I am grateful to Neth Prak, Sochea Kim and Heng Roeung for their precious collaboration during field research, and the numerous people, Bunong villagers, teachers, NGO workers, government representatives who accepted to offer me some of their time to talk about multilingual education. I would also like to thank all those who gave me precious feedback and editing advice on this paper, including Nicolas Salem-Gervais and Rich Garella.
1In 2003, a conference on “Language Development, Language Revitalization and Multilingual Education in Minority Communities in Asia” took place in Bangkok. It sparked the creation, a year later, of the Mother Tongue-Based Multi-Lingual Education (MTB-MLE) Working Group, based at UNESCO Bangkok. This body, assembling representatives of United Nations agencies and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), has been working to put multilingual education on the regional policy agenda. In addition to regularly organizing large international conferences, it has participated in the publication of a broad range of documents, including reports, case studies, manuals, and an advocacy kit. Cambodia has been a focus of this effort from its inception.
- 1 Bilingual education, and multilingual education refer here to “the use of a learner’s strongest lan (...)
2At the 2003 conference, representatives of the NGO CARE gave a talk on the Highland Children’s Education Project that their organisation had started implementing in the north-eastern province of Ratanakiri. Among seven “case studies of good practice in Asia” in the 2007 UNESCO publication on “Mother Tongue-based Literacy Programmes,” Cambodia is cited for a non-formal bilingual education government program in the neighbouring province of Mondulkiri, carried out in collaboration with the International Cooperation Cambodia (ICC)’s local multilingual education project.1 More recently, the Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport’s Multilingual Education National Action Plan, which sets guidelines to develop multilingual education within government schools and was adopted in 2015, has been repeatedly cited as one of the most progressive texts on the topic in Southeast Asia.
- 2 For a critical reflection on the recent official distinction between ethnic minorities and indigeno (...)
- 3 Ironside’s figure of 221,948 persons is based on the 2019 National Census and on World Bank data fr (...)
3However, this apparent success story and Cambodia’s image as a regional role model need to be contextualized and scrutinized. Ethno-linguistically, although Cambodia is comparatively homogenous relative to its neighbours in the region, its image of an ethnically uniform nation is politically constructed, and statistics need to be relativized (Frewer 2014). The Khmer make up around 90% of the population. The remainder is made up mostly of “ethnic minorities” (ជនជាតិភាគតិ/chun cheat pheak tech) that are not considered indigenous, such as the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cham, and the Lao, and are not included in the multilingual education programs at the centre of this paper.2 The so-called “indigenous ethnic minorities” (ជនជាតិដើមភាគតិច/chun cheat daeum pheak tech) constitute only a small minority, officially less than 2%, estimated in 2020 as about 222,000 persons (Ironside 2022: 382).3 Most of the people who fall within this category live in the north-eastern highlands in Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri provinces and in neighbouring Stung Treng and Kratie provinces. Some dwell closer to the lowland Khmer, among them the Kui who live in the more central and northern provinces of Kompong Thom, Preah Vihear, Kratie and Stung Treng, as well as some very small Pearic-speaking groups, in the country’s western provinces of Battambang, Pursat and Koh Kong (Map 1). Of the latter, only the Kui are involved in a relatively recent multilingual education project.
Map 1. Cambodia’s...
Map 1. Cambodia’s indigenous minorities
Map published in 2006 by the NGO Forum of Cambodia (Khmer daoem=Chong, Punong=Bunong)
4Much remains to be understood about the pre-colonial history of these peoples, but it appears clear that the highland inhabitants had remained largely outside of the Khmer central power until the beginning of the 20th century, when the French colonial forces managed to “pacify” what they had identified as rebellious Hinterland (Guérin 2008). With their integration into the Cambodian nation, reinforced after the country’s independence, the highland inhabitants were exposed to a range of assimilation policies that aimed to make them fit into the Khmer mould (Guérin et al. 2003; Scheer 2012; Padwe 2013). The violence of these policies, which involved cultural humiliation, land expropriation, forced displacement and military repression, led to local attempts to resist (Bourdier 2020; Scheer 2022), but not to any consolidated ethno-nationalist movement.
5Since the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements, which aimed at ending two decades of war and conflict, and at transforming Cambodia into a liberal democracy, the international community’s large influence contributed to the official recognition of “indigenous ethnic minorities” (a new generic term that appeared in the 2001 Land Law), endowed with special rights, notably to collective land ownership. However, the development era that began in the same period was also synonymous with massive land expropriations throughout Cambodia (e.g. Springer 2015; Diepart & Schoenberger 2016), not least in the highlands (e.g. Leemann & Nikles 2017; Bourdier 2019). For many indigenous minority inhabitants of the forested North East, the first multilingual education projects arrived around the same time as the companies and speculators who caused large-scale loss of land and access to natural resources.
6These past and present political contexts, and the ways in which they played out in the highlands, need to be kept in mind when examining how multilingual education evolved in Cambodia. There is abundant literature, notably in the fields of educational science and policy analysis, but it tends to strongly focus on the present, and to pay little attention to the broader political context. To complement the existing literature and further account for Cambodia’s historical-political specificities, I first provide a broad overview of past politics on languages in education in the north-eastern highlands, and then look at the contemporary promotion of mother tongue-based multilingual education and at how this new policy idea was appropriated by various actors.
7I rely on secondary sources, notably the rich body of literature on the past two decades of multilingual education efforts in Cambodia, as well as on primary sources, both archival and ethnographic. I gathered some complementary historical information at the National Archives of Cambodia, as well as through interviews carried out since 2008 with various historical witnesses. Regarding more recent developments, I draw on long-term fieldwork in Cambodia, with indigenous persons who have been involved with multilingual education, as well as on interviews with government officials and with representatives of international organizations and NGOs, on provincial and national levels. While I try to address past and contemporary education among Cambodia’s indigenous minorities by looking at the highlands as broadly as possible, the first-hand information from the local level stems exclusively from my research with Bunong people in Mondulkiri. I have been learning Bunong since 2009 with the invaluable help of my colleague Neth Prak, who also accompanied me in much of my early research. Over the past five years, I had the chance to work with Sochea Kim and Heng Roerng, who helped me with the language and provided their engaged reflections.
8To understand how people in Cambodia have been making sense of mother tongue-based multilingual education today, it is important to understand how the various languages spoken in the country were politically addressed in the past. The focus is on the region that constitutes contemporary Mondulkiri and, to a lesser degree, on Ratanakiri.
- 4 Cambodia’s king Norodom signed a treaty with the French that largely ceded power to the French, who (...)
9The French established their Protectorat over Cambodia in 1863, but it was not until about the 1930s that they gained control over the north-eastern highlands.4 At the beginning of the 20th century, the central administration’s influence had only reached a little beyond the Mekong and up the western slopes of the Annamite highlands to a few Stieng and Bunong villages that had submitted. In 1904, the province of Stung Treng, formerly the southernmost province of Laos, became attached to Cambodia (Forest 1980: 167-180). The French immediately started deploying their administrative machinery in this area (Guérin 2008: 195-204), whose eastern part constitutes today’s Ratanakiri province. After a first failed attempt to pacify the still-unsubdued southern part of the hinterland, in the early 1930s the French managed to impose their power in today’s Mondulkiri province. In the wake of their victory over the “rebellious” highlanders, they established military posts and tried to implement their mission civilisatrice (civilising mission) through medical centres and schools. Drawing on Mathieu Guérin’s rich archival research and on some primary sources, I will illustrate the linguistically inconsistent education models that the French promoted in the Cambodian highlands. This necessitates some attention to the influence of colonial politics in neighbouring Annam.
