KAMALIKA PIERIS
With the ‘rise’ of the Tamil language in Sri Lanka, there was the desire to bring Tamil to the
same level as Sinhala. Sinhala ranks first in
all trilingual lists including
name boards on roads. A suggestion
was made that the languages should be vertically written, on name
boards, with Sinhala in the middle. ( Daily News 16.6.09 p 10) . This
would eliminate the visible rank order and remove the dominant position
of Sinhala .
There was also the desire to bring Tamil to
the same level as Sinhala on the
cultural plane. This was best done by gathering Sinhala and Tamil writing
together and running them alongside. Sri Lankan Mosaic”, (2002) published by
Three Wheeler Press, funded by Michael Ondaatje, did just that.
It
published an equal number of Sinhala and Tamil short stories in English
translation, implying that the overall output of writing was also equal. However, the output is not equal.
International Standard Book Number (ISBN) statistics showed that 6377 Sinhala and 677 Tamil books with ISBNs were published in 2014.
Michael Ondaatje also wanted one significant
modern novel in Sinhala and Tamil each translated into English and published by
Three Wheeler Press, funded by Michael Ondaatje. Three Wheeler therefore
published ‘Sangu’ by S. Ponnuthurai and “Podu purushaya” by Sunethra
Rajakarunanayake. This is an unintentional lumping together of Sinhala and Tamil
as vernaculars.
Sirisumana Godage was a prolific publisher of
Sinhala works. His name was associated exclusively with Sinhala
publishing. He was persuaded to publish
Tamil literature as well. Godage went further.
In April 2014, Godage held a function to salute senior Sinhala and Tamil
writers at one ceremony. 15 writers in Sinhala and Tamil each were to be
recognized .The 30 names were given in their own languages. Invitation was in
both Sinhala and Tamil. Tamil literature, at least in appearance, had now come
level with Sinhala literature.
But the Tamil lobby was not satisfied with
what had been achieved. They complained that the official language policy with
regard to Tamil was not satisfactory in 2017. Nirmala Chandrahasan said that
the government should ensure that the Official languages policy is implemented
in full, and this includes the Central ministries, and that Tamil speaking
citizens (and Sinhala speaking citizens living in North and East) are able to
communicate with and receive communications from the State in their language in
any part of the country.
Although the Tamil language has been one of
the official languages of the Country from 1987, and this is set out in the
Constitution, this provision is still to be implemented fully. This fact is
mentioned in the LLRC Report as a grievance to be rectified, concluded
Chandrahasan. Article 24 of the
constitution which makes Tamil the language of administration in the North and East
is being violated openly, complained D Hoole.
Jehan Perera focused on the media. We call on
the state television stations to carry the same discussion topics on their
Tamil channels as they do on their Sinhala channels instead of showing films,
music and sports thereby undermining the desire of Tamil-speakers to be one
with the nation in its suffering. We request that such media programmes be translated
for all to understand,” he said in 2019.
The Tamil lobby has no intention of letting go. They were prepared to coerce if necessary. In August
2018, the Official Language Commission advertised for a ‘Language promotion and
Investigating officer’. The lobby would
prefer, however, to persuade. The Official language Ministry has conducted
a large number of awareness programmes and workshops to educate the public on
the importance of the Official Language policy”, said Ganesan. Workshops were conducted for
district secretariats, police officers, health sector and various categories of
state officials. Prathiba Mahanama, former Commissioner of Human Rights also
gives lectures on the importance of the National Language Policy, he
added.
The Tamil
lobby wanted to see the Tamil language entrenched all over the
island. There are 332 Divisional Secretariats in this country of which 41
are officially declared bilingual, as Tamil and Sinhala speaking people live in
these areas, said Minister Mano Ganesan,
for example Dehiwala, Kolonnawa, Wattala
and Nuwara-Eliya. Officials in these secretariats at least, should be able to
communicate in both languages, as a start, he said.
Ganesan said that any Tamil, anywhere, should be able to communicate with
and transact business with the state, the law courts and the police in Tamil. This means a full parallel service structure
of Tamil translators, interpreters, typists, stenographers and a separate set
of Tamil publications at all levels.
Unfortunately, admitted Ganesan, there is a dearth of translators and
interpreters in the country. This was in 2016. I have
submitted a cabinet paper requesting to employ a large number of translators
and interpreters. As this is a professional job, my Ministry will train
civilians as translators and interpreters and appoint them especially to police
Stations and judiciary services as we need to have proper translators in these
departments. Just because one speaks Sinhala and Tamil, they can’t be proper
translators and interpreters.
Minister
Ganesan admitted in 2017, that bilingual language proficiency within the State
sector was nowhere near satisfactory. Learning the second language is
considered an additional burden by employees although second language
proficiency is tied to their promotions and incentives,” he said .
