Showing people how it could be benificial to create material in their mother tongue would hardly be the sort of thing to get gongchandang pissed off at you.
In fact, despite an existing policy of minority language education in China, there is usually a vast shortage of materials and they often have to use putonghua textbooks even though the kids may not know how to read them.
Mark
On 05/06/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
Delirium wrote:
As you noted, the choice is a political one, and I'm not sure we ought to be in the business of running political campaigns. Providing resources for anyone to work on a Wikipedia in any language they choose, sure; but to actively promote the use of particular languages over other languages isn't our place.
If I understand correctly, it's not a political issue in the sense of being controversial, it's a political issue in that polticians all want to do something about it.
Well, it *is* a political issue in the sense of being controversial. What the proper arrangement of languages should be in India is quite a hot-button issue. For example, to what extent should the country have a common language, at least as a second or third language that people can use to communicate with each other? If there is to be some such language, should it be English or Hindi? A previous BJP government tried to expand the teaching of Hindi as a second language in non-Hindi-speaking areas, in order to help it supplant English as the common-denominator language, but met with fierce resistance from non-Hindi-speakers.
In other countries the issue is even more inflamed---consider, for example, the Tamil language in Sri Lanka, or the Tibetan language in China. I don't really think this is a mess we should wander into.
-Mark
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