A restaurant sign featuring both Tibetan and Chinese, in a village where the Tibetan residents speak Ngandehua, one of Tibet’s minority languages (Image: Gerald Roche)
As elsewhere in High Asia, minority languages in Tibet are the first victims of international tensions.
During the recent UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) periodic review of China, a total of twelve countries raised the issue of Tibet. In their response, the Chinese delegation devoted two minutes to discussing Tibet (begins 2:33:39), and half that time was spent talking about the Tibetan language.
Interestingly, none of the countries that raised the issue of Tibet explicitly referred to language. Why, then, did the Chinese delegation draw attention to this issue?
In part it is because they consider addressing language issues a key success in China’s program for Tibet. In white papers on Tibet in 2015 (April and September), 2011, and 1992, China has repeatedly boasted of its successful provision of language rights for Tibetans.
But, language has also been a significant aspect of Tibetan grievances and international scrutiny, particularly in the last decade. Students have protested against changes to bilingual education several times since 2010. Many of the 154 self-immolators in Tibet expressed fears regarding the fate of the Tibetan language. And most recently, the imprisonment of language advocate Tashi Wangchuk brought condemnation from the international community, including from within the UN.
China therefore had good reason to focus on language issues in its response during the UNHRC periodic review.
China’s discussion of language issues focused on the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR)—despite the fact that most Tibetans in China live outside it. They described efforts to translate official documents and media into Tibetan, the successful digital encoding of the Tibetan script, and the implementation of a bilingual education system in Mandarin and Tibetan.
It is unclear if these measures actually constitute an effective offset to the aggressive promotion of Mandarin. For example, Tibetans are currently deeply concerned about the increasing presence of Chinese loanwords in Tibetan, considering it evidence of more systematic imbalances between the two languages. However, even if these measures are effective in protecting Tibetan, they completely fail to protect other languages of the region.
For example, the non-Tibetan Monpa and Lhoba peoples of the TAR speak several languages. Although China is keen to draw attention to their Tibetan bilingual education program in the TAR, the languages of the Monpa and Lhoba people are completely excluded from schools. They instead receive education in Tibetan and Chinese, bringing with it all the well-known detriments of being denied mother tongue education.
Furthermore, not all Tibetans in the TAR use Tibetan as their first language. Linguists are still recognizing previously un-described languages in the region. There is also a growing community of Tibetan Sign Language users. Neither group is catered for by bilingual education policies that focus only on Tibetan and Chinese.
If we widen the scope to include Tibetans outside the TAR, the significance of this exclusion grows. Tibetans within China speak at least 26 distinct non-Tibetan languages, none of which are recognized by the state. A total lack of state protections for these languages is leading to language loss—all these languages are now being replaced by Tibetan or Chinese.
It is also worth pointing out that whether or not Tibetan itself is a single language is not a trivial question. Although sharing a common written language, the spoken forms of Tibetan are highly divergent. Some linguists classify ‘the Tibetan language’ in China into up to 16 languages. Comprehension between these spoken languages is low. Bilingual education policies that ignore this diversity also ignore the important role that comprehension plays in the classroom.
The response of the Chinese delegate at the UN periodic review, therefore, was missing the point. Promoting a single language is an inadequate measure to protect the rights of a multilingual population. In fact, promoting the Tibetan language in many cases impinges upon linguistic rights. This is the case not only of non-Tibetan populations such as the Monpa and Lhoba, but also for Tibetans who do not speak Tibetan, or primarily use a signed language.
Unfortunately, Chinese policy-makers are not alone in missing this point. Although international organizations that advocate for Tibet frequently focus on language issues, they consistently refer to Tibetans as an homogenous population with a single language. Like the Chinese state, they tend to ignore languages when talking about language rights.
The International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), for example, expends significant effort on their website explaining that the Tibetan language is not Chinese. And despite the fact that ICT has campaigned for Tibetan’s language rights, including within the UN, this has always overlooked the region’s linguistic diversity. The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, meanwhile, has published two reports focusing on language in education. Both these reports, in 2003 and 2007, focus only on a single Tibetan language.
Representatives of the Chinese state, and the international community of Tibet advocates, therefore, find themselves curiously united on this issue. Despite their obvious open disagreements, both agree that Tibetans speak only a single language. They therefore continue to debate linguistic rights in ways that erase and exclude Tibet’s minority languages.
