Coloniality Encounters: Sinhala as it should be spoken
Continuing anecdotes of my lived experience of how coloniality played out in my own life My primary and secondary schooling was at Ladies’ College, a fee-levying private, girls’ school, founded by the Church Missionary Society in 1900. It had been my mother’s alma mater as well. In her time, the school was largely run by missionaries, instruction was in English and my mother followed Latin as her second language, not Sinhala. I saw two missionary Principals in my time - Miss Simon and Miss Hitchcock, but educational reforms in the country meant that all of us with Sinhalese and Tamil parents had to follow classes in SInhala or Tamil There was a small English medium for girls who were neither SInhalese nor Tamil or who had mixed parentage. Even though the classroom work was in the local languages, the rest of our school life was conducted in English. I learned Sinhala as a subject and even though I had this very anglophilic background, and a home and social ...