10The French colonial power’s approach to education among the north-eastern minorities initially consisted in imposing the Khmer majority model. Guérin (2008: 312-313) relates that in the early 1920s a school was established in Veunsai, in the far north of today’s Ratanakiri province. In 1921 it hosted eighteen students, seven of whom were of indigenous minority descent. They all received a scholarship and appeared eager to study, but budget cuts rapidly put an end to this first initiative. A second school was built in 1931 in Snoul, on the southern slopes of the highlands, among Stieng peoples who had been subdued earlier by the central power. By 1935, the chief of Cambodia’s education department reported that of a total of 40 students there, 20 were Stieng and none completed their primary education.
- 5 Lettre de Suzanne Karpélès au résident supérieur du Cambodge, du 31 mai 1933, anc/rsc 9144, Guérin (...)
- 6 Lettre du résident supérieur au délégué du Haut-Chhlong, 7 octobre 1933, anc/rsc 9144. Excerpt tran (...)
11Meanwhile, the “pacification” of the hinterland of what was then called Haut-Chhlong, which is now part of Mondulkiri province, led to the establishment of a pagoda school next to the military camp of Le Rolland, in Bunong territory. In May of that year, Suzanne Karpélès, the secretary of the then-recently created Buddhist Institute, had written to the highest representative of the French colonial power in Cambodia, the résident supérieur, to suggest the development of Buddhism in the highlands.5 She even travelled to the North East in the company of the Venerable That, a Sanskrit professor of the École supérieure de Pali in order to further the local populations’ Khmerisation. Karpélès’s initiative received official support from the résident supérieur, Achille Silvestre, who presented the teaching of the Buddhist moral in conjuncture with the Khmer language as “one of the best instruments of penetration and taming of our primitives.”6 A Bunong monk was sent to Le Rolland to ensure, in Karpélès’s words, “a good Khmer colonization work and to attract many of his compatriots” while the French worked at constructing the pagoda and classroom (Guérin 2008: 314).
- 7 Guérin lists Bu La, Chbar valley Chong Phlas, Bu Plok.
12In 1934, the résident supérieur reported to the gouverneur général of Indochina that the small pagoda constituted an “undeniable centre of attraction” for the surrounding Bunong, adding that one young student learned to read and write Khmer within a few months. In addition to this pagoda school and a second one established next to the military post of Gatille, he also planned to open schools in four other places (Guérin 2008: 129).7 However, apart from a few highly touted exceptions, the pagoda schools were met with little interest, and the Buddhist monks’ efforts to promulgate their religious practice among the spirit worshipping Bunong even provoked some irritation (ibid. : 129, 314).
13Only a few years after the establishment of the pagoda school, schools of a different type were launched in the same area.
- 8 Rapports et correspondances concernant la délégation du Haut-Chhlong, Camp le Rolland, résidence de (...)
- 9 Smith (1933). I thank Mathieu Guérin for having informed me about this document.
- 10 Note de présentation. Affectation d’un secrétaire cambodgien des Résidences à la Délégation du Haut (...)
14In 1937, the capitaine délégué Boucher de Crèvecœur, who was in charge of the military camp of Le Rolland, set up a Franco-Biat school and a secular boarding school, where a Khmer teacher taught both in local Biat (today referred to as Bunong-Biat), and in French (Guérin 2008: 129). This first use of an until-then unwritten highland minority language in a Cambodian school was enabled by the publication of a Franco-Biat dictionary by the résident Ernest Hoeffel in 1936, printed in 500 copies. It was based on the work of Roth Chhan, who had been appointed as secretary in Le Rolland but who was killed in March 1935 during an attack by Bunong resistors.8 In this early didactic material, the Latin alphabet was used to represent the Bunong-Biat language, in line with a decree established by the gouverneur général of Indochina on 2 December 1935. There had been an earlier effort to create a writing system for the Bunong language, also using the Latin alphabet, by the American pastor G.H. Smith, whose Dictionary of the Pnôang language, bǐat dialect (Pnôang-English) dates to 1933.9 The French capitaine then in charge of Le Rolland suggested to his superior at the office of political affairs of Indochina that Roth Chhan, as he was attached to the délégation of the Haut-Chhlong, could build upon the pastor’s document. The reaction was categorical; there could be no collaboration with an American missionary that could risk stimulating his “missionary zeal”.10
Fig. 1. Two early...
Fig. 1. Two early efforts to create scripts for the Bunong language: Pastor Gordon Hedderly Smith’s 1933 Dictionary of the Pnoang language, biat dialect, and administrateur Ernest Hoeffel’s 1936 Lexique Franco-Biat
Source and credit: EFEO archives and library.
- 11 According to a 1952 Cambodian press article, the school in Le Rolland was burned down along with th (...)
15The combination of classes in the local language and French, together with a secular boarding school, did not remain limited to Le Rolland. A similar effort, with the Brao and Jarai languages, was made one year later in Veunsai (Guérin 2008: 315-316) and further Franco-Biat schools were established next to the military posts of Gatille and Deshayes (Melville 2000: 12).11 In all these institutions, students were required to dress in khaki uniforms and follow a strict discipline. For three years, they learned French and had practical classes—gardening, rice culture, carpentry, blacksmithing, and sports—taught in both their mother tongue and French (Guérin 2008: 130). Khmer was taught only in the third year as the colonial administration considered it more important to ensure that the highlanders whom they trained would be good intermediaries with the local populations (ibid.: 316).
- 12 English translation by the author. Capitaine de Crèvecœur, mémoire adressé au résident supérieur du (...)
- 13 English translation by the author. Rapport sur la pénétration du capitaine Crèvecœur, 1938 quoted b (...)
16The pioneer of this model in Cambodia, capitaine de Crèvecœur, had already pleaded in 1935 for both safeguarding the Bunong “mentality”, by protecting their “primitive qualities” from an “undesirable khmerisation”, and enabling them, through the teaching of the Cambodian language, writing and culture, “to participate in the well-being of neighbouring population who is richer and more industrious”.12 Although in a 1938 closing report he agreed that there should be a “slow khmerisation” to “elevate the primitives’ intellectual and moral level,” he continued to advocate for France’s duty to protect the “local races.”13 This approach and more specifically the Franco-Biat school of which de Crèvecœur had made himself an advocate were inspired by the work of résident Léopold Sabatier in the neighbouring Annamese highlands.
