Conference Agenda

Ethiopia is a multilingual country. There are over eighty ethnic groups, most of them with their own distinct vernaculars. Of these languages, Amharic, the language of the Amhara ethnic group, which has been the hegemonic force in Ethiopian politics, has been the national and official working language of the country for more than a century. Consequently, languages other than Amharic have been abandoned from the public sphere. One such language is Afaan Oromo. Following the 1991 political change, the language began to make an official appearance in primary schools, media, and government offices at the regional level. Despite these efforts, Afaan Oromo was unable to become an official working language, and this has been one of the issues in the political struggle of the Oromo. In the last three decades, the Oromo have been massively arrested in response to their political opposition, and the prisons were filled with people who speak Afaan Oromo, and consequently, the language was labeled as a prison language. In 2018, Abiy Ahmed, an ethnic Oromo, assumed power, and the fate of Afaan Oromo began to change. The language is declared as an official language of the country alongside Amharic. The language is now everywhere, from the national palace to commercial signage. Yet, there are critical voices that oppose the decision, claiming that the ruling regime is injecting its ethnic-oriented political ideology through Afaan Oromo. Evidently, there is now a vivid contestation between Afaan Oromo and the other dominant language, Amharic, and this contestation always takes the form and color of the country’s political instability and chaos. Taking this as a point of departure, this study aims at analyzing the recent developments of Afaan Oromo from a linguistics citizenship theoretical framework. The study follows a qualitative paradigm, and the data will be collected from different sources.

In Ecuador, plurinationality is a constitutional mandate which recognizes linguistic diversity of 14 indigenous nationalities co-existing in one country. Yet the coloniality of power sustains bilingualism in Spanish and English as the de facto aspiration of young Ecuadorians, despite the implementation of intercultural bilingual education with Kichwa and Shuar as languages of instruction. The hegemony of colonial languages is maintained with Spanish as the official language of the country, and global English taught over indigenous languages as a mandatory subject in schools and universities.

The presenter uses a decolonial lens to approach theoretically unequal multilingualisms in plurinational Ecuador, pointing to the deep colonial roots in Southern multilingualisms which must be understood as a still persistent denigration of alternative forms of knowledge (Makoni & Pennycook, 2023). This work encourages intellectual engagement with the implications of Southern multilingualisms, which include the plurality of knowledges, beliefs, and ways of knowing (Heugh, 2017).

The data in this presentation are from a comparative ethnography in a teacher college in Ecuador that prepares English and Kichwa teachers. The study theorizes epistemic agency as a discourse produced by English language advocates who promote Global North ways of knowing as well as dismiss ancestral languages and knowledges. The presenter discusses the role of English language advocates in maintaining unequal multilingualisms and makes a call to educational stakeholders for employing their epistemic agency to promote diversity of knowledges.

Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (2023). Looking at multilingualisms from the Global South. In The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism. Routledge.

Heugh, K. (2017). Re-Placing and Re-Centring Southern Multilingualisms. (pp. 209-229). In Kerfoot, C., & Hyltenstam, K. (Eds.). (2017). Entangled discourses: South-North orders of visibility. Taylor & Francis.

Language policy (LP) plays an important role through the education sector especially in multilingual and postcolonial contexts such as Morocco and Tunisia. The discriminatory nature of LP contributes to the construction of the socioeconomic status and social inequalities (Leibowitz 1974). This paper analyzes the ways in which the socioeconomic status is shaped in and through LP in education in the Moroccan and Tunisian contexts. The political metamorphosis that took place after the sociopolitical turmoil in 2010-2011 changed LP of the two states through the education system. I identify the political factors influencing LP and the socioeconomic contexts of the two countries’ populations with a focus on higher education. The project employs a mixed-method approach that investigates the ways in which LP established by the Moroccan and Tunisian governments influence the language practices of university students and professors and thereby contribute to the construction of their socioeconomic status. This approach includes an analysis of language practices, ideologies and management (Spolsky 2012) of universities students and professors, and an analysis of the overt and covert LP (Shohamy 2005) imposed by Moroccan and Tunisian institutions. This comparison between Morocco and Tunisia will help us to understand the processes through which two countries with similar historical and linguistic roots lead to form different socioeconomic status of their citizens through the LP.The final aim of this comparative analysis is to identify new models of LP that can be considered by the policymakers of the two countries to reduce the inequalities that have increased since the uprisings in 2010-2011.

Leibowitz, A. H. (1974). Language as a means of social control. Paper presented at the 8th World Congress of Sociology, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Shohamy, E. (2005). Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches. Routledge

Spolsky, B. (2012). The Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy. Cambridge University

Press.