The Tamil lobby
however, is jolly well determined to see that all government servants speak and
work in Tamil. Since force feeding” Tamil to state sector employees had failed,
they had to think up something else. They decided that employees must know Tamil
BEFORE they took up government service. Minister Ganesan said in 2016, that he
had put forward a Cabinet paper asking Cabinet to declare that State employees
should be completely bilingual before they were given state jobs.
This means that pupils needed to be taught Tamil thoroughly and
properly in secondary school. At the moment, even basic Tamil is not taught. In 2019 several schools in Agalawatte
complained that no teachers had been appointed to teach Tamil. Parents
complained that they have to send their children to private tuition classes to
learn Tamil. Ganesan
admitted that ‘Right now there is a shortage of six thousand
language teachers – Sinhala, Tamil and English. So we are in the process of
training teachers. Up to Grade 9 a second language is compulsory, but there
also the quality is not good,” he said.
It appears that the Tamils themselves are
unable to study in Tamil. Zahira
College, Hambantota is
the only Tamil medium national school in the District to teach Advanced Level
Science and Mathematics. “Two teachers had been appointed
to this school for teaching those subjects but they did not remain in the
school for long. Now, in 2018, the Tamil medium students do not have an
opportunity to study science or mathematics for the Advanced Level examination,
said critics.
Schools in
the Central, Uva and Sabaragamuwa Provinces do not teach Science and Moths in
Tamil, at Advanced Level in 2019 as they do not have Tamil teachers. This is
despite the Central and Uva Provinces having separate Provincial Education
Ministries for Tamil schools. Maths and Science teachers from the Northern
Province were brought down to teach the subjects, in the past, but now it
is not happening. The Provincial Education authorities do not show any
inclination towards getting them down.
In the Central Province, the Tamil Provincial
Education Ministry Secretary is also the Provincial Agricultural Minister. He
has no time to overlook the Education sector, said complainants. The few
schools that have Tamil stream Science and Maths restrict admission. They
insist that students must have 9‘A’s in the Ordinary Level examination, to gain
entry into the Science and Maths streams.
Despite these bilingual problems, Sri Lanka
became a trilingual nation in
1987. Sinhala, Tamil and English became
official languages carrying equal rank. The legal position of English, which
was supposed to be a ‘link language’ appears to be the same as Sinhala and
Tamil, observed K.M. de Silva. The trilingual
situation was accepted without protest by the public because they had
absolutely no intention of complying with it. They intended to work around it.
Important areas of public life went trilingual
effortlessly. The Constitution of the Republic of Sri Lanka and all Acts of
Parliament were in all three languages.
The Hansard reported in all three languages.
Government forms, such as birth, death,
marriage, passport applications, which are now online, are trilingual. But
Instead of separate forms for each language, the government sensibly arranged
for one form with instructions in all three languages. Thus avoiding the
creation of a ‘permanent circus of three languages with three sets of
translations, adding to the public sector costs’ as one critic put it. There
was a rank order in which the three language were to be listed, Sinhala first, then Tamil followed by English.
Road directions and street names were
given trilingually. There was a prescribed rank order and a prescribed
size for the three scripts. The rank order was Sinhala, Tamil, and English. Kandy Railway Station however, had Sinhala in
large letters, above the main entrance, with Tamil and English in smaller
letters on either side. In
Jaffna, the name boards of
Jaffna Railway station, University of Jaffna and police stations
were trilingual, in
the prescribed rank order. Notices
inside Jaffna Railway station were also given in all three languages.
Commercial establishments, both government and
private, also followed the trilingual policy. State banks and private banks,
for instance, gave directions in all three languages, in the official rank
order. Cheque books, savings books, Fixed Deposit applications and Fixed
Deposit certificates carried information in all three languages.
But it appears that there is room for
improvement. In 2017, Yahapalana government repeated that steps will be taken
to ensure all external and internal movable and immovable signboards are
trilingual. All documents and forms for public use will be
available at State institutions in the three languages. Efforts will be made to
ensure citizens receive oral and written responses in the official language of
their choice or the link language at all State institutions.
The government planned to make the whole of
Sri Lanka trilingual. There was a Cabinet decision to this effect in 2012. A trilingual dictionary with pronunciation
has been prepared by the Department of Official languages and is now available
online. https://www.trilingualdictionary.lk/)
A ten year national plan for a trilingual Sri
Lanka was published in 2012, by the government Policy Research & Information Unit [PRIU]. This plan said, inter alia, in Phase 1 there will be a
national cadre of 1st and 2nd language teachers, there will be school textbooks
and cassettes of songs in all three languages.
