Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia 9789048552719

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
About the Cover Image
1 Introduction: Bordering Tibetan Languages. Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia
2 Playing with Language Boundaries. Heteroglot Standard Language Ideology and Linguistic Belonging among Amdo Children
3 The Role of Classical Tibetan (Chöke) on the Development of Kurtöp , a Language of Bhutan
4 Reimagining Rongring without Tibetan Buddhist Influence
5 Glottonyms, Identity, and Language Recognition in the Eastern Tibetosphere
6 On the Yak Horns of a Dilemma. Diverging Standards in Diaspora Tibetan
7 Changing Identity and Linguistic Practices in Nubri. Veiled Language Endangerment in the Nepalese Tibetosphere
8 Borderline Dominance: Transnational Tibetan Language Politics in the Himalayas
9 Borders: In Conclusion
Tibetan Language Summaries
Index

Citation preview

Bordering Tibetan Languages

Asian Borderlands Asian Borderlands presents the latest research on borderlands in Asia as well as on the borderlands of Asia – the regions linking Asia with Africa, Europe and Oceania. Its approach is broad: it covers the entire range of the social sciences and humanities. The series explores the social, cultural, geographic, economic and historical dimensions of border-making by states, local communities and flows of goods, people and ideas. It considers territorial borderlands at various scales (national as well as supra- and sub-national) and in various forms (land borders, maritime borders), but also presents research on social borderlands resulting from border-making that may not be territorially fixed, for example linguistic or diasporic communities. Series Editors Tina Harris, University of Amsterdam Willem van Schendel, University of Amsterdam Editorial Board Franck Billé, University of California Berkeley Duncan McDuie-Ra, University of New South Wales Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University Yuk Wah Chan, City University Hong Kong

Bordering Tibetan Languages Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia

Edited by Gerald Roche and Gwendolyn Hyslop

Amsterdam University Press

Cover image: see p. 10 Photograph by Gerald Roche Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Layout: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 504 0 e-isbn 978 90 4855 271 9 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463725040 nur 630 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 9 About the Cover Image

10

1 Introduction: Bordering Tibetan Languages

11

2 Playing with Language Boundaries

31

3 The Role of Classical Tibetan (Chöke) on the Development of Kurtöp, a Language of Bhutan

53

4 Reimagining Rongring without Tibetan Buddhist Influence

83

Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia Gerald Roche

Heteroglot Standard Language Ideology and Linguistic Belonging among Amdo Children Shannon Ward

Gwendolyn Hyslop

Charisma K. Lepcha

5 Glottonyms, Identity, and Language Recognitionin the Eastern Tibetosphere 105 Hiroyuki Suzuki

6 On the Yak Horns of a Dilemma

127

7 Changing Identity and Linguistic Practices in Nubri

157

8 Borderline Dominance

175

9 Borders: In Conclusion

197

Diverging Standards in Diaspora Tibetan Dirk Schmidt

Veiled Language Endangerment in the Nepalese Tibetosphere Cathryn Donohue

Transnational Tibetan Language Politics in the Himalayas Gerald Roche

Gwendolyn Hyslop

Tibetan Language Summaries

203

Index 215 List of Figures and Tables Figures 57 Figure 3.1 Map of East Bodish area Figure 3.2 Internal phylogeny of East Bodish 59 Figure 6.1 A map showing the twelve largest Tibetan languages, as given by Tournadre (2003). Circles show rough locations 131 and relative population sizes of these dialect families. Figure 6.2 A map of the Tibetan settlements established by the CTA’s Home Department dotting India, Nepal, and 132 Bhutan (based on Asfuroglu, 2012) Figure 6.3 A map showing the extent of the Tibetan Empire in the 134 eighth and ninth centuries (based on Kapstein, 2006) Figure 6.4 Traditional nomads, farmers, and monastics from Tibetan-speaking China move to secular education or small business opportunities in the diaspora (BBG & 142 Gallup, 2012) Figure 6.5 A satirical comic (from WeChat) is an example of these perceptions and prejudices: The new arrival (a Tibetan from Tibet, གསར ་ འབྱོར ་ པ་ ) is doing all the work for the Tibetan language (བོད་ སྐད་ ཡིག), while dragging the diaspora speakers up the hill behind him (གཞིས ་ ཆགས ་ པ་ ).145 Figure 6.6 Plotting reading levels versus grade levels in diaspora speakers (Esukhia, 2016). There is no significant correlation; grade levels R 2 = 0.03. 149 Figure 6.7 A survey shows Literary Tibetan is used far more by Tibet-born speakers (Esukhia, 2016). This higher use is predictive of higher reading levels (R 2 = 0.43). Note the effect of language anxiety: a full third of diaspora-born speakers report they do not use Literary Tibetan at all. 149 Figure 6.8 High vocabulary levels (left) and reading levels (right) correlate more strongly with being born and raised in Tibetan-speaking China than the diaspora (Esukhia, 2016). 150 Figure 7.1 Location of Tibetic languages in Nepal, showing Nubri. Kathmandu is marked with a star. 159

Figure 7.2 Ethnic identity (left) and linguistic affiliation (right) in the Nubri region Figure 7.3 Areas of the Nubri Valley where Nubri is spoken Figure 7.4 Languages spoken in the Nubri Valley: Samdo (Kyirong) is spoken in the north near the border with Tibet; Sama, Lho, and Prok varieties of Nubri are spoken within the valley; Kuke predominates in the Kutang area. Figure 7.5 Bar chart of perceived prestige of different varieties spoken in the Nubri Valley Figure 7.6 Bar chart of reported intelligibility (in %, y-axis) for each Nubri variety (as shown on the x-axis) by speakers from the different villages (indicated by the label of each cluster along the top) Figure 7.7 Nepali exerting a greater influence in southern Nubri Figure 7.8 The influence of Tibetan is strongest in upper Nubri Tables Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 3.5 Table 3.6 Table 3.7 Table 3.8 Table 3.9 Table 3.10 Table 3.11 Table 3.12 Table 3.13 Table 3.14 Table 3.15 Table 3.16 Table 3.17 Table 3.18 Table 6.1

East Bodish languages Sound changes within East Bodish East Bodish terms for body parts East Bodish terms for animals East Bodish terms for colours East Bodish nouns East Bodish temporal words Terms for grain in East Bodish languages Terms for dairy products in East Bodish languages East Bodish terms for numerals East Bodish verbs East Bodish pronouns East Bodish question words Comparative East Bodish bound morphology Some PEB forms in comparison with Tibetan Some Kurtöp and Tibetan religious terms Some additional Kurtöp borrowings from Chöke Kurtöp grammatical forms borrowed from Tibetan Textual evidence showing a spelling change that reflects pronunciation Table 6.2 Textual evidence showing a ‘frozen’ spelling that no longer reflects pronunciation

162 163

163 165

166 169 169

56 60 61 62 63 65 65 66 69 71 72 73 75 76 77 78 79 79 135 136

Table 6.3 Modern pronunciations across Tibetan varieties Table 6.4 Contrasting descriptions and features of literary Tibetan (H) and the Tibetan vernaculars (L) Table 6.5 Language prestige in the Tibetan context Table 6.6 Directly comparing standard features of literary Tibetan with Central Tibetan Table 6.7 Distinguishing Diaspora Tibetan from Central Tibetan Table 6.8 A comparison between the features of traditional and modern reading Table 6.9 The path to literacy and the roadblocks in standard Tibetan Table 7.1 Perceived prestige of different varieties spoken in the Nubri Valley Table 7.2 Reported intelligibility between Nubri varieties Table 7.3 Preferred language of communication in Nubri

136 138 139 140 143 146 148 165 166 167

Acknowledgements First and foremost, the editors would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their patience and perseverance during the long and complex process of finalizing this book. We are also grateful to the staff at Amsterdam University Press for their assistance with this volume, to the reviewer who provided helpful feedback on all the contributions and to Tobias Stefan for his assistance with the final stages of proof-reading and indexing. This book emerged from two events, and thanks are also due in this regard. The f irst event was a panel on ‘Language Revitalization in the Tibetospheric Borderlands’, at the 6th Asian Borderlands Research Network conference, ‘Borderland Spaces: Ruins, Revival(s) and Resources’, in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), 13-15 August 2018. The second event was the workshop ‘Talking Borders: Making and Marking Languages in the Transnational Himalayas’, held at the University of Sydney on 27 June 2019, in conjunction with the 52nd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics and the 25th Himalayan Language Symposium. We would like to thank the organizers of these conferences, as well as all the speakers and audience members at these events. In particular, we would like to thank Associate Professor Tsering Shakya, Canada Research Chair in Religion and Contemporary Society in Asia at the University of British Columbia, for his feedback at the event in Sydney. We would also like to acknowledge that this book was made possible through a Transforming Human Societies Research Focus Area grant from La Trobe University and further supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Both editors would like to give special thanks to our families for their support and patience during the long process of bringing this volume together. Finally, we would also like to acknowledge the hard work, intellectual integrity, and moral courage of one of the volume’s contributors, whose chapter could not be included in the final collection due to state-imposed censorship of their work.



About the Cover Image

The sign on this book’s cover represents some of the complex everyday practices of language bordering in and around Tibet. There are three pairs of terms, in Tibetan script (above) and Chinese characters (below), all naming the same items at a small restaurant. In the first pair, the Tibetan (ཁོན་ ཧྥུན khon.h+phun.) is a transcription of the Chinese term, 宽粉 (kuānfěn). In the second pair, the Tibetan རིང ་ ཕུས (ring.phus) is a transcription of the Chinese 酿皮 (niàngpí), but based on the regionally dominant, non-standard Sinitic language, Qinghaihua, which gives the pronunciation rangpi rather than niàngpí. The last pair uses different Tibetan (སྲན་ ཉོག sran.nyog) and Chinese (搅团 jiǎotuán) terms to refer to the same dish. This sign was photographed in Sengeshong (སེང་གེ་གཤོང seng.ge.gshong), a village on the northeast Tibetan Plateau, where residents speak a language called Ngandehua. Local Tibetans consider Ngandehua to be a ‘mixed’ language. Photograph by Gerald Roche.

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Introduction: Bordering Tibetan Languages Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia Gerald Roche

Abstract This chapter explores the relationship between language borders and state borders. It argues that both state and language borders are forms of structural violence that are mutually reinforcing. These interlocking forms of structural violence produce material, biopolitical, and representational inequalities and concrete harms. Therefore, like the placing of state borders, the placing of language borders is seen to be a non-trivial issue. The transnational Himalayas, stretching across the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bhutan, are introduced as an ideal site for investigating how language and state borders interact. Furthermore, the role that Tibetan, as an imagined language, plays in the region is seen to have central importance to this dynamic. Keywords: borders, languages, Tibet, Himalaya

Languages and borders It is both widely agreed and frequently observed that the borders of nation states and languages do not match. This seemingly straightforward claim is sometimes made to celebrate and valorize linguistic diversity within a state, or to critique the fantasy of the linguistically homogeneous nation state where linguistic and political borders seamlessly align. What this claim leaves unexamined, however, is language borders themselves. It takes language borders to be precisely what they are not: natural, apolitical, and uncontested.

Roche, Gerald, and Gwendolyn Hyslop (eds), Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 DOI: 10.5117/9789463725040_CH01

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This book examines where, how, and by whom linguistic borders are drawn. It looks at how language borders interact with other borders, particularly state borders, and how these interactions impact people’s lives. In particular, we examine the negative effects that language borders produce as a form of structural violence (Galtung, 1969; Farmer, 2004). This focus on borders, particularly state borders, as sites of violence, has become particularly pronounced in recent years, in the context of rising populism and exclusionary nationalism, as well as numerous border crises around the world: the 2015 European migrant crisis; Brexit and the looming border with Northern Ireland; the ongoing tragedies and travesties of Australian border ‘protection’; the persecution of Rohingya in Myanmar and their flight across the border to Bangladesh and India; the detention camps on the US-Mexico border; border conflicts between India and China cross the Himalaya; and ongoing efforts to parse citizens and foreigners in India, to name but a few. In this context, scholarship is increasingly turning from discussions of borderlands as complex, fuzzy, contested zones of interaction, towards examinations of borders as sites of violence. This book is situated within the context of this turn. As a quintessential form of structural violence, state borders are designed to be divisive (Konrad et al., 2019). They separate inside from out, here from there, citizens from foreigners, and us from them, thus setting limits for inclusion and exclusion and restricting movement and belonging (Jones, 2016). State borders create centers and peripheries, and in doing so also produce marginalization and remoteness (Saxer & Andersson, 2019). State borders create contours of difference exploitable by transnational capitalism – differing labor laws, environmental regulation, pay scales, and so on (Valencia, 2019) – thus allowing exploitation and environmental destruction to be carried out by transnational corporations. Miller (2019) argues that the global regime of nation-state borders works primarily in the interests of the global economy and its capitalist elite, creating a system that privileges the flow of profits and capital whilst enforcing the immobility and vulnerability of certain people, producing a form of ‘global apartheid’ (Dalby, 1998; Hage, 2016). Walia (2013) therefore argues that states and capitalism work together to form an integrated system of ‘border imperialism’ that both separates and binds together, creating a world system that requires borders to help maintain structural inequalities (Wallerstein, 2004). This book addresses the complex intersections between state and language borders in Tibet and the surrounding regions in the transnational Himalayas.1 State borders, both recognized and contested, carve the region 1 For a perspective focusing on languages and borders in the Himalayas, and including Tibet only tangentially, see Daurio and Turin (2020).

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into realms of political exclusivity, stretching this mountainous heartland across six separate countries: China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar. The chapters in this book examine case studies in China (see chapters by Suzuki, Ward, and Schmidt), Nepal (Donohue), Bhutan (Hyslop), India (Lepcha), and transnationally (Roche). Ostensibly drawn to coincide with natural ‘barriers’ that pattern human diversity, the borders of this region in fact split communities, curtail mobilities, and disrupt long-standing patterns of exchange and interaction (Harris, 2013; Khan, 2015; Yeh, 2019). More significantly, however, the imposition of state borders in the region represents a shift in forms of sovereignty: from regimes of sovereignty over people, to regimes of sovereignty over territory (and thus all people within that territory). Although largely inherited from imperial forebears (Gamble, 2019), these new borders differ in collapsing territory and population into singular relations of sovereignty to the state (Relyea, 2017) in novel ways. These borders thus work to obliterate previously existing relations of sovereignty that were complex and multiple – often bifurcated between land and bodies, as well as ‘nested’ at different scales (Simpson, 2014). A major issue is therefore not simply where the borders have been placed, and what prior forms of political organization they have erased, but also how they have fundamentally altered the relationship between people and political authority. As a canonical form of structural violence, state borders are intimately linked to other forms of borders, including linguistic, ‘racial’, and ethnic borders. State borders do not simply represent the limits of state power. In territorializing state power and generalizing it to a particular population, they also create and maintain a variety of ‘interior frontiers’ within state territory (Stoler, 2012, 2017). At the simplest level, these interior frontiers are administrative, dividing state territory into various zones where state power is applied differently: special economic zones, autonomous regions, states versus territories, rural versus urban space, and so on (Cartier, 2011, 2015; Mbembe, 2003). But beyond this, interior frontiers are also created between populations within state territory, by dividing that population into ‘races’. This process of racialization is foundational to the state (Foucault, 2003), though how race manifests within a particular context, and the extent to which it reproduces the canonical, biological notion of race, varies (Omi & Winant, 2014; Wolfe, 2016). Finally, interior frontiers are also created within citizens, as internalized frames for dividing up the world around them and the people in it. Such interior frontiers include, importantly, the naturalization of hegemonic images of language and the placement of language borders (Ives, 2004). Borders thus

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shape “who we think we are and our understanding of our individual and collective power [as well as] our sense of possibilities and therefore, quite literally, our life chances” (Wonders, 2015, pp. 193-194). All these interior frontiers – between territories and populations, and within citizens – disappear or lose their salience at state borders. State borders thus do not exist simply at the edges of state space. They pervade it. This does not mean that state borders are present everywhere and always. State power must also be activated and enacted through action – through bordering (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019). Individuals and institutions within a state are constantly called on to recognize and act on the categories imposed within state space, to actualize the state’s interior frontiers, and their own. In doing so they not only inscribe those borders, but also reproduce the borders and the state itself. Following Butler (2004), we can think of those who reproduce and enforce state power as ‘petty sovereigns’ – non-state agents to whom state power is ‘outsourced’ or ‘delegated’ (Wenner, 2020). Yeh (2019, p. 5), in her discussion of non-state sovereignty in the Himalaya, claims that petty sovereigns are particularly prominent in the Global South, where states are weak, and sovereignty is exercised by “local strongmen, vigilantes, insurgents, illegal networks, gangs, and warlords.” However, the discussions within this book show that petty sovereigns can emerge anywhere, as anyone, not just through those in designated roles that permanently concentrate power and wield it over others. Instead, petty sovereigns appear whenever we speak. Throughout this book we meet a variety of petty sovereigns who actively or incidentally deploy state authority and legitimacy to make and mark language borders. In Ward’s contribution we see children and care-givers in Amdo, the northern region of Tibet, acting as petty sovereigns when they mark a border of mutual exclusion between Tibetan and Chinese languages. Lepcha, meanwhile, looks at how language activists in Sikkim act as petty sovereigns when they attempt to purify the Rongring language of Tibetan loanwords. And in chapters by Hyslop and Suzuki, we encounter the possibility that linguists may act as petty anti-sovereigns, interrupting and problematizing state authority and the common sense it generates. To understand how speakers and listeners act as petty sovereigns in relation to language borders, we can begin by acknowledging that states have the capacity to define, authorize, and legitimate what counts as a language and what does not – what qualifies for codification and reproduction, and what gets relegated to the status of dialect, jargon, lingo, patois, or accent. The creation of these borders is never simply about “linguistic materials” such as “phonemes, lexemes, and syntactic or morphological rules” (Urciuoli,

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1995, p. 538). Rather, linguistic borders are set and languages differentiated when linguistic features are interpreted within a particular social, historical, and political context, through particular ideological lenses (Irvine & Gal, 2000), and in relation to state power and its reproduction by petty sovereigns. Therefore, as several of the contributions to this volume demonstrate, what counts as a language in one state may be a non-language in another, and vice versa. This volume’s contribution by Donohue traces how in Nepal, on the border with the Tibet Autonomous Region in China, a chain of related speech varieties are described and recognized through a complex set of terminologies; just over the border in China, all this variety and terminological complexity is subsumed under a single Tibetan language. In his chapter on glottonyms, Suzuki examines how practices of labeling speech varieties among Tibetans in China trace a significant interior frontier, carving off a number of speech varieties in opposition to, but subordinated within, a hegemonically imagined single Tibetan language. And as I show in my own chapter, the differentiation of languages is sometimes outsourced by multiple states to transnational actors, leading to peculiar and complex forms of collaboration between antagonistic states. How languages are differentiated and where language borders are placed are non-trivial issues; the placement of language borders has a number of profound real-world effects. These effects are, firstly, material (Flores, 2017): languages and their speakers receive resources for institutional production, development, and reproduction. Material inequalities apply both to languages themselves (what sort of access they have to resources for development, reproduction, and so on), as well as to the social groups that use, identify with, and are identified with them (Roche, 2019b). So, it is possible for a social group to have access to resources, but not their language, and vice versa. Either way, language can and does serve as a contour for economic inequalities. Material inequalities between language forms have consequences for human lives, including not only reduced life chances and quality of life, through differentiated participation in education,2 as well as economic and civic life, but also reduced quantity of life, via differential participation in healthcare, law and order, and so on. We can also think about how forms of linguistic inequality are entangled with relations between economic inequality and reduced lifespan (Therborn, 2013), or racism and poor health (Sullivan, 2015; 2 Much of the literature on this topic stems from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 1953 report on The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education (UNESCO, 1953).

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Trent et al., 2019). If economic inequalities relating to language borders impact the quality and quantity of life, it is therefore relevant to think about these inequalities in similar ways to how Ruth Gilmore (2007, p. 28), and others, consider racism, as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Finally, the placement of language borders also has important consequences for identity, and the social distribution of esteem, respect, valor, and hope, all of which are both political resources (Hage, 2003; Appadurai, 2013) and important determinants of lived experience. Language borders not only differentiate, separate, and rank various types of people, but also immerse, engulf, erase, and eliminate these differences (Roche, 2019a). Language borders can fix people and populations into subordinated positions within a hierarchy or, by excluding them from the hierarchy all together, seek to eliminate them. In short, then, the ways in which states place language borders are related to material, biopolitical, and representational inequalities and the production of associated harms. The chapters of this volume attest to these harms. Schmidt’s contribution examines how the erasure of borders between spoken and written Tibetan impedes educational success (and presumably, therefore, the life-course) among Tibetans in India. In my chapter, I examine how a vicious cycle exists whereby material and political inequalities feed into each other to produce language shift towards Tibetan, which is itself a dominated language undergoing language shift, among a number of vulnerable communities in the region. Chapters by Hyslop, Donohue, and Lepcha invite us to think about when a border is recognized but ignored by the state: when a language is perhaps considered distinct, but still insignificant to the state, and is thus deprived of material and political support. Such harms are not simply brought about by the capacity of borders to exclude and divide. It must also be acknowledged that borders enable violent forms of inclusion – incorporating people into both patterns of power and perception as a result of their physical location, within the reach of a specific form of state power. Therefore, whilst the literature on borders has tended to focus on how borders limit movement, we also need to attend to how borders prevent people from staying where there are as who they are. To be engulfed within a state means to be submerged within and reproduced by the logic of that state. Whilst scholars have recently called for free movement and a “right to the world” (Nevins, 2017), we might also consider the right to not just escape one state and access another, but also the right to stay where one is and not be subject to state violence. If mobility is a political act (Monsutti, 2018), immobility can be too; the right to stay (Oberman, 2011) is a necessary compliment to the right to freedom of movement.