This erasure and exclusion matters. It perpetuates the impression that some languages, like Tibetan, deserve rights, whilst others do not. And yet a commitment to the idea of rights involves a commitment to the equality of all people regardless of their language.
If China really wants to fulfill its constitutional promise to respect the rights of ethnic minorities, it needs to support all their languages, not just a few carefully chosen ones. And if the international community wants to hold China accountable for their failures to respect minority rights, we need to stop replicating their erasure of linguistic diversity, and focus attention on Tibet’s most vulnerable populations.
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David’s right but I look at the lingo issue in East Asia in a very broad sense and in an historic perspective because it’s modern Sino-Japanese relations that are still simmering, potentially so dangerous for the whole region and because America is involved and because powerful languages ebb and flow.
Consider imperial Manchu’s abrupt demise: Though for generations throughout Old Cathay a primary language of the Qing dynasty (1636-1911), neither the last emperor (Pu Yi, 1906–1967) nor his brother Pu Jie (1907-1994) spoke it at all. Today, neither their relatives residing in Japan, nor any one in China outside Xinjiang or academia retains mastery of that Semitic language. Despite the edicts and efforts of Pu Yi’s imperial ancestors to foster, and later to revive, the once mighty Manchu tongue, a mere handful of fluent speakers of pure Manchu resides today in Beijing, Shenyang (formerly Mukden) and a few locations bordering the Bohai Sea. (On Sino Japanese history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident )
Praise be to God, I’ve been back in Oz for a decade now, after spending ten years teaching English, French and Esperanto in 30 Chinese cities. It astounded me that so many English majors on most Chinese campuses despise Japan, half a century after WW2. It didn’t help that a CIA maverick blew up the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during my tenure. I don’t think those same majors love the language of Shakespeare much either.
The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (1954, 1975, 1978, 1982) protects language rights of its 55 minorities. Esperantism and its internal idea more than nominally uphold equality of rights irrespective of one’s politics, religion, nationality, class, wealth, or gender, all of which explains why the Chinese government and people see Esperanto as a friend and engage two teams of Esperantists in Beijing’s public service producing (a) one of the best Esperanto magazines in the world, and (b) quality programmes broadcast in Esperanto several times per day and telecast from the ultra-modern studios of China Radio International. And, as the nation’s economic star blazes once more, a nongovernmental Esperanto movement is increasingly active in China. An adage from antiquity resonates yet in the southern provinces of the People’s Republic: “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away.”
China is reluctant to recognize more languages because its ideology on such matters comes straight from Leninism, which took it straight from 19th-century Romanticism: to recognize a language means to recognize a distinct people. Thus, China would have to recognize a lot more than the 56 nationalities it does now. And it is reluctant to do that, because:
– That would make it look like a nationality (let alone dozens!) had been overlooked, and seeming admissions of incompetence are hard to make. The last time a nationality was newly recognized was a few decades ago, and those people live in such a remote area that the government could make it plausible that they really had been overlooked without anybody being at fault here.
– Each recognized nationality must have a complete Communist Party apparatus. It’s a lot of work to set that up.
– If the official Tibetans speak a whole bunch of languages, how many do the official Hàn Chinese speak? That question probably implies threats of separatism at best, and of a chaotic crumbling of the country to dust at worst, to some of the people in power.
– Excuses are available. The speakers of the Rgyalrongic languages in Sìchuān – which are more closely related to Qiang, the medieval Tangut language and probably even to Burmese than to Tibetan – are classified as Tibetans not only by the government, but also by themselves; they are Tibetan Buddhists, their cultures are largely Tibetan, and their languages contain enough Tibetan loanwords that they generally consider the languages Tibetan, too, not much more different from Written Tibetan than the Amdo Tibetan spoken on the other side of the mountains.
As far as the hundreds of self-immolators are concerned, whether in Tibet or Tienanmen Square (Falun Gong), a typical response voiced by the atheistic Communist Party is that religious administrations are responsible for misleading those heroes, martyrs and lovers of democracy. A particularly horrid incident occurred about 15 years ago under Mao’s famous portrait when one of Beijing’s ‘finest’ in mufti appeared out of the blue to extinguish the flames. In famous tourism centres it’s rare to see police officers any where in the world with fire extinguishers at the ready under their overcoats. BTW, what Mao’s people succeeded in doing to Inner Mongolia’s culture a generation or two ago has inspired the current regime.