17Sabatier, who administered Darlac province (now Đắk Lắk province, Vietnam) from 1913 to 1926, had become a key architect of colonial policy towards Indochina’s indigenous minority populations (Guérin 2003: 262). With the support of the résident supérieur of Annam, he produced the 1923 circular “Guiding Principles of the Moï Regions’ Administration,” Moï (or Moy) being a generic term used in Vietnam for the “savage” highlanders. This document largely relied on Sabatier’s mode of governing the Rhadé inhabitants of Darlac (Guérin 2003: 263). Based on the consideration that the highland peoples’ cultures were precious, but threatened by “degeneration,” Sabatier developed a form of rule that valued customary laws and languages and kept the dominant majority at a distance but imposed French leadership. Besides local tribunals relying on customary laws that the French had formalized so as to fit their interests and convictions, the circular also included a section on the creation of “franco-moy” schools, each of which should function with French and the language of the group considered to be dominant in a region. As Guérin (ibid.) notes, this focus on one specific language or dialect in plurilingual areas was based on French criteria and created a hierarchy between groups. Although Sabatier was removed from his position by the latter half of the 1920s, his policies continued to influence governing methods in Indochina.
18In Cambodia, the two Franco-indigenous schools of Veunsai and Le Rolland seem to have been relatively successful (Guérin 2008: 129, 316). Most of the students enrolled in Le Rolland came from prominent Bunong families. An elderly woman from Bu Sra interviewed in 2012 remembered that an influential man from Bu Toy village, who had been an early ally of the French, had come to her village, offering to take children to study in Le Rolland. She and other older interlocutors remembered the name of a Khmer teacher—Pak Semei—who was teaching in their Bunong mother tongue and in French. They reported that some of the Bunong children who completed this schooling were sent to further their studies in the lowlands and later occupied positions within the colonial and later the independent government, becoming a new indigenous elite.
- 14 Rapport du chef de service de l’enseignement sur le fonctionnement du service de l’enseignement au (...)
- 15 Ibid.; Rapport annuel du service de l’enseignement, 1940-41, anc/rsc 2137. See also Guérin (2008: 3 (...)
19While the secular Franco-Moy schools appear to have been more successful among the highland minorities than the Khmer pagoda schools, the two models co-existed, and were supported by the French Protectorate of Cambodia. On one hand, the chief of the education service wrote in 1940 that schools aim at “progressively leading ethnic minorities to mould themselves into Cambodian lifestyle” describing this process as “cultural Khmerization.”14 On the other hand, the education service’s annual reports of 1939-40 and 1940-41 state that the most important aim of the two schools in the highlands is a “cultural Francization” and that teaching Khmer is of secondary importance.15 In the foreword of the Hoeffel dictionary (1936: vi), the mother tongue is presented as a tool to enable the highlanders to become literate, but also to learn French.
- 16 Comparable to the customary laws’ codification that Sabatier launched with the Rhadé coutumier in A (...)
20These two approaches could be seen as illustrating different political priorities: the extension of the Cambodian king’s authority on his kingdom’s margins, or the defence of French colonial power. The deployment of one model rather than of the other could also be related to the specific needs and requirements of the field, as Guérin (2008: 319-320) pointed out. In Stieng villages on the slopes of the highlands that had long since submitted to the central power, Khmer pagoda schools came along with high taxes and land seizures. In the rebellious highlands, indigenous inhabitants were offered classes in their mother tongue, in addition to advantageous taxing, limited Khmer migration and attempts to protect their customs.16 This second model, however, came to a rapid end as Cambodia approached independence.
- 17 Translation by the author of the original French quote “[…] faire [les Phnongs] sentir la nécessité (...)
21Soon after Cambodia achieved its independence in 1953, King Norodom Sihanouk abdicated the throne and committed himself to build a nation-state. One of his Sangkum Reastr Nyium government’s goals, from the mid-1950s to the 1960s, was to turn the population into Cambodian citizens. The highland inhabitants, previously grouped under the generic and often derogatory term Phnong (Cambodian equivalent to Moï/Moy, used in Vietnamese, or Kha in Thai/Lao), were newly designated as Khmer Loeu, or upland Khmer, illustrating the aim of rendering all Cambodians Khmer. However, the Khmerisation process was far from limited to this new labelling, and education was one of the Sangkum government’s tools to make the highland inhabitants fall into the mould of the majority population. Thus, as of 1957, the leadership of Basic Education defined its goals as follows: “[…] to make the [Phnongs] feel the need to learn to read and write Cambodian, teach them to dress, teach them to work” (Meyer 1979 : 686).17
- 18 Évolution du Srok de Chhlong Loeu, anc/Meyer B-675.
22Although the government schools were disconnected from the pagoda, there was a parallel attempt to promote Buddhism in the highlands. A monk was sent to the existing pagoda of Chhlong Loeu, and a second pagoda was constructed in O Reang in the years following independence.18
Fig. 2. Indigenou...
Fig. 2. Indigenous minority student from the Northeastern highlands learning the Khmer alphabet and language during the Sangkum regime
Source and credit: Fonds Meyer – National Archives of Cambodia.
23The building of schools and health centres in these remote regions was heavily publicised in magazines such as the Sangkum. Prince Sihanouk was pictured reaching out to the local Khmer Loeu population, but the gracious images were belied by less gracious politics. With the creation, in 1959 and 1962, of the new provinces of Ratanakiri (formerly part of Stung Treng) and Mondulkiri (formerly part of Kratie), the Sangkum government attempted to tighten its grip over these remote regions by putting them under military administration. One result was violent military repression when Brao and other indigenous inhabitants of Ratanakiri expressed discontent as their land was taken away from them for a state rubber plantation (Pomonti & Thion 1971: 121; Meyer 1971: 196-197).
- 19 Seven elementary schools were opened “in so far unexplored remote corners (Roveak, Péamchiméat, Bou (...)
- 20 Ibid.
- 21 Réalisations par l’autorité Civile dans le domaine de la civilisation des Hautes Régions de Kratié (...)
24In Mondulkiri province we can see Sangkum education politics in action. According to a 1961 report by the governor of Kratie, Tep Sunty, the number of schools in Chhlong Loeu (formerly Haut-Chhlong) district multiplied by three times between 1956-1957 and 1961-1962.19 In 1962 a high school was built in Sen Monorom, the new provincial capital (Meyer 1979: 685). The Bunong teachers who had been trained by the French were replaced by Cambodians from the lowlands (Melville 2000: 15). Further, high-placed friends of the Sangkum (Sahachivin), founded an association to support those students who “continue their secondary education in Kratie-city and in Phnom Penh”.20 In 1961, there were thirty-seven Khmer Loeu students in Kratie high school (collège), one in Phnom Penh and five in apprenticeship in the Chhlong paper-factory.21 At least some of the highland students studying in Kratie were training to become primary school teachers so that they could promote education in their home villages (Bourdier 1996: 405).
- 22 For a critical reading of this endeavor, see Guérin (2008) and Scheer (2012).