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Stasis in a world of borders can subject people and social groups to pervasive violence, as borders are reproduced in everyday interactions and interpersonal acts of language bordering. A key pivot for acts of linguistic bordering is the shibboleth: linguistic features that index the border between both language forms and social groups. Although typically minor, these differences can have profound effects. Frantz Fanon (2008) has described how shibboleths were used to “classify” and “imprison” Martinicans in France “at an uncivilized and primitive level” (p. 15), seeking to “fix” them, “the same way you fix a preparation with a dye” (p. 89), and leading the typical Martinican migrant in France to “lock himself in his room and read for hours – desperately working on his diction” (p. 5). When such ‘linguistic profiling’ (Baugh, 2005) becomes linked to domination, marginalization, and violence, seemingly trivial linguistic elements can “put speakers at risk” (Urciuoli, 1995, p. 539). In discussing how shibboleths have been used in violent conflicts, to distinguish friend from foe, the killable from those who must be protected, Louis Jean Calvet (1998, p. 24) notes that, “one can die on account of a phoneme, on account of a difference of pronunciation.” The role that shibboleths play in making certain populations available for violence demonstrates the complex interconnections between differentiation and destruction. Linguists and others often turn away from these complexities by recourse to the formulaic declaration, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” As Maxwell (2018) argues, this ‘joke’ is typically deployed in an effort to avoid discussing the political underpinnings of the language/dialect distinction; it is an act of abstention couched as aphoristic wisdom. Rather than serving to focus our attention on the political nature of language bordering, this stock phrase is more often used to suggest that language bordering is an artifact of the arbitrary use of power, and therefore beyond the scope of the study of language, and the disciplinary bounds of linguistics. However, as Maxwell (2018, p. 273) reminds us, “politics can be studied.” But, doing so requires us to work at the borders of disciplines, engaging in both trans- and interdisciplinary research. This is precisely what this book aims to do, by focusing on a specific geographical context and its complex language politics, while working from a number of disciplinary perspectives.

Bordering Tibetan languages Several features of the Tibetan context lend themselves to an analysis of bordering and languages. To begin with, Tibetan languages typically express a rich polysemic ambiguity when it comes to spoken languages, which defies

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simple translation into English in terms of the language/dialect distinction (and the hierarchies it implies; see Lippi-Green, 1997). Different forms of speech are typically marked by the addition of skad (voice/speech/talk) or kha (mouth) following a place name, or some other limit of identity. For example, in written Tibetan we have not just bod skad ‘Tibetan talk’, but also A mdo skad ‘speech of the Amdo region’, ’brog skad ‘nomad talk’, Lha sa skad ‘Lhasa talk’, Sga ba skad ‘speech of the Gawa area’ (Konchok Gelek, 2017) and so forth. This system is both scalar and fluid, enabling language and dialect to exchange place in relation to different speech forms, acknowledging difference without creating stable hierarchies. Far more rigid, however, is the binary distinction between speech and writing (yi ge; yig).3 But even this opposition can be dissolved in the compound term skad yig, which, though it can be translated simply as ‘language’, carries different implications from the English term. The Tibetan language of language therefore provides a complex case for translating the binaries and hierarchies imposed by both Westphalian borders and Western language ideologies. These vocabularies for speaking about language exist in relation to a variety of language ideologies that seek to insert or erase both difference and hierarchy in relation to linguistic variation. Although these ideologies are the subject of several chapters in this book (as described in the summary of contributions below), it is worth briefly noting, first of all, that there is an emerging consensus amongst linguists that what we call the Tibetan language is actually a cluster of related languages (Tournadre, 2014). Linguists and others also increasingly differentiate this group of languages from others that share both deep-history relations of common ancestry and more recent contact phenomenon (such as lexical borrowing) whilst also existing in zones of overlapping identities and cultural practices. Examples of these more distantly related languages include East Bodish languages (Hyslop, 2014) and Gyalrong languages (Jacques, 2017). These seemingly naturalistic, objective renderings of language practices into linguistic objects are, however, contested. We see this particularly in relation to the Tibetan philological tradition, which takes literary Tibetan as the standard, canonical form of the language, and views linguistic diversity in the region in relation to this template, primarily through the dual lenses of drift and decay: spoken languages are seen as divergences from the literary form (Zeisler, 2006; Kellner, 2018). This divergence is typically seen as the corruption of the standard, due to ‘mixing’ with and contamination by other 3 Despite being conceptually distinct, speech and writing are typically blurred in practice, with both the writing system and texts being designed to aid recitation rather than silent reading. See Ekvall (1964) for an ethnographic account of Tibetan reading practices.

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languages, particularly ‘Chinese’ (Bendi Tso & Turin, 2019). Diversity of spoken languages, therefore, is thought to be the result of centrifugal corruption, and an aberration in an ideal historical trajectory of sustained unity and purity. Whereas linguists see the label ‘Tibetan’ as a hypernym that erases diversity, Tibetan philological ideologies construe ‘Tibetan’ as a naturalistic and selfevident singularity; efforts to insert difference within it are unfounded and destructive. This distinction between linguistic and philological practices of bordering is just one aspect of the complex and contested ideological positions that exist in relation to language in the region, and which this book explores. Beyond these issues of dividing up and bordering languages in the Tibetan context, we can also note that Tibet also presents a wealth of ways to think about borders, bordering, and alterity beyond languages. The border (mtha’ ’khob) has long been an important trope in how difference is conceived spatially, in both Tibetan speech and writing (Buffetrille, 2019). Mandalic models of spatialization in the Tibetan context (Makley, 2007; Roche, 2014) often imagine space as a pure center of Buddhist devotion surrounded by multiple borderlands inhabited by ‘barbarians’ (kla klo). Importantly, this sense of bordering and barbarism has often been related to language. As just one example, we see the Lhasa-born Sera Khandro, in her encounters with pastoralists from and in the ‘peripheral’ Tibetan region of Golok, stating that she could not understand their spoken language, and lamenting that, “when they speak, they seem like savage barbarians. It will be difficult for that which is called ‘the Great Perfection’ to flourish in their land” (Jacoby, 2016, p. 43). Tibetan civilizing projects and their linguistic prejudices not only targeted ‘uncivilized’ Tibetans, but also surrounding non-Tibetan populations, such as the Adi of Northeast India (Huber, 2008), and the various peoples referred to in Tibetan by the collective label ‘Monpa’ (Pommaret, 1999). Beyond these issues of cultural and linguistic chauvinism aimed at peripheral peoples, we also need to consider the sunnier cousin of this supremacy: the phenomena of prestige and influence. The long associations between written Tibetan and the institutions of Vajrayana Buddhism, and the language’s capacity to act as both a gateway to Enlightenment and a vehicle for various forms of spiritual power, have given written Tibetan a reach and influence unsurpassed by other languages of the region. Aspiring men from throughout the region have long circulated through the wide-flung monasteries in search of prestige and learning. Sacred scripts and oral performances of religious texts are, and have long been, intimate parts of daily life for many people and peoples throughout the region. Given the political and historical complexities of borders in the region, the linguistic ambiguities surrounding language borders, and the cultural

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practices associated with bordering, Tibet, its languages, and those surrounding it, provide a rich frame through which to examine how state, ethnic, linguistic, and other borders interact. The various ways in which the authors of this book engage with these complexities is indicated through the volume’s title – Bordering Tibetan Languages – and its capacity to evoke multiple overlapping and competing meanings while productively drawing our attention in different directions. To begin with, bordering can be interpreted in at least two ways: as an adjective and a verb. As an adjective, bordering draws our attention to how some of the languages discussed in this book are adjacent to, around, or nearby Tibetan languages. It separates these languages from both Tibetan space and Tibetan people. Meanwhile, as a verb, bordering draws our attention to how this distinction is made, between Tibetan languages and others. These two senses of the word are intimately connected. A language cannot become adjacent to another without an act of bordering to separate them. Bordering as a status is only achieved through bordering as an activity. The term Tibetan, meanwhile, introduces important, irreducible, and deliberate ambiguity. Tibetan can mean both ‘of the place, Tibet’ and ‘of the Tibetan people’.4 These are not the same thing; some Tibetans live outside Tibet, and non-Tibetans live inside it. What then, are Tibetan languages? Are they only the languages of Tibetan people, or can this extend to languages spoken by other people in Tibet? What is the relationship between the spatial and social borders of these two meanings of the term? And what does it mean to be bordering, in the sense of adjacent to, Tibetan languages in the context of this ambiguity? Meanwhile, in discussing languages, in the plural, the title draws attention to the multiplicity of languages spoken by Tibetans, in Tibet, and in surrounding areas. In doing so it reminds us that every form of diversity is also a plurality of acts of singularization: many borders make a diverse whole. Diversity, as a normatively valorized state in liberal democratic contexts, does not exist without some form of bordering and the structural violence this implies. To be bordering languages also raises the question – what does it mean to be adjacent to a multiplicity, to share an edge with a plural?

4 We have opted to deliberately highlight this ambiguity by eschewing the term ‘Tibetic’ in the book’s title. ‘Tibetic’ was proposed by Tournadre (2014) to refer to the family of languages descended from Old Tibetan. This term is too limited to cover the languages and topics covered in this book. However, we have used the term in sections of this chapter and elsewhere in the book where linguistic precision is required.

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The contributions The contributions to this volume engage with this set of questions about the complexities, ambiguities, violence, and harms of linguistic bordering from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and with a number of different motivations. Contributors include anthropologists (Lepcha, Roche, and Ward), linguists (Donohue, Hyslop, and Suzuki), as well as educational experts (Schmidt). These differing disciplinary approaches mean that each author brings not only different theoretical approaches to the issue, but is also motivated by a different set of priorities and questions, thus providing us with a multifaceted overview of this complex topic. In Chapter 2, Shannon Ward discusses how children and caregivers in the Amdo region of Tibet make and mark language boundaries between Tibetan and Chinese in their everyday linguistic practice. She demonstrates how children are both willful and skillful as linguistic agents, modifying the way they ‘play’ with language borders in different contexts: sometimes blurring them, and at other times not just maintaining borders, but vocally reflecting on them in their metapragmatic commentary. Ward analyzes how children’s practices enact and respond to “heteroglot standard language ideology” – “a moral emphasis on multiple, competing standard languages.” She notes that whilst this ideology enables speakers to maintain a distinction between Tibetan and Chinese as differentiated linguistic codes and social identities, this distinction takes place at a cost. As children come to identify ‘Tibetan’ with the literary form taught in schools, rather than the spoken standard they acquire at home and in their community, they also engage in a “radical compression of deep-rooted cultural associations between place and language.” As a result of this compression, heteroglot standard language ideology conspires with other structural constraints to encourage Amdo children’s language shift from their mother tongues to Mandarin. Gwendolyn Hyslop, in her contribution in Chapter 3, looks at the relationship between Kurtöp, an indigenous language of Bhutan, and Chöke, the classical literary Tibetan language used across the Himalaya. She begins by observing that “[t]he languages of Bhutan are often assumed to be Tibetan dialects,” but goes on to note that the country is home to nineteen distinct languages, none of which can be called Tibetan in any straightforward sense. Each of these languages has a distinct historical and linguistic relationship to Tibetan as a liturgical language and regional scripta franca, in addition to a distinct genetic relationship. Hyslop’s meticulous comparative work examines the ways in which written Tibetan has exerted influence on spoken Kurtöp. This influence is evident in multiple borrowings: of lexical

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items, sounds, and grammatical morphemes. Despite the heavy influence from written Tibetan, Hyslop argues that Kurtöp is clearly a non-Tibetic language, instead belonging to a little-studied language group, the East Bodish languages. Therefore, despite strong historical influence between languages, and the merging and blurring that this results in, borders between language families remain distinct, although not obviously at first blush. In Chapter 4, Charisma K. Lepcha discusses Rongring, the language of the Lepcha people, who are indigenous to Sikkim and the surrounding area. She looks at the complex ways in which religion, language, and identity are intertwined. Her chapter traces these entanglements to the establishment of the Sikkimese Namgyal dynasty by Tibetan migrants from the north in the seventeenth century. Lepcha traces how religion was used as an aspect of statecraft by the Namgyal rulers, leading to the emergence of complex syncretic cultural forms that incorporated many aspects of Tibetan Buddhism into Lepcha practice, and were part of a broader process of Tibetanization. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Lepcha sacred texts, in the Lepcha script, are suffused with numerous Tibetan loanwords. In this context, Lepcha discusses a campaign of linguistic purism currently underway to remove Tibetan loanwords from Lepcha texts. She argues that these efforts to inscribe a distinct border between the two languages are unlikely to bear fruit, given the syncretic nature of Lepcha religion. In making this argument, Lepcha demonstrates how language borders are rarely singular, but are, instead, tied up with other forms of social distinction. In Chapter 5, on “Glottonyms, identity, and language recognition in the eastern Tibetosphere,” Hiroyuki Suzuki discusses the relationship between language names and language borders. In examining how language names can create and maintain certain kinds of social relations, Suzuki focuses on three cases. First is the controversy surrounding the term ‘Tibetic’, a label that has been proposed for the group of languages descended from Old Tibetan, and which has caused considerable controversy both amongst linguists and between linguists and sectors of the Tibetan community. Secondly, Suzuki looks at the Tibetan term logs skad, which is applied to a variety of speech forms used by Tibetans that are marked by their unintelligibility to mainstream Tibetans. The third case that Suzuki examines is that of ‘mixed’ languages. He argues that although labeling languages as mixed often has pejorative connotations, speakers of these languages often see this mixture as an important part of their identity. In examining these labels and the complex connections between language names and social relations, Suzuki argues that linguists have a responsibility to balance their commitments to specificity with Tibetan ways of thinking about and naming languages.

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In Chapter 6, Dirk Schmidt brings the issue of languages and borders into the educational realm in his discussion of how linguistic standards operate as a border, separating written and spoken forms. He provides an overview of how and why this gap has been emerging over the course of the long history that separates our present moment from the creation of the Tibetan script in Tibet’s imperial heyday of the seventh century. A focus on speech forms found in the Himalayan diaspora shows how this gap between ‘how Tibetan is spoken’ and ‘how it is written’ has widened due to natural language change. He then examines how this gap functions as a barrier to achieving literacy in Tibetan today, and how issues of learning to read are compounded by social and political factors – factors that tend to promote a singular, prestigious ‘Tibetan language’ to the exclusion of a diversity of living varieties. Chapter 7 takes us to Nepal and Cathryn Donohue’s work on Nubri. Nubri is one of Nepal’s Tibetic languages, all of which are spoken along the border with the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. Donohue examines the complexities of linguistic borders in the Nubri region, and the ways in which prestige, intelligibility, and identity interact to produce an intricately textured language ecology. She shows how proximity to the border impacts patterns of multilingualism, and also how the border has impacted prior forms of mobility and connectivity between Nubri and Tibet. Donohue describes the language as presently being at a critical juncture where language shift towards Nepali appears imminent. In the book’s penultimate chapter, I continue looking at the issue of language shift, examining how Tibetan, as an imagined standard language, exerts what I call ‘borderline dominance’ – the capacity of a demographic and political minority to exert linguistic dominance over other smaller minority groups. My perspective is at once areal and community-focused. The chapter moves across state borders, between the People’s Republic of China, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and India, to look at communities across this transnational regional that are shifting from their heritage language to some form of Tibetan, or are otherwise renegotiating the borders of language and belonging in relation to Tibetan. I argue that this shift towards Tibetan is the result of both imperial legacies and contemporary international relations, and is also predicated on Tibet’s ongoing, sovereign-like behavior and its pre-accumulated linguistic capital. This chapter shows how states and their borders menace smaller languages not only by creating a container within which national languages are promoted, but also by connecting communities to both national and regional language markets. Finally, a contribution that we were unfortunately unable to include in this volume demonstrates how the issues we are discussing are politically

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charged in the context of growing tensions in the region. This chapter explored how language ideologies and practices in a Tibetan school in China create temporal borders, differentiating between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ languages. It examined how government policy, scholarly discourses, and social relations recreate a set of chronopolitical binaries that position Tibetan as traditional (hence also backwards, and associated with the past) and Chinese as modern (and thus progressive, and associated with the future). As we finalized this volume for submission, we were contacted by the contributor, who had been requested to submit the chapter for review by a representative of the Chinese Communist Party at their university. The author then sent us the revised, approved chapter, complete with the party representative’s changes. The text was drastically changed. The terms ‘Tibetan’ and ‘Han’ had been systematically removed, nullifying the author’s efforts to carefully examine how ethnicity and language were given chronopolitical dimensions in local educational policy, discourse, and practice. The word ‘tensions’ had been replaced with ‘relations’. Reference to the marginalization of Tibetan language and culture was removed, as was a claim that the educational system was “failing to address issues of cultural relevance” for Tibetans. The author’s conclusions, which were modestly and cautiously critical of educational policy in relation to language, were whittled down to a few superficial reflections without any substantive analytical component. These drastic changes in some place impeded the intelligibility of the text, and profoundly impacted the article’s intellectual integrity, and we thus regrettably decided that we could no longer include this contribution. This unfortunate incident demonstrates how borders assert themselves, and have their political impacts, in the most unexpected places. When we began this volume, the border of the PRC had not yet asserted itself in the realm of transnational knowledge production, but before we reached publication, this border had suddenly taken on a very real existence, bordering the limits of permissible knowledge and scholarly collaboration.

Conclusion: Beyond borders? This introductory chapter has drawn on the critical border studies literature to examine state borders as forms of structural violence, and to relate this to the complex ways in which language borders are produced, resulting in a variety of harms. In closing this chapter and leading into the individual contributions of this book, I would like to briefly reflect on how we might

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avoid or reduce some of the harms described in this introduction and throughout this book: of exclusion, erasure, marginalization, material deprivation, exposure to violence, and so on. Critical border studies literature often proposes the abolition of borders as a solution to the structural violence they enact (Walia [2013] offers a particularly compelling argument in this regards). It is worth considering how the removal, opening, and transgression of state borders in the Himalayas would possibly provide avenues for social justice and the reduction of harms. Such developments might, for example, enable the creation of transnational networks amongst the speakers of marginalized and minoritized languages that would promote the circulation of knowledge, strategies and techniques for language maintenance and revitalization as well as material resources (Davis et al., 2019). It might help communities secure the ‘right to stay’ discussed above – to remain where they are but to escape the oppressive treatment by the state that has engulfed them and that threatens them and their language. Greater freedom of movement in a region with more open (or nonexistent) borders might also enable individuals and communities to seek linguistic justice by moving to wherever conditions are most favorable. However, despite the promise of such developments, the prospect of open borders also raises important questions. Not all flows across open borders would necessarily benefit the vulnerable and marginalized. To what extent would open, porous, or abolished borders reproduce existing power inequalities and reinscribe the subordination of the disempowered? Would a world without state borders provide greater refuge and protection for the linguistically vulnerable, or increased exposure to multiplied sources of violence beyond the state? What relations of solidarity and mutual aid would ensure that a world of open borders would be more, rather than less, just? In short, how should border imperialism be undone to ensure the benefit of all? And what about language borders? Is an abolitionist approach useful, and what would it look like? Here, I think that caution is once again warranted. Approaches aiming to complexify, blur, and puncture language borders run the risk of both reproducing and legitimizing the erasure of subordinated languages by state power, turning well-meaning post-structuralists into unwitting petty sovereigns. Often presented as a way to undermine inequalities, efforts to remove language boundaries can also reproduce existing power hierarchies and increase the vulnerability of oppressed populations, intensifying their exposure to harms (De Meulder et al., 2019). This is particularly likely to be the case in a world where state borders, and the internal frontiers they create, remain undone.

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Rather than considering the abolition of language borders, we might want to consider their democratization as a path to greater justice and reduced harms (Young, 2011). Perhaps we need to think about how, when asserted by communities, language borders can work against state borders, to reassert suppressed sovereignty, and claim a right to stay in place whilst perpetuating non-subordinated distinction. Perhaps claims to language borders can serve to exteriorize an alternative set of interior frontiers that promotes the interests of the oppressed against those of the state. In short, reconsidering language borders for greater social justice might need to focus not so much on the borders themselves, but who gets to define them (Meek, 2011). In the case of both state borders and language borders, efforts to reduce harms and move towards more just social and political structures and relations involve debates that permeate the literature on social justice elsewhere, drawing on the distinction between what Nancy Fraser (2003) describes as ‘transformative’ and ‘affirmative’ approaches. Affirmative approaches seek to retain borders of social distinction and recognition, but establish more equitable social relations by repairing the damages of status subordination through discourses of valorization and practices of affirmative action. Transformative approaches, meanwhile, aim to achieve greater social justice by abolishing the borders of social distinction that enable social hierarchies to form. Consideration of the issues above relating to state and language borders will benefit from deeper engagement with this broader conversation in the social justice literature. By way of conclusion then, I will leave the reader with a question to consider when reading the chapters that follow: in each of the cases considered, what strategies and techniques of affirmation and transformation of both linguistic and state borders might enable the transition to a more just and less harmful set of social and political relations?

References Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition. Verso. Baugh, J. (2005). Linguistic profiling. In S. Makoni, G. Smitherman, A. F. Ball, & A. K. Spears (Eds.), Black linguistics: Language, society and politics in Africa and the Americas (pp. 167-180). Routledge. Bendi Tso & Turin, M. (2019). Speaking ‘Chone’, speaking shallow: Dual linguistic hegemonies in China’s Tibetan frontier. In S. K. Sonntag & M. Turin (Eds.), The politics of language contact in the Himalaya (pp. 137-162). Open Book Publishers.

