Language Use and Attitudes in Mauritius on the Basis of the 2000 Population Census

Rajah-Carrim, Aaliya

doi:10.1080/01434630508669085

Cited by 21 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Moreover, it characterizes a categorization not depicted in early census representations. Different authors have presented alternative categorizations in different periods, challenging the census reporting of 1983and 2000(Rajah-Carrim 2005Sonck 2005;Sauzier-Uchida 2009) and suggesting that the boundaries of race and ethnic, religious, and cultural groups are continually being contested.…”

Section: A Perspective On Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schooling Education in Mauritius

Samuel

Mariaye

2019

Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia

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Mauritius bears the hallmarks of being complementarily a country of eastern and western worldviews, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously borrowing traditions from its diverse heritages. It is a country of both Asian and African cultural, political, historical, and institutional connections. Developments in its educational landscape have thus been shaped by and resonate with historical and current experiences within the Southeast Asian region. Drawing on available (2018) official reports and policies of the Mauritian Government, especially the Ministry of Education and Human Resources, Tertiary Education and Scientific Research (MoEHRTESR), and the work of current doctoral students engaged with developing scoping reviews of the forces shaping Mauritius' schooling system, this chapter showcases how this small island developing state (SIDS) has strategically renegotiated its connectivities with its local, regional, and global partners throughout its formative history. It argues that while policy construction initially involved alignment with advice and directives from multinational organizations that exported their preferred conceptions of education and development to the island, over time, this agenda was challenged to become more inclusive of indigenously connected local resources. We analyze Mauritius' polyglot schooling typologies and structures, shifting curriculum, language educational policy options, and ICT choices as a strategic educational lever for development and offer a historical theoretical lens for the construction of Mauritius as a SIDS. Furthermore, we question whether, through their partners, national state authorities can activate the required epistemic and practical resources to enact policy change and implementation that is the product of creativity, innovation, and research informed critique.

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Section: A Perspective On Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schooling Education in Mauritius

Samuel

Mariaye

2019

Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia

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“…The only language that has marginal access to official communications is Mauritian Kreol 1 (de Robillard 1991: 162;Miles 1999b: 97;Sauzier-Uchida 2009: 113). It is seen as the language of everyday interactions (Rajah-Carrim 2005) and the lingua franca (Miles 2000). It is further associated with illiteracy and practical tasks (SauzierUchida 2009: 115), its use being, until its standardisation and introduction as an optional subject in schools in 2012, restricted to communiqués from the Ministry of Fisheries addressed to fishermen, because they are categorised as coming from low-educated income groups (Tirvassen 1999).…”

Section: The Functional Differentiation Of Languages (I) Formal V/s Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a matter of fact, adopting a behaviouristic approach, many studies have analysed linguistic data in relation to sociological variables (e.g. Moorghen and Domingue 1982, Eriksen 1998, Bissoonauth and Offord 2001, Rajah-Carrim 2005, Sonck 2005, and Bissoonauth 2011. Once the political boundaries have been established, these linguists describe the sociolinguistic organisation of the community with particular stress on the relationship among languages.…”

Section: A Meta-analysis Of the Mauritian Sociolinguistic Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Taking into account the fact that 1.3 million people are linked with a dozen languages, researchers (e.g. Moorghen and Domingue 1982;Stein 1982;de Robillard 1990, 1993;de Robillard 1991;Bissoonauth and Offord 2001;Rajah-Carrim 2005Sonck 2005;Sauzier-Uchida 2009;Bissoonauth 2011) have sought to provide an explanation of the social organisation of languages by focusing on the status of languages, their functional differentiation, and attitudes towards languages in different settings. The analysis of the linguascape, from the Structuralist perspective, has shown that there exists a stable hierarchy of languages conceptualised by the notion of diglossia (Ferguson 1959) and further refined by that of asymmetrical diglossia (Chaudenson 1984).…”

