In Nepal, the language policy and planning (LPP) phenomenon has been embedded in complex social structures such as histories, social class, ethnicity, caste, and religion. Language education policy decision-making in schools, therefore, is affected by several discourses pertaining to these social structures, and to values. While the complex interplay of social, educational, geopolitical, and economic aspects of national and international languages has been well documented in the research literature (see, Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016; Poudel & Choi, 2021), how discursive forces such as globalisation, nationalism, ethnicity, social inequalities and equity intersect as inherent part of policy-crafting in the schools' LEP in Nepal deserves scholarly attention.
We bring in the construct of 'intersectionality', as well as discourse, to understand how intersecting discursive forces collectively shape LEP decisions at the school level in Nepal. The intersectionality approach does not necessarily involve discourse analysis that adopts analytic tools for exploring the values in the texts (talks and written). We take policies (both formed and enacted) as outcomes of discoursal contestations or negotiations of multiple material (e.g., economic) and social (e.g., identity and mobility) orientations of the subjects of the discourses.
Moreover, the recent emergence of increasingly mobile communities has brought multiple but interlocking discursive forces such as globalisation, neoliberal capitalism, nationalism and ethnolinguistic identity into schools and have affected the language policy choices. Some of these are aligned with each other and thus create synergy, while others are in conflict and cancel each other out. In such contexts, the theory of intersectionality as an analytical framework (Gay, 2018) unravels the relationships between different but co-existing and interconnected forces shaping LEP.
It also reports how policy actors in Nepal's schools reference dominant (e.g., globalisation and nationalism) and dominated (local ethnolinguistic) discourses and their power relationships while making LPP decisions. The dominant forces, such as globalisation, neoliberal marketisation, and nationalism, have attributed to ascendence of English-only monolingualism-in-practice in the schooling contexts of Nepal since the beginning of formal schooling in mid-nineteenth century, contrasting with macro multilingual policies' imagined goal of sustaining linguistic diversity that has promoted ethnic/indigenous languages since the last decade of twentieth century. Hence, these findings have important implications for Nepal and similar multilingual contexts globally in relation to their language policy and planning initiatives that aim at promoting linguistic diversity.
References
Canagarajah, S., & De Costa, P. (2016). Introduction: Scales analysis, and its uses and prospects in educational linguistics. Language and Education, 34, 1–10.
Gay, G. (2018). Foreword: Considering another view of intersectionality. In N. P. Carter & M. Vavrus (Eds.), Intersectionality of race, ethnicity, class and gender in teaching and teacher education (pp. vii–vxi). Brill Sense.
Johnson, D. C. (2011). Critical discourse analysis and the ethnography of language policy. Critical Discourse Studies, 8(4), 267–279.
Poudel, P. P., & Choi, T.-H. (2021). Policymakers' agency and the structure: The case of medium of instruction policy in multilingual Nepal. Current Issues in Language Planning, 22(1-2), 79–98.