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Hage, G. (2003). Against paranoid nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society. Annandale, NSW: Pluto. Hage, G. (2016). État de siege: A dying domesticating colonialism? American Ethnologist, 43(1), 38-49. Harris, T. (2013). Geographical diversions: Tibetan trade, global transactions. University of Georgia Press. Huber, T. (2008). Pushing south: Tibetan economic and political activities in the far eastern Himalaya, ca. 1900-1950. In A. McKay and A. Balicki-Denjongpa (Eds.), Buddhist Himalaya: Studies in religion, history and culture: Proceedings of the Golden Jubilee Conference of the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology (pp., 259-276). Namgyal Institute of Tibetology. Hyslop, G. (2014). A preliminary reconstruction of East Bodish. In T. Owen-Smith and N. Hill (Eds.), Trans-Himalayan linguistics: Historical and descriptive linguistics of the Himalayan area (pp. 155-179). Walter de Gruyter. Irvine, J., & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, politics, and identities (pp. 35-84). School of American Research Press. Ives, P. (2004). Language and hegemony in Gramsci. Pluto Press/Fernwood Publishing. Jacoby, S. H. (2016). Love and liberation: Autobiographical writings of the Tibetan Buddhist visionary Sera Khandro. Columbia University Press. Jacques, G. (2017). Gyalrong language. In R. Sybesma (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics (pp. 583-589). Brill. Jones, R. (2016). Violent borders: Refugees and the right to move. Verso. Kellner, B. (2018). Vernacular literacy in Tibet: Present debates and historical beginnings. In E. Krotz, S. Müller, N. Kössinger, & P. Rychterová (Eds.). Anfangsgeschichten/Origin Stories (pp. 381-402). Brill. Khan, S. W. (2015). Muslim, trader, nomad, spy: China’s Cold War and the people of the Tibetan borderlands. University of North Carolina Press. Konchok Gelek. (2017). Variation, contact, and change in language varieties in Yul shul (northern Khams). International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 245, 91-111. Konrad, V., Laine, J. P., Liikanen, I., Scott, J. W., & Widdis, R. (2019). The language of borders. In S. D. Brunn & R. Keherin (Eds.), Handbook of the changing world language map (pp. 2175-2192). Springer. Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. Routledge. Makley, C. E. (2007). The violence of liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist revival in post-Mao China. University of California Press.

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Maxwell, A. (2018). When theory is a joke: The Weinreich witticism in linguistics. Beiträge zur geschichte der sprachwissenschaft, 28(2), 263-292. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics (L. Meintjes, Trans.). Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40. Meek, B. A. (2011). We are our language: An ethnography of language revitalization in a northern Athabaskan community. University of Arizona Press. Miller, T. (2019). Empire of borders: The expansion of the US border around the world. Verso. Monsutti, A. (2018). Mobility as a political act. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(3), 448-455. Nevins, J. (2017). The right to the world. Antipode, 49(5), 1349-1367. Oberman, K. (2011). Immigration, global poverty and the right to stay. Political Studies, 59(2), 253-268. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial formation in the United States. Routledge. Pommaret, F. (1999). The Monpa revisited: In search of Mon. In T. Huber (Ed.), Sacred spaces and powerful places in Tibetan culture. Library of Tibetan Works & Archives. Relyea, S. (2017). Indigenizing international law in early twentieth-century China: Territorial sovereignty in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Late imperial China, 38(2), 1-60. Roche, G. (2014). Flows and frontiers: Landscape and cultural dynamics on the northeast Tibetan Plateau. Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 15(1), 1-25. Roche, G. (2019a). Articulating language oppression: Colonialism, coloniality and the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages. Patterns of Prejudice, 53(5), 487-514. Roche, G. (2019b). Linguistic justice, decolonization, and language endangerment. Paper presented at the Foundation for Endangered Languages Annual Conference (Sydney, Australia 14-16 December 2019). https://easychair.org/publications/ preprint/JsQp Saxer, M., & Andersson, R. (2019). The return of remoteness: Insecurity, isolation and connectivity in the new world disorder. Social Anthropology, 27(2), 140-155. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Duke University Press. Stoler, A. L. (2012). Interior frontiers. Political concepts: A critical lexicon. https:// www.politicalconcepts.org/interior-frontiers-ann-laura-stoler/#ref58 Stoler, A. L. (2017). ‘Interior frontiers’ as political concept, diagnostic, and dispositif. Fieldsights. https://culanth.org/f ieldsights/interior-frontiers-as-politicalconceptdiagnostic-and-dispositif Sullivan, S. (2015). The physiology of sexist and racist oppression. Oxford University Press. Therborn, G. (2013). The killing fields of inequality. Verso.

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Tournadre, N. (2014). The Tibetic languages and their classification. In T. OwenSmith and N. Hill (Eds.), Trans-Himalayan linguistics: Historical and descriptive linguistics of the Himalayan area (pp. 105-129). Walter de Gruyter. Trent, M., Dooley, D. G., & Dougé, J. (2019). The impact of racism on child and adolescent health. Pediatrics, 144(2). https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2019-1765 UNESCO (1953). The use of vernacular languages in education. UNESCO. Urciuoli, B. (1995). Languages and borders. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 525-46. Valencia, S. (2019). Gore capitalism. MIT Press. Walia, H. (2013). Undoing border imperialism. AK Press. Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-systems analysis: An introduction. Duke University Press. Wenner, M. (2020). Functions of sovereign violence: Contesting and establishing order in Darjeeling, India. Political Geography, 77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. polgeo.2019.102094 Wolfe, P. (2016). Traces of history: Elementary structures of race. Verso Books. Wonders, N. (2015). Transforming borders from below. In L. Weber (Ed.), Rethinking border control for a globalized world: A preferred future (pp. 190-198). Routledge. Yeh, E. (2019). ‘The land belonged to Nepal but the people belonged to Tibet’: Overlapping sovereignties and mobility in the Limi Valley borderland. Geopolitics, 26(3), 919-945. Young, I. (2011). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press. Yuval-Davis, N., Wemyss, G., & Cassidy, K. (2019). Bordering. Polity Press. Zeisler, B. (2006). Why Ladakhi must not be written – Being part of the Great Tradition: Another kind of global thinking. In A. Saxena and L. Borin (Eds.), Lesser-known languages of South Asia: Status and policies, case studies and applications of information technology (pp. 175-194). Mouton de Gruyter.

About the author Gerald Roche is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Australia, and a co-chair of the Global Coalition for Language Rights. He is an international expert in language revitalization and the politics of language in Tibet and the Himalayas.

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Playing with Language Boundaries Heteroglot Standard Language Ideology and Linguistic Belonging among Amdo Children Shannon Ward Abstract This chapter examines the consequences of language standardisation for children in contemporary Amdo (Qinghai, China). Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork documenting children’s language practices in a region historically characterised by linguistic convergence, I show how the youngest generation of Amdo Tibetan speakers is defining social belonging by marking a boundary between the Tibetan and Chinese languages. I argue that children’s linguistic boundary-marking responds to ‘heteroglot standard language ideology’, a moral orientation towards Tibetan and Chinese as discrete languages that has arisen amidst anxieties over assimilation and leads children to identify with a rural/urban binary. Because this binary entrenches a hierarchy between Tibetan and Chinese, community aspirations for socioeconomic mobility encourage children to speak standard Mandarin. Keywords: language boundaries, language standardisation, language ideologies, Tibetan language, Amdo Tibet

Introduction It was a midday in June 2018. I was in an Amdo Tibetan village, in a small valley nestled beside the Yellow River in Qinghai, China. Three children sat atop a stationary bicycle in an exercise plot gifted by the county government. Six-year-old Dolma was first, trailed by her six-year-old cousin Dawa and four-year-old sister Lhamo. Suddenly, Dolma braked the pedals, pointing. Two new children stood at the gate to the exercise plot. Hesitating, they opened

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the gate and entered. Dolma dismounted the bike and called to Lhamo and Dawa in Amdo Tibetan “ŋa-zo dewa-kə ma-re-pa”1 (I guess they’re not from our village). Dawa and Lhamo ran to catch up with Dolma, while Dolma greeted the newcomers in hesitating Mandarin, saying, “xiao3 peng2you!” (little friend!). With her decision to switch from spoken Amdo to Mandarin, Dolma marked this arrival as a cross-linguistic encounter. The other children followed suit. They stood in two separate groups. In Mandarin, they discussed the locations of their schools. Dolma, Dawa, and Lhamo attend the local village preschool. The other two children attend a preschool in Xining city, the provincial capital located about 250 kilometres north-east. After several moments, the children departed from their meeting point. Dolma, Dawa, and Lhamo returned to the bicycle, while the newcomers skipped towards a small plot of grass. Based on the children’s choice to converse in Mandarin and play separately, I assumed that the newcomers were not ethnic Tibetans. Dolma had stated that the newcomers were not from her village. Maybe, I pondered, they were from a nearby Han Chinese or Muslim Hui community, visiting their family’s rural homeland during the summer holiday. When another adult arrived on scene, I realised I was mistaken. I approached the woman to greet her. She responded to me in Amdo Tibetan, and identified the two children as her own. The woman explained that her family was from this very village. Her children, however, attended a school in Xining city. Since all the children shared the same village homeland, why did they mark a linguistic and social boundary between each other? In this chapter, I examine Amdo Tibetan children’s formation of language boundaries by drawing from fifteen months of ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork conducted from 2016 to 2018. During this research, I documented the spontaneous language use of children from one extended family, who were living in rural villages or Xining, Qinghai’s capital city. All of these children acquired spoken Amdo Tibetan as their first language, and were bilingual in Mandarin. While children living in villages maintained their bilingualism, children living in Xining city rapidly shifted to preferring Mandarin, the official language of the Chinese state, around age three (Ward, 2019). I draw on literature in language ideologies to demonstrate how the issues of language bordering examined in this volume contribute to Amdo 1 Quotations from spoken Amdo are transcribed with the International Phonetic Alphabet. Quotations from Mandarin use Pinyin transliteration. In quotations involving language mixing, Mandarin words are bolded. Literary Tibetan words provided in-text use Wylie transliteration.

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children’s language shift. My analysis reveals Amdo children’s historically contingent forms of identification. In a borderland region characterised by extensive hybridity and admixture (Roche, 2016, p. 128), contemporary Amdo children identify with sharply demarcated boundaries between the rural and urban, and between Tibetan and Chinese. I argue that this boundary-marking is one response to a newfound pressure to speak two standard languages: Amdo Tibetan and Mandarin Chinese. The heightened significance of these boundaries affects everyday relationships in Amdo Tibetan families and communities. In the pages that follow, I show how two binaries – rural/urban and Tibetan/Chinese – have supplanted traditional place-based linguistic variation in Amdo.

Heteroglot standard language ideology I analyze Amdo Tibetan children’s language practices by integrating literature on language ideologies with key issues in border studies. My analysis starts from the conviction that it is necessary to examine language boundaries not only through institutionalised designations and political discourse, but also through everyday verbal practices. This conviction derives from linguistic anthropological interest in language ideologies. Language ideologies are taken-for-granted beliefs about language and social life that speakers display through two mechanisms. First, speakers explicitly articulate ideologies about language in the content of their discourse. Second, speakers socially display their ideologies in patterns of everyday language use. These social displays may be implicit (Silverstein, 2001, pp. 400-401; Woolard, 1998a, p. 4), but they are tied to the values associated with specif ic linguistic features (Eckert, 2008, p. 463; Urciuoli, 1995, p. 538). These explicit articulations and implicit displays reveal the interface between a language’s social functions and structural forms (Woolard, 1998a, p. 3). The unification of language form and function means that speakers’ beliefs about the boundaries of their communities motivate linguistic convergence or divergence (Irvine & Gal, 2000, pp. 36-37). A language ideological approach aims to reveal the mechanisms of social and linguistic differentiation at play in speakers’ conceptions of languages as distinctive codes. In the ethnographic setting of Amdo, this approach calls into question the state’s official view of Mandarin as “the sun around which minority-language planets orbit” (Dwyer, 1998, p. 79). Instead, this approach attends to how speakers orient to standard languages, in which

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contexts, and why. By tracing children’s everyday language use, I argue that when Amdo children differentiate between Tibetan and Chinese as discrete codes, they respond to a ‘heteroglot standard language ideology’, or a moral emphasis on multiple, competing standard languages. Children do not learn standard languages spontaneously in the course of first language acquisition and socialisation. Standard languages require the continuous recognition and reproduction of key features that are taken for granted as legitimate. Communities espousing standard languages, or ‘standard language cultures’, tend to view language as a cultural possession that speakers must learn through explicit instruction. The ‘standard language’ is not based on native speakers’ intuitions (Milroy, 2001, p. 530). It is an idealised system that is maintained through significant social pressure for native speakers to use certain legitimate language forms, in certain contexts, and in certain ways. The work that goes into maintaining standard languages is not neutral. It upholds the economic, social, and cultural benefits conferred upon those who have learned to use standard languages (Bourdieu, 1992, pp. 44-46). As described in the subsequent section, heteroglot standard language ideology derives from local Tibetan responses to state language policies that position Tibetans as minoritised citizens and provide them with differential access to education based on their places of habitation. With the concept of heteroglot standard language ideology, I amend Silverstein’s (1996) analysis of the ‘monoglot’ standard in American English. As Silverstein argued, the ideal of a common language in the contemporary United States drives collective conceptions of language, and, in turn, shapes how people actually use language (p. 285). To be fully recognised as a citizen of the United States, one must speak only standard English. Amdo’s standard language culture resembles that of the contemporary United States because the endpoint of community belonging is the boundary of the standard language itself. However, Amdo’s standard language ideology differs from that of the United States due to the position of Tibetans in contemporary China. As Shneiderman (2006) adeptly notes, Tibetan identity is simultaneously ethnic and national: “When the unit of analysis is China or the broader Himalayan region, Tibetan-ness is a marked, minority ethnic category. However, when the unit of analysis is the Tibetan nation, Tibetan-ness takes on the invisibility of dominance” (p. 15). In other words, ethnic marginalisation informs Amdo Tibetans’ own understandings of their nationhood. As active participants in everyday social interaction, Amdo Tibetan children encounter language ideologies in the course of their language acquisition and socialisation. Because these young children are the next generation of Amdo speakers, their language use makes apparent how heteroglot standard

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language ideology is reproducing the simultaneous markedness of Tibetan ethnic marginalisation and the invisibility of Tibetan national dominance in contemporary China.

The sociolinguistic setting: Standard language culture in Amdo’s linguistic ecology Amdo’s standard language culture has developed amidst extensive language contact and a history of socially valued linguistic diversity. The region that Tibetans call Amdo, today divided between the mainland Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu, is home to an estimated 15-20 languages, which derive from four language groups: Turkic, Mongolic, Tibetan, and Sinitic (Janhunen, 2012, pp. 177-178). Amdo’s languages form a ‘sprachbund’; despite their distinctive origins, they have structurally adapted to one another through geographic proximity. Historically, Amdo’s inhabitants have spoken diverse mother tongues, while also using the major regional varieties of spoken Tibetan and Chinese, Amdo Tibetan and Qinghai hua, for interaction across communities (Dede, 2003). Traditionally, the function of Amdo Tibetan and Qinghai hua as lingua francas was not linked to a standard language culture. Inhabitants of Amdo conceptualised Tibetan and Chinese as two groups of regionally diverse spoken languages. Individual spoken languages marked places of origin, while each group of languages also shared a common literary tradition (Mair, 1991; Tam, 2020).2 Today, Amdo Tibetans identify as speakers of a Tibetan language (a mdo skad) with two salient varieties, ‘nomad talk’ (’brog skad) and ‘farmer talk’ (rong skad). The labels of ‘nomad talk’ and ‘farmer talk’ intersect with finer-grained distinctions between place-based mother tongues, known as yul skad. The Tibetan term yul skad translates to ‘land speech’, demonstrating how linguistic diversity indexes place-based belonging. In Amdo, one’s yul skad marks one’s kinship bonds, spiritual connections to the homeland, and family migration histories. Linguistic diversity has therefore traditionally encouraged inclusion in place-based social groups, rather than perpetuating exclusion from a shared national identity. 2 Note that Roche’s emphasis on the subordinated position of the spoken ‘dialects’ in relation to the literary language (this volume, Chapter 1) is a feature of standard language culture. The existence of spoken linguistic diversity and a common literary language does not entail inequality, in and of itself; however, the ideological privileging of one mode of language over another does (Eckert, 1980).

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As Suzuki (this volume) demonstrates, however, not all forms of placebased linguistic variation have been traditionally accepted as markers of Tibetan identity. Yul skad that are spoken by ethnic Tibetans and share significant structural commonalities with other Tibetan languages are named with local toponyms. The practice of assigning a toponym to a spoken variety legitimises it as an emblem of place-based linguistic belonging. In contrast, languages spoken by ethnic Tibetans that are not mutually intelligible with other Tibetan languages are categorically referred to as logs skad (‘side’ or ‘reversed’ speech). The hard boundary between yul skad and logs skad marks the traditional endpoint of Tibetan linguistic belonging. The rise of heteroglot standard language ideology has introduced another hard boundary, between Amdo’s yul skad and a standard Tibetan language, known as pha skad gtsang ma, or ‘pure father tongue’ (Tunzhi et al., 2019, pp. 32-33). In Amdo today, belonging to the Tibetan nation requires displays of linguistic allegiance. Young children must speak the pha skad gtsang ma, rather than their yul skad. In his work on Amdo Tibetan celebrities’ media discourse, Thurston (2018) argues that campaigns about speaking pha skad gtsang ma represent an “attempt to exercise control over a linguistic world that threatens to spiral away […] as Tibetan communities become increasingly integrated into the Chinese state and the global marketplace” (p. 202). Thurston references economic changes that have accompanied modernisation campaigns in China’s far west. These changes have introduced Mandarin to Amdo’s linguistic ecology, and encouraged learning standard languages to enhance participation in the radically expanded market economy (Roche, 2017).3 In other words, recent changes to the economic position of Tibetans in China have made linguistic diversity within Amdo’s yul skad a point of collective anxiety, thus narrowing the range of linguistic features that Tibetans associate with their national identity. Exercising control over language in this manner has given rise to a standard language culture that rationalises itself through a revisionist history of Tibetan philology (Roche, this volume, Chapter 1). Amdo Tibetans define their standard 3 A full treatment of the region’s political economy is outside the scope of this article. It is nonetheless worth noting that Amdo’s political economy intersects in important ways with language policy, education, and language standardisation efforts. Scholars of contemporary Tibet largely agree that the Open Up the West campaign (Ch. xi1bu 4 da 4 kai1fa1) brought the most significant socioeconomic changes to the region in the past twenty years (Fischer, 2013). This campaign reformatted Amdo Tibetan livelihood strategies by curtailing land use, settling nomadic herders, and introducing an extensive program of state subsidies (Yeh & Makley, 2019), all of which have contributed to Amdo Tibetan families’ newfound hope in socioeconomic mobility through education.

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spoken language through features connected to literary Tibetan, especially sounds of the yul skad spoken by Amdo’s nomads (Prins, 2002, p. 42). These sound features serve as ‘shibboleths’, “index[ing] the border between both language forms and social groups” (Roche, this volume, Chapter 1). The result is the perpetuation of a standard spoken Amdo Tibetan, whose features are ideologically connected to two symbols of Tibetan national identity: literary Tibetan and nomadic peoples. In this historical reimagining, literary Tibetan and nomadism represent untouched reservoirs of Tibetan culture. The fact that literary Tibetan was, like all living languages, subject to linguistic convergence and change, has been erased (Thurston, 2018, pp. 202-203). The persistence of diverse yul skad with their own histories of convergence has been overlooked. Amdo children must navigate this dissociation of standard Tibetan from their own yul skad as they learn how to mark belonging to their communities.

The political setting: Language and ethnic policy in Amdo The specific contours of Amdo’s standard language culture mirror state efforts to uphold Mandarin as China’s common language. It is in this sense that Amdo’s language ideology presents two competing ‘heteroglot’ standards: standard Mandarin, and the pha skad gtsang ma, standard Amdo Tibetan. The Chinese state’s support for multiple standard languages in its ethnic policy, along with the renewed emphasis on using only standard languages in schooling, represent key focal points of heteroglot standard language ideology that shape the social lives of young children. Amdo Tibetans’ emphasis on the differences between the yul skad and the pha skad gtsang ma mirrors the Chinese state’s own forms of language engineering. The Chinese state recognises its population as comprising a Han Chinese majority and 55 minoritised ethnic groups (Ch. min2zu2). In defining these groups, state-sponsored researchers attempted to align the boundaries of each ethnicity with a territory, a single spoken language, and a single written language, leading to the creation of standard vernaculars with written equivalents. Language engineering for the Han majority involved the promotion of standard Mandarin, a ‘common speech’ (Ch. pu3tong1hua 4) that resembled its literary equivalent of standard simplified Chinese (Ji, 2004; Rohsenow, 2004). Language engineering for each minoritised ethnic group involved reforming existing written languages, and developing new writing systems for those whose designated vernacular lacked a written form (Shakya, 1994; Zhou, 2003). The 1954 Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (and its subsequent versions) guarantees the right of minoritised

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ethnic groups to use their designated vernaculars and written standards in official capacities including signage, politics, and education, but only in rural territories recognised as autonomous prefectures or counties (Zhang, 2013, pp. 568-572). The state therefore bounded language rights to demarcated territories along a rural/urban divide. The state policy of territorialising language rights through written languages has persisted. Since the late twentieth century, however, the state has begun to more aggressively promote assimilation and modernisation through Mandarin, especially in its school system. Even in rural areas where schooling is provided in a minoritised language, schools define students’ achievements through their knowledge of Mandarin (He, 2014). Educational standardisation now aims to develop all students’ knowledge of Mandarin, as a tool for uniting the Chinese nation. This represents a shift from previous language policies that promoted designated minoritised languages on the same terms as Mandarin (Zhou, 2017, pp. 470-471). For students who continue to pursue their studies in minoritised languages, the end of socialist job allocation has meant that they have fewer employment prospects than those educated in Mandarin (Zenz, 2013). The economic value of an education in Mandarin versus standard Tibetan is therefore highly unequal, which reinforces economic inequalities between rural and urban communities. The shift towards Mandarin-medium schooling has been accompanied by rural communities’ increased reliance on public education. In his study of pastoralists’ reactions to a new primary school in southern Amdo, Huatse Gyal (2019) found that, despite a general mistrust of state education, parents framed schooling as essential to their children’s futures. Gyal notes that this attitude responds to relatively recent economic changes; since the 1980s, land-use policies have made subsistence pastoralism increasingly untenable, leading rural Amdo communities to rely on the market economy. In fact, Yeh and Makley (2019) note that accessing schooling now functions as a significant driver of rural-to-urban migration in Amdo. With livelihood strategies shifting towards market labour, families desire educational opportunities that are associated with better socioeconomic outcomes and require knowledge of Mandarin (pp. 3-4). As economist Andrew Fischer (2013) argues, despite these aspirations for mobility, assimilationist models of education combined with exclusionary pressures against minoritised ethnic groups in the labour market have entrenched existing inequalities. The rise of a standard language culture in Amdo has therefore been driven by pressures for Tibetans to participate in an economic system where their ethnic and linguistic identities are devalued. In a comparative analysis of language mixing in three minoritised European language communities, Gal (1987)

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traced specific pathways of community language shift in speakers’ historically contingent responses to economic marginalisation. According to Gal, Patterns of choice among linguistic variants can be interpreted to reveal aspects of speakers’ ‘consciousness’: how they respond symbolically to class relations within the state, and how they understand their historic position and identity within regional economic systems structured around dependency and unequal development (Gal, 1987, p. 637).

