Language and education in Eritrea

In multilingual societies, school is an arena in which three potentially conflicting dimensions of language policy meet: language as a right, language as a resource, and language as a problem. School is at the same time an instrument in the implementation of a country's official language policy, and an institution in which language ideologies at the macro-level meet language behaviour of teachers and pupils at the micro-level. This is the more so in countries where recent independence coincides with the existence of a variety of ethnic groups and languages, which differ both in size and status. This book is about language and education in Eritrea. Eritrea is independent since 1991 and, consisting of different ethnolinguistic groups, is an intriguing example of a country that is facing the complex interdependencies of language, social mobility, ethnicity, and nationalism. It is special in the sense that it, unlike many other postcolonial African countries, in its Declaration of Policies in Education in 1991 explicitly decided for a policy of mother-tongue education in terms of the use of ethnic group languages as languages of instruction in primary education. This study consists of three interconnected studies dealing with language policy, language diversity, and language use in education. The first study is a critical analysis of the present Eritrean language policy, its ideology, and its influence on education. The second is a sociolinguistic survey in which home and school language profiles of 359 primary school pupils of different ethnic groups all over the country are mapped. The last study is ethnographic in nature. It investigates the way in which language diversity in Eritrea is reflected in the interaction between teachers and pupils in primary school classrooms in which the language of instruction is either the mother tongue of the pupils or a second or third language. Altogether this book provides a fascinating picture of language policy in action.