Section: An Overview Of the Sociolinguistic Landscape Of Mauritiusmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Deconstructing and Re-Inventing the Concept of Multilingualism: A Case Study of the Mauritian Sociolinguistic Landscape

Tirvassen

Ramasawmy

2017

SPILPLUS

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This article aims at deconstructing the conception of multilingualism developed in mainstream sociolinguistics by critically examining the assumptions underlying this trend of research, which is grounded in the scholarship of Labov (1972), Fishman (1984 and even Gumperz (1972). In order to engage in that discussion, we use the Mauritian sociolinguistic landscape, as described by researchers following that tradition, as a case. We, thus, carry out a meta-analysis of existing sociolinguistic research conducted in Mauritius, which serve to illustrate the extent to which knowledge produced bear the influence of the structuralist approach. Then, we critically discuss and reflect upon the assumptions underpinning such research, and in so doing, challenge key concepts such as language and diglossia.Finally, we open a discussion on the need to adopt an alternative epistemological position in order to construct a different type of interpretation of the phenomenon following the ground-breaking work of scholars such as Makoni and Pennycook

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“…Bhojpuri, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Gujarati were now added to the Mauritian linguistic mosaic along with Hindi and Urdu, which were especially valued in liturgical contexts (Miles 2000). The subsequent arrival of Chinese traders from mainland China resulted in the insertion of Hakka Chinese and Cantonese into the Mauritian multilingual matrix (Rajah-Carrim 2005). Eventually, after 158 years of British colonial rule, when Mauritius gained independence from the United Kingdom, there was already a well-established "four-part harmony" of Mauritian languages with MC as "the uncontested lingua franca; French as the inherited language of social and cultural prestige; English as the language of education, law, public administration and to a degree commerce; and [a] panoply of Indian and Asian languages" (Miles 2000: 217).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth Discourse in Multilingual Mauritius: The Pragmatic Significance of Swearing in Multiple Language

Auckle

2017

SPILPLUS

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Drawing from Dewaele (2010Dewaele ( , 2013, this paper seeks to analyse the socio-pragmatics of swearing in face-to-face multilingual conversational encounters and argues that the conversational locus (Auer 1984) of playfulness favours, among others, the co-occurrence of slang and code-switching (CS). Defined by Eble (1996: 11) as an "ever changing set of colloquial words and phrases that speakers use to establish or reinforce social identity or cohesiveness within a group or with a trend or fashion in society at large", slang is more often than not associated with the speech of youngsters seeking to set up the linguistic boundaries of their in-group. Viewed as a global phenomenon, which is transposed differently in local contexts by young people hailing from different social, cultural and linguistic backgrounds -including, as Zimmerman (2009: 121) notes, dialectal and sociolectal backgrounds -it acts as a marker of symbolic "desire and consciousness of youth alterity". Such a situation can be endowed with further sociolinguistic complexity in multilingual situations such as Mauritius, where the wide range of available languages endows speakers with an equally fertile repertoire of swear words derived from diverse sources.In keeping with the above, this paper focuses on a series of multi-party recordings carried out between October 2011 and March 2012 and analyses the ways in which the usage of swear words in multilingual contexts can act not only as a reflection of speakers' communicative competence, but also as an externalisation of their dynamism and creativity. The use of swear words in conjunction with CS is, thus, viewed as being a pragmatically consequential conversational act. Such linguistic versatility appears to be indexical of a reflexive position that youngsters orient themselves to by allowing their linguistic output to be seen as a performance, "involv[ing] on the part of the performer an assumption of accountability to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content" (Bauman 1975: 293).

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Language Use and Attitudes in Mauritius on the Basis of the 2000 Population Census

Cited by 21 publications

References 7 publications

Schooling Education in Mauritius

Schooling Education in Mauritius

Deconstructing and Re-Inventing the Concept of Multilingualism: A Case Study of the Mauritian Sociolinguistic Landscape

Youth Discourse in Multilingual Mauritius: The Pragmatic Significance of Swearing in Multiple Language

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