Interview with Maya Manandhar and Shanti Manandhar of Jagat Sundar Bwonekhuti Secondary School

During my last few weeks in Kathmandu, I sought out people that I thought had interesting opinions on language rights and language education in Nepal, and sat down with them for informal interviews. I wrote about some of these interviews here and here.

This last interview is with Principal Maya Manandhar and Vice Principal Shanti Manandhar of Jagat Sundar Bwonekhuti Secondary School, one of the first mother language schools in the country. It is located near the bank of the Bishnumati River, in a traditional Newari community not far from Swoyambhu. This interview was transcribed and the parts of it that were in Nepali were translated into English:

What is the history of your school and what makes it unique? How is Newari a part of the curriculum?

The school is twenty years old. After the democratic revolution the government gave us the permission to start the school. This was the first, and now there are many. It is a committee-run school, not a private school - there were six members in the first year. This is a mother language school, which means that every subject is taught in the Newari language: that is the teaching methodology. We use the Lotus Books that we publish in Newari for grades 1-5, and we use the English language government books in 9 and 10 (with the optional Newari subject books). The SLCs are taken in English. We teach Newari as a subject, and we choose one out of many different Newari scripts. We teach prachalit, as opposed to the more artful scripts, or Devanagari, which is a script from India, not Nepal. We have a problem with the books in grades six, seven, and eight. There are no Newari books and we use different materials, including photocopies. We teach Media in Newari.

An organization from Japan sponsors students here. Forty per cent of the students are sponsored by individual Japanese donors.

What is the benefit of a Newari component to the curriculum?

Students learn about the script and the culture, Nepal's historical culture. The script is important to preserve, as well as the culture, a very old culture.

Does education in the mother tongue help students to learn?

Little kids need to learn in their own language. What takes two days to learn in another language will take one day in their own language. Our school has gone through three groups of SLC, above 50% with distinction. So the system has been working so far. Also, language are dying all over the world, and that's why we need to preserve ours.

What are the good things and the bad things about the program?

The good things: if it was not taught in school, the knowledge of old songs and dances would be disappearing. We teach traditional dance and music in our school, also sitar (which isn't traditional). We teach old games as well.


There are also some bad things. Learning only in Newari, students can sometimes have no "scope." In college there's no scope for Newari students. The government has not made room for Newari colleges and jobs for Newari speakers. Some of our students have jobs in newspapers and etc.

I see a book of children's stories by Hridaya here on the table. Can you tell me about him?

He was very big. He wrote some famous books in Newari and was given the title of Kabikeshar by King Mahendra. Of course he was persecuted and put in jail before that. We have statue of him in our school.


The main statue belongs to Jagat Sundar Malla, a great Newari scholar who our school is named after. He saw the need for mother language schools, but he was put in jail for this and after he got out he flew to Japan. He saw the schools there and decided to come back to Nepal and sell all of his property to help establish a school. He had to hide his books, and then he died before the school was established. But we established it in his honor.

Chant Révolutionnaire (von den Brigadas Internationales)

Between 1936 and 1939, some 35,000 foreign volunteers from fifty-three different countries came to Spain to fight against Francisco Franco's Nationalist Army. They were drawn by the ideological struggle against fascism, and backed by socialist, communist, and democratic movements. They became the International Brigades of the Republican Army, and this is one of the songs that they sang:

This scan is from Legions of Babel: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War by V.B. Johnston. My friend Jonathan found this book when we were at the Library of Congress in DC. I count five languages in the song: English, German, Spanish, French, and Russian. It was published by The Volunteer for Liberty, the newspaper of the International Brigades of the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War, which was published in French, German, Italian, Polish, and English.

What I love most about the mishmash of languages in the song is all the spelling and grammar mistakes. I think most of them are intentional; the anarchic grammar gives a colloquial feel to the song that enhances the feeling of international brotherhood. As Jonathan pointed out, spelling  'comment ça va' as 'comment savar' and 'working shirt and pants' as 'woiken shoit and panties' makes it sound like this is being sung by a New Yorker who is just now getting a handle on all of these languages being spoken around him.

Because I apparently have nothing better to do, I decided to translate the song (preserving the grammar mistakes as best I could). Black is English, Red is French, Orange is Spanish, Blue is German, Green is Russian:

The Internationalist

I came to Spain in January

I speaks only English

But now I say Comment Ça Va

Wie gehts, Que Tal, Comrade

I driving with my ambulance

In woikin' shoit and panties

I have no time for romance

And work much harder than before

When evening comes I say good night

My blankets all lost

I'm very cold, but I am told

This is war, dat's the war, there's a war on

But other things I has learned

That eats is not much

Our meat is sometimes burned

With garlic, also oil

But one idea is above all

An idea very profound

We'll work hard for Franco's fall

And the United Proletariat Brothers of the whole world

Here multilingualism is used to underpin the message of international solidarity. It strikes me as counter to the Esperanto Movement, which views linguistic confusion as a source of international discord and seeks to propagate a single international language. 

