International Mother Language Day

While many applications in the domain of e-commerce, payments have managed to achieve inclusion through introducing languages, EdTech apps have a lot of catching to do

International Mother Language Day is observed on 21st February since 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. The theme of this years International Mother Language Day has been coined as “Fostering multilingualism for inclusion in education and society”[1]

UNESCO notes that this year’s observance is “a call on policymakers, educators and teachers, parents and families to scale up their commitment to multilingual education, and inclusion in education to advance education recovery in the context of COVID-19.” [2]

With increasing penetration of internet, especially in tier 2 and 3 cities, Google has found that 90% of the new internet users are consuming content in vernacular medium. They found that adoption of vernacular entertainment and chat applications is greatest, followed by digital news and social media platforms[3]

Google has been the frontrunner in using these insights to bring products which appeal to “Bharat” – launching AI Assistants, features in Google Maps and other products. Even in the India Digitization fund announced at the peak of COVID19 pandemic in July 2020, they identified “enabling affordable access and information for every Indian in their own language, whether it’s Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi or any other” as the first focus area important to India’s digitization[4]

Unsurprisingly, every app these days has the feature of using in vernacular languages, even extending customer support and voice notifications in vernacular languages. [5]

Screenshots from WhatsApp, Flipkart and PhonePe. Virtually every app now has the feature of using in mother tongue / vernacular languages

Mother Language in Education:

While several applications, including e-commerce, payments have managed to penetrate into rural markets by implementing the language features, lot needs to be done in the EdTech space. The challenges here are different. Mere translation of the content or instructions would not help the learner understand the concepts.

Globally 40% of the population does not have access to an education in a language they speak or understand. Numerous studies have proven the effectiveness and importance of teaching in mother language especially in earlier years of school education. The national education policy recommends that “the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, but preferably till Grade 8 and beyond, will be the home language/mother tongue/local language/regional language.”[6]

Only 24% of the students, out of more than 25crore, study in English Medium. While Hindi medium caters to around 40% of the students, the remaining 36% of the students are studying in vernacular medium – most of them in mother tongue.

Schoolnet has experienced that the problem of teaching in language other than mother tongue is particularly visible in the schools managed by Tribal Welfare Departments. Students attending these schools, who speak various dialects as their mother tongue, are taught in the nearest regional language or English. In this process they end up facing an uphill task in foundational learning and transition from primary education to higher secondary and thereon to higher education.

Odisha is the only state to formally incorporate MLE into its education system, and that too only for its tribal areas. In 2007, the Odisha government introduced a programme in which the mother tongue of students from scheduled tribes is used as the medium of instruction in primary school. Odia is taught as the second language from Grade II and English from Grade III. Tribal languages continue to be taught as subjects after primary school.[7]

NEP also suggests that more higher education institutions and more programmes in higher education to use the mother tongue/local language as a medium of instruction to increase GER and to promote vibrancy across all languages.

Scope for EdTech

Technology has immense power of reaching out to large number of people at lower costs compared to human intervention. The objective of socially conscious edtech apps should be to reach out to these people who do not have any choice.

Currently the large players in EdTech have developed their applications to cater predominantly to the English speaking Metro school population only. The so-called rural student or those studying in vernacular medium are supported only through smaller and local edtech organizations

Note: this blog was first posted on Geneo blog

[1] https://en.unesco.org/commemorations/motherlanguageday [2] Ibid [3] India’s Mobile-First Ecosystem in Numbers, Google [4] https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/investing-in-indias-digital-future/ [5] https://blog.phonepe.com/building-a-seamless-payment-experience-for-millions-of-indians-6b25ef086503 [6] National Education Policy 2020 [7] https://www.indiaspend.com/why-early-learning-in-mother-tongue-is-more-effective-but-hard-to-implement-in-india/