25When I discussed Sangkum education with elderly Bunong inhabitants, some mentioned that the school in Le Rolland had continued to exist, with both Khmer and French lessons, and that a new one was created in Bu Sra at the end of the 1950s. According to a man who studied in the new school during the first three years, there was a Bunong teacher and around a hundred pupils from the surrounding villages. To continue beyond grade 3, Bunong students had to go to O Reang or to Sen Monorom, where a Bunong man who had studied in Le Rolland was the director. Pö Mbjaan from Bu Sra, who went to school in Sen Monorom, reported that he lived in a boarding school where he received books and a monthly scholarship, and the food was good. I also discussed with one of the Bunong pupils who had done an apprenticeship in the Chhlong paper factory and who explained that “father-prince” Sihanouk had provided for their studies, along with dried fish, rice, and clothing so that they could focus on their work. This former apprentice remembered that when he was in boarding school in Mondulkiri, during the holidays, the students had been taken on an excursion to Siem Reap, to visit the temples of Angkor and see “images of Khmer Loeu” in the bas-reliefs. This episode illustrates Sangkum politics that consisted in showing the highland inhabitants that they had contributed to build the glorious past Khmer kingdom.22
26The fond memories that some of my interlocutors brought up when talking about this period of their life seem to bear witness to an at least partial success of Sihanouk’s ideological Khmerisation efforts. However, it is important to note that there were surprisingly large numbers of Bunong teachers (and one school director), given the government’s wish to replace them with Khmer. Further, Richard Melville, who was then working for the US government in Cambodia, relativized the official success of the new education program in Mondulkiri, noting that in 1961:
Of the two hundred students who started studying over the past several years, it is reported that sixty finished the fifth grade and took the exam for entrance to secondary school at Kratie, twenty were entered and three finished and were granted entrance to the lycée at Kompong Cham, where only one graduated. (Melville 2000: 21.)
27It is today difficult to verify and complete these figures through field data, but what can be said is that most of my Bunong interlocutors who had entered the Sangkum education system reported that they had to abandon it because of the increasingly disruptive effects of war.
28It is not easy to document the educational experiences of the highland peoples during the turbulence from the late 1960s to 1979, marked by the intensifying Vietnam war and by the Khmer Rouge’s progressive seizure of power in Cambodia. Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri fell under Khmer Rouge control in 1970, after the coup d’état against Prince Sihanouk that marked the beginning of the pro-American Khmer Republic. Although the Khmer Rouge leaders called them “ethnic brothers and sisters” (បងប្អូនជនជាតិភាគតិច/bang peon chun cheat) and praised their unspoiled lifestyle, for most of the highland inhabitants the Maoist ultra-nationalists’ rule was extremely disruptive (Colm & Sim 2007; Bourdier 2020). In Mondulkiri’s Bu Sra region, by 1972 Bunong inhabitants were forcibly displaced to work in the irrigated rice fields of the northern district of Koh Neak. I heard several Bunong persons mention basic Khmer literacy classes that young children could follow for one dry season, but there do not seem to have been any concerted education efforts.
29Some of the minority peoples managed to escape the Khmer Rouge by crossing the border to Vietnam or Laos (Baird 2020; Scheer 2022), including Bunong inhabitants of Mondulkiri’s south-east who fled to South Vietnam, where some of them enrolled in literacy classes during the first years of their exile. Their experience appears particularly meaningful as it continued to influence them after they were repatriated to Mondulkiri years later. Many Bunong villagers crossed the border in late 1969 and early 1970, as American B-52s bombed the border area, and took refuge in the camps next to the Special Forces bases of Bu Bong and Duc Lap. Despite the tumult of war, several of my Bunong interlocutors mentioned having taken literacy classes in their mother tongue during their time in the refugee camp. According to a Bunong man who fled to Bu Bong with his family, he learned to read and write Bunong from an American and a Vietnamese Protestant teacher. Several of my interlocutors recalled the literacy program as the one of “N’Guh’s mother hitting the dog” (see fig. 3), in reference to one of the initial textbook’s very first lessons.
Fig. 3. Excerpt o...
Fig. 3. Excerpt of the Bunong language primer Gap ntom nti uanh
Source and credit: co-authored by Richard Phillips, Dieu Mui and Y Kem Kporr, and published in 1971 by the South Vietnamese Department of Education.
30The literacy primer that my interlocutors referred to was part of a collection of Bunong pedagogical titles that the South Vietnamese Department of Education published in 1971 and over the following years. These textbooks were produced with the support of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (today SIL Global), an American Faith-Based Organization (FBO) that had a contract with the U.S. Department of Education since 1957 to create primers in the highland minority languages (Salemink 2003: 216). In 1967, the Ministry of Education in collaboration with SIL launched a bilingual education program, which received substantial funding from USAID until 1971 (Stoll 1982: 88). According to SIL members, their organization prepared 200 titles in 17 languages and trained as many as 800 teachers for formal and non-formal literacy programs in South Vietnam (Pike & Brend 1977: 47, 50).
31The promotion of mother tongue-based education in the Central Highlands was, in the context of an increasingly bewildering war, far from neutral in motivation. The highland minorities had been alienated by the South Vietnamese government’s aggressive post-independence policies, causing land loss and acculturation. From 1955 onwards, some of them gathered to form an ethno-nationalist movement, which would become the Front Uni de Lutte des Races Opprimées (FULRO). To win these strategically important people back over, the Saigon regime’s American allies tried to conquer their “hearts and minds.” Offering classes in local mother tongues constituted a response to one of the FULRO’s grievances, which was surely provoked in part by the previous existence of Franco-Moy schools (Dharma 2006).
- 23 For further details on the relation between SIL and WBT, see Aldridge (2018).
32For SIL, the creation of writing systems and literacy materials for languages that until then had none (or only a barely formalised recent one) were first steps towards rendering the Bible accessible in every language of the world. This was an implicit goal of this Protestant organisation whose origins go back to 1934, rendered more explicit in the name of its sister-institution, Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT), created in 1942 by William Cameron Townsend.23
- 24 Richard Phillips, Dieu Mui and Y Kem Kporr co-authored at least two literacy books (1974), a collec (...)
33The Bunong language textbooks that my interlocutors remembered were co-authored by Richard Phillips, who had come to Vietnam in 1958 as a member of the U.S.-based Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). In a 2010 interview with Richard Phillips and his wife Lillian, he mentioned having moved to Ban Me Thuot in 1960 and studied the Bunong Buneurr dialect from 1961 to 1963 with native speakers in a nearby camp. This camp was one of the places where highland inhabitants had been resettled by the military to create “free-fire zones” elsewhere and to shield them from communist influence. While Richard Phillips was enrolled in a linguistics program at Cornell University, in the U.S., he was also working on the publication of the pedagogical books, as well as on the translation of biblical materials into Bunong.24 The Phillips couple did not mention having collaborated with SIL, but both Christian organizations used to work together on Bible translations in the South-Vietnamese context of the early 1970s (Gregerson & Smith 2016: 93, 96, 99, 101).
- 25 Similarly, books in Jarai, written in a Latin-based alphabet, were used in Ratanakiri province (Chr (...)
