An unbiased description of the situation. You can read the process as progress or loss, but unless the facts are acknowledged, discussion will descend into accusations of bias in one direction or another. (Which I have seen aplenty in other posts on Substack, including one objectionable poster who accused me of serving up lies from the mainstream media.) Thank you, North Whale.
I observed a boarding school for (mainly) Tibetans in rural Yunnan 20 years ago, lots of challenges. Of course there was a "learn Mandarin" aspect, but in fact students from different isolated mountain valleys couldn't understand each other or understand Tibetan as spoken in Lhasa, so using their "home" language was really not an option. Chinese became their lingua franca. Such groups are probably a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the populations you discuss. In addition, as infrastructure has been built out, the number of villages that are a 2-day walk to the nearest road must by now be vanishingly small.
I saw that as well in the mountains of the Philippines last year, an isolated community (Occidental Mindoro) where almost no one was familiar with Tagalog or English, and most couldn't communicate with the "same" ethnic group on the other side of the mountain, 8 separate "dialects". Our hosts, who had been working with the group for a decade-plus, thought that they were at the extreme end of isolation among all the minorities in the Philippines. The people I've met in the north of Luzon may have kept their ethnic identity, but were often trilingual with some education and an ability to interact with government offices/workers. And wanting their kids to have more education.
This is an interesting comment. Tibetan is known for its dialect situation. If Tibet were an independent country, the language would have been standardised on Lhasa, reinforced through the education system. In fact, the Lhasa variety IS regarded as the standard language, but it seems that Tibet has not been able to effectively implement the kind of “standard language” policy so familiar from other countries, possibly for economic or geographical reasons. But because Tibet belongs to China, the kind of stringent standardisation or centralisation found in other countries is even more difficult, because there is another supra-Tibetan standard available.
Great educational piece, thanks much. The "West" characterizes this as a gross attack upon indigenous culture, language and dialects, but it's hard to have a unified country if there are hundreds of "different" languages being spoken.
An unbiased description of the situation. You can read the process as progress or loss, but unless the facts are acknowledged, discussion will descend into accusations of bias in one direction or another. (Which I have seen aplenty in other posts on Substack, including one objectionable poster who accused me of serving up lies from the mainstream media.) Thank you, North Whale.
Thanks for a really nice article.
I observed a boarding school for (mainly) Tibetans in rural Yunnan 20 years ago, lots of challenges. Of course there was a "learn Mandarin" aspect, but in fact students from different isolated mountain valleys couldn't understand each other or understand Tibetan as spoken in Lhasa, so using their "home" language was really not an option. Chinese became their lingua franca. Such groups are probably a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the populations you discuss. In addition, as infrastructure has been built out, the number of villages that are a 2-day walk to the nearest road must by now be vanishingly small.
I saw that as well in the mountains of the Philippines last year, an isolated community (Occidental Mindoro) where almost no one was familiar with Tagalog or English, and most couldn't communicate with the "same" ethnic group on the other side of the mountain, 8 separate "dialects". Our hosts, who had been working with the group for a decade-plus, thought that they were at the extreme end of isolation among all the minorities in the Philippines. The people I've met in the north of Luzon may have kept their ethnic identity, but were often trilingual with some education and an ability to interact with government offices/workers. And wanting their kids to have more education.
This is an interesting comment. Tibetan is known for its dialect situation. If Tibet were an independent country, the language would have been standardised on Lhasa, reinforced through the education system. In fact, the Lhasa variety IS regarded as the standard language, but it seems that Tibet has not been able to effectively implement the kind of “standard language” policy so familiar from other countries, possibly for economic or geographical reasons. But because Tibet belongs to China, the kind of stringent standardisation or centralisation found in other countries is even more difficult, because there is another supra-Tibetan standard available.
Great educational piece, thanks much. The "West" characterizes this as a gross attack upon indigenous culture, language and dialects, but it's hard to have a unified country if there are hundreds of "different" languages being spoken.