Language Oppression in Tibet

Carrie and Megan talk with Dr Gerald Roche, Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Cultures at La Trobe University, about his new book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, language oppression, solidarity, China and Tibet. 

• LSA's response to the EO on English as the Official Language of the US

Chapters

• 13:35 Interview with Gerald

Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi, welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast on linguistic discrimination. 

Megan Figueroa: I'm Megan Figueroa. 

Carrie Gillon: And I'm Carrie Gillon. 

Megan: Hello, Carrie. 

Carrie: Hello.

Megan: I know, I'm putting on a cheerful act. 

Carrie: Yeah, that was good. 

Megan: It's all I can do but to not cry or punch pillows. 

Carrie: Yes, yes.

Megan: Yes. 

Carrie: Well, it's time to be marching in the streets.

Megan: Yeah, Tucson, I really should have gone. Tucson had a great protest at the Tesla dealership yesterday. 

Carrie: Yeah, there was one here too. 

Megan: Oh, was there? 

Carrie: Yeah, and I was intending on going, but I will admit it was raining and it's not easy to get to from where I am.

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: Excuses, excuses. 

Megan: Fair enough. 

Carrie: But the next time I'm going to go. 

Megan: Yeah. There will be a next time. This Tesla takedown is pretty well organized and it's working really well, I think.

Carrie: Yeah. It's grassroots. It's like an easy target. The man is a madman. The cars are shit. 

Megan: Yeah, all these stories of people being trapped in the cars because of the terrible idea to not have handles that work like normal handles. It's bizarre. 

Carrie: And the full self-driving or whatever they call it that is not self-driving at all. 

Megan: Yeah. So, yeah, bad car anyway. 

Carrie: Anyway, speaking of Nazis. 

Megan: Yep, speaking of, we now have an official language of the United States. English was decreed to be the official language of the US at the beginning of this month by an executive order, of course, an executive order. Actually, I don't even know if that's how it would be done anyway, but this is how he does things. I think they've tried to do it through Congress before, but it hasn't worked. 

Carrie: Yeah, that would be the more normal way to do things, but you can... I mean, for whatever reason, the United States has set things up such that the president can put out executive orders. They don't always stand, but, yeah, it is a mechanism that can be used. 

Megan: So in the order they state, "A nationally designated language is at the core of a unified and cohesive society, and the United States is strengthened by a citizenry that can freely exchange ideas in one shared language." This comes at a time, of course, when English is already the official language in more than 30 states. So 30 states have already said that English is their official language. So it makes you wonder like, really how necessary is this?

Carrie: Yeah. The reason why countries tend to have official languages is as a way of promoting some kind of identity, right? 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: So Canada has two official languages, so we want to be known as a bilingual country. We want to also protect French, because it was under threat at the time, in the 60s for sure. There are maybe slightly less nefarious reasons to do something. It just feels like this is extremely nefarious. 

Megan: Extremely nefarious coming from this administration, from this president. 

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: Especially since there's all these mass deportations and like there are other things that are happening in the states right now that are clearly showing their true colors when it comes to this kind of stuff. Like, yeah, they say they want to be united, but...

Carrie: No, they don't. 

Megan: No, they don't. 

Carrie: Or they want to be united against everybody else. 

Megan: Right.

Carrie: All us NPCs. 

Megan: Yes.

Carrie: By the way, that is something that really irritates me, just that's how they're treating everybody, right? Like they see us as worms as NPCs so we don't count. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: Meanwhile, they're interchangeable fascist cogs. I just... ugh! Anyway. 

Megan: There's a lot of people that are arguing that this is not good because this goes against what the founding fathers wanted, which would be true.

Carrie: Yes, and we can talk about how the LSA responded.

Megan: Yeah, so how did the LSA respond?

Carrie: So, I won't read the whole thing, because that's way too much. But, so the executive order statement number one, "From the founding of our republic, English has been used as our national language. Our nation's historic governing documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, have all been written in English." So the reply from the LSA is, the United States has always been a multilingual country and this gives it strength.

Megan: Yes, it's so important that it's always something that I thought of as a strength of the United States. Thought it was neat that we didn't have an official language when so many other countries do. 

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, definitely it is a difference. And there are ways of handling multilingualism where you still have official languages, but because there are just so many, it would be hard to make them all official. So, you know, like, for example, Alaska does have official languages and many of them are Indigenous.

Megan: Yeah, so like some of the individual states have official languages. I'm wondering, I'm thinking of like Texas or something. They probably have an official language and I wonder if it's just English when you would think it'd be like Spanish as well. But of course not. 

Carrie: Let's see.  So yeah, no, Texas actually does not have an official language, which is interesting. 

Megan: Oh, that is interesting. I wonder if they'll follow suit or if it's just, you know, not worth it anymore since there's a federal level official language. 

Carrie: Well, yeah, at this point, it doesn't matter, right? 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: Like you could, unless you're going to add more other languages besides English as a way of protecting. Now, executive statement number two, "A nationally designated language is at the core of a unified and cohesive society in the United States is strengthened by citizenry that can freely exchange ideas in one shared language. Reply from LSA, citizens of the US and of all democracies inevitably have different linguistic ways of navigating their lives, and enforced monolingualism never achieves national unity." 

