This research, conducted at a major university in Tanzania, investigated the personal experiences of multilingual students vis-à-vis the government's language policy requiring Swahili as the language of instruction (LoI) at the primary level and English at the secondary level. The participants, who spoke 25 different languages as their L1, were…

This paper discusses structural and ideological challenges to mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) which has in recent years been gaining ground in many educational contexts around the world. The paper argues, however, that MTB-MLE is set against these challenges - referred to here as inequalities of multilingualism - which prevent…