At phase 2 English and the 2nd language will be introduced to
Grade 5 exam, as well as O and A levels, and a pass in them will be compulsory
to proceed further. All university students will be taught to be competent in
Sinhala, Tamil and English. There will
be exams for trilingual competence for government servants. There will also be
an appreciation of cultural practices of Sinhala and Tamil dance, music, drama
literature and rituals.
The notion of a trilingual Sri Lanka was
welcomed by the ‘minorities’. Every citizen must learn all three languages said
M.S.M. Ashraff in 1998. Every Sri Lankan should be able to speak Sinhala and
Tamil, said Mano Ganesan in 2017. Estate
employees and residents in Nallathanni protested against the defacing of the
English and Tamil language names on the name board of Sri Pada. The protesters
demanded that the authorities punish those responsible for the crime.
How trilingual was Sri Lanka, really. The last
Census, of 2012 gave the following figures for Language literacy by ethnicity”
S T E
Sri Lanka 79.7% 26.4%
30.8%
Sinhalese 96.4 5.3 31.1
Sri Lankan Tamil 17.3 94.1 24.3
Indian Tamil 20.9 86.2 19.4
Sri Lankan Moor 40.6 94.8 38.7
Burgher 77.0 29.1 97.4
Malay 81.8 97.1 66.8
(Table 10.4:
Language literacy by ethnicity, 2012 Census) .
This table shows that 79.7% spoke Sinhala,
30.8% spoke English and just 26.4% spoke Tamil. This means that the rank order
of use was Sinhala, English and Tamil.
Here comes the second
statistic. The Schools Census, Ministry of Education 2017 said that there were a total of 3,055,926 Sinhala Medium
pupils, 1,025,358 Tamil Medium pupils and 84,720 English Medium pupils. According
to this Census there were 6,332 Sinhala medium
schools and 3009 Tamil medium schools There were 558 schools which taught in Sinhala
& English, 173 schools which taught
in Tamil & English ,
75 schools teaching in Sinhala & Tamil
and 47 schools which
taught in Sinhala, Tamil & English . The Northern district had 898 Tamil medium
schools and 28 Sinhala medium
schools.
The third
statistic is also from education. All Island Tamil medium schools short
drama competition organized by the Tower Hall Theatre Foundation and sponsored
by the Education Ministry had 50 schools participating in 2016.The All Island
Schools Drama Competition for Sinhala medium schools had 300 schools
participating.
Yahapalana
government announced that it was going in for trilingual education in a big
way. In 2018 Cabinet approval was
obtained for two trilingual schools. Trilingual Mixed National Schools for
Grades 6-13 in Nanuoya, Nuwara Eliya, at the cost of Rs. 800 million, and in
Wellawatte, Colombo, at the cost of Rs 900 million.
In 2019, Cabinet
approved a proposal for a trilingual mixed National school in Peradeniya, at an
estimated cost of Rs 1,141 million.
Yahapalana government said it had also started
trilingual schools in Kurunegala, Kandy, Colombo and Meerigama and intends to
have more trilingual schools in future. It also plans
to convert existing schools into trilingual National schools in the near
future. Students of
all nationalities will be allowed to study in any of the 3 languages.
Trilingual education
was loudly welcomed by Christians, Muslims and Marxists. All schools must adopt a trilingual policy. Teaching should
be in one medium but they must also learn the other two languages, said
Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith in 2016. At least one subject should be taught in
Tamil and one in English to Sinhala students and vice versa said Elmo de Silva
in 2016.
The Ministry
of education should see to the teaching and testing of bilingual (Sinhala and
Tamil) competencies or trilingual (Sinhala, Tamil and English) competencies
from the primary level up to higher-secondary level, said DEW Gunasekera in
2008.
Prof Furkan,
principal of Zahira, pointed out that in the new Tri-lingual National Schools
all children should learn all three languages from Year 1 to Year 13 to be
really tri-lingual. This will also mean that when they enter local Universities
they will be more competent in the English Language to handle higher education
at tertiary level here or even overseas.
It is unlikely that
Yahapalana has a clear policy on trilingual education. The idea, it seems, is
to teach each pupil solely in one
language . That is easy and convenient. That will of course, continue to keep pupils separated according to language , which is what the
policy is trying to avoid. Hopefully the
pupils will probably be brought together for
games, art and so on.
UNESCO has made recommendations on this matter, first in 1999 and in 2003. UNESCO
maintains that initial
instruction must be in the
mother tongue, but this must now be supplemented by other languages. Schools
must now move from monolingualism to bilingualism and
multilingualism. Children should be given a ‘multilingual education. They must be taught
at least three languages, the mother tongue, a regional or national language
and an international language, decalred UNESCO. Critics however, warn that pupils
should learn the international language, as an additional language and not to
the extent that it endangers one’s native language. ( CONTINUED)