Megan: It never does. 

Carrie: Monolingualism is not good, you know? 

Megan: No. No. Think about a baby brain and if you just give it one language you're like underutilizing the baby brain. 

Carrie: It's true. Alright executive statement number three, "Speaking English not only opens doors economically but it helps newcomers engage in their communities participate in national traditions and give back to our society." The reply, "Official English policies do not improve economic prospects for those who arrive in the US speaking another language, nor do they improve communication for those who live in multilingual communities." No, it does nothing. 

Megan: No, exactly. Exactly. 

Carrie: Does this executive order come with a bunch of money for... 

Megan: For classes and... Yeah.

Carrie: ESL classes and supports?

Megan: Nope.

Carrie: Jobs? 

Megan: Nope.

Carrie: Like, all they're doing is trying to destroy all the jobs.

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: On purpose, because they think, they really honestly think that AI is ready to take over most jobs, so they're just like, okay, [crosstalk]. 

Megan: Is that what it is? Do you think that they think AI can take over? 

Carrie: I believe so. These people are like, cooked. Their brains are cooked. They really do think that AI is way better than it actually is. Like, do LLMs create natural sounding language now? Absolutely. Do they do a good job? Mostly yes. Is it actually making... like, do they actually make sense? Do they understand what they're doing? No, they can't do a job. They can't actually do all the writing for us, because they don't know what they're doing.

Megan: Nope. 

Carrie: Because they're not thinking. 

Megan: Yeah, they're not thinking. That's a big point. Yeah.

Carrie: But the people in Silicon Valley, their brains are so cooked. They think that they are thinking and so they think, oh, all the office jobs are going to go away. Therefore, there's going to be a revolution. Therefore, we better take over power now. That's what I think anyways. I read this somewhere and I was like, this resonates with me because this doesn't make sense why Silicon Valley just like completely in lockstep almost, almost at completely in lockstep were like, yep. 

Megan: Yeah. You're right. They were all at his inauguration, the big titans of Silicon Valley.

Carrie: Sure were. 

Megan: Yep. In the front row, no less. 

Carrie: So gross. All right. Executive order statement number four, "Establishing English as the official language will not only streamline communication, but also reinforce shared national values and create a more cohesive and efficient society." Reply, "Supporting and promoting multilingualism makes a nation stronger, not weaker." 

Megan: Agreed, simple, but it's true. 

Carrie: Yes. It's absolutely true. Making a language official has nothing to do with streamlined communication. Like 0. 

Megan: According to this NPR article that I'm reading, one in 10 people in the United States speak a language other than English, which is triple the amount compared to 1980.

Carrie: Oh, interesting.

Megan: Yeah, so it continues to grow.

Carrie: Only 10% seems small. I thought it'd be more than that. 

Megan: It does seem small. This is according to 2022 data from the US census. 

Carrie: But the census didn't ask what language.

Megan: It does.

Carrie: I took that census. There was no question on language. I took that census. I was in that census in 2020.

Megan: I remember a question on language, on which language was spoken in the home. [crosstalk] If there's a language other than English. 

Carrie: Really?

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Really?

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: I did not get that question. I was shocked. I was like, why is there no language question? 

Megan: I went to the link about the census and it says, nearly 68 million people speak a language other than English at home in 2019. 

Carrie: In 2019? Oh, that was before the census. 

Megan: They asked about the year before, I guess. Yeah. Well, anyway, that's a lot of people. 

Carrie: No, yeah, for sure. It's still a lot of people. I'm just surprised that it was that few. I thought it'd be more. That makes me wonder, well actually I can find out what the situation is in Canada. I would have thought it would be more than 10%. Well, especially there's two languages that have to be... 30% of the population of Canada speaks a non-official language. 

Megan: Oh, so that's even not French. That's pretty... That's amazing. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Megan: But we actively discourage multilingualism here.

Carrie: That is true. That is absolutely true.

Megan: As you can see now by our official language decree. Yeah. 

Carrie: Well, yeah, in some ways the official language decree is... Like it was already functionally kind of there.

Megan: You know what I mean? Yeah.

Carrie: Like the pressure was already there. This was just kind of making it slightly more concrete. 

Megan: Yep. Exactly. Exactly right.

Carrie: Because Canada has official languages, and yet we have more multilingualism. 

Megan: Yep. I bet you'll see that a lot of places where there's official languages, but there's more multilingualism. 

Carrie: Yeah, yes, yes. Because... especially if you have more than one official language, it kind of opens the door up a bit, I guess.

Megan: It does, yeah. 

Carrie: But yeah, I also feel like it was starting to shift until I think recently, but it was feeling like Canada was becoming more anti-immigrant because of the housing crisis and all these things. But if I will say one thing that Trump has done good for Canada, it has brought us all together. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: We have a common enemy.

Megan: Making you very patriotic. Yeah.

Carrie: We have a common enemy. It is amazing. Even the Quebecois are saying, oh Canada, games now. You do not understand how shocking that is. Shocking. Like...

Megan: Wow! 

Carrie: Quebecois are like, just sweet Canadian. What? What is happening?

Megan: Anyway, you're welcome.