In Amdo, shifting economic relations have transformed the social values associated with specific linguistic features, in turn redefining legitimate language. Traditional cultural associations among land, language, and belonging now contradict the dominant language ideology. This ideological disjuncture poses a central challenge for young children: their yul skad is not the spoken Tibetan language they are expected to use in order to ensure cultural continuity or economic mobility. We can trace Amdo children’s consciousness of their ethnic and national identities through their marking of social and linguistic boundaries in everyday talk. The following sections describe how children’s everyday uses of their yul skad demonstrate historical linguistic convergence and more recent language contact with Mandarin. As children age, however, they begin to enforce both a social and linguistic border between Tibetan and Chinese. Children discourage each other from the flexible uses of language that can support sustained multilingualism. When children’s peers and caregivers display negative stances towards their flexible multilingualism, children self-identify with an opposition between the Tibetan and Chinese languages and identities. Rural children abandon certain features of their yul skad. For urban children, who grow up using Mandarin outside the home, alienation from their mother tongues is more extreme. These children come to actively identify as urban Mandarin speakers.

Blurring boundaries: Language mixing and bivalency in rural children’s play In their earliest interactions, both rural and urban children use their yul skad with their family and related peers. As children age, enter preschools, and form peer relationships outside the home, they prefer more standard varieties. Rural children begin to use more standard forms of Amdo, rather than their yul skad, and begin to restrict language mixing to certain genres

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of play. Urban children, who lack access to a peer group with the same yul skad, prefer Mandarin (Ward, 2019, p. 247). These changes in rural and urban children’s language repertoires demonstrate consciousness of legitimate forms of language. Young children use language in creative ways, but learn to suppress their intuitions across a wider range of social settings as they age. Children respond to heteroglot standard language ideology when they choose to use or suppress certain linguistic features or forms of code mixing. Due to structural convergence in the Amdo sprachbund, many of Amdo’s yul skad include bivalent features, “words or segments that could ‘belong’ equally, descriptively and even prescriptively, to [all] codes” used in multilingual speech (Woolard, 1998b, p. 7). Bivalent features reveal contradictions between identified language boundaries and the realities of structural convergence amongst languages in contact. Bivalent features do not correspond to the standard pha skad gtsang ma, which mirrors literary Tibetan and is void of markers of spoken linguistic convergence. Several yul skad from Amdo’s farming communities display bivalency in a series of discourse markers: -la, -ba, and -ja. The discourse markers serve epistemic, phatic, and emphatic functions. Typological research suggests that they entered Amdo Tibetan through contact with the Turkic language Salar (Simon, 2016, p. 172). These three discourse markers also happen to be homophonic with Mandarin sentence-final particles that encode different semantic meanings. The discourse markers therefore simultaneously belong to several of Amdo farming communities’ yul skad, Salar, and Mandarin. The linguistic convergence of Amdo’s yul skad and Salar represented in this set of discourse markers indexes family migration histories. Dolma, Lhamo, and Dawa, the children we met in the chapter’s opening, trace their heritage to Hualong, an area where the Salar language has historically been spoken. With Qinghai’s establishment as a province in 1929, Hualong came under the rule of the Hui Muslim militarist, Ma Bufang. By the late 1930s, Ma Bufang had allied with the Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Army) against the Red Army (Chinese Communist Army). To avoid conscription into the escalating civil war, Tibetans from Hualong fled south (Tsering Bum, 2013). When Dolma, Lhamo, and Dawa use bivalent discourse markers, they therefore invoke a dual history: that of the contact between their yul skad and Salar, and that of the movement of their ancestors. The values associated with these discourse markers are complicated by their association with Mandarin. Paradoxically, these linguistic forms simultaneously index place-based identities and kinship, as well as anxieties about the encroachment of Mandarin. Children’s uses of bivalent features reveal their understandings of linguistic boundaries, as well as their own responses to dominant language

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ideologies. In imaginative play routines outside the purview of adults, rural children mix their yul skad, along with its bivalent features, and Mandarin. For example, one afternoon in late June 2018, Dolma and Lhamo were playing with me in their family’s courtyard. Dolma, aged five years, eleven months at the time, pretended to be a magician by making a tissue paper disappear. While waving the tissue in her hands, Dolma called out, “mo2shu 4 mo2shu 4! da ɣɲik̚ tsəm-ma-do-ra.ta, mo2shu 4 mo2shu 4” (Magic, magic! Then, keeping your eyes closed, magic, magic). Dolma paused, shifting the tissue behind her back and holding out her empty hands. She then stated, “me-la!” (Nothing’s there!). Dolma initiated the magic trick by reciting the Mandarin word mo2shu4 (magic) and holding a tissue. She then instructed her audience in her yul skad. Next, she repeated mo2shu 4 (magic) in Mandarin. Finally, Dolma asserted that the tissue was gone, again using her yul skad, while holding out her empty hands as evidence that she had completed the magic trick. In this play sequence, Dolma enacted two personae through two distinct codes: a Mandarin-speaking magician, and herself, a child providing instructions to manage the unfolding of the game in her yul skad. Dolma retained the language choice and associated identity of the magician. She also conformed to the norms of peer-group play by using her yul skad to direct her audience’s actions. When closing the magic trick, Dolma used a bivalent discourse marker. This feature encodes a duality in linguistic meaning and cultural association. Dolma simultaneously enacted her own identity as a rural Amdo farmer, and as a character from the media. By using a bivalent feature, Dolma inhabited identities both cosmopolitan (associated with Mandarin), and local (associated with her yul skad). When rural Amdo children use bivalent features in imaginative play, they expand the definition of what it means to speak and be Tibetan. They display acceptance of a broad repertoire of linguistic features and associated cultural meanings when marking their Tibetan identity. In this genre of play, rural children do not mark a social or linguistic boundary between Tibetan and Chinese. However, Amdo adults use bivalent features to form language boundaries by associating them with different languages based on the age of the speaker. Adults label children’s uses of bivalent discourse markers as evidence of their language shift to Mandarin. When assisting with transcription, adults identified the yul skad’s discourse markers as “coming from Chinese,”4 but only when they were used by children and not adults. In other words, adults labelled these bivalent features as Mandarin when they were spoken by 4

Translated by the author from fieldnotes.

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children, but as their own yul skad when they were spoken by adults. Adults thus interpret children’s uses of converged features through a heteroglot standard language ideology that recognises only Tibetan and Chinese as valid languages, and that labels Chinese as a threat to Tibetan linguistic continuity. By differentially applying this interpretation to children’s speech, they encourage children to suppress their knowledge of their yul skad. Heteroglot standard language ideology therefore unintentionally alienates Amdo children from their yul skad.

Enforcing language boundaries: Children’s surveillance of language mixing Rural children generally restrict language mixing to imaginative play outside the purview of adults. When rural children use Mandarin loan words in the presence of adults, adults often correct them by offering an alternative, standard Amdo term that has an equivalent in literary Tibetan (Ward, 2018). Children respond to adults’ enforcement of this language boundary by monitoring each other’s language mixing. For example, several days after the Tibetan New Year celebration in 2017, Dolma, sister Lhamo, and cousin Dawa were sitting in the living room of their uncle’s home. They imaginatively recreated the New Year’s celebration of the previous days. Dolma and Lhamo cried out ‘cheers’ in Mandarin (gan1bei1), adding a Tibetan emphatic -ja. As they repeated “gan1bei1 -ja! gan1bei1 -ja!”, clacking teacups filled with water together, cousin Dawa grabbed an empty soda bottle and hit the girls on their heads. Dawa shouted in the yul skad, “tɕʰo ʳdʑa re-ba?” (So, you’re Chinese?). With this statement, Dawa censored Dolma and Lhamo’s language mixing by using the label ‘Chinese’ as a negative assessment. The girls ignored Dawa’s interruption, and continued with their mock celebration. Their uncle, however, also intervened, negatively assessing the girls’ language mixing and encouraging Dawa to assert the standard Tibetan equivalent of the Mandarin loan word. Uncle stated, “ⁿdə.ge ze-ɲen-nə-ma-re. awu-kə da ɸɕe-ko-no. e-ko?” (Talking like this isn’t good. Older brother [Dawa] knows. Do you know?). Dawa paused, and uncle offered the standard Tibetan phrase for cheers. Uncle said, “ɕe.tok̚-ɸɕi ze-nə.re. i-ra?” (We say ‘bottoms up’, right?). Dawa immediately followed uncle’s statement by repeating, “ɕe.tok̚-ɸɕi ze-nə.re” (We say ‘bottoms up’). Dawa then turned to Dolma and Lhamo, suggesting, “ɕe.tok̚-ɸɕi ze-na?” (Say ‘bottoms up’, then?).

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Dolma and Lhamo did not respond. Uncle replied by praising Dawa, “ɣɲikə Dawa-kə da xi-a-ja. ʳdʑa.ʂkil woʳ.ʂkil ɣɲikə xi-kə” (Dawa knows both, then. He knows both Chinese and Tibetan). Uncle’s characterisation of Dawa as knowing both Chinese and Tibetan reveals the centrality of language boundaries to heteroglot standard language ideology. In the above interaction, all three children demonstrated their knowledge of their yul skad and Mandarin. Only Dawa enforced a prohibition against mixing languages. He associated Dolma and Lhamo’s violation of the boundary between the Tibetan and Chinese languages with a non-Tibetan identity. It was Dawa’s separation of the two languages that led to Uncle’s attribution of Dawa, but not Dolma and Lhamo, as bilingual. Uncle therefore characterised legitimate multilingualism as the separation of Tibetan and Chinese when he praised Dawa. Heteroglot standard language ideology challenges children’s intuitions about their own language repertoires. Rural Amdo children maintain their multilingualism as they age; however, they learn to suppress their own intuitions as multilingual speakers, constructing a linguistic boundary between Tibetan and Chinese languages and identities. The continuous marking of this social and linguistic boundary has profound social consequences. Rural children have access to a peer group who shares their linguistic and social identity. Based on their birth place, they will go on to attend schools with mostly Tibetan peers, with options to access Tibetan language instruction. Urban children, who lack access to the social contexts that support constrained multilingualism, are alienated from their identity as Tibetan speakers and Tibetan persons.

Enforcing territorial distinctions: The displacement of the urban child Urban Amdo children self-identify and are identified by others as Mandarin speakers. Because they grow up away from a network of extended kin, young urban children are more dependent on adult caregivers for their early language socialisation than their rural counterparts. In the first years of life, urban children use their family’s yul skad, along with Mandarin, with their adult caregivers. In their interactions outside the home, they rely on Mandarin to communicate with multi-ethnic and multilingual neighbours, teachers, and peers. Urban children form relationships with peers who do not share their yul skad, and face pressure to demonstrate academic achievement in Mandarin from the time they begin primary school. When,

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in response to state language policy, their families and communities also define their ways of speaking in opposition to their Tibetan identity, urban children can face ruptures in their family relationships. These tensions arise in the course of everyday talk, when adult caregivers and urban children co-construct children’s identities as Mandarin speakers. For example, a young boy, Sonam, who was growing up in Xining city, drastically shifted his language preferences after beginning preschool. He lived with his parents, aunt, uncle, two cousins, and paternal grandparents in an apartment building in Xining city. Sonam had employed his family’s yul skad as his primary language until age three. After he began attending a Mandarin preschool, he mainly used Mandarin in his interactions with his family members (Ward, 2019, pp. 155-156). Sonam’s shifting language preferences affected his relationships with his family members. Sonam began to express conflicting stances towards his caregivers in the course of everyday talk. For example, in July 2018, Sonam was aged three years, eight months old. One day, I visited his family and was speaking with his grandfather, while Sonam read a book nearby. While his grandfather was talking to me, Sonam suddenly interrupted, shouting in Mandarin “apʰə chao3 si3 le, chao3 si3 le!” (Grandpa you’re too loud, too loud!). Grandfather responded with a negative assessment, stating in his yul skad, “kʰa rok̚ do. ⁿdə.gə ji ɲen-nə-ma-re” (Be quiet. Doing that is not good). Instead of complying with Grandfather’s request, Sonam escalated his interruption. Sonam yelled out, using Mandarin loan words in the syntax of his yul skad to say, “na ŋi kʰa rok̚ shuo1! o! tɕʰi tsʰə shuo1? apʰə!” (Hey, I said be quiet! Oh! What are you saying? Grandpa!). Grandfather initially ignored Sonam’s interruption, but then turned to him, asking, “apʰə ɸɕe-ko-no mə-tʰun-nə-re?” (Don’t you agree with what Grandpa’s saying?). Sonam responded by reasserting his initial complaint in Mandarin, “chao3 si3 le” (You’re too loud). Grandfather added, “chao3 si3 le? apʰə ɸɕe-ko-no e-ko-kə?” (Too loud? Do you understand what Grandpa is saying?). Sonam responded, now shifting to his yul skad, “mə-ko-kə” (I don’t understand). This interaction reveals that everyday social relationships contribute to urban children’s alienation from their yul skad. Perhaps feeling excluded from the adults’ conversation, Sonam attempted to participate by shifting the code to Mandarin. When Grandfather did not validate Sonam’s

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contribution, Sonam escalated his conflicting stance towards Grandfather. Through the content of his talk, Sonam also expressed a conflicting stance towards the Amdo yul skad. In fact, Sonam identif ied as a Mandarin speaker in a manner that did not match his linguistic repertoire. Sonam adeptly used the syntax of his yul skad, inserting Mandarin verbs into Amdo matrix sentences. Ironically, Sonam used the yul skad to assert that he did not understand Grandfather. This disjuncture between Sonam’s code choice and the content of his talk went unnoticed by Grandfather. Instead, Grandfather mirrored Sonam’s confrontational stance by discouraging Sonam’s participation in the ongoing talk and asking rhetorical questions that ratified Sonam’s claims to not understand. Grandfather thus accepted Sonam’s self-identification as a Mandarin speaker, overlooking features of Sonam’s talk that demonstrated his knowledge of the Amdo yul skad. Urban children’s identification with Mandarin is compounded by the fact that their education carries their parents’ hopes for socioeconomic mobility. As Grandfather explained, The children’s parents think differently than me. They think the children need to learn both literary Chinese (rgya yig) and literary Tibetan (bod yig) so they will have the knowledge to go anywhere in society and find whatever employment they wish, whereas I wanted to bring them to the rural homeland when they were about three years old to study literary Tibetan (bod yig). Otherwise, my children can speak Tibetan (bod skad shes), but my grandchildren will speak little Tibetan, and my great-grandchildren will never speak Tibetan. Certainly, they are Tibetan. But, not knowing how to write or speak Tibetan, is not Tibetan. It’s the same as Chinese people.5

In explaining his views about Sonam’s education in Xining city, Grandfather emphasised that his opinion differs from that of Sonam’s parents. Sonam’s parents focus on the promises of socioeconomic opportunity that they believe will accompany Sonam’s urban education. Grandfather, instead, felt that if his grandchildren were to study in rural schools with Tibetan instruction, they would maintain the ability to speak Tibetan. In explaining his perspective, Grandfather articulated the focal points of heteroglot standard language ideology. He conflated literary Tibetan with a single spoken 5 Personal communication from audio recorded interview, 11 June 2018, translated by the author.

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standard, and naturalised a rural/urban divide in children’s identities. Grandfather differentiated between literary Tibetan and spoken Tibetan (bod yig and bod skad, respectively), but did not discuss his own yul skad. He left unstated the relationship between literary and spoken Tibetan, implying that they are merely different modes of one single language. Also, Grandfather identified urban schooling in Mandarin as the cause of Tibetan children’s complete assimilation, making them ‘the same as Chinese people’. Grandfather’s sense that language policy in education is the salient cause of language shift overlooks important opportunities to support children’s multilingualism outside of school settings. When adults normalise the standard language culture perpetuated in schooling, they often do not recognise children’s intuitive displays of their linguistic knowledge, which entrenches children’s dissociation from their spoken yul skad. Urban children therefore face a double bind because, following heteroglot standard language ideology, the very focal point of their family’s aspirations for socioeconomic mobility entails their own linguistic erasure.

Conclusion: Reformulating language boundaries In contemporary Amdo, heteroglot standard language ideology legitimates a constrained form of multilingualism, where standard Amdo Tibetan and its appropriate uses are defined in opposition to Mandarin. In the course of their everyday, informal language socialisation, Amdo children encounter the same ideologies that characterise the Chinese state’s promotion of Mandarin. Rural Amdo children face pressure to speak in ways that constitute Tibetan and Chinese as discrete languages that are used in separate social situations and specific territories, and that correspond as closely as possible to their literary standards. Rural children must enact a moral imperative for Tibetan national unification through language standardisation. In this way, Amdo’s heteroglot standard language ideology unintentionally reinscribes state power in everyday talk by linguistically reproducing China’s own ‘interior frontiers’ (Stoler, 2017). Even in early childhood, Amdo children demonstrate their consciousness of these ideologies by actively marking boundaries amongst each other. Rural children label peers who violate norms of language mixing as ‘Chinese’. Urban children are identified by rural children, as well as their own families, as Mandarin speakers. As a result, only certain children continue to identify as Tibetan speakers as they grow up. This process of self-identification carries consequences beyond early childhood. As Schmidt (this volume) found in Tibetan diaspora communities

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in the Himalayas, educational settings promote an imagined singular ‘language’, which conflicts with children’s lived realities of learning to read a literary language distinct from their mother tongues. When Tibetan children in diaspora enter schools, they must mediate the dissonance between the imagined standard language and their actual language practices. Also, the naturalised binary divide between rural and urban Tibetan identities persists into adulthood. For example, Yang (2018) noted a hierarchical identification amongst Tibetan college students on a multi-ethnic campus in China. Discourses about the purity of the pha skad gtsang ma were linked to assessments about the purity of Tibetan persons (p. 929). These judgements about Tibetan language and identity also drew on place-based distinctions. Tibetan students articulated a hierarchical “delineation of ‘authenticity’ in which nomadic Tibetans are on the top, rural Tibetans are next, and urban Tibetans are on the bottom” (p. 930). This hierarchy correlates with state language policy, which supports minoritised language education, but only in rural areas. It also reconfigures pre-existing forms of place-based belonging in Amdo, in which diverse yul skad marked one’s kin group, homeland, and occupation as a farmer or nomad. These pre-existing forms of place-based social and linguistic belonging have been challenged by heteroglot standard language ideology. The examples in this chapter show that the notion of purity associated with the pha skad gtsang ma, or standard Tibetan, values sound features of Amdo nomads’ yul skad over features of linguistic convergence apparent in farmers’ yul skad. This devalorisation of farmers’ spoken languages discourages children’s flexible uses of their yul skad. When overtly displaying their language ideologies, adults and children alike restrict the range of language forms that are accommodated within their Tibetan national identity. Children are discouraged from using the converged features of their yul skad that, among adults, index meaningful family histories. Heteroglot standard language ideology thus challenges the maintenance of diversity within spoken Amdo Tibetan, and encourages language shift to Mandarin among children, in particular. Children’s dissociation from their spoken yul skad has arisen in the context of rapid socioeconomic change and new forms of mobility. As Suzuki (this volume) suggests, the mobility of Tibetan communities challenges the cultural preference for legitimising spoken language varieties with toponyms. In Amdo, cultural associations between place and language have shifted, now entrenching a binary opposition that maps languages onto a rural/urban divide. This binary opposition unintentionally encourages a larger-scale language shift in favour of Mandarin due to its associations with socioeconomic

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mobility. The separation of languages into distinct domains means that social inclusion and economic survival are now linked to the use of the dominant state language of Mandarin (Eckert, 1980, p. 1053). In China’s far west, the state’s expansion of a market economy and associated assimilationist models of schooling demonstrate an ideological push for modernisation. This push for modernisation carries social and material consequences. Amdo Tibetans have responded by explicitly marking the boundary between ‘Chinese’ and ‘Tibetan’, crafting a Tibetan national language as a foil to standard Mandarin. In this chapter’s opening scene, two groups of Amdo children from the same village homeland formulated a social and linguistic boundary between each other. The children growing up in their rural homeland, and the children visiting the homeland from their residence in the provincial capital city, framed their meeting as a cross-linguistic encounter between rural Tibetan speakers and urban Mandarin speakers. In a region where place-based linguistic diversity has historically marked social belonging, the children’s boundary marking represents a radical compression of deep-rooted cultural associations between place and language. The children enacted a form of ‘borderline dominance’ (Roche, this volume, Chapter 8) within their own community, marking a sharp distinction between rural Amdo speakers and urban Mandarin speakers. The children’s boundary-marking suggests that they have actively responded to a heteroglot standard language ideology, learning to identify each other through two opposing standard languages. These reformulations of place-based identification constrain whose language practices can be recognised as legitimately Tibetan. The forms of place-based belonging afforded to Amdo children now reproduce a rural/urban divide, responding to state efforts to modernise rural and minoritised communities through language standardisation.

