When listening to Prof. Wei’s speech yesterday, his use of the phrase ‘named languages’ really resonated with me. It reminded me of multiple instances and observations over the couple of years interacting with ‘Gormati’ speaking people. Prof. Wei was talking about Translanguaging for inclusion and social justice.
The second year of working with the Laman Banjara people, some of the students from Anandshala came to stay at Harali temporarily while their parents were away for sugarcane harvest season. Hematai was working on creating an English-Gormati bilingual picture book with them. She had worked with students at Harali before, to create an English storybook with visuals. The students themselves came up with the story and had drawn visuals themselves. Similar to the previous project, we started with some storytelling sessions.
In the first session, students were asked to narrate Gormati stories that could inspire a narrative for the book. A girl next to me asked another: “कांइ बोले छ?” (What are they talking about?)
“म्हन्जे हापल्या भाषेत बोलाच” (That means we speak in our language”).
Did that mean not everybody refers to the language as Gormati? So I asked the students afterwards – what do you call the language you speak in?
There was a confused pause. आमची भाषा? (Our language?)
There had not been a need to name the language they spoke. There was no situation where they had to talk about their language as a thing. They interacted amongst themselves a certain way and in school they had to learn Marathi, a named language and a subject of study. We had created the need to name by asking questions about their non-Marathi practice.
“Named languages are abstractions from social activity of languaging. It is the linguists who socially constructed languages and gave them names.”
– Prof Lee Wei, February 2023
When interviewing parents last summer about language practices, we saw the same thing. After the experience with the students I had started asking questions with the phrase ‘घरची भाषा’ (home language). It worked well as we were talking about how their children transitioned from home language to language of instruction in school. If I didn’t use the word Gormati then most referred to it as आमची भाषा (our language).
In other instances, when asked to speak in Gormati, a couple of facilitators and students who had lived outside the Tanda for an extended period, were anxious. They claimed they could not speak in Gormati. However, observing their natural languaging practice I realised that they go in and out of Gormati and versions of Marathi (peppered with everday English words) when at home or speaking with their peers. Naming their languaging practice probably pushed them to acknowledge their practice as different from ‘standard’ Gormati, whatever that meant for them.
Naming the language in this way created these abstract buckets of Gormati and Marathi as if these were distinct parallel monolingual practices. The biggest struggle moving forward for us at Anandshala is going to be acknoweldging the translanguaging practices, working on the perceptions all of us have about language practice and related power equations, and figuring out what it means for classroom/languaging practice in Anandshala and Anandghar space.
devayani tirthali 