Carrie: Yeah, I guess. I would obviously rather not have a threat of war. We're already in a trade war, like literal war. If an invasion happens, I don't know what I'm going to do. Anyway, I would rather not have that. But one slight silver lining is it's brought us all together. 

Megan: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I wish I were Canadian. 

Carrie: Well, Canada might be soaking up some. Like, BC, at least, is definitely actively seeking out American nurses and doctors. We have a shortage and we're like, hey, this might be a good time to get some, poach some. 

Megan: It would be, yeah. Yeah, it's a really good time. 

Carrie: And also I'm wondering if like a bunch of scientists are going to get poached like... 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah, it's weird times because like, it used to be the brain drain was going from Canada to the US and now maybe the other way.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: We'll see. Anyway...

Megan: Anyway... Well, I hope you're all hanging in there. We have a really interesting episode for you today. 

Carrie: Yes, as always. 

Megan: Yes. 

Carrie: And yeah, stay safe and stay sane and we'll talk to you. Today, we're very excited to have Dr. Gerald Roach, who is a lecturer in the Department of Languages and Cultures at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. His work focuses on power, the state, colonialism, and racism. And he is the author of The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, which is why we have him on today. So welcome.

Megan: Yeah, welcome. 

Dr. Gerald Roach: Yeah, thank you. It's really lovely to be speaking to you both. I've been listening to your podcast for ages, so it's like cool to be here. 

Carrie: Oh, that's awesome. 

Megan: Yes, we're so happy to have you.

Carrie: Yes. So we always ask, the first question is always around why did you want to write this book and why now? 

Roach: Yeah, so it's kind of like a difficult question because in some ways I sort of didn't want to write this book. It's maybe important to get across that before the why now part I guess. So the reason why I didn't want to write this book, it has to do with the reasons why I was in the place that I wrote about, which was in like the Tibetan part of China.

So I lived in China from 2005 to 2013. I went there as a teacher and I was teaching English, but I was also teaching anthropology. And like the anthropology that I was teaching was basically teaching anthropology to Tibetans so that they could represent themselves anthropologically. Right? So it was coming, like I trained as an anthropologist, not a linguist, and I trained as an anthropologist at this time where there was a lot of anxiety in the discipline about representation. Right? 

They kind of like had unearthed all these diaries of early 20th century anthropologists and found out that they were deeply racist and everyone was shocked. And then we had to have these soul-searching moments about what it means to represent other people. And so there was kind of like two responses to that. Well let's say three actually. 

So one response was that, well, anthropologists should just study ourselves, our own culture. So we turned the gaze inwards. Second response was to develop kind of approaches that made our positionality explicit. So like, I'm Australian, I'm a man, I'm an English speaker, I'm a cis man, etc. And the third approach was like to expand the circle of who could be an anthropologist so that the people that anthropologists were typically representing would come to represent themselves. 

And that's the kind of like the tradition that like the solution to that problem of representation that I was participating in. So I went to China to work with Tibetans to develop a kind of like anthropological culture there amongst Tibetans so they could write about themselves. And so like people that I trained sort of 15, 20 years ago have gone on to become anthropologists and publish their own works and they're teaching in universities in the US and in China and so on.

And so, you know, my political ethos, my academic approach to these issues was all about cultures of self-representation. So I kind of like didn't want to write this book in that sense. I put off writing this book. Like I didn't go to China so that I could write a book about Tibet. That wasn't the idea. But a couple of things kind of coalesced that made me feel that the book was necessary and that no one else was going to be able to write it.

So I guess that moves towards the why now part of the question. So I mean there was a practical thing underlying my decision to write it which was that I kind of got kicked out of China, like not explicitly, but there was like a process of tightening the screws on foreigners in China over the period that I was there. So that happened at like two moments. So one was 2008; 2008, there was a large political uprising amongst Tibetans in China and foreigners were blamed for this.

They were pointing the finger and like, I don't know if you would know about these, there's these conspiracy theories about George Soros being sort of like a protest puppet master who incites color revolutions all around the world and da, da, da, da, da. And so there was this like conspiracy theory blogger who wrote this and it got picked up by the Chinese press as a legitimate news story that like, the CIA funded by George Soros was promoting this political uprising rather than the political conditions that Tibetans faced under Chinese occupation. 

So they just started kicking foreigners out. I'm a low level foreigner because I'm an Australian. We don't fund color revolutions. So we're not a threat. But like over that time from like 2008 to 2013 when I had to leave, Xi Jinping came to power, new laws about foreign NGOs came into power, all things like this. And so basically like, I just couldn't live there anymore. So I had to leave. 

So I left and it wouldn't have been possible for me to write this book when I was living in China, like on a number of levels. Like I just... like I think the most important thing is that I had become so habituated to life there, so habituated to the explanations for the problems that I became interested in that I just couldn't have thought the thoughts I needed to think to write this book if I was living in China, right? 

But also politically, it just wouldn't have been possible for me to do it in China. It wouldn't have been possible for me to sort of like, you know, a lot of discussion went into this book. I had to talk through things with a lot of people in different contexts and to do that sort of publicly in social media, in public presentations, in writing op-eds and things like this to like figure out how to land the ideas to get feedback from different audiences and so on. Right?