34The victory of North Vietnam in 1975 put an abrupt end to the presence of Americans in the highlands, as well as to the bilingual education program and to the right to Christian worship. However, books, especially Christian songbooks, and other scriptural materials, continued to circulate under the radar, or were hidden to be later recovered. While many young Bunong refugees stayed in Vietnam and started to learn Vietnamese and the quốc ngữ writing in government schools, some mentioned that later, this made it easy for them to read the Bunong materials, as they were also based on the Latin alphabet. When, in 1986, seven years after Cambodia’s liberation from the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese and the Cambodian socialist governments organized a repatriation of Bunong refugees to Mondulkiri, some of the highland dwellers returned with their books among their possessions. These materials continued to be in use in some highland villages when I visited in 2008, even though different and complementary literacy primers had been promoted in the meantime.25
35Having put an end to the violent Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam installed a new government in Cambodia, the Popular Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), and shaped its policies. Like their fellows in Vietnam, the Cambodian highland inhabitants were officially referred to as “ethnic minorities” (ជនជាតិភាគតិច/chun cheat pheak tech), a term supposed to recognize their specific, but equal identity within a socialist pluri-ethnic nation. In practice, however, the dominant majority constituted the model to follow (Guérin et al. 2003: 256). This meant that the language of instruction was, again, exclusively Khmer. The national curriculum merged socialist and Vietnamese revolutionary educational ideals with Cambodian teachers’ pre-war memories to promote a “new socialist man” with a Khmer cultural identity (Ayres 2000: 130). Its concrete implementation in the highlands was complicated though. Cambodia’s education system had suffered immensely from the Khmer Rouge, with 75% of its teachers killed, according to official 1984 PRK statistics (Ayres 2000: 126). Furthermore, north-eastern Cambodia remained difficult to access, which led the government to reward those civil servants who agreed to work there and thus help to re-establish control over the margins (Guérin et al. 2003: 121).
36Mao Bunna, a Khmer man who worked from 1987 to 1989 as a teacher in Sen Monorom, explained in a 2009 interview that he had volunteered to go to Mondulkiri, because this helped him to access the Pedagogical Institute’s training as a language teacher (see also Guérin et al. 2003: 122). He remembered that he and his five fellow teachers had plenty of didactic materials, generously provided by UNICEF, but not many students to teach to in the provincial capital. In his grade 5 class, Mao Bunna stood in front of about 30 pupils, most of whom were the children of Khmer officials. Similarly, most of his few Bunong and Stieng pupils were children of “privileged” indigenous government employees. Besides the school in Sen Monorom (grades 1-8), he had heard about primary schools, some with boarding schools, established across the province. Indeed, in Bu Sra, several people mentioned having gone to a small school where two Bunong teachers were teaching in Khmer. Two of my interlocutors who had been soldiers at that time reported that some of them were given the opportunity to join Khmer literacy classes. While one would need to do further research on education among Cambodia’s highland minorities during the 1980s, it seems fair to say that despite the PRK’s efforts to rebuild the country’s educational institutions, most of the north-eastern inhabitants remained out of reach of any schooling.
37Before turning to the most recent era of “development” that followed the 1991 Paris Peace agreements, it is important to remember that while indigenous minority peoples living in Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri may not have experienced any sustained period of school enrolment, they have encountered or at least heard of a multitude of educational models. Far from being “blank pages,” many of them have already had to make sense of educational politics. Some of my Bunong interlocutors were aware of several school models, ranging from the Franco-Moy, to the Khmer-language instruction, to classes in their mother tongue, but written in a slightly different Latin alphabet. Others remained largely beyond the reach of the various educational efforts. This diversity of experiences needs to be kept in mind when reflecting about the ways in which indigenous peoples have been perceiving and adopting contemporary schooling efforts.
- 26 At the beginning of the 21st century, around 40% of the Cambodian state budget came from foreign ai (...)
38The United Nations Transitional Authority Cambodia (UNTAC) that prepared the 1993 democratic elections in Cambodia came hand in hand with a myriad of international NGOs. Many of these organizations were active in the fields of health care and education (Trannin 2005), services that at that time barely existed. Critics have pointed out that this resulted, in the long run, in the outsourcing of large parts of the country’s social services (Ear 2012), suggesting that the development of local capacity for services including education was diminished.26 I will provide a broad overview of education efforts towards the highland inhabitants over the past three decades, and then explore the understandings that different groups of involved or concerned people have of these efforts.
39Many of the NGOs that entered Cambodia in the early 1990s spoke the language of “Education for All” that was introduced in 1990 at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, by various United Nations bodies and the World Bank. The aim of this agenda was to provide “all poor children” with access to quality primary education by 2000. Later this target was postponed to 2015 and was then injected into the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which still later became the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Throughout, it remained part of the global development agenda that influenced NGO projects and policies in Cambodia. While by 2000, literacy rates were low across the country, a survey conducted by the Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport with UNDP and UNESCO showed that they were lowest among north-eastern highland children (Thomas 2003, see also Dy & Ninomiya 2003). Considering that this particularly weak literacy rate and school enrolment were in part due to language issues, several NGOs launched the first bilingual education projects in this region by the end of the 1990s.
40In 1996, several Christian faith-based organizations, including World Concern, the Danish Santal Mission and Interact, started the first bilingual education effort of the development era in Ratanakiri province. These NGOs formalized their collaboration by creating ICC in 1999 and setting up the Ratanakiri Integrated Development Education (RIDE) project. ICC grew over the years, with notably SIL joining the network. The NGO worked closely with the Ministry of Education’s Department of Non-Formal Education to set up community-based schools outside of the formal education system for young speakers of Austro-Asiatic, Môn-Khmer languages: Tampuan, Brao (Thomas 2003), as well as Kreung and Kavet.27 While ICC proposed to rely on the Latin alphabet-based scripts developed in the 1960s in Vietnam, the Cambodian government rejected this option and requested a writing system based on the Khmer alphabet instead (Benson & Wong 2017; see also Gregerson 2009). This initial bilingual education project, and the substantial effort it required, from the creation of new orthographies to the development of textbooks and readers, laid the groundwork for subsequent endeavours in this direction (e.g. Thomas 2003; Wright & Boun 2015: 521).
41The early years of the new millennium were synonymous with an important set of government recognitions. In 2003, the National Language Institute of the Royal Academy of Cambodia and Ministry of Education representatives contributed to the official approval of Khmer-based writing systems for five languages—Brao, Bunong, Kavet, Kreung, and Tampuan—that ICC had developed with community language groups in Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri and with the linguistic expertise from SIL and the Evangelical Mission to the Unreached International (EMU) (Ball & Smith 2025). One year earlier, in 2002, CARE International, with the support of UNICEF and AusAID, worked closely with the Provincial Office of Education Youth and Sport (POEYS) of Ratanakiri, as it launched the Highlander Community Education Program, its bilingual pilot project that initiated community schools in Tampuan and Kreung languages in Ratanakiri province. Notably, CARE developed primers compatible with the national curriculum. Both ICC and CARE signed Memorandums of Understanding with the Ministry of Education in 2002 and 2003 respectively, confirming the official approval of their NGOs’ multilingual education programs in the highlands (Thomas 2003; see also Sun 2009). In addition to the projects in Ratanakiri, in 2004 ICC launched non-formal education classes among the Bunong speakers of Mondulkiri. A few years later, Mondulkiri’s Provincial Office of Education initiated a Non-Formal Education pilot project with the support of UNESCO Cambodia and the expertise of ICC.
Fig. 4. Cover of ...
Fig. 4. Cover of the Bunong language literacy primer 1
Source and credit: Co-authored by eight Bunong language specialists, including local and foreign ICC members, first published in 2007 by ICC, with grants from the Finnish Evangelical Mission and the Ministry of Foreign Affrairs Finland, and TEAR Australia
- 28 ICC translated pedagogical materials (90 titles in 2011) that CARE had produced in Tampuan and Kreu (...)
