Forks in the ‘Mother Tongue’: UNESCO and the Transnational Renewal of Bilingual Education after 1945

This article examines the shifting valences of multilingualism and bilingual education from the late colonial era through political decolonisation. It reveals how post-war discussions of language in education drew on but also diverged from earlier nationalist and imperial discourses that portrayed multilingualism as a threat. Across this divide, the concept of the ‘mother tongue’ was often used as a proxy for cultural belonging. However, after 1945, widening participation in the international arena also fostered more positive interpretations of multilingualism. I focus on the Paris-based UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a hub that linked North and South and an amplifier of findings that were supportive of bilingual education. UNESCO’s conferences and publications helped shift political and scientific opinion, at times by defying conventional geographies of knowledge production and dissemination, as, for instance, studies from the postcolonial Philippines found their way, via Paris, into American bilingual education advocacy.