So it's a kind of like deliberative process to work through the issues that I became interested in and I couldn't have done that inside China. Right? The political atmosphere, the legal frameworks wouldn't have allowed me to do that. And they also would not have allowed the people that I lived and worked with to do that as well, right? So as much as I support the idea of kind of the politics of self-representation as being really important, we also have to recognize that there are limits to the politics of self-representation that come in through other forms of politics. 

So to give an example, like if you are talking about the kind of issues that I write about, which is about like language endangerment, language oppression, language policy, language politics. If you talk about these things, not even publicly, or if you politically organize around these issues in China, the kind of like formal state backlash that you can expect to meet could range from something like, you know, economic punishment, like you lose your job, up to you are tortured to death in prison, right? Which happened just recently. 

So at the end of last year, there was a Tibetan man called Gombonamjul. He'd been arrested in May for doing language activism in the province that I used to live in, Qinghai province. And he was released from prison because his health condition had deteriorated so badly. And he died 3 days later and at his funeral they found marks on his body that suggest that the reason for his deteriorating health was the torture that he had suffered in prison. 

So, yes, within that kind of political circumstance, there are profound limits on self-representation. It's not to say that we are able to talk that like we actually have freedom of speech in the countries that we live in, but we face a different set of controlling mechanisms, right? Different restrictions on who can say what and how much they're believed and so on.

But so in China, there's just these profound limits on what people can say about their own political lives and their own linguistic circumstances. And I just kind of got to the point where it became clear that those limits were never going to be transcended within my life. I just don't think that's going to change. And it particularly relates to the specific issue that I'm interested in, which is a subset of languages in Tibet. 

So just like very briefly, Tibetan is a minority language in China, but amongst Tibetans, there are also minority languages. And those minority languages are not part of the popular discourse in journalism or activism. They're not part of academic discourses beyond a very restricted conversation. And it just like became clear that no one was going to say anything about those languages, no one was going to attend to that predicament. 

And the plight that those communities are facing after 50 plus years of Chinese occupation and after like 20 years of very intense assimilatory policies, the predicament that those communities are facing in regard to maintaining their languages has just become drastic. It's timely. This needs to be talked about now. The people in those communities don't have the conditions that enable them to speak about it themselves. So that's why this book and why now, I guess. 

Carrie: Makes sense. 

Megan: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense and I appreciate your discussion of self-representation. It's something that I wouldn't have thought about around this issue, but of course it makes sense to me now.

Carrie: As you were starting talking with it at first, like, oh, self-representation is like, I know this is important, but China? And then you brought it back around. I was like, mm-hmm, yeah.

Megan: Yeah. 

Roach: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are some things that people in China can say, but there are many, many things that they can't say. 

Carrie: Exactly. Yeah.

Megan: So the big question is, what is language oppression? 

Roach: Yes. Language oppression is not a term that I came up with, but it's a term that I found useful in trying to think through the problems of language in Tibet. So the term, as I use it or as I came across it was developed by Alice Taft and her colleagues in a book chapter that they wrote. I think it's the Oxford Handbook of Language Endangerment and they have a chapter in that book which is about Indigenous languages and wellbeing.

So I kind of started off working through these problems through a endangered languages framework because I was in China not only as a teacher but also doing community work like helping communities, document and revitalize their languages, and when you're looking for a toolkit to use and you live in a sort of politically repressive context, the UNESCO framework on language vitality is handy. There's a lot of kind of like depoliticized tools that you can use from endangerment linguistics in those kinds of contexts. 

So I was using those tools. But then when I wanted to try and understand the problem that was driving the loss of those minority languages in Tibet, it's like the language endangerment framework doesn't have a compelling explanatory mechanism embedded in it for me. Whereas language oppression, the way that it's talked about does because they start out the chapter just saying that like, this is a political problem.

Problem is not language endangerment. The problem is language oppression. They define language oppression as a deliberate attempt to coerce language loss targeting a specific population. So they're talking about the context of the loss of indigenous languages in settler colonial contexts like Canada, US, Australia, and so on. But to me, that idea of like coercing a group of people into giving up their language sets the problem up in a way that made sense in terms of what I was viewing in terms of language loss in China.

Because like when the state comes along, it's not banning languages and it's not forcing people to not speak their language. It's not like you're walking down the street, you're speaking your language, the cops arrive and throw you in the van and you're never seen again. It's coercive. That word is really key, right? There's sort of all of these diffuse and subtle mechanisms embedded in the world around you. They're not really explicated as efforts to get you to stop speaking a language, but they function in that way. 

So I think the phrase language oppression, it sets up the problem in a way that draws our attention to the issue of language loss in a helpful way, because it sets us looking for those coercive mechanisms, and that's what we need to look at, right? If we want to stop language loss, we need to intervene in those coercive mechanisms. We need to figure out how those messages are being sent, how people are being manipulated, and we need to stop that. Right?
So that's why I find that term useful. 

But there's another reason, which is that it sets up useful comparisons that make the problem make sense to broader audiences in a way that language endangerment doesn't. Language endangerment sets up a kind of framework where people are comparing it to biological and environmental problems, and it kind of prompts people to overlook the human dimension in a way that I think is problematic. Because fundamentally the problem of language oppression is human problem. 

