ABSTRACT

Analyzing three cases of school-level language policy decision-making in Nepal shows that each school had a pair of language policy arbiters, actors with disproportionate power over language policy decisions. The permissive but passive stance of Nepal’s government toward providing multilingual schooling including minoritized languages created a situation where inaction maintained the language policy status quo. This ethnography of language policy builds on theorizing of the language policy arbiter to show that agency may require coordination of two people, rather than being a slot filled by individuals. In a highly centralized education bureaucracy, there were no crucial arbiters between central policymakers and the school level. Shifting from viewing scales as fixed to being produced by scale-making practices clarifies how scale is employed politically. I argue that identifying language policy arbiters may be important not only for analysis but also for advocates interested in opening ideological and implementational spaces for multilingual education.

摘要

分析尼泊尔的三起学校一级语言政策决策案例，结果表明，每所学校都有一对语言政策仲裁员，这些行为者对语言政策决策拥有不成比例的权力。尼泊尔政府在提供包括少数民族语言在内的多语种学校教育方面的宽容但又消极的态度造成了一种情况，即无所作为维持了语言政策的现状。语言政策的民族志建立在语言政策仲裁员的理论基础之上，以表明代理机构可能需要两个人的协调，而不是由个人填补的空缺。在高度集中的教育官僚机构中，中央决策者和学校之间没有关键的仲裁者。从固定的观看比例转换为通过比例制作方法产生的比例，可以清楚地说明如何在政治上使用比例。我认为，确定语言政策仲裁员可能不仅对分析很重要，而且对有兴趣为多语言教育开放思想和实施空间的拥护者也很重要。