References Bourdieu, P. (1992). Language and symbolic power. Polity Press. Dede, K. (2003). The Chinese language in Qinghai. Studia Orientalia Electronica, 95, 321-346. Dwyer, A. (1998). The texture of tongues: Languages and power in China. In W. Saffran (Ed.), Nationalism and ethnoregional identities in China (pp. 68-85). Routledge. Eckert, P. (1980). Diglossia: Separate and unequal. Linguistics, 18, 1053-1064. Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4), 453-476.

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Fischer, A. (2013). The disempowered development of Tibet in China: A study in the economics of marginalization. Lexington Books. Gal, S. (1987). Codeswitching and consciousness in the European periphery. American Ethnologist, 14(4), 637-653. He, B. (2014). The power of Chinese linguistic imperialism and its challenge to multicultural education. In J. Leibold and Y. Chen (Eds.), Minority education in China (pp. 45-64). Hong Kong University Press. Huatse Gyal (2019). ‘I am concerned with the future of my children’: The project economy and shifting views of education in a Tibetan pastoral community. Critical Asian Studies, 51(1), 12-30. Irvine, J., & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 35-84). SAR Press. Janhunen, J. (2012). On the hierarchy of structural convergence in the Amdo sprachbund. In P. Suihkonen, B. Comrie, & V. Solovyev (Eds.), Argument structure and grammatical relations: A crosslinguistic typology (pp. 177-190). John Benjamins. Ji, F. (2004). Linguistic engineering: Language and politics in Mao’s China. University of Hawaii Press. Mair, V. (1991). What is a Chinese ‘dialect/topolect’? Reflections on some key SinoEnglish language terms. Sino-Platonic Papers, 29, 1-31. Milroy, J. (2001). Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(4), 530-555. Prins, M. (2002). Toward a Tibetan common language: Amdo perspectives on attempts at language standardization.” In T. Huber (Ed.), Amdo Tibetans in transition: Society and culture in the post-Mao era (pp. 27-51). Brill. Roche, G. (2016). The Tibetanization of Henan’s Mongols: Ethnicity and assimilation on the Sino-Tibetan frontier. Asian Ethnicity, 17(1), 128-149. Roche, G. (2017). Introduction: The transformation of Tibet’s language ecology in the twenty-first century. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2017(245), 1-35. Rohsenow, J. (2004). Fifty years of script and written language reform in the P.R.C. In M. Zhou & H. Sun (Eds.), Language policy in the People’s Republic of China: Theory and practice since 1949 (pp. 21-43). Springer Netherlands. Shakya, T. (1994). Politicisation and the Tibetan language.” In R. Barnett (Ed.), Resistance and reform in Tibet (pp. 157-165). Indiana University Press. Shneiderman, S. (2006). Barbarians at the border and civilising projects: Analysing ethnic and national identities in the Tibetan context. In P. C. Klieger (Ed.), Tibetan borderlands (pp. 9-34). Brill. Silverstein, M. (1996). Monoglot ‘standard’ in America: Standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In R. Macauley and D. Brenneis (Eds.), The matrix of language: Contemporary linguistic anthropology (pp. 284-306). Westview Press.

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Silverstein, M. (2001). The limits of awareness. In A. Duranti (Ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader (pp. 382-407). Blackwell. Simon, C. (2016). Morphosyntaxe et sémantique grammaticale du salar et du tibétain de l’Amdo. PhD diss., Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. Stoler, L. (2017). “Interior frontiers” as political concept, diagnostic, and dispositif. Fieldsights. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/interior-frontiers-as-political-conceptdiagnostic-and-dispositif Tam, G. (2020). Dialect and nationalism in China, 1860-1960. Cambridge University Press. Thurston, T. (2018). “The purist campaign as metadiscursive regime in China’s Tibet.” Inner Asia, 20, 199-218. Tsering Bum (2013). A northeastern Tibetan childhood. Asian Highlands Perspectives, 27, 1-118. Tunzhi (Sonam Lhundrop), Suzuki, H., & Roche, G. (2019). Language contact and the politics of recognition amongst Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China: The RTa’u-speaking ‘Horpa’ of Khams. In S. Sonntag and M. Turin (Eds.), The politics of language contact in the Himalaya (pp. 17-48). Open Book Publishers. Urciuoli, B. (1995). Languages and borders. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 525-546. Ward, S. (2018). The moral economy of Mandarin loan words: Perspectives from Amdo Tibetan family conversation. Paper presented at Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, Washington, DC, 24 March. Ward, S. (2019). Learning language, transforming knowledge: Language socialization in Amdo Tibet. PhD diss., New York University. Woolard, K. (1998a). Introduction: Language ideology as a field of inquiry.” In B. Schieffelin, K. Woolard, & P. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory (pp. 3-50). Oxford University Press. Woolard, K. (1998b). Simultaneity and bivalency as strategies in bilingualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 8(1), 3-29. Yang, M. (2018). Discourses on ‘authenticity’: Language ideology, ethnic boundaries, and Tibetan identity on a multi-ethnic campus. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 39(10), 925-940. Yeh, E., & Makley, C. (2019). Urbanization, education, and the politics of space on the Tibetan Plateau. Critical Asian Studies, 51(1), 1-11. Zenz, A. (2013). ‘Tibetanness’ under threat?: Neo-integrationism, minority education and career strategies in Qinghai, P.R. China. Global Oriental. Zhang, Q. (2013). Language policy and ideology: Greater China. In R. Bayley, R. Cameron, & C. Lucas (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 563-586). Oxford University Press.

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Zhou, M. (2003). Multilingualism in China: The politics of writing reforms for minority languages 1949-2002. Mouton de Gruyter. Zhou, M. (2017). Language policy and education in greater China. In T. L. McCarty & S. May (Eds.), Language policy and political issues in education (pp. 463-477). Springer International.

About the author Shannon M. Ward is an Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Canada. Her research examines language socialization, multilingualism, and heritage language learning, with a focus on communities from the Himalayas.

3

The Role of Classical Tibetan (Chöke) on the Development of Kurtöp, a Language of Bhutan1 Gwendolyn Hyslop

Abstract Kurtöp displays a special relationship with Classical Tibetan. Although Kurtöp and its sister languages look surprisingly similar to other Tibetan languages, linguists can show even with core data that Kurtöp cannot be a direct descendant of Old Tibetan. The aim in this article is to use the comparative method to reconstruct aspects of the language to Proto East Bodish – the parent language to Kurtöp and other East Bodish languages –and then compare the reconstructions with Written Tibetan as a way to infer influence from Classical Tibetan on Kurtöp. I will show that the influence has been pervasive; although Kurtöp is demonstrably East Bodish (and not Tibetic), lexicon, grammar, and phonology have all been shaped by this liturgical language. In other words, language change and language contact through time can be examined through a lens of linguistic force, resulting in blurred borders. Keywords: Kurtöp, East Bodish, Bhutan, Classical Tibetan, language change, areal influence

Introduction The languages of Bhutan are often assumed to be Tibetan dialects, perhaps due to some of the apparent cultural similarities with Tibet and the fact that 1 This work has been generously supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP140103937) and a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I am grateful to many colleagues for comments, in particular Toni Huber, Nathan Hill, George van Driem, Scott DeLancey, Gerald Roche and the other participants of the joint ICSTLL52-HLS25 Workshop Talking Borders: Making and marking languages in the Transnational Himalayas, held in Sydney on 27 June 2019.

Roche, Gerald, and Gwendolyn Hyslop (eds), Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 DOI: 10.5117/9789463725040_CH03

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a version of the Tibetan writing system is employed to represent Bhutan’s national language, Dzongkha. Buddhism still operates as a National Religion, with a majority of the country’s inhabitants self-identifying as practitioners of various streams of the religion. This religion is also directly linked to Tibetan through the writing system. Classical Tibetan, called Chöke in Bhutan, is the liturgical language of the various forms of Bhutanese Buddhism and still enjoys a very high level of prestige in the country. As such, Chöke extends pressure on the modern languages, and has likely been doing so for over one millennium, since the introduction of Buddhism into Bhutan. In this way, one can see Chöke is a language of influence, crossing borders of language, time, and geopolitical space, to change and shape other modern languages. Despite a modern perception that Bhutanese ‘language’ might be synonymous with ‘Tibetan,’ Bhutan is actually home to 19 distinct Tibeto-Burman languages (van Driem 1998). Many of these languages are identified as occupying an unknown position within Tibeto-Burman; these include Tshangla, Black Mountain Mönpa, Lhokpu and Gongduk. There are a few Central Bodish (aka Tibetic) languages, including Dzongkha, the national language and native language to most people in the western third of the country, Chocanganca, spoken in Eastern Bhutan, and Brokpa, the native language of a few nomadic herders inhabiting remote pockets of eastern Bhutan. The Bhutanese sub-family with the largest number of languages is the East Bodish group, comprising Khengkha, Upper Mangdep, Bumthap, Kurtöp, Dzala, Dakpa and Chali. Although East Bodish languages have been shown elsewhere to constitute their own group outside of Tibetic (Michailovsky and Mazaudon 1994; DeLancey 2008; Hyslop 2008, 2013), there is still confusion over the classification of these languages within Tibeto-Burman, in large part due to the many apparent similarities with Tibetic languages (e.g. see DeLancey 2008 for an overview); that is, influence from Tibetic languages – Chöke in particular – has coloured our understanding of the genetic placement of East Bodish languages within the context of Tibeto-Burman. The aim of this article is to examine the history of Kurtöp, one East Bodish language, in light of comparison with Tibetan, as a way to gauge how Tibetan has crossed borders to influence a different language in a different country. In particular, this article takes lexical and morphological data from East Bodish languages and examines it in-depth, reconstructing forms and functions, when possible, to Proto East Bodish (PEB). One can then compare the reconstructed parent and the subsequent linguistic history to Written Tibetan to look for similarities that could be due to genetic relationship versus those that could be due to borrowing.

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The analysis presented here demonstrates that such borrowing has been extensive. Although I spend the majority of the chapter establishing just how extensive this borrowing has been, in the conclusion I return to the issue of language borders that this volume focuses on to interpret the empirical patterns that I have established. I argue that each incident of the many lexical, phonological, and morphological borrowings from Tibetan into Kurtöp can be construed as evidence of border-crossings from one language to the other. Taken together, one can see that over a long stretch of time, with enough of these linguistic border-crossing events, the border between Kurtöp and Tibetan has become blurred.

Kurtöp Kurtöp is an East Bodish language of Northeastern Bhutan, spoken by approximately 10,000 people. Like the other East Bodish languages, Kurtöp is not a direct descendant of Old Tibetan and as such belongs to a different linguistic group than the Tibetic languages (Michailovsky and Mazaudon 1994; Hyslop 2013, 2014). However, Chöke has had a large influence on the development of Kurtöp over the centuries. Chöke influence is identified in the domain of phonology, the lexicon, and grammar. In term of phonology, Kurtöp has recently innovated a series of retroflex stops, developed palatal stops, and is developing tone, all in the same phonological contexts as many modern Tibetic languages. While standard Kurtöp only has five vowels, speakers educated in Dzongkha and Tibetan also use two front rounded vowels in the same contexts they are found in Tibetan (Hyslop 2017). These phonological developments are very likely to have developed under influence from Tibetan, and will be highlighted as part of the reconstruction process outlined below. In terms of lexicon, there is a near complete overlap in religious vocabulary as Chöke words were borrowed directly into Kurtöp, presumably under the influence of Buddhism. In addition to the religious domain, Chöke words are in nearly every other lexical domain of Kurtöp, including basic verbs and body parts. Finally, Chöke influence is evident on the grammar, with the nominalizers -khan and -pa, being borrowed from Tibetan, for example. Even the egophoric perfective marker -shang can be shown to be a borrowing from a Tibetic language (Hyslop 2020). These morphological borrowings, I argue, also form evidence that Tibetan has extended such a force over Kurtöp over the years that the border between the two languages has been blurred.

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Reconstructing East Bodish In order to see which aspects of Kurtöp have developed under the influence of Chöke, one first needs to ascertain which aspects of the language can be reconstructed to Proto East Bodish, the putative ancestor language of Kurtöp and its sister languages. The term ‘East Bodish’ was first used by Shafer (1954) to identify a proposed family of languages to which Dakpa, a language spoken southeast of Lhasa, belonged. Shafer (1954) noted that Dakpa, and therefore ‘East Bodish’ languages were closely related to, but not directly descended from Old Tibetan. There is still little work on the subfamily as a whole, but Hyslop (2013) does provide evidence that links the languages together in one sub-group. The discussion below builds from Hyslop (2013, 2014, 2015). The seven East Bodish languages are summarized in Table 3.1. For the most part, the designation of these languages is straightforward. The approximate geographic location of the East Bodish languages in shown in Figure 3.1. Table 3.1  East Bodish languages Language

Other names

Estimated # of speakers

Dakpa

Dwags, Tawang/Northern Monpa

50,000

Dzala

Kurtöp, ’Yangtsebikha, i ga brok

20,000

Chali

Chalipakha Upper Mangdep, Phobjikha, Mangdebikha, Hengke Zhâke, au gemale Bumthang, Bumthabikha, Monpa Kheng

1,000

Upper Mangdep Kurtöp Bumthap Khengkha

3,000 15,000 30,000 40,000

Beginning in the southern region of Bhutan, Khengkha is spoken by approximately 40,000 speakers. Chamberlain (2004) presents a phonological analysis and proposed an orthography but otherwise very few Khengkha data has been published. Adjacent to the Khengkha’s northwestern region is the Upper Mangdep language, spoken by approximately 15,000 speakers. There is considerable diversity within this group, such that people from some regions may not necessarily understand each other. However, in the absence of detailed descriptive work form several villages, it is not possible to coherently argue in favour of or against the varieties spoken in this region to be best grouped as one or more languages. Aside from data

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57

Figure 3.1  Map of East Bodish Area

presented here and in Hyslop (2013, 2014), Upper Mangdep data have only appeared in print in Nishida (2009) and Bosch (2016). Immediately east of the Upper Mangdep region is Bumthap, a language with approximately 30,000 speakers. A grammatical sketch of Bumthap has recently been made available in English (van Driem 2015). Kurtöp has received the most attention, with several articles and theses, including a full reference grammar (Hyslop 2017). Dakpa and Dzala are spoken on the eastern edge of the East Bodish region. Dakpa has perhaps 50,000 speakers spread across Bhutan, Tibet, and Arunachal Pradesh while Dzala has perhaps 40,000 speakers, primarily in Bhutan and Tibet. Hyslop and Tshering (2010) offer some data and analysis on Dakpa and van Driem (2007) presents data for both and offers the observation that the two seem to form a subgroup within East Bodish (a claim also substantiated in Hyslop 2013). Additional data and analysis on Dzala has been made available via a 2008-2009 Field Methods class at the University of California, Santa Barbara (see also Genetti 2009). The smallest language in the family is Chali, with around 1,000 speakers. Other than the few lexical items presented in Hyslop (2013, 2014), Chali is completely undescribed. Obviously, there is still little work on the subfamily as a whole, but Hyslop (2013) does provide evidence that links the languages together into one family. Despite the paucity of data, some observations regarding the phonology of Proto East Bodish can be offered. All the synchronic languages have a

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robust three-way voicing (voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced) contrast at labial, dental, and velar places of articulation.2 All languages also have palatal stops but it is clear with comparative evidence that at least some of those stops are recent innovations from velar or labial plus palatal glide combinations in syllable onset position. Several but not all varieties of East Bodish languages also have retroflex stops. As such, it should be possible to reconstruct a three-way voicing contrast at minimally labial, dental, and velar places of articulation; whether or not palatal stops will reconstruct is a matter of ongoing research; retroflex stops do not reconstruct to Proto East Bodish. Dental affricates, dental fricatives, and palatal fricatives are also found in all languages and as such probably reconstruct as well. To date, one language (Bumthap) also has retroflex fricatives, the origin of which is still unclear3. All East Bodish languages have a voiced rhotic and lateral and four voiced nasals (labial, dental, palatal, velar) as well as a voiceless lateral. Some of the varieties also have a voiceless rhotic and voiceless sonorants, though in these cases the diachronic development via sonorant-obstruent consonant clusters is usually obvious. In terms of vowels and suprasegmental features, I propose a tentative five vowel inventory for Proto East Bodish: /i, e, a, o, u/. Khengkha and some varieties of Kurtöp have retained this while other languages have more complex systems. The variety of Upper Mangdep spoken in Phobjikha, for example, has these five cardinal vowels plus /y, ø, ɔ, æ/. Some of East Bodish languages have contrastive vowel length (open syllables only) and some also have nasalisation. It is clear the vowel length has recently developed via loss of a coda consonant while nasalisation has recently developed via loss of a nasal coda or a borrowing from Dzongkha. All of the languages have contrastive tone following sonorant consonants. It is not yet clear if this is to be reconstructed to the parent language or if all the daughter languages have undergone the same tonogenetic developments; this is a matter of ongoing research. 2 In this way the East Bodish languages look very similar to many Tibetic languages. Differences in the phonology are found elsewhere, however. A systematic comparison of Proto East Bodish phonology with that of Tibetic or other languages that have been called “Bodish” is beyond the scope of this article, but one difference between, say Central Tibetan or Dzongkha and the East Bodish languages is in the tone system. Whereas for East Bodish languages tone is predictable following (most) obstruents (see Hyslop 2009) the situation for Central Tibetan and Dzongkha is more complicated (see, for example, Caplow 2009 for some discussion). 3 At the moment, we are pursuing the possibility that contact from a Khams variety could have been the source of retroflex fricative borrowings into Bumthap, based on their presence in some Yunnan varieties of Khams (Hiroyuki Suzuki, personal communicatiom).

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Figure 3.2  Internal phylogeny of East Bodish

There has not been enough detailed grammatical analysis of enough East Bodish languages to say much about aspects of grammar that reconstruct to the parent language. Preliminary observations show that the grammatical forms are substantially different across the different languages and not as easily reconstructable. Much more research is needed in this domain. Using the comparative method, I compare lexical and morphological items in the modern East Bodish languages as a way to reconstruct lexical and grammatical forms to the Proto language, which I estimate to have been spoken approximately 2,000 years ago, give or take perhaps 500 years, in the Southeastern Tibetan plateau.4 The internal phylogeny of the family is summarized in Figure 2 below, following Bosch (2016).

Sound changes Despite the paucity of available data, there has been some work identifying sound changes which can be used to reconstruct Proto East Bodish 4 Of course, some caveats are needed here. First, the dates are rough approximates, based on what we know about language change as documented elsewhere (e.g., the development of modern Romance languages from Latin). Second, it would be too superficial to assume people who spoke the reconstructed parent language proposed here belonged to one monolinguistic-monoethnic group. Rather, Historical Linguistics theory and methodology must assume that these daughter languages developed from a parent language no longer spoken (the statistical improbability of chance leads us to reject randomness as the explanation for the striking similarities between the daughter languages). This proto language also necessarily belonged to people who spoke it. However, these two assumptions do not preclude the possibility that Proto East Bodish was only one language spoken by a potentially ethnically diverse population who used it as just one aspect of their linguistic repertoires.

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(ie provide a reconstruction using principles of comparative-historical linguistics). Hyslop (2013) proposes a few sound changes used to put forth a tentative phylogeny of East Bodish. Slightly updated versions of these sound changes and some newly identified sound changes are shown in Table 3.2. Table 3.2  Sound changes within East Bodish5,6 Sound change

Conditioning environment

l>j a>e e>i e>i a>æ o>ø u>y k hw > ɸ kr, khr, gr > ʈ, ʈh, ɖ krV, kwV > rV+H, wV+H gj > j kj, khj, gj > c, ch, ɟ kjV, khjV, gjV > kjV+front, khjV+front, gjV+front u>o

all/unknown unknown unknown preceding coronals preceding coronals preceding coronals preceding coronals Syllable onset Syllable onset/unknown Syllable onset/unknown Syllable onset/unknown Syllable onset Syllable onset unknown

Da

Dz

x x

x x

Ku

Bu

Kh

x

x

x

Ch

UM

x x x x x x x

x x x

x x

-

-

x

x

x

x

x

x x

x

The above table represents the current state of the art with regard to East Bodish sound changes. In many cases there are exceptions to these sound changes and as such more work is still needed to refine the conditioning environment and be able to account for borrowings. For example, both kr > ʈ and krV > rV+H are easily seen in Kurtöp, as in Kurtöp ʈoŋ ‘village’ and rá ‘hair’ versus Bumthap kroŋ and kra. The sound changes may actually characterize different stages of the language; for example, perhaps the sound change krV > rV+H happened first but then Kurtöp borrowed a Tibetic word for ‘village’ and later the sound change kr > ʈ happened (this latter change almost certainly having developed under influence from Tibetan). 5 An ‘x’ indicates we have evidence that the sound change has happened in the language while an ‘-‘indicates we have evidence that the sound change has not happened in the language. If a cell is left empty that indicates we are lacking the necessary data to know one way or the other. 6 As I show in Hyslop (2013), the sound changes are not exceptionless. This may be due to the fact that the sound changes are still in progress, that non-conforming forms are borrowings, or some other reason as of yet unknown.

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The Role of Cl assical Tibetan (Chöke) on the Development of Kurtöp

Despite the uncertainties, the above observations offer some help toward reconstructing some aspects of Proto East Bodish.