The reason why language oppression is bad is not necessarily because we lose the information that's encoded in the language in terms of like what it might tell us about the environment or what it might tell us about language in general. These are the kind of answers that linguists give when they say why language endangerment is bad. The reason why language oppression is bad is because it means that people live in an unjust political system, right?

It means that they are unfree. It means that they are oppressed. People understand that being oppressed is bad. If you hear language endangerment, it's just like, it's an object far away. It's not a person, it's a language, and it's endangered, it's at risk, something is vaguely threatening, like it sets up a kind of lack of concern and a poor set of comparisons for helping us to understand the problem. Oppression draws attention to the human dimension of what is going on and that it enables us and prompts us to consider comparisons with other forms of oppression that we might already be thinking about.

So like all of us on this zoom call and all of the people who are listening to this would be familiar with other kinds of oppression that they think are bad, that they don't think should exist in the world, that they have put thought and effort into understanding and opposing that they have mobilized against and so on, and we need to think about language oppression in those comparative terms, right? It is as bad as other forms of oppression and particularly we need to do that because it's so widespread.

Like we live in this moment of global crisis where at least half of the world's languages are faced with political and social conditions, meaning that they will no longer be spoken at the end of the century. Right? And that's a very conservative estimate, but it's a robust estimate. So that's the one that I use. I think the number is probably much higher. And that's a lot of people. The number of languages is not what concerns me. What concerns me is that is millions of people around the world today who are facing oppression and that's bad. And it's not a type of oppression that we typically talk about. 

Like one of the indicators that I used to sort of indicate the fact that we don't really care about language oppression is the way that we talk about intersectionality, right? Intersectionality is a really useful way of talking about the way that different forms of oppression collide with one another. So canonically, it was developed to talk about race and gender. But now people will say, well, we have to oppose all forms of oppression. There's race, there's gender, there's ability, there's sexuality, and they'll stop there. Usually they might have another one, but no one will say language, right? Language is sort of off the table for discussion when it comes to oppression. And I think it needs to be on the table. We need to be talking about it. 

Carrie: Yeah, really good points. I have a question that's maybe like a little bit off the wall, but I agree that using the word oppression is better, but ecological damage is also a human problem. So one of your objections is about that. But like, do we need to talk about ecological damage in a different way to highlight the fact that it's a 'us' problem? 

Roach: Yeah, and we have and we do, like there are great discourses and social movements around climate justice now that have reframed the problem, right? They reframe the problem by appending that word justice, which people tend to think of it as an inherently human endeavor, justice. So when you talk about climate justice, you're humanizing it in that regards, but you're also... Like climate justice conversations tend to reframe the discussion to look at the way that climate harms are unevenly distributed along familiar lines of like race, gender, not language, but we could say language as well.

There has been a turn in environmental discourses to look at these issues, but the discourses of language endangerment haven't caught up. Like insofar as language endangerment is a derivative discourse of environmentalism, it's still stuck in the 1990s very much where it's about like map measure, raise awareness, et cetera. It doesn't have that sort of differentiated political lens attached to it as much. So yeah, I would say that yes, I agree with you, I think.

Carrie: Okay. No, that's good. You're right. You're right. There is more conversation or like there's been a shift. You're absolutely correct. And we haven't followed suit. So, that's good. 

Megan: So from that, I was also thinking, what are some of the coercive mechanisms at play here? 

Roach: Yeah, like I think we have to start at like the cold[?] face of language oppression. Like where language oppression happens is in the family, in the household, usually between the parent and child, but sometimes between other caregivers when you have different family structures. But so language oppression happens when a decision is made to withhold a particular language from the child. 

So in the context where I was working and where I wrote about this, there was three relevant languages. There's Mandarin Chinese, which is the state language, which is compulsory for everyone to learn. There is the local variety of the Tibetan language which is spoken by all Tibetan people and increasingly so as I'll explain. And then there's a language called Manikacha. Manikacha means our language because languages don't really have names, right? 

That's a thing that comes in later that's usually imposed by the state. So they call their language Manikacha, our language. It's spoken in four villages in the area where I was doing my research. And it's been spoken in those 4 villages for about 800 years or so, roughly. And that was a sustainable context for all of that time. Manikacha speakers transmitted Manikacha to their children, generation after generation, for over 8 centuries. Then you get to this pivot point where people stop doing that, right? 

They start transmitting Tibetan primarily rather than Manikacha. And you have this generation of kids, which is coming of age now, where they understand Manikacha, but they can't really speak in it. They speak habitually in Tibetan and they use Mandarin Chinese in particular contexts. So when we look at that interface and that decision, the first thing that we have to understand is that that decision is not a freely made decision. That decision is structured by relations of power that exist outside the household. 

And we have to do that because there's this like ongoing argument since we started talking about language endangerment in linguistics is that, well, we shouldn't really care about this stuff because people are just making decisions and who are we to tell them what to do? It's this kind of like knee-jerk liberalism where any kind of choice is a good choice and you can't intervene because that's oppressive. That argument got made by prominent linguists when language endangerment became an issue, they were just like, this is silly. We shouldn't be talking about this. It's a waste of our time. People are just making these choices. We should support them to do whatever they want, et cetera. 

