Tibetan Languages in the People's Republic of China

The diversity of Tibetan societies, their languages and culture, is often poorly understood outside those communities. This webinar presents research from recently published studies of language and linguistic change in Tibetan parts of China.

The book titled The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet (Cornell University Press) explores the state policies and everyday practices that are driving the ongoing destruction of linguistic diversity across the Tibetan Plateau in the People's Republic of China. The book focuses on Manegacha, which is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future. In addition to examining the local dynamics threatening Manegacha and other languages in Tibet, the book also highlights the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world.

The book titled Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau examines the language socialization trajectories of rural and urban children, in Amdo, Tibet. Amdo is a region of eastern Tibet incorporated into mainland China, where Chinese state development policies are catalysing rural to urban migration, consolidating schooling in urban centres, and leading Tibetan farmers and nomads to give up their traditional livelihoods. As a result, children face increasing pressure to adopt the state's official language of Mandarin. By integrating a fine-grained analysis of everyday conversations and oral history interviews, this book reveals that young children are not passively abandoning their mother tongue for standard Mandarin, but instead are reformatting traditional Amdo Tibetan cultural associations among language, place, and kinship as they build their peer relationships.

About the speakers

Gerald Roche, Associate Professor of Politics at La Trobe University. He is a political anthropologist who researches a range of topics at the intersection of language and power. Gerald's publications can be found in Annual Review of Anthropology, American Anthropologist, China Quarterly, Modern China, and other journals.

Shannon Ward, PhD New York University, a linguistic anthropologist who studies language socialization in Tibetan and Himalayan communities. Her research interests focus on the agency of young children in language change. She works as an assistant professor at the University of Columbia Okanagan.

Mark W. Post (discussant), an anthropological linguist focused on Asian minority languages, their socio-cultural contexts, and their co-evolution in deep time. His 10 books include comprehensive grammatical, lexicographic and historical-linguistic descriptions of Galo and Tangam, both minority languages of the eastern India-Tibet border region, based on immersion fieldwork over the past two decades. Currently Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, he is also Co-Director (with Dr. Yankee Modi) of the Centre for Cultural-Linguistic Diversity (www.ccld-eh.org), a training and resourcing organisation engaging with Indigenous researchers and community organisations throughout the Eastern Himalayan region.

This event is co-hosted by the China Studies Centre, the Discipline of Linguistics, and the Discipline of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.