Cambodia, a Model of Multilingual Education? Past and Present Perspectives on Teaching Indigenous Minority Languages in a Khmer Nation

In international forums on Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE), Cambodia has, over the past decade, come to be considered as a role model in Southeast Asia. The Cambodian Ministry of Education and Youth’s 2015 National Action Plan, which aims to increase the number and quality of classes for “indigenous ethnic minorities” in their mother tongue, has often been cited in reports and meetings about the region. However, Cambodia’s exemplarity must be scrutinized in context. The country’s indigenous minorities make up only about 2% of the national population, and since the colonial era they have been subjected to a variety of integration policies intended to assimilate them with the Khmer majority. While such historical-political elements affect multilingual education in Cambodia, they tend to be underemphasised in assessments of the recent policies’ implementation. To complement the existing literature with a clearer picture of Cambodia’s specificities, this article will first rely on historical data to provide an overview of past practices in the field of indigenous minority languages in education. It will then approach the contemporary promotion of MTB-MLE and explore how this new policy idea was appropriated by a variety of actors: Khmer officials, foreign NGO representatives and indigenous minority contributors. This requires drawing on archival data, oral history, and long-term ethnography.