And I just think that that's a really power blind way of looking at the situation because why are those people making that decision now? Why didn't they make it for the last 800 years? So you have to start looking historically what has changed in those people's lifetime to make them make a different decision. And then that draws our attention to all the things like, well, the Chinese state established itself in the Tibetan areas where I was working. It enacted various policies. It started classifying the population in particular ways. It built institutions. It invested in those institutions. 

It guided people's behavior through economic benefits and penalties and things like this and so we start sort of like tracing the lines of power that have shaped that decision out of the household through time backwards in history and through space out into the realm of the nation state. And I also trace them like all around the world because it has an important global dimension when we talk about the Tibetan situation. But the key thing is to just try and figure out how that choice to not transmit a language is unfree. 

What made that choice unfree? Right? That's really the key question. Like when I was interviewing people for this book and I talked to them, there are these kinds of like socio-linguistic domain analysis interviews where it's like, what language do you use at school? What language do you use when you speak to the government? What language do you use when you speak to your neighbor? Et cetera, et cetera. And they're trying to figure out why people use particular languages in particular contexts. 

And when I was doing these interviews and people would always just answer the question with one of the two kind of like state-sponsored languages in the region where it's like, what language do you speak in school? We speak Tibetan or we speak Chinese, and then you say what language would you like people to use in school? We would like them to use Tibetan or Chinese because it's important for getting a job. Well, would you like them to use Manikacha at school? Yeah, of course, that would be great, but like that doesn't exist, that's not an option. We can't actually choose that. It wouldn't benefit them in any other way. 

So you start figuring out that people are using this kind of like benefit calculus when they're making decisions about what language to use and which language to transmit, and they are making choices that are highly restricted. So the thing about these minority languages that are spoken amongst Tibetan people in China is that the Chinese state basically says that they don't exist. There was like, after the Chinese state established itself in Tibet, it started like classifying people, classifying languages.

And basically the decision was taken that Tibetans all have one language. It is the Tibetan language, just like they speak French in France and German in Germany, Tibetans speak Tibetan and everything else that exists we're just going to sort of cram into this dialect box and everything that's in the dialect box, we're just going to pretend it's not there and we're going to wait for it to die. Right? 

And this was a theoretically motivated decision that they made at the time, like state policy at that time was made on the basis of sort of doctrinaire Marxist-Leninism, which had a theory of social evolution built into it, which was developed by American anthropologists. Right? So anthropologists are responsible for everything bad. So, you know, there's this idea of social evolution, where like, there was a tribe and then tribes coalesced to form nations and nations coalesced to form something else and on and on. And that was related to stages of language development. 

So the idea was that these dialects would all come together to form languages. The language would represent the stage of having attained the national level of development. And then once all the minority groups in China had achieved national level development, their languages would all be assimilated and everyone would come together in like socialist brotherhood and only speak Mandarin Chinese. And this is kind of like, that's the turning point of policy that we're at now. 

Like the Chinese state is no longer Marxist-Leninist. It's not communist. That's not a real thing. That's a conservative talking point. The Chinese state is just a nation state, like everyone else, and capitalism and so on. So we're at this inflectional point where that trajectory, that plan that was established in the mid-20th century is now turning a corner where they assume that all of those languages they classified as dialects are now dying. They are because people are being forced into not transmitting them. 

The big languages that they established as the kind of like official canonical national languages like Tibetan, like Uyghur, like Mongolian, they are now coming under assault really heavily. So the policy is turning a corner where everyone is going to be only using Mandarin. That's where it's headed. And that's really, that's super recent. 

Like I was living in China at the point where the government formally announced for the first time in history that more than 50% of the population could use Mandarin. So that was 2007. So it's like the phase of sort of assimilatory development of the last 25 years has been the real move fast, break things stage. And that's where it's at now. 

Carrie: Yeah. I always felt like that was their goal, like for a long time ago, but it's interesting that they're finally getting there, or maybe not finally, but they're getting there. It's really terrifying, but also not really all that surprising, unfortunately. 

Roach: Yeah. And I think it's terrifying because of the scale of the project.

Carrie: Yes, yes.

Roach: There is no larger state-led linguistic assimilation project on the face of the planet today. That's it. That's not an apology for English, whatever. It's just a statement of fact. Like, you know, you have to give these disclaimers when you're talking on the internet.

Carrie: Yeah, to cover all your bases.

Roach: Because I will say that like, China represents the largest state-led assimilation project on the face of the earth and someone will say like, Gerald thinks everyone should speak English. So you just... 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: Oh my God! Those are not even rela-... Ugh!

Roach: No, it's not just an internet thing. There's a particular political class on the internet that think that any criticism of China is an apology for American state power.

Megan: Ooh.

Carrie: Yeah. 

Roach: Right? 

Carrie: No, it's true. That's true. 

Roach: So we have to say these things.

Megan: I can hold hate in my heart for both things. 

Carrie: Exactly. 

Roach: Yeah. So this is the thing, we have to hate everyone equally. Like, I know your tagline. I know your tagline. But sometimes if we care about language and we care about people, sometimes we have to be an asshole just to the right people. 

Megan: Yes.

Carrie: Yes. 

Megan: Absolutely. 