Austin Life

Since I came back to Austin, I've continued helping out at the Multicultural Refugee Coalition as a Language Coordinator. That mostly means I've been helping to run their software reading program, IBM's Reading Companion.

Here is a short film about what the MRC does:

This Austin Life

The Nepali speakers that I know in Austin have come from refugee camps in Nepal. Their homeland is Bhutan, and they are ethnically Nepali. They make up a pretty large percentage of the people who use the MRC.

Here is a Euronews feature on the Bhutanese refugees that was brought to my attention by my friend Ram:

Focus on Bhutan Refugees

Seventh Grader Suspended for Speaking in Native Language

From the Native News Network:

Menominee Seventh Grader Suspended for Saying "I Love You" in her Native Language

I heard many stories in Nepal about students being punished for speaking their native language (even physical punishments or, in the case of some of the English Medium schools, "fines"). I guess this kind of thing still happens in the US too. Thanks to Kelsey for the link. 

Interview with Dipak Tuladhar of Modern Newa English School

During my last few weeks in Kathmandu, I sought out people that I thought had interesting opinions on language rights and language education in Nepal, and sat down with them for informal interviews. I wrote about the first of these interviews here.

The second interview was with the director of the Modern Newa English school, Dipak Tuladhar. I met with him at his school, which is on Kathmandu's Durbar Marg, close to one of the most famous luxury hotels in Kathmandu, the Yak and Yeti. The preschool looks like one of the many new preschools in Kathmandu, the ones whose flashy advertisements throughout the city boast modern European educational techniques and are emblazoned with popular cartoon characters. But this school is unique in an interesting way:

Here are the notes transcribed from my interview. The words of Mr. Tuladhar:


"What makes this school unique is Newari language instruction. Speaking in the mother tongue is punished in most schools, but this is totally against human rights. Children want to speak in their own tongue, and forcing them to speak in another language is a barrier to their learning. But we can't change the system completely. We feel that mother tongue in pre-primary is necessary, and when students are older there are different situations.


There is a misunderstanding in our society that mother language in the classroom impedes learning. But comprehensive communication is very important in education. Children must be taught in a language they understand.


I started in the commerce field, but I changed fields because of my sentiment. I do the policy for this school, but expert teachers do the teaching. I invested money to create this school. It is now independent, and all fees come from student tuition and transportation. There is no support from NGOs. We do not provide scholarships because we have to pay teachers and other staff. We do not let any teachers work for free in our school. In my view, free service will not last longer.


We have native English speakers Anglo-Indian and American part time teachers for better English of our students. We publish our own Newari textbook, but the other subjects are taught in English.


Our textbooks are in English, but the medium of speaking is in Newari. At first we thought there should be Newari texts, but these are hard to find, and we want our students to be able to compete with other students when they leave. Starting from age two, the kids are in play group, then nursery, lower and upper kindergarten.


I started the Newa School Abhiyan, the Newari School Campaign, to fund other schools like ours. One is the Thecho Newa English School, which has the same modality. It is three years old, and has been independent of support from us for a year. It is necessary to be independent and not take money from NGOs, because if you only take money then you don't work hard. The main criteria of their contract is that they use Newari for instruction; everything else is up to them. 


We've started eight Newari pre-primary schools now, and this school is 8 years old. We give support to many other schools that want to have single classes in mother tongue. There is also an unaffiliated Newari high school which recently had SLC toppers (Jagat Sundar Bwonekuthi). This shows that mother language education works. Students and parents are also happy with the mother language education of our schools."


Having spent time talking to policy and educational planners and linguists about the language situation in Nepal, I thought it would be interesting to visit some of the schools that use mother languages in the classroom. I had visited a pilot mother language government school off in a tiny village near Palpa back when I was in college, where I heard mixed reviews and polite complaints about government interference and lack of support. But now I was restricted to the Kathmandu Valley.

There is an intense cultural pressure placed on government schools to follow in the footsteps of the prestigious private schools and teach entirely in the medium of English. For example, of the ten schools in the Kathmandu Valley that I visited in preparation for the arrival of the next year's English teachers, all but one of them were English medium or were in the process of becoming English Medium. Those that didn't teach entirely in English taught in Nepali, and not in any of the other languages spoken in the valley (primarily Newari and Tamang).

Because of this pressure, and because of the importance placed on national testing assessments, it is not surprising that there are few public mother language schools. But the thought occurred to me that private schools could lead the way by showing that mother tongue education can be beneficial, and this is why I visited Modern Newa English School, which seems to prize the international language of English alongside the traditional cultural language of Newari. It is different than other schools that I have visited because it is a preschool, which I believe is a fairly new concept in Nepal, and thus it does not have to compete with primary and secondary schools with national testing scores. It also enforces the language while the students are young.