Data and reconstruction Body Part Terms In Table 3.3, known forms for various body part terminology are shown. Table 3.3  East Bodish Body Part Terms7 Gloss

PEB

‘tooth’ ‘hair’ ‘blood’ ‘waist’ ‘hand’ ‘nose’ ‘knee’ ‘bone’ ‘head’ ‘eye’ ‘leg’

Da

Dz

Ku

Bu

Kh

*kwa wá *kra *kak khret *khrat *lak lá: *ná *pOskOm?

wá ʈa ke:ʔ ʈhet la: ná pukum

wá rá ka: khrat ja: ná pusum

kwa kra kak khrat jak náphaŋ

kwa kra rá ka: ʈhat ketpa ja: jaʔ nabli putmoŋ

*rOs *gO*mE-

rý gokte me:ʔ leme

rospa gujuŋ mi: tawa

ruspa* gokti meloŋ lεmin

gujuŋ

rotpa gujuŋ mek tawa

Ch

gujuŋ mé:ʔ

UM wá ~ ó rá

la: pøhø rotho gunu

I can readily reconstruct forms for ‘tooth,’ ‘hair,’ ‘blood,’ ‘waist,’ ‘hand,’ and ‘nose.’ It is clear that, from the data currently available, there are approximate reconstructions of ‘knee,’ ‘bone,’ ‘head,’ and ‘eye.’ In addition, ‘bone,’ ‘head,’ and ‘eye’ share the same initial syllable. It would appear that ‘knee’ reconstructs to two syllables in PEB, but the form of the second syllable is not yet certain. A final labial nasal is present in the Dzala and Kurtöp reflexes, suggesting it is relatively old, but Khengkha has final /-ŋ/ and no final nasal is found in the Upper Mangdep reflex. Upper Mangdep has lost many final consonants (and vowels), so the absence of /-m/ is perhaps not surprising. What is yet to be explained, however, is the final rounded vowel in the Upper Mangdep form. Either a coronal coda was present in an older 7 The capital indicates a back, round vowel but with uncertain height -- further data and analyses are required to assign height quality to the reconstruction. Similarly, indicates a front vowel with unknown height, pending future research.

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stage of the language, or the rounding is due to assimilation to the vowel in the first syllable. Note also the Dakpa and Dzala reflexes for ‘hand’ and ‘nose’ do not show the change a >e as expected, for reasons as of yet unknown. Animals Turning to animals, Table 3.4 illustrates the comparative East Bodish terms for various animals, again based on the data that is currently available to us. Of the eight forms, six confidently reconstruct, including the first syllable for the word for ‘hen.’ Looking only at three languages (Dakpa, Dzala, Kurtöp), there are three separate roots for ‘mouse,’ making reconstruction impossible at this stage. Similarly, the forms for ‘snake’ suggest two different roots. It is worth noting, that a Kurtöp form mreka indicates ‘smile shape,’ which is likely related to the Dzala form, thus suggesting that the Dzala form is a recent innovation. The Upper Mangdep form is borrowed from Dzongkha, leaving us to tentatively reconstruct *po to PEB. Table 3.4  East Bodish Animals Gloss

PEB

‘otter’ ‘horse’ ‘hen’ ‘bear’ ‘dog’ ‘mouse’ ‘deer’ ‘snake’

*krɑm *tɑ *kh ɑ*wɑm *khwi *kh ɑçɑ *po

Da

Dz

Ku

Bu

Kh

Ch

UM

te kh ɑwɑ wɑm k hi ʝu kh ɑçɑ

rɛ́m te kh ɑ: wəm k hi mɑtsɑŋmɑ kh ɑçɑ mrekɑliŋ

rɑ́m tɑ

tɑ

krɑm tɑ kh ɑgɑ

tɑ kh ɑgɑ

tɑ khom

khwi

ɸi

khwi

c hy

kɑçɑ po

kh ɑçɑ

wɑm khwi ŋíjɑ kh ɑçɑ po

by

Colours East Bodish words for the colors ‘red,’ ‘white,’ and ‘black’ are shown in Table 3.5. As will be noted, we only confidently reconstruct the word for ‘white.’ There is a chance that the Dakpa/Dzala forms for ‘red’ are related to the forms found in the Bumthap group, if the change l > ʝ can be postulated. Similarly, there is a chance that the Kurtöp form for ‘black’ is related to the Dakpa/Dzala forms, perhaps assuming the change ml > mj > ɲ. In both cases, more work is clearly needed. I am not sure what caused the loss of aspiration in the Upper Mangdep form, though it could be under influence from Dzongkha, which has kɑ:p ‘white.’

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The Role of Cl assical Tibetan (Chöke) on the Development of Kurtöp

Table 3.5  East Bodish Colors Gloss

PEB

Da

Dz

Ku

Bu

Kh

‘red’ ‘white’ ‘black’

lju kh ɛ́r mlɛŋbu

lew kheru mlæŋpu

ʝinti kh ɑrti ɲunti

ʝinti

*kh ɑr

ɟinti kh ɑrti

Ch

UM

kɑt

Basic Nouns Table 3.6 illustrates some comparative East Bodish nouns. Forms for ‘rock’ and ‘arrow’ reconstruct straightforwardly. The proto nature of three forms requires additional speculation, and for six of the eleven I am not able to offer a reconstruction. At first glance, it appears that the Dakpa/Dzala root for ‘water’ is innovative, compared to the forms in the other languages. However, the Dakpa/Dzala form tshi is found in Kurtöp as a word meaning ‘stickiness’ or ‘sap,’ and Yangdzom and Arkesteijn (1996) list as the Khengkha word for water. As Khengkha is spoken in a large area by a relatively large population, presumably there is an as-of-yet unexplored dialect diversity, reflected also in these different reflexes for ‘water.’ The point, though, for this digression, is simply to highlight the fact that there appear to be two roots in PEB that have since come to have the meaning ‘water’ in EB. It is not possible at present to discern what semantic differences were held between *khwe and *tshi in the proto language. All the languages for which these are data show similar forms for ‘wind.’ In the case of monosyllabic reflexes, the form consists of either a rhotic or lateral plus a rounded back vowel. Kurtöp, Bumthap, and Upper Mangdep have disyllables for the reflex, but the second syllable in each of these instances contains a lateral plus rounded back vowel. The initial syllables, however, vary across the languages. There is also some similarity in the forms for ‘baby,’ with only Dzala to be completely different. I tentatively propose to reconstruct a monosyllable with a back rounded vowel and coda nasal for this root. The reconstruction of the remaining six words in Table 3.6 is more problematic. At first glance it appears the words for ‘snow’ would be related. However, the Dakpa/Dzala forms have aspiration whereas the forms in the Bumthang group do not. Recall that two forms were reconstructed for PEB ‘water,’ one of which consisted of an aspirated labial and labiovelar glide onset cluster. Reflexes for this root appear in all the languages except Dakpa/Dzala, leading us to suspect that the forms for ‘snow’ are actually

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refelxes of this root. If so, then they could not be reflexes of the same form represented by the Kurtöp, Bumthap, and Khengkha forms. In the reflexes for ‘fire,’ there is a shared syllable me/i found across the languages for which there are available data, but it is not yet clear whether the first syllable ga found in the Kurtöp, Bumthap, and Khengkha forms is innovated or conservative. One might expect gami to be innovative, given the preponderance of forms for ‘fire’ lacking ga in neighboring Himalayan languages. However, before looking outside East Bodish it will be important to look fully within the language to ensure that a form with a ga initial syllable is not to be reconstructed to PEB (and subsequently lost in some daughter langauges). There are clearly two separate roots represented in the forms for ‘house.’ One suspect the form represented in languages of the Bumthap group is conservative, with the Dakpa and Dzala form being a borrrowing from Tibetan , but more data is needed to confirm this. The final four words in Table 6 exhibit three roots each. There is little doubt that a form for ‘chili’ cannot be reconstructed to PEB. The chili, being only recently brought to Bhutan, is surely younger than PEB would be, and therefore the words found in the languages today are independent innovations, which may or may not be useful for further internal subgroupings. It might be worth pointing out, at any rate, that the Chali and Upper Mangdep reflexes (chau and chou, respectively) are clearly cognate with Kurtöp chɑwɑ ‘Sichuan pepper (Xanthozylum),’ reminiscent of the Dzongkha-Tibetan phenomenon, wherein ’ema, the Tibetan word for ‘Sichuan pepper,’ was used in Bhutan to refer to ‘chili.’ In the four languages for which there are forms for ‘wife’, there are three obviously different forms, complicating a reconstruction to the proto language. Finally, there are three obviously different words for ‘sun’ in the East Bodish languages for which I have data. Again, it is difficult to know which root is more original. The root found in the Bumthang languages is most obviously Tibeto-Burman (looking similar to PTB8 *g-nam), but I have not been able to rule out the possibility that this form has been borrowed into the Bumthang group. The Dakpa/Dzala root is strikingly similar to Lepcha plang ‘to rise,’9 which perhaps indicates it is an older TB form for which Dakpa/Dzala have an innovated use. The Chali form is perhaps similar to Tamang ‘tihnyi, Takali tihngi (Hale 1973), Athpare (Ebert 1997) and Yamphu (Rutgers 1998) nam, and/or Boro san (personal field notes). 8 Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) forms are drawn from the STEDT database (http://stedt.berkeley. edu/~stedt-cgi/rootcanal.pl). 9 Drawn from Plaisier (2007).

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The Role of Cl assical Tibetan (Chöke) on the Development of Kurtöp

Whatever the relationship of the Chali form outside of East Bodish, I am still unable to ascertain which root (or roots) to reconstruct to PEB without further research. Table 3.6  East Bodish Nouns Gloss

PEB

Da

Dz

Ku

‘arrow’

*mlɑ

mlə

mləh

mja

‘stone’ ‘water’

*gor *khwe/ *tshi *rO? *On?

gor tshi

gor tshi rót bikikaʊ kh ɑwɑ mé khem

‘wind’ ‘baby’ ‘snow’ ‘fire’ ‘house’ ‘chili’ ‘wife’ ‘sun’

ɔnu kho me kh ɛm sol muip plɑŋ

prɑŋ

Bu

Kh

Ch

UM

gor khwe

gor khwe

ɸe

khwe

gor khö

ʝiluŋ óŋɑ kɑ gɑmi me bɑŋgɑlɑ nésɑŋ ne

ʝoloŋ

luŋ olo kɑ gɑmi mai bɑŋgɑlɑ keme ni

lú

ɲulu úp

chau

chou

kɑ gɑmi me bɑŋgɑlɑ némo ni

thanman

Temporal words Table 3.7 illustrates the few temporal words amongst the comparative East Bodish data. The PEB form for ‘year’ is easy to reconstruct, as is the form for ‘yesterday,’ which has second syllable in some but not all daughter languages. It appears as though the form for ‘today’ should reconstruct with an initial da- syllable, but without more data it will be impossible to speculate further. Finally, the data show at least two disparate roots for the word ‘tomorrow,’ not allowing us to reconstruct one form over another to PEB. Again, the Dakpa and Dzala forms do not have an e vowel, as expected. Table 3.7  East Bodish Temporal Words Gloss

PEB

Da

Dz

Ku

‘yesterday’

*dɑŋ

dɑŋ

dɑŋ

‘year’ ‘today’ ‘tomorrow’

*néŋ *dɑ-

níŋ dɛç nogor

níŋ

dɑŋniŋ/ dɑŋnɑ néŋ dɑsum jɑmpɑ

noŋor

Bu

néŋ dusum jɑmpɑt

Kh

Ch

UM

dɑŋlɑ

dõl

ɲéŋ dɑsum jɑmpɑ

né: dɑsu nɛmbɑ

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Gwendolyn Hyslop

Agricultural economy With the relevant background information in place I can turn to the data and examine what reconstructs to Proto East Bodish, lexically. Table 8 shows synchronic East Bodish grain terms in all seven languages, represented using IPA. If a cell is left blank it is because I have not been able to confirm presence or absence of the grain in the speech community. Use of ‘N/A’ indicates I confirmed the speech community does not use the grain. For example, in the case of Bumthap, I was able to confirm that Broomcorn millet is not used; as such ‘N/A’ is written in the cell. Table 3.8  Grain terms in East Bodish languages Gloss

PEB

Da

Dz

Ku

‘maize’ ‘paddy’

uʃom dep

aʃam dep

bakchukpa ɐʃɐm mras mras; mrat

‘husked rice’

depzi

depzi cʰuŋ

‘cooked rice’

to

to

‘broomcorn millet’ ‘finger millet’

choŋ khre

‘foxtail millet’ ‘wheat’ ‘barley’

*nas

Kh

Ch

ɐʃɐm mras

ahamar geza t͜ɕaŋbu sem

ʈʰuŋ

ʈʰuŋ

tɕʰuŋza tɕʰum

ipa

zama

to

zumala to

choŋ khre

jon ʈʰe

N/A koŋbo

jon jon koŋko koŋpu

͜ t̠ ɹ̝ ʰe

món món ko ko ná ~ ne na

ran go nas

N/A go nat

ran kar na:

kar; zẽ nɛs

‘bitter buckwheat’ *brasma brem

bremo bra:ma

‘sweet buckwheat’ *kyabras kjabre ~ kyabrasma

kjabre cara

Bu

ran kar nâ

branbrama brama ma ~ brasma carae cere tɕara

UM

brɛm

gere

Beginning with terms for ‘maize,’ there are three roots used within the languages and it is not possible to reconstruct a term to Proto East Bodish. Dzala, Bumthap, and Khengkha all use the term aʃam and the Dakpa term uʃom term is clearly derived from the same root. Note that aʃam is also the Tshangla form for ‘maize.’ The Chali form ahamar may also be related to this

The Role of Cl assical Tibetan (Chöke) on the Development of Kurtöp

67

root but there is not enough data from Chali in order to ascertain whether or there are regular correspondences between the sounds in the Chali word and the reflex in other East Bodish languages. Kurtöp is the only language to make use of the term bakchukpa; it is not known where this term originates from. Upper Mangdep geza is borrowed from Dzongkha geza. The fact that a term for ‘maize’ does not reconstruct is not surprising as maize was only brought to Bhutan within the past 500 years. It is hypothesised that Proto East Bodish was spoken at least one millennium prior to this. The other grains, however, presumably were in use in Asia at the time Proto East Bodish was spoken. There are also see several roots pertaining to rice. Within the East Bodish languages we can identify terms for ‘paddy’ versus ‘husked rice’ versus ‘cooked rice’ even if for some languages ‘paddy’ and ‘husked rice’ are homonymous. The form mras is found in Kurtöp, Bumthap and Khengkha, perhaps ultimately shown to reconstruct to a proto East Bodish (cf. Written Tibetan ḥbras10). Dakpa and Dzala have a different root, dep, which also occurs in their word for ‘husked rice.’ The origin for dep, along with Chali t͜ɕaŋbu and Upper Mangdep sem is unknown. Terms for ‘husked rice’ also vary, involving both the root dep and a form with a voiceless palatal or retroflex initial, followed by a high back vowel and velar nasal. Note that the Bumthap and Khengkha forms are probably borrowed as there is no evidence for native retroflexes in either language. The Bumthap and Chali forms for ‘cooked rice’ are nominalisations of the verb zu ‘to eat.’ Dakpa, Dzala, Khengkha and Upper Mangdep to is probably a borrowing from Dzongkha to. Kurtöp ipa is of unknown origin. Millet terms also show remarkable variation within the family. Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) is not used by all communities who speak East Bodish languages; it is not grown in the Bumthang region and it was trialled in the Kurtöp region a few decades ago but was quickly abandoned. In the Upper Mangdep-speaking region there is variation; for example, millets are not used in Phobjikha but are in regions of lower elevation, such as Tshangkha. Even there, though, the presence or absence of Broomcorn millet has not yet been confirmed. Dakpa and Dzala communities use the term choŋ while in Khengkha and Chali the form jon is used. Foxtail millet (Setaria Italica) is also absent in the Bumthap-speaking region and in Phobjikha. For Dakpa and Dzala speakers this grain is referred to as món while in Kurtöp, Khengkha and Chali Foxtail millet is ran. Finger millet (Eleusine coracana) is the only millet for which all East Bodish languages 10 See Sagart (2003), who first posits a form *mras for ‘paddy’ and Hill (2011) who shows how the Tibetan form has developed from older *mras.

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have a term. There are two different roots in the languages. The Kurtöp and Upper Mangdep terms are retroflexed version of Dakpa and Dzala khre while Bumthap, Khengkha and Chali all have forms with a root koŋ. East Bodish terms for ‘wheat’ seem to reflect three different roots. Kurtöp and Bumthap go and Dakpa and Dzala ko are perhaps related to Written Tibetan gro. A form kar is used in Khengkha, Chali, and some varieties of Upper Mangdep, likely borrowed from Dzongkha.11 The Tshangkha variety of Upper Mangdep uses the word zẽ, for which no source is currently known. The lack of common roots for ‘maize,’ ‘rice,’ and millet terms makes reconstruction impossible, suggesting that these crops were not used by speakers of Proto East Bodish. Instead, after the breakup of the family, different language groups adapted new terminology as they acquired the grain.12 While it is not possible to reconstruct maize, rice and millets to Proto East Bodish, there is evidence in favour of reconstructing ‘barley,’ ‘bitter buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum)’ and ‘sweet buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum)’. For ‘barley,’ all East Bodish languages have a monosyllabic form beginning with n. The following vowel is low in all languages except for Upper Mangdep and some varieties of Dakpa, for which is it is e. The sound change a > ɛ when preceding a coronal is typical for Upper Mangdep and so nɛs is a regular reflex. Likewise, s > t in coda position is a sound change in some varieties of Bumthap and Kurtöp and as such the form nat in Bumthap is predictable. Not enough is known about the sound changes in the other languages to be certain that the reflexes are predictable but nonetheless the forms are all derived from the same root, which I tentatively reconstruct as *nas. I can more confidently reconstruct both ‘bitter buckwheat’ and ‘sweet buckwheat’ to Proto East Bodish. Reconstructed *brasma13 remains as brasma in some varieties of Bumthap but coda -s is dropped in other languages. The change *-s > -n appears to be regular before nasals in other varieties of Bumthap (see e.g. data presented in Donohue 2020). The sound change a > ɛ is again reflected in the Upper Mangdep form brɛm and the loss of the final vowel is also a regular sound change. The change a > e is also reported in Dakpa and Dzala, and as such it is not surprising to see to see forms with 11 The synchronic Dzongkha form for ‘wheat’ is ka:. However, the coda -r is reconstructible based on the long vowel and ’Ucen spelling: དཀར ་ . 12 Note that being able to identify the source of all the disparate terms, and an understanding of how their history reflected adoption of the new grain technology, in each language, would offer considerable support to this hypothesis. However, in most cases this is not known and remains a matter of ongoing work. 13 Note that these buckwheat reconstructions have been updated since Hyslop & d’Alpoim Guedes (2021), reflecting newly available data.

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The Role of Cl assical Tibetan (Chöke) on the Development of Kurtöp

e in place of a. It should be highlighted however, that the Dzala form has a final o in place of a. This is likely the result of influence from Written Tibetan brabo. Sweet buckwheat reconstructs as *kjabras(ma)14, with all languages showing a reflex except Upper Mangdep, which has replaced the native term with the Dzongkha term. kj- palatalises in all East Bodish languages except Dakpa and Dzala. The first and second vowels front in Khengkha and the second vowel diphthongises in Bumthap; the motivation for these changes remains unknown. As mentioned above, a > e is a common sound change in Dakpa and Dzala and is reflected in the second syllable of the reflex. The lack of fronting of the first vowel in the Dakpa and Dzala reflexes is probably due to conditioning environment of the a > e sound change, which is still a matter of research. The reconstruction of -s in *kjabras(ma) is based primarily on the assumption it is a derivation on the form *brasma. While it is not yet possible to understand all the detailed sound changes which have given rise to the modern East Bodish reflexes for ‘barley,’ ‘sweet buckwheat,’ and ‘bitter buckwheat,’ I can reconstruct a term for the three grains to the parent language shared by modern East Bodish languages with some confidence. Ultimately, of course, I will need to explain all the sound changes in the modern languages, in addition to the replacement of the Upper Mangdep reflex for ‘sweet buckwheat’ by the Dzongkha equivalent. This is certainly a different picture than that for the other grains. All modern East Bodish-speaking populations also rely heavily on dairy production for their livelihoods. Table 3.9 presents dairy terms in the modern East Bodish languages. Table 3.9  Dairy terms in East Bodish languages Gloss

PEB

Da

‘milk’ *gju jo ‘buttermilk’ *tarpa tarba *phrum tʃhur; phrom; ‘cheese’ phrum ‘whey’ tarchu; churgu

Dz

Ku

Bu

Kh

Ch

jo tarwa phrom

ɟu tarwa phrum

dʒu tarpa phrum

dʒu t̪ arwa phrum

dʝu t̪ arwa phrum

UM

gy dau phrum; d̥atshi churbu churkhu ʈʰakhuk tɕʰorko tɕʰurkʰu daːtʃʰu

14 At the moment, there appears to be no direct evidence internal to East Bodish to reconstruct the final syllable -ma. It is presumed, first based on the assumption that *kyabras(ma) is derived from *brasma (the first syllable perhaps related to PTB *krəy ‘sweet’ or some other derivation not yet understood). Second, there is additional is possible external evidence for *kyabrasma, found in ’Olekha t͡ʃɑrɑ:mɑ ‘sweet buckwheat’ (Hyslop 2016: p. 92) and Gongduk cârma (Karma Tshering, field notes). If we can show that these ’Olekha and Gongduk terms are borrowings, we can posit PEB *kyabrasma with more confidence.