Carrie: Yes, you're absolutely right. Like, yes, when we say don't be an asshole, it's more like individual level stuff. 

Megan: Systemic things. 

Carrie: These oppressive forces. Absolutely. We need to be more asshole-ish. We need to be angrier. 

Roach: Yeah. Structural asshole, interpersonal not asshole, I guess. 

Carrie: Yeah, exactly. 

Megan: Yeah, I know.

Roach: It's catchier the way you say it now so don't change it. 

Carrie: Yeah. If we're going to change it, we need to find something a little bit pithier. But yeah, no, this is all horrifying and all true. So why did you want to study language oppression in Tibet specifically? 

Roach: I didn't would be the quickest way to say that. Like, I had no specific designs on Tibet. I kind of like ended up there, would be the short, like I won't give you the whole biographic episode. But you know, like in Australia, there's no program where you go to university and learn Tibetan and graduate and go do something. That's not a thing that really exists here. I didn't study Asian studies or China as an undergrad, so it wasn't a well thought out plan. It was kind of life circumstances. 

But I think that that's important because in terms of the kind of like academic that I tried to be and in terms of the kind of research that I tried to do, I think we should be driven by the problems that we encounter in life, not by conversations that are happening in the discipline. So I know that as an academic, I've suffered because of that because I'm just not interested in a lot of the big conversations that happen in the disciplines that I'm involved with because they don't reflect the problems that I've encountered in my life, right? 

So I've just been driven to try and understand the world that I have encountered. Part of that world that I've encountered just happened to be the problem of minority languages in Tibet. I tried to develop theories that helped me understand that situation. While I was doing that, I was also thinking about the broader context of the specificities of the historical moment we live in where we're witnessing this global destruction of linguistic diversity and I wanted to also try and say something about that. 

So even though the book is about Tibet, it's got Tibet in the title, the sort of... and there's a lot of ethnographic detail, right? Because I'm an anthropologist, so I worked through at that level of like, how does this really look on the ground in people's everyday lives, working it out and communicating it in that way was really important to me. But hopefully it also provides kind of a foundation, a framework, a way of looking at things that people working anywhere with oppressed languages will find constructive. That's my hope for this book. 

Megan: And I wonder when you say oppressed languages, is it possible? Because I'm thinking from our listeners perspective that some people like me may have been thinking about how they grew up with a parent that withheld the language from them, but the language is a majority language. Like I was withheld Spanish. So that's not in danger. Is it still oppression?

Roach: Yeah, so that's still oppression, I would say. So using a language oppression framework also opens the conversation up to include groups of people that I think should be in solidarity with each other, right? Can be productively in solidarity with one another. So you look at the situation where Spanish was withheld from you and how free was that decision made on your parents’ behalf? Like I don't know the situation but I would assume that they were driven by sort of economic conditions that were coercive, by frameworks of racialization that were hierarchical and all of those things, right? 

So to me, that's language oppression. And that sort of puts... I'm not a Marxist, but the phrase class consciousness is like, you know, the idea of class consciousness is that people who were being exploited had to work to realize that they were all in the same situation, right? That they're all oppressed by the same people. And it's similar with language oppression, right? That within a given context, different people will be oppressed by the same group of people, and they will share common experiences, and they have common interests.

The difficult things about language politics is that it often breaks down on communal lines where it's like, my people, my language, nationalism is the classic framework for this. That sets up this competitive dynamic where it's like speakers of endangered languages come to be competing for resources, but also for political capital, influence and so on. And it's like that competition is corrosive to the solidarity we need to counter language oppression.

That's why I think language oppression is a good way of looking at it because you can be denied a majority language and still be oppressed and recognize in your experience something that you share with someone else who speaks a language that we would consider classically endangered. And most people speaking English today don't have to reach very far back into their family history to find that connection. So like my family is like third generation Irish immigrants. 

My grandmother on one side could say her prayers in the Irish, but I don't have a word of it, right? A lot of English speakers have this kind of history where historically you came to be speaking English by one of your ancestors being oppressed, right? And that should also be a vehicle for solidarity with speakers of oppressed languages today, I think. 

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad I asked. I think that's really important for our listeners to hear. And it makes a connection to this stuff that can seem a little more concrete than just an abstract connection.

Roach: Yeah. And I think recognizing that there's a number of ways that people can recognize that connection. And it's important to try and do that when we're talking about faraway places, right? Like when, like I write about Tibet, like Tibet has become, it's kind of like a stereotype for a distant and irrelevant place. Like when I was at university in the early 2000s people talk about the Tibet effect where it's like well-meaning progressive people who only care about things on the other side of the world but don't concern themselves with the injustice on their doorstep, right?

So Tibet has become a metaphor for kind of something far away and irrelevant. But when we start looking at the structures that drive language oppression, they're structures that we're all embedded in at the same time together, right? It's capitalism, it's the state. We're all stuck in the same mud. So we all have common concern for solidarity.
And that realization is, I think, really fundamental to a kind of global social movement that we need to end language oppression.

Carrie: Yeah, I remember when I was younger, like Richard Gere doing something at the Oscars and people were just like rolling their eyes at him that he would bring up Tibet. And it's like, yeah, why can't he? It's still important. 

