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Happy Year of Indigenous Languages. Let’s talk about what it means when scholars erase languages by calling them dialects. Thread.
First, there are status and value implications. “A dialect is a language that gets no respect” says Rosini Lippi-Green. Languages are good, dialects bad. High/low, rational/emotional, practical/impractical etc.
This has affective implications. Speakers of dialects learn to be shy/ embarrassed/ ashamed of the way they speak, leading to anxiety, self-monitoring, etc.
Erasure also has institutional implications. Dialects don’t get taught in school. No corpus development. Excluded from govement, media, etc.
The status and institutional impacts of erasure are tied: low symbolic value = low material investment.
What happens if you keep that erasure going for decades? What if you build that erasure into the structure of a state and the self image of a nation? It’s called language oppression: enforced language loss.
Gyalrong isn’t a dialect. It’s a group of languages which are independent from Tibetan. Ditto Monpa. This discourse of ‘reclassification’ erases a whole bunch of languages, marginalises the entire communities that speak them, and stigmatises speakers.
And don’t even get me started on this racist stammbaum nonsense 🤬
So if you care about linguistic diversity, you can help by acknowledging the diversity that exists among Tibetans. Of languages. Speak up, speak out, acknowledge, respect.
And don’t go talking about Tibetan language politics as some primordial struggle between Tibetan and Chinese. If you do, you’re part of the problem. You’re contributing to the erasure of languages, the suffering of communities, and the pain of actual human beings.
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