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There is more similarity in dairy terms across the languages than what was present with most of the grain terms. Words for ‘milk,’ ‘buttermilk,’ and ‘cheese’ appear to readily reconstruct to Proto East Bodish. I confidently reconstruct ‘milk’ as *gju. The initial consonant is lost in Dakpa and Dzala and the vowel is lowered. Again, both these sound changes are seen elsewhere in the language though further data is needed to understand the precise conditioning environment. All the other languages, except for Upper Mangdep, show palatalisation of the onset cluster. Upper Mangdep keeps the velar initial but fronts the vowel, another sound change which is found in the language elsewhere. Reflexes for ‘buttermilk’ are almost identical in all the languages; I reconstruct a form with -pa as the second syllable, based on the Bumthap form and that pa > ba > wa elsewhere. There are three roots for ‘cheese.’ Kurtöp, Bumthap, Khengkha and Chali all have phrum and Dzala similarly has phrom. Some varieties of Upper Mangdep makes use of the East Bodish form phrum while others have borrowed Dzongkha d̥ atshi. Dakpa also has East Bodish phrom and phrum in addition to Tibetan tʃ hur. I reconstruct *phrum to Proto East Bodish, noting that Dakpa and Dzala have lowered u to o, as has been seen elsewhere. It is worth noting that this root is not unique to East Bodish as it is found in Archaic Tibetan as well to mean yoghurt and buttermilk.15 I assume the sound change u>o has resulted in the Dzala and Dakpa reflex phrom, noting that some varieties of Dzala have borrowed the form with the high vowel, probably from neighboring Kurtöp. Finally, looking at the different words for ‘whey,’ there is a different picture. In Chali, Khengkha, Kurtöp and some varieties of Dakpa there is a form which probably reconstructs as *churkhu and is etymologically cheese-water (cf. PEB *khwe). However, the root for ‘cheese’ is the Tibetan word for ‘cheese’ and thus probably a borrowing into these languages and not reconstructible to Proto East Bodish. The Tibetic root for ‘cheese’ is also present in the Dzala form churbu. Upper Mangdep daːtʃʰu is a borrowing from Dzongkha. Bumthap has a unique first syllable in ʈʰakhuk; the etymology for this remain unknown though I suspect it is borrowed as there is currently no evidence for Bumthap to have retroflexes in native words. Numerals Unlike many other forms discussed, the numerals, it turns out, are fairly easy to reconstruct for PEB. With the exception of ‘two’ and ‘ten,’ the EB numerals reconstruct straightforwardly, as shown in Table 3.10. 15 I am grateful to Nathan Hill for consulting Bstan lha’s dictionary of archaic terminology in order to ascertain this for my benefit.

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Table 3.10  East Bodish Numerals Gloss

PEB

Da

Dz

Ku

Bu

Kh

Ch

UM

‘one’ ‘two’ ‘three’ ‘four’ ‘five’ ‘six’ ‘seven’ ‘eight’ ‘nine’ ‘ten’ ‘twenty’

*thek

th i nei sum bli lɛŋe krò nís kɛ̀t dugu ciŋnəi khəli

th e nai sum bri lɛŋe ɖoɁ ní gɛt dugu cí kh ɑlit

the: zon sum ble jɑŋɑ ɖò: ní(s) ɟɑt dogo ch e khedi

thek zon sum ble jɑŋɑ grok nyít ɟɑt dogo ch e khaethek

thek zon sum blɑ jɑŋɑ gro nyít ɟɑt dogo ch e khaide

th e ne sum bre jɑŋɑ ɖoɁ ní ɟɑt dugu ch e khethe

th i zøn sum bre lɑŋ ɖo nís gæ dok khepche khedi

*sum *ble *lɑŋɑ *grok *nís *gj ɑt *dOgO *kh ɑl(thek)

Note that the numerals also exhibit some of the sound changes listed in Table 1. Dakpa and Dzala have /e/ or /ɛ/ where the PEB forms have /ɑ/. PEB /e/ changes to /i/ in Dakpa and Dzala reflexes, with the exception of Dzala ‘one,’ which has retained the mid vowel. Kurtöp has innovated a retroflex in favor of a velar-rhotic onset, but so has Chali, Upper Mangdep, and Dzala. It is not yet known if this is a regular sound in these languages or not. The Chali, Kurtöp, Khengkha and Bumthap reflexes for ‘five’ illustrate the change l > j, which has been used a diagnostic sound change for the subgroup comprising these four languages (Hyslop 2013). The reflexes for ‘eight’ suggest that the same languages also underwent the change gj > ɟ, though more data are required to confirm this. I have not yet reconstructed forms for ‘two’ or ‘ten,’ pending more data and further analysis of sound change. Given the preponderance of nasal-initial forms for ‘two’ throughout TB, I would expect the form zon to be innovative. However, it is found in the Bumthang languages and Upper Mangdep, but not Chali, as would be expected given the proposed tree in Figure 2. Either Upper Mangdep and the Bumthang languages innovated the word separately, our tree is wrong, or the form is conservative and the presence of nasal-initial forms elsewhere in the language is due to borrowing. There also appear to be two separates roots for ‘ten.’ The Upper Mangdep form khepche is analyzed as twenty-half, making the Kurtöp, Bumthap, Khengkha and Chali forms a clipped version of the compound. Importantly, however, the compound (and therefore the clipped innovations) appear to be Dzongkha borrowings; the Dzongkha form for ‘half’ is che while the Kurtöp forms is phretse. Further, khepche itself is a way of expressing ‘ten’ in Dzongkha.16 The 16 I am grateful to Karma Tshering for calling this to my attention.

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Dakpa and Dzala forms, though superficially similar with palatal stops and front vowels, presumably represent a separate root. Verbs A short list of comparative East Bodish verbs is shown in Table 3.11 Note that I can readily reconstruct forms for ‘give,’ ‘come,’ and ‘pour’ to PEB. There is less data for ‘sleep,’ but the fact that cognate forms are found in Dzala, Kurtöp and Upper Mangdep (with vowel fronting expected) suggests that *dot reconstructs as the verb ‘to sleep’ to PEB. With regards to the verb ‘eat,’ I suspect the Khengkha form is innovative and thus a form with a voiced fricative can be reconstructed to PEB. Several forms have a high back vowel here, but not all, making it difficult to reconstruct. To further complicate matters, the Dakpa reflex undergoes stem alternation, depending on as of yet unknown factors (see Hyslop and Tshering 2010: 15-16), and it is not yet possible to establish a more basic form between the two. Finally, one will note the several roots used for the verb ‘to go.’ All languages except Chali have a form with a voiced velar initial and either a diphthong ai or a mid front vowel e. I have shown elsewhere that Kurtöp ai > e can be the result of sound change ultimately from -al (Hyslop 2017) and in Hyslop (2017) I also show that verbs which take the -le form of the imperative originally had an -l coda. In Kurtöp, the verb ge ‘go’ is a word that takes the -le form of the imperative. This, combined with the fact that the root appears with a diphthong elsewhere in the family, is suggestive of a coda -l present at the PEB stage. Other roots for ‘go’ in EB are go, i and brok. The form i is found in other languages of central Bhutan, including Tasha-Sili (if e is considered; see Hyslop and Tshering 2009). The form brok in Dzala appears to be innovative and unique. Table 3.11  East Bodish Verbs Gloss

PEB

Da

Dz

Ku

Bu

Kh

Ch

‘eat’ ‘come’ ‘go’ ‘do’ ‘pour’ ‘sleep’ ‘give’

*zV *rɑ *gɑl

zo ~ ze

cɑp

gai bu jok

gai bu jo

zu rɑ i

bi

lok dø bi

zu rɑ ge, go ŋɑk jok ~ jo: dot bi

zu

gai

zau rau brok

*lok *dot *bi

UM

rɑ go, ge, i kj ɑp dø

bi

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The Role of Cl assical Tibetan (Chöke) on the Development of Kurtöp

Pronouns Pronouns for the East Bodish languages are shown in Table 3.12. I will begin with an examination of the forms for first person, which are shared throughout the languages. Table 3.12  East Bodish Pronouns Gloss

PEB

Da

Dz

Ku

Bu

Kh

Ch

UM

1.sg 1.pl

*ŋɑ ?

ŋe ŋɑr

ŋɑt ner (incl) net (excl)

ŋɑt ŋet

ŋɑ/ŋɑt

ŋɑt ne

ŋɑ

2. sg 2.pl

*i/*nVn

i ir

wit nin

wet win

we

í

yi

3. sg 3.pl

*khi/*bV

be ber

ŋe ŋɑtɑ (incl) ŋɑrɑ (excl) i itɑ(ŋ) (incl) irɑ(ŋ) (excl) be betɑ(ŋ) (incl) berɑ(ŋ) (excl)

khit bot

gon/khit bot

gon

k hi

k hi

For first person singular, all the languages possess a form with a velar nasal initial. In Dakpa and Dzala the following vowel is the mid front vowel e while for the other languages the vowel is the low back a. Recall that Dakpa and Dzala can be separated from the other East Bodish by the shared sound change a > e and thus the form ŋe as opposed to ŋa, found elsewhere, is not surprising. The most unusual aspect of the first person pronouns is the innovative coda -t, which is required in Kurtöp but appears ‘optionally’17 in Khengkha and perhaps Chali. The precise development of coda -t on the Kurtöp absolutive pronouns remains unclear, but some evidence of its development may come from the fact that -t is the ergative suffix on Mangdep pronouns (F. 17 I do not mean to imply that -t is used without any change of meaning in these languages, as an alternation between ŋa ~ ŋat most certainly is meaningful; rather, I do not yet understand what the alternation signals in Khengkha. With regard to the presence of the coda -t in the Chali first person pronoun, I have recorded instances of it present, and no instances of ŋa by itself, but I believe not enough data have been collected to state confidently that the form ŋat is used exclusively. This is especially given the case that I have recorded the form for first person plural, and second and third person singular without a coda -t.

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Nishida, pc).18 Whatever the source of the coda -t, it is clear that it is innovative and the first person singular pronoun can be reconstructed as *ŋa. Without more data it will be diff icult to reconstruct the f irst person plural pronoun. At present, the Kurtöp, Bumthap and Chali data favor a form with a mid front vowel, while Dakpa and Dzala have a form with a low vowel. The Dakpa and Dzala reflexes, however, could be a change from ŋe to ŋa, perhaps in response to ŋa ‘1’ > ŋe through regular sound change. There are two roots present in the East Bodish second person pronouns. The one that occurs in all the daughter languages today has a front vowel i, with a glide onset in some languages. Given the predominance of the high vowel i over the mid vowel e (present only in Bumthap), I reconstruct one PEB second person pronoun as *i, believing the glide onsets in Kurtöp, Khengkha, Bumthap and Upper Mangdep to be innovative. Second person plural forms are still missing for several languages, but tentatively reconstruct nVn as another second person form used in PEB. Two roots for third person pronouns are found throughout East Bodish. A form with a velar initial and high, front vowel is found as the singular form in Kurtöp, Bumthap, Chali and Upper Mangdep. Data from Khengkha, Upper Mangdep and Chali still lacking, I have found forms with a labial initial for plural forms in Kurtöp and Bumthap, and for both singular and plural forms in Dakpa and Dzala. The form gon, found in Khengkha and Bumthap is presumed to be innovative, as it still exists as a lexical word ‘friend’ in Kurtöp. I therefore reconstruct two roots to PEB: *k hi and *ba. The motivation for the vowel in the f irst form lies in the fact that all modern reflexes have this vowel. The motivation for the low, back vowel in *ba is as follows. First, both Dakpa and Dzala have a mid front vowel e for the forms, with plurality indicated by a separate plural marker (-r in Dakpa or -ta(ŋ)/-ra(ŋ) in Dzala, depending on clusivity). Given that the sound change a > e has occurred in Dakpa/Dzala, it is plausible that *ba could be reconstructed for the proto language shared by these two languages. In Kurtöp and Bumthap, however, the labial is followed by a rounded 18 One possible scenario is that proto ergative *-s (cognate with Classical Tibetan ergative -s; DeLancey 2003: 258) > -t in East Bodish (-s > -t in coda position is a sound change that happened elsewhere in the subfamily; e.g. rospa ‘bone’ > rotpa ‘bone’ in some dialects of Kurtöp). The ergative, being used pragmatically like the ergative today (see Hyslop 2010) could have generalized into the default form of the pronouns, giving rise to the current absolutive (unmarked) pronominal forms in Kurtöp and Bumthap.

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vowel o. I speculate the vowel a > o when following labial stops, and thus the proto form giving rise to the Kurtöp and Bumthap forms could also have been *ba. Therefore, the form *ba readily leads to be in Dakpa and Dzala, based on what is known about sound change established for these languages, and plausibly leads to bo in Kurtöp and Bumthap, based on what I speculate. Ideally, one would f ind additional data elsewhere in Kurtöp and Bumthap evidencing the change a > o when following a labial initial, as further support. Question words In Table 3.13 I show comparative forms for question words ‘what,’ ‘where,’ and ‘who.’ It appears that there are two roots for each form, making reconstruction difficult. For ‘what,’ the Upper Mangdep and Dzala forms appear similar while Chali and the languages of the Bumthang group have a different form. The fact that affrication or frication exists in the forms for all the languages may turn out to be important -- that is -- signal evidence of one shared proto form, but there is not enough evidence at present to reconstruct one form to PEB. There are clearly two separate roots in the forms for ‘where’ and ‘who.’ Chali shares a form with Dakpa/Dzala for ‘where’ while it appears that Dakpa/Dzala have a unique form for ‘who’ not shared by the languages. At present, it is not possible to reconstruct any question words to PEB. Table 3.13  East Bodish Question Words Gloss ‘what’ ‘where’ ‘who’

*PEB

Da

Dz

Ku

Bu

ʝɑ áu é:

ʝrɑ áu

su

di (dzi) gɑ su

Kh

Ch

UM

ɟɑ

ɟɑ

áu ae

gɑŋ

ɑ́çi údɑ ɛ

Bound morphology Due to the dearth of linguistic analysis available on the East Bodish languages, it is particularly difficult to compare and reconstruct morphology. Nonetheless, there are comparative forms for future tense, question copulas, and ergative and genitive enclitics available for several languages, as summarized in Table 3.14.

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Table 3.14  Comparative East Bodish Bound Morphology19 Gloss

*PEB

Da

Dz

Ku

Bum

Kh

Ch

UM

fut

-mɑ *lo

-m lo -si -ku

-mɑ lo -(g)i -ku

-mɑle jo -li, -gi, -i -gi, -i, -li, -ci

-mɑlɑ Jo -li

-m jo

do

lo

-li

-u

q.cop erg gen

Future tense forms with the syllable -ma are found in all the languages for which I have data. The source of the second syllable -la/le on the Kurtöp and Bumthap forms is somewhat of a mystery. Hyslop (2020) argues that -la had an original function as a copula and has now fused with an erstwhile nominalizer -ma. Reflexes of PEB question copula *lo, a form required to predicate information questions, appear in all the languages. On the surface, it appears that the function of the question copula is the same across all languages, but further researcher should confirm this. The Chali reflex do is unexpected, based on what is currently known about EB sound change. Given the change l > j for Chali and the Bumthap languages, one would expect the Chali reflex to have an initial glide j, rather than stop d. Nonetheless, I tentatively reconstruct the form *lo. Ergative and genitive forms are more diverse in the languages than the forms discussed above. On the surface, it may appear that ergative -gi could be reconstructed to PEB, given its presence in Kurtöp and Dzala. However, deeper analysis of the Kurtöp -gi (Hyslop 2017) is suggestive of -gi being a borrowing over original -li. Dzala, spoken in a region directly adjacent to the Kurtöp speaking area, may exhibit a similar phenomenon. There is not enough evidence yet to ascertain whether Dakpa -si or Bumthap/Kurtöp -li is found elsewhere in East Bodish. Indeed, further research may show that Dakpa -si is reconstructable within EB and related to the ergative -s in Written Tibetan (Beyer 1992). For example, if there is evidence that Mangdep ergative -t is a reflex of ergative -s(i), it would serve as support of this hypothesis. At present, however, there simply is not enough data. What is certain, though, is that the ergative -gi found in Kurtöp and Dzala does not reconstruct to PEB.

19 In Hyslop and Tshering (2010: 16)’s data, -m correlates with third person future, while -k appears to correlate with first person future. Given that the study was preliminary, it is too early to tell whether or not the analysis of -m being a marker of third person future, or something else, such as alterphoric future, for example.

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The Chali, Dakpa, and Dzala forms appear to reflect the same root; presumably the Chali form reflects loss of initial k. I am still missing data for other languages, and the Kurtöp data confuses matters. In elicitation, the forms -gi and -i are used on nouns and pronouns have a -ci formative, which was presumed to be related to -gi ~ -i. In texts, however, forms -li occasionally crop up on nouns and, even more surprising, the form -ti occasionally occurs on the second person plural pronoun as -ti in ninti. As an added piece to this puzzle, Kurtöp has a future tense form -ci20 and Khengkha has a future tense form -ti.21 If these forms are historically related, then it is possible that the Kurtöp genitive -ci on pronouns is historically derived from an older form -ti, almost completely lost in the language today. The point of this digression is only to point out that it is not yet possible to reconstruct the original form of the genitive in Proto-Kurtöp, let alone PEB. Chöke interrupts PEB to Kurtöp It is clear from the reconstructions that I can reconstruct some forms to a Proto East Bodish level, and that these forms are distinct – though often similar – to Written Tibetan. Some of these are summarized in Table 3.15. A cursory glance at the data in the table will be enough to convince any linguist that Old Tibetan and Proto East Bodish must have been closely related languages indeed; however, it is also obvious that the relationship between them is complex. This topic is beyond the scope of this chapter. Table 3.15  Some PEB forms in comparison with Tibetan Gloss

PEB

Written Tibetan

‘one’ ‘three’ ‘four’ ‘five’ ‘six’ ‘seven’ ‘eight’ ‘sleep’ ‘give’

*thek *sum *ble *lɑŋɑ *grok *nís *gj ɑt *dot *bi

gcig gsum bzhi lnga drug dbun rgyad gnyid sbyin

20 See Hyslop (2020) for further argumentation. 21 In Hyslop (2017) I analyze -ki ~ -ci ~ -iki as a hortative, though comparative evidence with Khengkha may suggest the form -ci is a reflex of older -ti and that -ki ~ -iki represents a separate form historically, now merged into the same morphophonological paradigm.

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Gloss

PEB

Written Tibetan

‘arrow’ ‘milk’ ‘cheese’ ‘barley’ ‘bitter buckwheat’ ‘soul’ ‘year’ ‘tooth’ ‘hair’ ‘blood’ ‘otter’ ‘horse’ ‘bear’ ‘snake’

*mla *gyu *phrum *nas *brasma *phla *néŋ *kwa *kra *kak *kram *ta *wam *po

mda oma phyurba nas brabo bla lo so skra khrag sram rta dom sbrul

For each word as shown in Table 3.15 – as with likely thousands of other words – there is a linguistic history that can be traced directly from the Proto language. However, the influence from Chöke has also been great. For example, most religious terms are clearly direct borrowings, as summarised in Table 3.16. Any Kurtöp term related to Buddhism, to my knowledge, can be directly linked to a Chöke counterpart. The Kurtöp forms in Table 3.16 thus haven not descended directly from Proto East Bodish and instead have been borrowed. Table 3.16  Some Kurtöp and Tibetan religious terms Gloss

Kurtöp

Written Tibetan

‘religious vase’ ‘lama’ ‘honorific guest’ ‘prayer for being’ ‘abbot’

bumpa láma kuɖon kurim khenpo

bumpa blama skumgron skurim mkhyenpo

It is also easy to identify several lexical borrowings in other domains as well. When lexical items are nearly identical between Kurtöp and Tibetan, but similar forms are absent from the other East Bodish languages, this is strong evidence for a borrowing. Domains include honorific vocabulary in particular, but others are present as well. Some of these are shown in Table 3.17.

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Table 3.17  Some additional Kurtöp borrowings from Chöke Gloss

Kurtöp

Written Tibetan

‘eye (honorific)’ ‘difficulty’ ‘particularly’

cen kangel khepardu

spyen dkaangal khyadpardu

Chöke influence is also evident in the domain of phonology, with some of the sound changes arguably developing from Tibetan influence. Spoken Tibetan, for example pronounces velar plus rhotic onset sequences as retroflexes. For example, Written Tibetan skra ‘hair’ is pronounced as ʈa while the Kurtöp word is rá. Kurtöp has relatively recently also adopted this sound change into its language, as evident in words like ʈoŋ ‘village’ (still pronounced as kroŋ in Kurtöp’s closest sister language Bumthap). It may turn out that other sound changes, such as tonogenesis (e.g. Hyslop 2009), velar palatalization, and others have developed under influence from Chöke. Chöke influence is evident in some aspects of the grammar. For example, Kurtöp genitive and ergative -gi, which are not reconstructable to PEB, must have been borrowed from Tibetan. There is also compelling evidence, presented in Hyslop (2020), that the egophoric perfective -shang has also been borrowed from a Khams Tibetan variety, relatively recently. Some of these borrowed grammatical forms are shown in Table 3.18. Table 3.18  Kurtöp grammatical forms borrowed from Tibetan22 Gloss

Kurtöp

Tibetan

‘ergative’ ‘imperfective nominaliser’ ‘locative’ ‘egophoric perfective’

-gi -khan -ro -shang

-gi(s) -khan -ru ɕaŋ Rgyalthang Tibetan (Hongladarom, 2007)

22 I do not mean to the suggest that Rgyalthang Tibetan is necessarily the source of the Kurtöp egophoric perfective; rather, it is likely based on the Rgyalthang evidence that the source is a recent borrowing from a Khams Tibetan variety that is/was spoken in Northeastern Bhutan, probably having migrated from Yunnan within the past few centuries at most. See Hyslop (2020) for further argumentation.

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Conclusion The East Bodish languages are clearly closely related to the modern Tibetic languages. Although modern East Bodish languages are not direct decedents from Old Tibetan, they have existed in overlapping time and space across many centuries, if not longer. The dominant religion (Buddhism) and associated language (Chöke) have had profound effects on local East Bodish languages. The boundary between the two languages has been blurred and it is only through careful, comparative linguistic work that one can see the original border that existed more clearly at Proto East Bodish. Through extensive contact, Tibetan has pushed its sounds across a linguistic border, directly into Kurtöp phonology. The lexicon, likewise, has been extensively borrowed into Kurtöp, making it seem that in the important domain of religion that there is no border at all between Kurtöp and Tibetan. The influence of Tibetan has been so great that several grammatical morphemes have been borrowed into Kurtöp. Historical Linguistics generally conceives of language change in a social vacuum, without contact from other languages. However, studies of language contact show us time and again that language change is highly subject to contact influences. The borders between languages are increasingly blurred as speakers of distinct languages spend more time together. In the case of Kurtöp, careful comparative work can show that the parent language, Proto East Bodish, was indeed a distinct language from Tibetan. But the power of Tibetan, particularly as a liturgical language, has been a border-erasing force, with phonological changes and lexical and grammatical borrowings being imprinted on Kurtöp. The border between the two languages is not yet erased, but the ever-present pressure of Tibetan in Bhutan continues to blur the distinction.

