The language or one of the languages with special legal status in a country and is used by its government to run its operations conduct business in courts, parliament, administration, and education.
Published in Chapter:
Challenges for Inclusive Education Through Home Languages in the Caribbean Part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands: Challenging Colonial and Neo-Colonial Beliefs About the Role of Languages in Education
Eric Mijts (University of Aruba, Aruba), Ellen-Petra Kester (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), and Nicholas G. Faraclas (University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus, Puerto Rico)
Copyright: © 2021
|Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-4075-6.ch009
Abstract
Over the past decades, an increasing number of initiatives aimed at the introduction of the use of home languages of the majority of the populations of the territories of the Caribbean part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in education, governance, and the judiciary have been the subject of lively and sometimes acrimonious debate. In this chapter, the authors discuss an inventory of popular beliefs on the adequateness for academic use and status of the different languages in the Caribbean part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to understand the processes that underly the resistance to moves toward inclusive education in home languages of the majority of the populations of these islands. This inventory is produced by the three authors of this chapter, who at various levels have investigated attitudes and beliefs related to language in general, and the adoption of the former colonizer's state tradition and language regime in particular, in Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, St. Eustatius, and St. Maarten.