Roach: Yes, it is still important. Even if it's far away, even if it's a cliché, even if you're Richard Gere, it's still okay to care about other people's suffering. That's one of the worst cruelties that I encounter in trying to talk about this stuff, is that people will say that you shouldn't be concerned about these people just because they're far away. Like, you know, there are various versions of that, but people take joy, they find pleasure in insisting that you don't show compassion for people who are suffering. 

Because it enables you to say that Richard Gere is a dickhead. And that's a powerful driver for a lot of people. And their desire to say that Richard Gere is a dickhead is stronger than their desire to express solidarity and compassion for people in pain. Right? And so that dynamic always comes into play. It doesn't matter. You can think what you like about Richard Gere. You should still be compassionate. 

Carrie: Yes. Who cares who the messenger is? It's still an important message. And also, like, this is before we would have used these terms, but the feeling I would get now in retrospect is, oh, you're just virtue signaling.

Roach: Yes. I mean, that's an awkward pause in the conversation because that's what that term is designed to do. 

Carrie: Exactly.

Roach: It's a choke point. It's like, we can't talk about this now because I said virtue signaling. Some of the work that I've been doing since the book, I've been looking at the way that there is backlash against indigenous language revitalization in Australia, which is, you know, it's part of a similar dynamic where you have a colonial situation where a nation state set itself up on other people's lands, coerced language loss and enforced another language, et cetera. 

We have this like fantastic groundswell of revitalizing languages here. And whenever they get used in public, like racists step up to express their hatred for them. And one of the tropes that they use is that this is just virtue signaling. And it's just a way of expressing your disdain for someone else's experience of justice.

Carrie: Vice signaling, to use the term. 

Roach: Yeah. Yeah. 

Carrie: Did we miss anything that you would like to tell our listeners about, about your book or anything about language oppression, et cetera? 

Roach: Yeah. So, like to go back to the point I made earlier, like you have to realize that you are not necessarily disconnected from people in Tibet or anywhere else in the world. And particularly this is true if you're an American. Like I don't know how many of your listeners are in America, but I assume that a large part of your listener base is American. 

Carrie: Yeah, it's almost the majority. 

Roach: Yeah. And it's, you know, it's not just that you sort of sit at the center of world power, but your government often has specific policies about these places. And given that you live in something which is still called a democracy, you have a capacity to intervene in that situation, right? So when it comes specifically to Tibet, the US government, they've just updated a law that you have. It's been called the Renew Tibet Act, used to be called the Tibet Policy Act. That commits US governments, regardless of who's in power, to take particular actions around Tibet.

At present, the way that that law is set up, it ignores the existence of minority languages in Tibet and acts just as if Tibetans all speak one language. So in that sense, it's failing to address the assimilatory mechanism that the Chinese state has put in place, which is to erase the existence of these languages. Right? So US lawmakers need to recognize that these languages exist. They need to make specific targeted interventions for these languages, which include committing funds because the US government commits a specific dollar value every year to supporting the Tibet cause.

None of that money is earmarked for those languages and it should be, and that would make a difference. But just more generally, like beyond the sort of like explicit political power and the access to it that all Americans have. Like Americans also wield this unfortunate, like social and cultural power. Right? Which means that, like everyone in the world has to care about what problems Americans have, and Americans don't have to care about anyone else's problems. 

This is reflected in academic research and online social conversations. And the best thing that I think Americans specifically can do, and I'm going to just throw Canadians in this bag as well, because you're all North Americans, the best thing that you can do is just break out of that and start being concerned about other people's problems, right? And just take a simple demographic approach. Most people in the world are Asians or Africans. And the best way that you can start learning about what's going on there is to form relationships with people in those places, right?

Social media, as much as it sucks and sucks more every day, enables you to do that, which is a profound thing. And if you're feeling down about the problems that you've faced as an American, you can learn about other people's problems and then you've got two things to worry about. And you know, you can acquire those perspectives of what everyday life is on the other side of the world and realize the common challenges that we all face. 

There is nothing better for supporting solidarity and there is nothing more threatening to people who want to wield power than understanding amongst oppressed people and shared goals, shared visions and so on. So I think that that's really important. So like get online, don't log off. Get online, stay online, but change the way that you are being online. Go seek out people in other places, learn about the problems that they face, stand in solidarity with them, develop compassion for them, get your hands dirty in other causes that are not yours and be in solidarity and be an asshole but be the right kind of asshole to the right people. 

Megan: Yes.

Carrie: Be the right kind of asshole to the right kind of people. 

Megan: Yes, I love it. It's a great final message I think. 

Carrie: Yes, yes it is. And it's timely because a lot of Americans are now using the Chinese equivalent of TikTok and learning that, hey, Chinese people have some things in common with us after all.

Megan: Yeah, exactly. 

Roach: Yeah.

Carrie: And better transportation.

Roach: Those are good things to learn. Both of those things are good things to learn, I think. 

Megan: Well...

Carrie: All right. Well, yeah. So we always leave our listeners one final message, don't be an asshole. Be the right kind of asshole. 

Megan: Yes, don't be an asshole. Be the right kind of asshole when it permits. Thank you so much for being here. 

Carrie: Thank you.

Roach: Thanks. Thanks. 

[END]