42ICC’s and CARE’s capacity to work closely with the provincial and national authorities is widely described as having contributed to the Cambodian government’s increased involvement in multilingual education. The Ministry of Education took over responsibility for bilingual community schools on the ground, first in 2007 in Ratanakiri, and a few years later in Mondulkiri, Strung Treng, Kratie and Preah Vihear (Benson & Wong 2017; Wright & Boun 2015: 523; Ball & Smith 2025).28 The Education Law that came into effect in 2007 gave “authorities the right to choose the language(s) of instruction, by issuing special sub-decrees or decisions in areas where Khmer Loeu or Indigenous languages are spoken” (Kosonen 2013: 44). In 2010, the Ministry of Education signed the Guidelines on Implementation of Bilingual Education Programs for Indigenous Children in Highland Provinces, which were inspired by the community school model that CARE had piloted in Ratanakiri (ibid.). This document defines the expansion of bilingual education in the five specified provinces and determines the use of the mother tongue as a language of instruction, from grades 1 to 3, decreasing from 80% to 60% and then to 30% before shifting over to all-Khmer instruction in grade 4 (ibid.: 45).
43Drawing on these guidelines and on the door opened in the 2007 Education Law, the 2013 sub-decree (prakas) on “identification of languages for Khmer national learners who are Indigenous people” makes it possible for those Cambodian citizens who identify as “indigenous ethnic minorities” to receive initial instruction in their mother tongue rather than in the Khmer national language (Wong 2015; Benson & Wong 2017). It did so by anchoring the terms of multilingual education defined in the 2010 Guidelines within the national education system. A further step was taken in the 2014-18 Multilingual Education National Action Plan (MENAP), that was officially approved in 2015 and resulted from five years of collaboration between CARE, UNICEF, and the Ministry of Education (Benson & Wong 2017). Described as a roadmap to implement—fund, improve and expand—multilingual education in Cambodia (ibid.), this action plan involved integrating existing multilingual community schools into state schools and working towards the recognition of community teachers as government teachers.
44By 2019, it was determined that more than 92 preschools and 80 primary schools were delivering multilingual education in the country, and in 2020 anecdotal reports estimated that 6,747 children were enrolled in these programs (Ball & Smith 2019, 2025). While the National Action Plan’s goal of increasing the quantity of multilingual classes and pupils was largely met, its aim of also improving the education model failed, according to various evaluations (Benson & Wong 2017; Ball & Smith 2019). It was nevertheless described as a “basis for planning and dedicating a budget” for the Ministry of Education and its development partners, “giving MLE a relatively secure position in primary education for the foreseeable future” (Benson & Wong 2017: 6). Indeed, the MENAP was followed by the Multilingual Education Action Plan (MEAP), that covers the period from 2019 to 2023 (Ball & Smith 2025). This latter Action Plan focused on improving the quality of multilingual education, notably in the field of teacher training, and opened the program to speakers of Jarai, an Austronesian language.
45When discussing these multilingual education efforts, in early 2020, with a representative of Mondulkiri’s Provincial Office of Education, he mentioned that it had become difficult to implement teacher trainings and regular visits over the last two years, as there was no more support from the NGOs. This was corroborated by a Bunong teacher, who in 2024 regretted that it had been a while since there last was a training. Also, in 2024, another provincial education official explained that the provincial department had stopped expanding MLE schools in Mondulkiri. In a village school near the provincial capital, that was part of the MLE program, there was by then only one two-hour class per week given in Bunong, on Saturday mornings.
46This account of the recent development of multilingual education in Cambodia shows a process that unfolds through the involvement and long-term collaboration of some committed groups of actors. The community-based, non-formal bilingual education that ICC launched in Ratanakiri and later in Mondulkiri, and—importantly—the orthographies and the pedagogical materials that it created, constituted a steppingstone for CARE’s extension of MLE into formal education, which itself became a model for the Cambodian government’s later institutionalization. While ICC, with the important involvement of SIL, provided linguistic expertise, CARE offered organizational assistance on the ground, and UNICEF contributed to national-level institutionalization, involving relevant authorities as well as local indigenous minority representatives. This reading largely echoes the narrative of writings (e.g. Benson & Wong 2017; Ball & Smith 2019), which I found consistent with observations I have made in Mondulkiri and Phnom Penh since 2008. It is interesting to note that several of these academics have also actively taken part in the development of multilingual education in the region, but it would lead us too far here to delve into the complex intermingling of knowledge production, policy making and project implementation.
47I do not aim to provide an exhaustive, overall assessment of the results that multilingual education has produced over the past three decades, a task for which I am not equipped and that others have dealt with in great detail (e.g. Middleborg 2005; Benson 2011; Wong 2015; Lee, Watt & Frawley 2015; Ball & Smith 2019; Wright, Boun & Chan 2022). Neither do I consider, as some overall critiques do (Christie 2015), that the promotion of multilingual education, along with other development practices, systematically depoliticizes and silences Cambodia’s indigenous communities. While recognizing that the rule of experts renders technical what is political, I join Tania Li in asserting that “this operation should be seen as a project, not a secure accomplishment” (Li 2007: 10). Hence, I consider it important to appreciate the ways in which multilingual education has been understood in Cambodia, among those who contributed to launch it, as well as among those who are supposed to benefit from it.
48The conversations that my Bunong colleague Neth and I had in 2015 and 2016 with a highly placed representative of the Ministry of Education who had been working on multilingual education since its beginnings, were rich and partly surprising. The Khmer official expressed her pride about Cambodia’s achievements in the field of multilingual education, noting that the country was cooperating with NGOs as few others did in Asia. She explained in detail how the government had been working with both ICC and CARE to put into practice what she referred to as the “bridge program,” leading people from their mother tongue to the Khmer national langue. Reiterating some of the 2015 National Action Plan’s goals, she described multilingual education as aiming “to help the minorities engage with the broader society, so that people can develop together.” She noted that her ministry’s efforts to implement multilingual education were in line with the 2009 national policy on indigenous ethnic minorities’ development. Similarly, in 2016 a representative of the Department of Ethnic Minority Development said of the inclusion of classes in indigenous minority languages that it was “important for the children to develop in their own language when they are young, and later proceed to higher education” as “they need to understand the law and society, so to go back and teach their own community.”
49The argument for multilingual education did not end here. The experienced Ministry of Education representative further stressed the importance of indigenous minority children learning in their own language and “about their own history and culture,” so as “to express their own ideas, have deeper thinking.” Hence, I was surprised when, asked about her hopes for the future at the very end of our discussion, she said she wished that this special program would soon become unnecessary, as indigenous minority children would come to grow up speaking Khmer at home. While to me, this hope stood in contradiction with the emphasis she had just put on the inherent benefits of letting minority children acquire more knowledge about their own background, it appeared to be echoed by some of her colleagues. According to a 2019 evaluation of the National Action Plan, several senior education authorities “opined that MLE would only be needed until there was sufficient incursion of Khmer citizens into traditionally indigenous communities that children would naturally learn Khmer before starting school” (Ball & Smith 2019, 2025).
