Tamil Nadu govt dismisses media reports of trilingual policy in schools

Chennai: The Tamil Nadu government on Sunday dismissed the media reports of introducing a trilingual policy in the state government schools issuing a clarification that the existing bilingual strategy will continue here.

According to the media reports, steps have been taken to change the long-established bilingual policy in the Tamil Nadu government school curriculum and introduce a trilingual policy.

However, the Government of Tamil Nadu has clarified its language policy at various times and said that the only bilingual policy will continue to use Tamil as the mother tongue and English as a language to be connected with the world.

According to the Tamil Nadu (Learning Tamil Language) Act, 2006, every student is required to study Tamil as a compulsory subject up to the 10th standard.

However, non-native speakers of Tamil such as Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu have been studying their mother tongue, along with Tamil, as an optional subject and writing the exam for many years.

Therefore, an official statement issued by the School Education of Tamil Nadu asked the people not to believe the untrue and misleading reports about the language policy in the state.