University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Spring 2010 Language, Education, and Empowerment: Voices of Kumauni Young Women in Multilingual India Cynthia Groff University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, and the Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons Recommended Citation Groff, Cynthia, "Language, Education, and Empowerment: Voices of Kumauni Young Women in Multilingual India" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 115. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/115 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/115 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Language, Education, and Empowerment: Voices of Kumauni Young Women in Multilingual India Abstract My research explores the language and education situation in the Kumaun region of North India from the perspectives of rural Kumauni young women and in light of their views on empowerment and their aims for the future. My questions address language and education issues in the Kumaun 1) in relation to national policies and local ideologies, 2) as experienced and negotiated by young women, and 3) as applied in a unique Gandhian educational context. Based at Lakshmi Ashram, a Gandhian boarding school serving disadvantaged girls, I used ethnographic methods, focusing on a group of Kumauni young women. National-level language planning through the Indian Census, Constitution, and educational policies minimize some diversity. Locally, discourses about language and dialect, or bhasha and boli, and mother tongue allow for flexible categories and identities. Medium of instruction also takes new meaning through informal multilingual classroom practices.