50This perception was also reflected in the government’s reluctance to expand the multilingual program beyond the third year of primary education. During one of our interviews with the Ministry of Education representative, she mentioned her concern about a push by NGOs, at an international conference that she had joined, to extend the MLE program up to grade 6. She marked her opposition by stating that they could not waste more time in Cambodia and recalling that it was paramount for (foreign) NGOs to accept the nation, state schools and their curriculum. Another official, who had joined the Ministry of Education more recently, stated in 2016 that there was no political will in Cambodia to maintain indigenous minority languages. By January 2024, one of the representatives in charge of multilingual education in Mondulkiri, explained that if no further schools were added to the program in the province, it was also because many of the indigenous minority children already knew how to speak Khmer. This stood in contrast with an earlier comment of one of his colleagues, who mentioned in 2016 that it was up to the indigenous people to decide whether they wanted to continue to learn in their own language or immediately start in Khmer. One of the Ministry of Education officials I interviewed in 2016 in Phnom Penh said that he knew what most indigenous minorities wanted: to integrate into Khmer society, without caring anymore about their own language.
51For all these government representatives, it seems clear that the priority lies in the indigenous minorities’ integration into the Khmer society. Even if some mention the importance for highland children to learn about their own history and culture, this appears to be only relevant as long as they are not yet growing up in a dominantly Khmer setting. These four officials may not constitute a representative sample, but since they are all well informed about multilingual education and have been engaged over several years in its promotion, their positions can nonetheless be considered significant.
52In contrast to the mentioned Ministry of Education representatives’ positions, on the NGO and international organization side there appeared to be a strong consensus on the inherent benefits of multilingual education for indigenous minorities. Long-term actors from CARE and ICC agreed about the need to expand the current model to six years. Relying on findings in the field of education studies, they call the three-year program “early exit,” that is, too short to properly valorise and anchor people’s mother tongue. A Dutch education specialist, who had been working with CARE since the beginning of its MLE project in 2002, admitted, in 2016, that he considered the existing model to be insufficient. He optimistically added that it was nonetheless “a foot in the door” to argue for a longer program. The critique of the current model as too concise and only transitional also appeared in publications by SIL language consultant Kimmo Kosonen (e.g. 2005, 2013) and was clearly reflected in the 2019 evaluation of the MENAP, co-written by Mariam Smith, a former member of ICC.
- 29 This approach is reflected in a guide that Phil Smith co-published in 2013 with Matt Wisbey, titled (...)
53Further, there seemed to be a general consensus among CARE and ICC representatives when it came to defining the main contributions of multilingual education. The Dutch CARE representative emphasized this program’s ability to valorise local cultures and languages, without expecting indigenous persons to remain unchanged. According to him, the strength of multilingual education was precisely that it gave people the means to choose their own future, making them feel self-confident about their cultural background and providing them with the skills to navigate through new types of challenges. This identity-based development largely resonated with the approach of Mariam Smith, a Swedish teacher and literacy specialist, and her husband Phil, a British development specialist, who had been both working for ICC in Mondulkiri in different positions since 2003 and 2004 respectively. During encounters in 2009 and 2012, they underscored their emphasis on helping Bunong people in a culturally meaningful way to lead a better life in a rapidly changing context. Phil, who was with SIL at that time, defined his approach as in line with the organization’s Language, Education and Development (LEAD) Asia program, and different from SIL’s more traditional aim of translating the Bible into languages that had no script.29
- 30 The Kanjahn’s started living and working in Mondulkiri in 2001, initially under World Concern, whic (...)
54Some of the Smith’s former ICC colleagues hewed closer to this traditional aim. When talking in 2009 with Diethelm Kanjahn, a German linguist affiliated with SIL, and his wife, Mimi, an Australian educator, both of whom launched ICC’s work in Mondulkiri, they made it clear that it had always been an important goal for them to render the Bible available to the inhabitants of Mondulkiri in their mother tongue. During the years they worked with ICC, Diethelm played a key role in creating a writing system for Bunong that is based on the Khmer alphabet, and Mimi was similarly instrumental in the production of the first Bunong language primers in this new script.30 However, by 2006 they shifted their institutional affiliation from ICC over to the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). This move was necessary to proceed to working on Bible translation, as ICC had agreements to work only in the sectors of education and health, and C&MA had the required Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Cults and Religion. According to the head of C&MA Cambodia, the translation project further benefited from the Wycliffe Bible Translators’ support.
55While Diethelm stressed UNESCO’s recognition of the wish to read religious texts as a key motivation for people to become literate, for him and his wife, learning how to read in one’s own language was not only supporting literacy in other languages, but also a prerequisite for accessing the deep meaning of Christian scripture. Mimi explained that for those Bunong who had already some basic literacy skills in Khmer, this was a good starting point to learn how to read and write in their Bunong language. Here, she mobilized the same image of the bridge as the ministry representative had, but with an inverted way of crossing. In 2009, she started organizing non-formal intensive classes for Bunong to use their Khmer reading and writing skills to grasp the new orthography for their mother tongue. Her husband worked on translating the Bible in Bunong. This huge task involved a core team comprising a Protestant Bunong and a fellow SIL linguist, who had both worked with ICC, as well as a Catholic Bunong. Their New Testament was published in 2016, and the team has since moved on to the Old Testament.
Fig. 5. Two Bunon...
Fig. 5. Two Bunong versions of the New Testament
Nau Brah Ndu Ngoi: Nau Tâm Rgnlap Mhe [New Testament and Pasalms in Bunông Language] (Belteshazzar, 2004) in the latin-based script published for Vietnam, នាវកោរាញឞ្រាសងើយ (Wycliffe Bible Translators/The Bible Society in Cambodia, 2016) in the Khmer-based script published in Cambodia.
56The different trajectories chosen by persons who started with ICC, collaborating on the fundamental work of creating an orthography and basic literacy materials, reflect the complexity inherent to SIL. It comprises people who, while motivated by their Christian faith, focus on literacy promotion and training, along with others who also actively engage in the transmission of the Bible. While the former were involved in liaising with fellow NGO representatives and Cambodian government officials, the latter’s project was connected to the Khmer Evangelical Church (KEC) and missionary networks. Both approaches are officially registered and openly lived out, but their institutional separation probably enabled cooperation that would have been difficult or impossible if the promotion of multilingual education had been directly connected to the transmission of the Bible. The bifurcation allowed secular NGO representatives to state that they were categorically opposed to missionaries who try to impose their faith on others, without preventing them from relying on orthographies developed by people working on Bible translation.
57To address approaches of those who are supposed to benefit from multilingual education and who, in some cases, have also been engaged in promoting or transmitting it, I rely on conversations with a variety of Bunong persons including public servants, NGO representatives, and individuals of different ages who have been involved in some way with multilingual education.
58In 2020, I met with a Bunong man who was working with the provincial office of education in Mondulkiri, where he previously held the position of teachers’ trainer. He provided me with a very detailed picture of the number and locations of schools providing multilingual education across the province. Asked whether and how he considered multilingual education to be useful, he mentioned that it was important so not to lose the Bunong mother tongue and culture. He added that it was without doubt important to learn Khmer, but not only Khmer, and insisted that both languages had value. A schoolteacher working in a village near the provincial capital, shared with my Bunong colleague Heng and myself that she much enjoyed learning to teach in her mother tongue. She added that it had taken her some time to grasp the functioning of the Khmer-based alphabet for Bunong, and that it still was not always easy. During our visit in one of her classes, in early 2024, she was energetically leading her Bunong and Khmer students through the first pages of one of the story booklets that CARE had produced. After the lesson, she showed us a Bunong song book and, with my colleague, started enthusiastically deciphering the lyrics of tunes well-known to them.
