

2019. Dynamics of Marginalisation and Assertive Maintenance in Multilingual Contact. In Psychological Perspectives on Diversity and Social Development, ► pp. 123 ff.

Pennycook, Alastair & Emi Otsuji

2019. Mundane metrolingualism. International Journal of Multilingualism 16:2 ► pp. 175 ff.

Regnoli, Giuliana

2019. Translanguaging as an expression of transnational identity. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 5:2 ► pp. 165 ff.

Panda, Minati & Ajit K. Mohanty

2015. Multilingual Education in South Asia. In The Handbook of Bilingual and Multilingual Education, ► pp. 542 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.