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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka

Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka

Devotta, Neil

Paperback

Series: Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific

General Political ScienceIndian & South Asian History

ISBN10: 0804749248
ISBN13: 9780804749244
Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr
Published: Apr 9 2004
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.24 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In the mid-1950s, Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese politicians began outbidding one another on who could provide the greatest advantages for their community, using the Sinhala language as their instrument. The appeal to Sinhalese linguistic nationalism precipitated a situation in which the movement to replace English as the country's official language with Sinhala and Tamil (the language of Sri Lanka's principal minority) was abandoned and Sinhala alone became the official language in 1956. The Tamils' subsequent protests led to anti-Tamil riots and institutional decay, which meant that supposedly representative agencies of government catered to Sinhalese preferences and blatantly disregarded minority interests. This in turn led to the Tamils' mobilizing, first politically then militarily, and by the mid-1970s Tamil youth were bent on creating a separate state.

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