Fig. 6. Bunong li...
Fig. 6. Bunong literacy class in a Mondulkiri primary school, January 2024
Photo: Catherine Scheer
59Among the Bunong persons who had worked with ICC, notably those who gathered audio records of oral histories across the province in the NGO’s early years, some shifted to working with the church, if not on Bible translation, then on other ways of transmitting the gospel in Bunong. Some continued in other endeavours to promote Bunong language and culture, notably through a local NGO, Northeast Community Education Development, that operated a mobile library, trained teachers, and ran a specific literacy program with churches. One of this NGO’s staff members worked to help preserve the Bunong language and knowledge even outside of his job. I frequently observed him recording and taking photographs during village gatherings. He tried to document not only Bunong traditions but also ways of dealing with the ongoing turbulence that the inhabitants of Mondulkiri had been facing since the market economy’s aggressive expansion into the highlands.
60The defence of indigenous minority rights was key to the engagement of another former ICC staff member, who started in 2016 to head the Bunong network, and regularly spoke up in her mother tongue against all kinds of land abuses. Together with her colleagues from the network, she had initiated a yearly Bunong festival, taking place around the same time as the Khmer New Year. In a speech that she gave during the festival’s 2024 edition, this charismatic woman urged her fellows, with the use of much humour, to give Bunong names to their children, and not to hide their origin under a common Khmer name. She and her network companions further made efforts to find Bunong terms for specialized advocacy concepts that they had learned in Khmer.
61Lastly, I offer some insights from Bunong villagers about this most recent script for their mother tongue. When, in 2009, I started fieldwork in one of the Bunong communes that included many former refugees who had been repatriated from Vietnam in the mid-1980s, I heard several villagers describe the Latin-based script that they had learned during their exile as a more appropriate way to represent their language. Accordingly, they did not take interest in learning the Khmer-based Bunong writing. One man, who had long been a church leader, further described this new script as reflecting a Bunong dialect that he considered less appropriate than the one rendered in the so-called Latin script from Vietnam. However, this critique appeared to be relatively limited to a specific generation of Bunong, and to people who had spent a considerable part of their life in Vietnam. It contrasts with the eagerness of some younger people to read and write their mother tongue in the Khmer-based script.
- 31 Besides the book collection, the Bunong-English(-Khmer in a previous version) online dictionary pro (...)
62Within the generation of Bunong who grew up in Cambodia, many of those who came in contact with Khmer literacy and indigenous rights advocacy were equipped and motivated to promote their language and culture. As electricity and smartphones found their way to the highlands over the last decade, online groups and pages celebrating Bunong culture have been flourishing on social media. One of the richest pages, which now has 2,200 followers, is called “Bunong culture” and is managed by a man in his early 40s who studied law and is now working as an environmental ranger. On a very regular basis, he publishes a broad variety of posts that include colonial photos of highlanders, Bunong riddles in written format, foreign movie excerpts with a self-made Bunong voice-over that conveys funny but educative messages, and his own video recordings. The latter have featured elderly people reciting Bunong oral literature, Bunong speeches at gatherings, and even a Bunong literacy class taught by a former ICC employee. While the highly resourceful content-creator had to first learn the Khmer-based Bunong writing himself to be able to post the riddles he had heard from elders, his choice of orthography was clear.31 It may have been his own effort to learn the new script that motivated this cultural advocate to create a video of his friend giving a basic Bunong literacy lesson.
Fig. 7. Screensho...
Fig. 7. Screenshot of a video recorded Bunong lesson that the creator of the Facebook page “Bunong Culture-Nau vay Bunong” posted on 27 June 2024
63This collection of insights into Bunong adoption (and sometimes rejection) of the Khmer-based writing for their language and its transmission is admittedly fragmentary. Nonetheless, it gives an idea of the diversity of reactions that multilingual education could provoke and of the indirect paths over which people could get to take ownership of it. For those Bunong who had been learning Khmer at school, the Khmer alphabet served as a basis to access the Bunong one. As formal multilingual education seemed to be fading out in some Mondulkiri primary schools, notably due to a lack of funding, written Bunong appears to be an unlikely starting point for children there to become literate. However, the indigenous pride that has been emerging over the past decades among Cambodian minorities will probably invest Bunong and other minority language scripts with a certain popularity, since they can be a useful means of preserving and transmitting indigenous knowledges and values.
64The aim of this paper is not to provide any broad assessment, or generalizable conclusions about the workings of multilingual education in Cambodia, but to reflect upon the country’s status as a role model from a variety of contextually informed perspectives, through historic and ethnographic angles.
65To understand the reluctance that some mostly elderly and Christian Bunong expressed towards the new orthography of their language, it was necessary to know that some of the inhabitants of this border region lived for over two decades in Vietnam as refugees and possibly learned to read and write their language in another alphabet. Similarly, it might be useful to be aware that those who played a key role in creating writings for indigenous minority languages in Cambodia belong to the same organizations than those who did this work in Vietnam, a few decades earlier. This not only indicates access to grounded scientific knowledge, but it also leads one to be attentive to the Protestant NGO workers’ diverse procedural approaches to the goals of multilingual education, identity-based development, and Christianisation.
66The reluctance of some Khmer government officials to extend the “bridge program” beyond the third year of elementary school, despite their sometimes-long-term engagement in multilingual education promotion, becomes less surprising as one considers how deeply anchored Khmerisation politics are in Cambodia. Prince Sihanouk was the architect of a powerful assimilation discourse, overseeing, as the father of the nation, all of the country’s children. Hence, many Khmer Cambodians consider it an unquestionable benefit to assimilate minority peoples to the dominant model.
67What might be most remarkable in view of the historical precedents, is the pride that many of the country’s highland minorities, Bunong and other, have started to develop over the past two decades. Despite being few in number, and despite having been told for at least half a century that their way of life is archaic if not savage, more and more of them have claimed an indigenous minority identity and the rights officially attached to it. This movement has surely been fuelled by international indigenous rights advocacy groups (e.g. Baird 2011). However, and notwithstanding critiques of multilingual education in general and the early-exit model more specifically, the valorisation of peoples’ mother tongues has likely contributed to the emergence of indigenous pride. While the national language has become increasingly present in the life of many highland minorities, notably due to a great increase in Khmer migration (Sieng 2023), the act of emphasizing the value of the mother tongue is unavoidably political.
68Knowing how to read and write one’s own language is surely not sufficient and not even necessary for the efforts of indigenous minority people to defend the land they have been living on for centuries. Yet, the promotion of mother tongue literacy, which actively involved indigenous persons, often went hand in hand with a more general valorisation of indigenous language and way of life. This does not answer the question of whether Cambodia deserves to be a role model in MTB-MLE implementation, but it surely relativizes overly sweeping critiques of these literacy programs as depoliticizing.