As an outside observer who is not an educational professional, I cannot say how successful this school is, but I think that it is encouraging that the idea of combining modern educational techniques with mother tongue education is out there in the public discourse.

Street Linguistics

The names of city streets and avenues tell interesting stories about the cultures and the personalities of different groups of people who have lived there over time. For one thing, they tell us who our heroes were (something that can change dramatically over time). So in Austin there is a neighborhood with a Robert E Lee Street and a Jeff Davis Avenue, but downtown some of the most prominent streets boast names like Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Cesar Chavez Street and, perhaps most appropriately, Willie Nelson Boulevard.

(In the reverse process of hero creation, when I went to school in Portland I was delighted to find that many of the street names like Quimby, Flanders, and Van Houten where the source for names of characters on The Simpsons)

Street names can also tell us about our culture and our past. 

This is Meador Avenue in the St. Johns neighborhood. When I worked for the Census Bureau, I had to interview people on this street and ask them questions about their address. I assumed that the name was Spanish. Nearby streets have names like Bennet and Providence, but not too far away there is a Camino La Costa and a La Posada Drive, and most of the people that I spoke with pronounced it as if it were Spanish (pronounced, I think, something like /mead̪or/ or 'may-adore'). Later, someone in the neighborhood informed me that the "technically correct" pronunciation was /mɛɾɚ/ 'medder.' This is because the word is actually English: it comes from the old Central Texas pronunciation of the word 'meadow.' 

I'm not sure if that is true or not, but it seems possible. This is partly why I wholeheartedly condone the often-criticized cowboy pronunciations of Spanish street names that I was taught as a child: Guadalupe is 'gwadaloop,' Manchaca is 'manchak,' Pedernales is 'perdenalis.' The names and their pronunciation belong to the residents of the streets, and their usage defines the acceptable pronunciations. Pronunciation can tell us about the people who live there or who used to live there. 

For example, I grew up near here:

Depending upon where you stand or who you ask, this street is also called Allandale, 290, Northland, or 2222, presumably to keep people who don't live in the area from being able to get around. The name is a reflection of the presence of historical German communities in Central Texas. 'Koenig' is the German word for 'king.'

The street name is pronounced /kenɪg/ 'kaynig,' which is not obvious to non-residents. It is also not how the word 'king' is pronounced in Standard German, which is approximately like /kønɪk/ 'kernik.' The reason for this is that the Germans who settled in Central Texas (including my ancestors) mostly spoke dialects of German with unrounded front vowels that would be rounded in Standard German. The way we pronounce this street name is, in other words, actually a crystallized feature of a unique Texas-German dialect.

You can hear the same thing when Austinites pronounce the name of the old Mueller Airport - they don't say 'myooler' but rather 'meeler.' The Gruene river, another German word, is pronounced 'green' instead of an approximation of Standard German like 'groone':


Spelling:                                    Standard German:                                         Texas Pronunciation:

'ü' or 'ue'                                    /y/ ('oo' with tongue brought forward)             /i/ ('ee')

'ö' or 'oe'                                   /ø/ ('oh' with tongue brought forward)             /e/ ('ay')

Very few of the residents of these places speak Texas-German anymore, but the unique pronunciation of place names has survived. The story is similar with Meador Avenue, except that the Texas English pronunciation of the name is in conflict with the Spanish pronunciation because of a perceived Spanish origin. Either way, the pronunciation acts as a shibboleth and can lead to your identification as inside or outside of a group. I will pronounce the name Guadalupe Street differently depending upon whether I am talking to my grandparents or to a Spanish speaker or to a friend my own age who has moved here.

This is where my interests in linguistics began. I learned German in school so that I could speak with my grandfather, and yet I still couldn't understand him very well. I didn't get the joke when he called my cousin 'Danke Shane' because I didn't understand that this is how 'danke schön' is pronounced in Texas-German (of course that's also how Wayne Newton sings it).

Then I learned that he was speaking an American dialect of German, and I learned that there were people who like to study that sort of thing (specifically, these awesome people). And that is, more or less, how I ended up in Nepal.




Update:


Today I took the bus to Hyde Park from the University of Texas campus, and the automated voice recording that called out the names of bus stops pronounced the final Spanish vowel in "Guadalupe," but pronounced "Koenig" with an 'oh' sound. I wonder if this an oversight or whether this is actually a common modern pronunciation of the word. 


Also, I found this other dude on the Internet writing in the comments section of a phonetics blog about German settlers and in-group identification and using the same three examples. So, um yeah. Another dude on the Internet agrees with me; yes indeed.