THAILAND FOCUS November 3rd, 2014: Historians, academics and activists believe a pilot project designed to revive the local Arab-Malay script in the Deep South could help build peace in that troubled region through recognition and respect for local culture. The script, known as jawi, was banned many decades ago as rulers in Bangkok put pressure on the local ethnic Malay population to assimilate into mainstream central Thai culture and language. Central Thai, as opposed to regional dialects in other parts of the Kingdom, essentially became the national language and was adopted for education across the country. Now a pilot project and a campaign in the ethnic-Malay and Muslim majority five provinces of the Deep South is attempting to breathe new life into the unique language and culture of the region. The five provinces are Pattani, Songkhla, Satun, Narathiwat and Yala. The pilot project ‘Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB MLE) in Thailand’s Deep-South’ is a joint effort by Mahidol University, UNICEF and the Thailand Research Fund. It is being implemented by the Center for Documentation and Revitalization of Endangered Languages and Cultures, part of Mahidol University. First and foremost, the project was designed for the educational benefit of ethnic Malay children in the area. Research from a wide range of countries has shown that children do better in school and are more likely to stay in school and graduate if they are first taught in their mother tongue, or the language spoken at home. Gradually, they are shifted towards learning the national language as a language of instruction during primary schooling. But peace activists also believe that the respect for local culture inherent in allowing, recognizing and using the language in school and other official environments can contribute to alleviating the long-simmering ethnic and cultural tensions that have plagued the five provinces. “We have to preserve our cultural uniqueness,” local historian Ismail Ishaq Benjasmith told the AFP news agency after teaching a jawi class at a religious school in Pattani. “It is a small issue but it feeds into violence, because our history has been changed by the government and little by little people get angry.” Although jawi is widely taught in religious schools, only a handful of state-run schools in the Deep South are part of the mother-tongue program. Ethnic Malay children in those schools have been performing better on average on tests and in classes than their counterparts studying in schools without the program. That raises hopes they will stay in school and more likely integrate into national culture while retaining their cultural identity and heritage. Benjasmith said that suppressing language is suppressing culture, and that years of cultural degradation have increased support for insurgents in the area. In response, he has been leading a campaign to use jawi script and names on official signposts for every village in the five provinces, in addition to Thai script. So far, only a dozen or so villages have been able to erect signs with jawi names. But his goal is that every one of the more than 2,000 villages in the region will do the same. He intends to seek the support of the government in Bangkok to implement his ideas as a peace-building measure. thaiembdc.org/dcdp/?q=node/753
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 01:30:00 +0000
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