References Beyer, S. (1992). The classical Tibetan language. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bosch, A. (2016). Language contact in Upper Mangdep: A comparative grammar of verbal construction. Honours Thesis, Sydney: The University of Sydney. Caplow, N. (2009). Reconstructing stress in Proto-Tibetan: A study in historical comparative acoustics. PhD Thesis, Santa Barbara: University of California. Chamberlain, B. L. (2004). The Khengkha orthography: Developing a language in the Tibetan script environment. M.A. Thesis, Arlington: University of Texas.

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DeLancey, S. (2008). Kurtöp and Tibetan. In B. Huber, M. Volkart, P. Widmer (eds), Chomolangma, demawend und kasbek: Festschrift für Roland Bielmeier zu seinem 65. geburtstag, Widmer, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 29–38. DeLancey, S. (2003). Classical Tibetan. In G. Thurgood and R. J. LaPolla (eds) The Sino-Tibetan languages, London/New York: Routledge, 255–69. Donohue, M. (2020). Language and dialect relations in Bumthang. Himalayan Linguistics 19(3): 1-45. van Driem, G. (1998). Dzongkha. Leiden: Research School of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies van Driem, G. (2007). Dakpa and Dzala form a related subgroup within East Bodish, and some related thoughts. In R. Bielmeier and F. Haller (eds), Linguistics of the Himalayas and beyond, Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 71–84. van Driem, G. (2015). Synoptic grammar of the Bumthang language. Himalayan Linguistics Archive 6, 1-77. Ebert, K. H. (1997). Athpare grammar. Munich: Lincom. Genetti, C. (2009). An introduction to Dzala, an East Bodish language of Bhutan. presented at the 15th Himalayan Languages Symposium, Eugene, OR, August 1. Hale, A. (1973). Clause, sentence, and discourse patterns in selected languages of Nepal IV: word lists. (Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields 40). Kathmandu, Nepal: SIL and Tribhuvan University Press. Accessed via STEDT database: http://stedt.berkeley.edu/search/ on 2011-06-08. Hill, N. (2011). Multiple origins of Tibetan o. Language and Linguistics 12(3), 797-721. Hongladarom, K. (2007). Evidentiality in Rgyalthang Tibetan. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 30(2): 17-44. Hyslop, G. (2008). Kurtöp and the classification of the languages of Bhutan. In M. Bane (ed) Proceedings from the 44th meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 141–52. Hyslop, G. (2009). Kurtöp tone: A tonogenetic case study. Lingua 119(6), 827–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2007.11.012. Hyslop, G. (2010). Kurtöp case: The pragmatic ergative and beyond. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman area 33(1), 1–40. Hyslop, G. (2013). On the internal phylogeny of the East Bodish languages. In G. Hyslop, S. Morey, M. Post (eds.) North East Indian Linguistics 5. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press/Foundation, 91-109. Hyslop, G. (2014). A preliminary reconstruction of East Bodish. In N. Hill and T. Owen-Smith (eds.) Trans-Himalayan linguistics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 155-79. Hyslop, G. (2016). Worlds of knowledge in Central Bhutan: Documentation of ’Olekha. Language Documentation and Conservation 10: 77-106.

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Hyslop, G. (2017). A grammar of Kurtöp. Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region 18. Leiden: Brill. Hyslop, G. (2020). Grammatical origins of Kurtöp verbal morphology: On the development of mirativity versus egophoricity in the Himalayas. Studies in Language 44(1), 133-165. Hyslop, G. and K. Tshering. (2009). The Tasha-Sili language of Bhutan: A case study in language shift and Bhutanese prehistory. In H. Elnazarov and N. Ostler (eds.) FEL XIII: Endangered Languages and History. Bath: Foundation for Endangered Languages, 101-8. Hyslop, G. and K. Tshering. (2010). Preliminary Notes on Dakpa (Tawang Monpa). In S. Morey and M. Post (eds.) North East Indian linguistics 2, 3–21. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Michailovsky, B. and M. Mazaudon. (1994). Preliminary notes on languages of the Bumthang groups. In P. Kvaerne (ed.) Tibetan studies: Proceedings of the 6th seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (2). Fagernes: The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, 545-57. Nishida, F. (2009). A preliminary report on Mandebi-Kha (in Japanese). The Journal of Humanities Chiba University 38: 63-74. Plaisier, H. (2007). A grammar of Lepcha. Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library. Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region, v. 5. Leiden ; Boston: Brill. Rutgers, R. (1998). Yamphu: Grammar, lexicon, texts. Leiden: Research School CNWS. Sagart, L. (2003). The vocabulary of cereal cultivation and the phylogeny of East Asian languages. Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 23(1),127-136. Shafer, R. (1954). The linguistic position of Dwags. Oriens, zeitschrift der Internationalen Gesellschraft Für Orientforschung 7, 348–56. Yangdzom, D. and M. Arkesteijn. (1996). Khengkha lessonbook. Unpublished manuscript. SNV, Thimphu.

About the author Gwendolyn Hyslop received her PhD from the University of Oregon and is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. She is a specialist of Tibeto-Burman languages, in particular those from Bhutan. She has written a grammar of Kurtöp and also specialises in Historical Linguistics.

4

Reimagining Rongring without Tibetan Buddhist Influence1 Charisma K. Lepcha

Abstract This chapter focuses on Rongring – a language spoken by Lepchas in the eastern Himalayan borderlands. It focuses on language contact via Tibetan Buddhist religion and the borrowing of words, terminologies and ideas into the Lepcha language, including the creation of a new script. This process led to the blurring of linguistic borders between Lepcha speakers and Tibetan speakers, This chapter examines this process and questions whether it is possible to imagine Lepcha language without borrowed lexicons and traditions from Tibetan Buddhism vis-à-vis the Tibetan language. In the context of the often hazy borders between the Lepcha and Tibetan languages, this chapter attempts to trace the historical importance of Tibetan Buddhism in the development of Lepcha language as we know it today. Keywords: Rongring, Lepcha language, Tibetan Buddhist, influence

1 I am grateful to Dr. Gerald Roche for inviting me to be part of this project and providing f inancial support to attend the workshop ‘Talking Borders: Making and Marking Language Boundaries in the Transnational Himalayas’, held at the University of Sydney on 27 June 2019. I am indebted to Gerald for his encouraging feedback and continued patience as I worked on this chapter. I would like to thank Kachyo Lepcha and Pema Rinzin Lepcha, who have always assisted me in translating words and ideas whenever I have fallen short and made a mistake. I am also thankful to the faculty and students at the Department of Lepcha, Sikkim University, for responding to the questionnaire whose findings have been incorporated in this chapter. Acknowledgments are also due to Gwendolyn Hyslop for her input and to the reviewers who gave valuable inputs to tighten up this chapter.

Roche, Gerald, and Gwendolyn Hyslop (eds), Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 DOI: 10.5117/9789463725040_CH04

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Introduction The Buddhist monks were keen to communicate with the Lepcha people in their own language, and as so often happens when the influence of a new religion spreads, religious texts were translated into the local language of the area, in this case Lepcha, for which an alphabet had yet to be created. – Plaisier (2006, p. 34)

The Lepchas are the Indigenous people of Sikkim and the Darjeeling hills in India. They reside in small numbers in eastern Nepal and south-west Bhutan as the total Lepcha population is reported to be less than a lakh (100,000) across the world. Prior to the formation of nation states, Lepchas called their country Mayel Lyang – the land of hidden paradise – which, according to their oral history,2 included the above-mentioned territories and more when mapped out. While scholars have discarded this imagined ‘homeland’ for the Lepchas because there is no historical evidence supporting this view – it is “not dependent academically” (Subba, 1985) – there is a Lepcha song about the mythical homeland that tells us otherwise. Chuk-lat, Ponoke take, Chuk-kyer, Ru-chang Rang-a-Dake, Chuk-gyom Tal, Chyu-bee Bong, Chuk-veem, Zo-la-see Brong

Foning (1987) interprets these lines as the traditional territories of Mayel Lyang, where Chuk-lat in the first stanza means ‘east’ and Po-nok is thought to be Punakha, which is the former capital of Bhutan. In the second stanza, Chuk-kyer is ‘west’ and Ru-chang Rang-a-Dake are believed to be the Arun and Tamor Rivers, which is part of Nepal today. Chuk-gyom then means ‘north’ and Chyu-bee Bong means ‘right to the base of the sun’ while in the last line Chuk-veem means ‘south’ and Zo-la-see Brong means ‘enormous heaps of rice’. When you translate the poem, the boundaries of Mayel Lyang are mapped according to the places mentioned in the song. The modern creation of political boundaries separated Mayel Lyang and the Lepchas 2 This chapter will refer to a number of oral stories, myths and elements of local lore that have been passed down from generation to generation in Lepcha homes. As an Indigenous scholar, I write this chapter to validate the Lepcha understanding of their own language that has not necessarily been written by colonial or Tibetan scholars. In doing so, it is an attempt to acknowledge indigenous Lepcha knowledge and sources regarding the Lepcha language.

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into three different spaces, where today Lepchas are in the minority and their language has been marginalised as they came in contact with other dominant languages like Tibetan, Nepali, Hindi, English, Bengali, etc. I am interested in the contact between the Lepcha language and the Tibetan Buddhist language3 and the linguistic boundaries this draws from in order to inform what is understood as the Lepcha language today. The establishment of the Namgyal dynasty as rulers of Sikkim in the seventeenth century marked the advent of Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan language among the Lepchas. It was a gradual imposition by Tibetan migrant rulers from the north who used religion as a part of their statecraft to establish their kingdom. It was a strategic but predictable move by the Tibetans, who have long maintained this kind of relationship with those in the periphery across the Himalayas. In the Tibetan context, “religion has often been interpreted as synonymous with culture” (Shneiderman, 2006, p. 17) and using religion was a peaceful yet powerful way to propagate their language and culture and expand their kingdom, instead of waging war to occupy new land. Prior to this, the idea of religion as an organised institution was non-existent among the Lepcha population, who revered the mountains and rivers while they feared spirits that caused harm and destruction. Legend has it that the Tibetan dominance was foreseen by a powerful Lepcha priest in the fourteenth century. Khye Bumsa, a Tibetan noble, visited Sikkim to seek blessings from Thikung Tek, a powerful priest and bongthing,4 for his barren wife. The latter blessed the former noble with not one but three sons. Years later, Khye Bumsa returned to Sikkim to thank his Lepcha counterpart. It is believed that when Thikung Tek lifted one of the sons, the child’s feet touched his forehead. The Lepcha chief took this as a sign that this child’s descendants would rule Sikkim someday. He then asked Khye Bumsa to swear an oath of blood brotherhood between the Lepchas and the Bhutias as equals. The oath was consecrated at Kabi Longstok (with the two sitting on animal hides and surrounded by the blood of sacrificed animals as longtsaoks5 were erected to mark the “eternal friendship and 3 I have found myself to be using a number of Tibetan Buddhist words as part of my everyday Lepcha vocabulary today. While I would like to acknowledge that it wasn’t only Tibetan Buddhist religion, but also Christianity as another major religion, that changed the linguistic boundary of a Lepcha speaker, this chapter focuses on the persistent role of Tibetan Buddhist words in blurring the linguistic boundary. 4 Indigenous male ritual specialist who acts as a medium between spirits and humans but also performs the task of a traditional healer. 5 Longtsoaks can be understood as menhirs, which is part of megalithic tradition among Lepchas.

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fraternity” (Foning, 1987, p. 37) between the two communities. It has also been said that Khye Bumsa took a Lepcha wife to “reinforce the equal status of the two communities in Sikkim” (p. 54). The historical pact between the Lepchas and Bhutias was supposed to bind them together as an inseparable entity, but when the descendants of Khye Bumsa began to rule as chogyals (kings) of Sikkim, the Lepchas were betrayed by the Bhutias, who broke the brotherhood treaty by making the Lepchas their subjects. This narrative is often discounted as mere myth and Sikkim history only begins with the establishment of the Namgyal dynasty in 1642. Prior to that, there are no written records to tell the history of the people who were already living there. Taking archaeological evidence and corroborating with Van Driem’s linguistic history of the Tibeto-Burman language family (see Mullard, 2011), it is suggested that Lepchas have been residing in the Sikkim hills from at least 5000 BC. But the entry of Tibetans into Sikkim, especially as part of the ‘hidden land’ tradition in Tibetan Buddhism, connects Sikkim with the larger Tibetan narrative. Sikkim history is very much connected to the history of the Tibetans, who brought their culture, religion, and language to the new kingdom. Sikkim is part of the ‘Tibetan’ region that falls outside the political and geographical boundaries of Tibet. Whilst the precise nature of the qualities that unites these, often very different, regions has been debated and contested by academics, Sikkim has to be understood within the wider Tibetan context. (Mullard, 2011, p. 1)

This chapter focuses on the Tibetan Buddhist influence in Sikkim, especially among the Indigenous Lepcha population. I use the term ‘Tibetan Buddhist’ and not necessarily ‘Tibetan’ or ‘Buddhist’ singularly in this chapter because of the historical context that is still visible today in framing the image of Buddhist Sikkim (Arora, 2009). The arrival of Tibetans in Sikkim would soon result in a transformation of their identity into that of Sikkimese Bhutia and witness the emergence of a distinct language known as Lhokey or Drenjonke – a sister language to Dzonghka (which is spoken in Bhutan). They often try to distinguish their identity from that of the ‘original’ Tibetan identity by maintaining a subtle linguistic border between the variants of Tibetan as such. However, the largely accepted religious identity of Tibetans, Bhutias, and Lepchas as dominant Buddhists would soon be replaced by the majority Hindu Nepalis, and Nepali was to emerge as the dominant language in Sikkim today. Hence, the Tibetan Buddhist influence among the Lepchas has been observed since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

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Anthropologists studying the religion of the Lepchas during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been confused at the “contradictory and double-layered” (Torri, 2010, p. 153) belief system of the Lepcha people. “The discussion of the Lepchas’ religion is rendered extremely complicated by the fact that they practise simultaneously, and without feeling of theoretical discomfort, two (or possibly three) mutually contradictory religions” (Gorer, 2005, p. 181). Scholars have found it extremely difficult to categorise the religion of the Lepchas as they were “outwardly professing Buddhism, but at heart confirmed animists, worshipping the spirits of mountain, forest and river” (Macdonald, 1930, p. 8). This description may still hold true among some Lepchas today as the amalgamation of Buddhism and Indigenous religion meant that there was a coming together of monks and bongthings very much characterised by ‘syncretism’. The boundary between the lama and the shaman is often blurred as they coexist as religious specialists and divide their roles in performing the various rites and rituals of the Lepchas. Between the give and take of the two traditions, Lepcha religious practise was absorbed into the larger tradition of Buddhism, where the interaction resulted in an uneven exchange in many ways. Tibetan Buddhist language, religion, and culture were incorporated into the Lepcha vocabulary, beliefs, and everyday lives, but the latter have not been integrated into the former. In this context, it needs to be remembered that the Lepchas (like other Indigenous peoples across the world) did not have a word for ‘religion’ in their vocabulary. The word sang-gyo used to denote ‘religion’ is actually the shortened term for ‘Buddhism’, but it is used to refer to other religions as well. The Lepcha concept of god needed a reorientation while concepts like karma and reincarnation were never part of their belief system. To incorporate these newfound ideas into their language, they borrowed from Tibetan. As this happened, the Indigenous religious beliefs became heavily influenced by Tibetan Buddhist values and traditions. The changes were so significant that, as Plaisier (2015, p. 8) writes, “any study of Lepcha civilization cannot ignore the enormous impact of the Tibetan language and culture, a research topic that has received so far little attention”. Indeed, most of the studies on Lepcha language and culture have been isolated ethnographic accounts that do not address the interaction and contact with Tibetan Buddhist influence. Therefore, research of its influence on the culture, religion, and language of the Lepchas is important and essential. It is also said that the coming of Tibetans to Sikkim was the beginning of “Tibetization” (Bhasin, 2002) in Sikkim. Along with religion came the language, the culture, and a new worldview that would soon transform the religious, linguistic, cultural, and political landscape of Sikkim.

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Between the two languages, Tibetan was a language of power and i­ nfluence and Lepcha was the widely used language of the country until it ceased to be spoken even in Lepcha homes. As pointed out earlier regarding the Tibetan Buddhists, I would like to clarify that the descendants of Tibetan rulers would eventually identify themselves as Sikkimese Bhutias, thus creating a distinction between them and Tibetans from Tibet in the days to come. Despite the many cultural, religious, and linguistic similarities, the Sikkimese Bhutias would go on develop a ‘Sikkimese’6 (Mullard, 2011) way of doing things and a preference for being identified as Sikkimese Bhutias. But both of these are umbrella terms in today’s context, as the label ‘Sikkimese’ would indicate anyone who is from Sikkim and Bhutia, which includes seven other communities, namely: Tibetans, Dukpas, Sherpas, Yolmos, Kagates, Walongs, and Bhutias themselves. With this in mind, I shall refrain from using Sikkimese Bhutias and use Tibetan Buddhist/Buddhism to indicate the population that brought Buddhism to Sikkim.

The Lepcha language Lepchas call their language ‘Rongring’, meaning ‘language spoken by the Lepchas’. They call themselves Rong, a short version of Mutanchi Rongkup/ Rumkup, which means ‘children of the snowy peak’ or ‘children of god’. Lepchas believe they were created from the snow of Mount Kanchenjunga and that after the first man and woman were created the creator god spoke to them in the Lepcha language (Tamsang, 2009). ‘Lepcha’, however, is an exonym believed to have been given to the Lepcha by their Nepali neighbours. Derived from two Nepali words, lap and che, or lap-cha, ‘Lepcha’ is supposed to mean ‘unintelligible speakers’ or ‘inarticulate speech’ (Plaisier, 2006, p. 1). This term was mockingly applied to the Lepchas, who had difficulty pronouncing Nepali words.7 Lepchas call their homeland ‘Mayel Lyang’, which is understood to mean ‘the land of eternal paradise’ or ‘the place where Lepchas reside’. Its territories consist of areas that now fall under Sikkim, Darjeeling, and Kalimpong districts in West Bengal, Ilam in eastern Nepal, and Samtsi in south-west Bhutan. In all of these territories, Lepcha is 6 Today Sikkimese is used loosely to mean one is from Sikkim but historically ‘Sikkimese’ was an exclusive category used only for the aristocrat Bhutia population. 7 Although Nepali writers like Subba discard this translation and opines that there are no words in Nepali that corroborate the theory. However, it is generally agreed that lapche is belittling since most Nepali words ending with -ey have derogative connotations.

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a marginalised language firstly, because the numerical strength of the Lepcha population is not impressive and totals less than 100,000 across the world. Secondly, there is an increasing decline in the number of the speakers of Lepcha due to the modern education system, the influence of other languages, and the absence of Lepcha in the government and the private sectors. Lepcha is now primarily spoken at home, but usually only by the older generation as there has been a major language shift because of language contact with other predator languages in the region. The language speakers are further fragmented as they are thought to be speaking different languages altogether from one region to the next – when in reality it is often the influence of Tibetan, Nepali, and Limbu that has brought about the regional variation. Lepcha belongs to the Tibeto-Burman family and is a monosyllabic language governed by postpositions following a subject-object-verb structure (Klafkowski, 1980, p. 109). It also has its own script, written from left to right with spaces between words. The Lepcha script consists of 35 consonants and 9 vowels. The invention of the Lepcha alphabet has, however, been a controversial issue, which shall be discussed in detail later. The Indigenous Lepcha orthography is systematically arranged in a feature called lazong, believed to give “fluency, force and rhythm” (Tamsang, 2009, p. 10) in Lepcha when it is spoken. This is the traditional method of learning Lepcha – through sound. The sounds are recited by a teacher in a melodious tone, which allows the students to read and chant along, memorising letters and syllables in the process. Today, people learn Lepcha through primers and textbooks, but Indigenous learning occurred through recitation – “an old, powerful and important Lepcha tradition” (Plaisier, 2015, p. 70). Lepcha oral literature can be found in the form of myths, folktales, songs, and so on. Another systematic arrangement of the language is evident in the way rivers, animals, and parts of the body are named. Rivers in Lepcha-inhabited areas usually start with the sound represented by the English letter ‘r’, e.g.: Reli, Reshi, Rongnyoo, Rongnyong, Rangeet, etc. Animal names start with the sound ‘s’ and parts of the body begins with the sound ‘a’ – an eye is called amik, face is aaku, mouth is abung, and ears are anyor. The Lepcha orthography is still in use, although not every Lepcha has had access to the lazong training. The Lepcha script is transcribed using the Roman alphabet or the Devanagri script. The richness of Lepcha was highly appreciated by G. B. Mainwaring, the first person to write a grammar of Lepcha, which was published in 1876. In his introduction to A Grammar of the Róng (Lepcha) Language, he wrote: “The language is abounding in synonyms and possessing words to express every slightest change, every varying shade of meaning, it admits to a flow and power of speech which is wonderful, and which renders it capable of giving expression to the highest

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degree of eloquence” (Mainwaring, 1876, p. xix). The systematic organisation of the Lepcha language cannot be ignored even in everyday words and names. From the letter ‘k’ alone, the Lepchas produce 540 different sounds and words which can be perfectly used in sentences to express one’s thoughts. If we carry on with other consonants, conjunct consonants, vowels, diatric marks, signs and symbols, it will give us 6,660 words which can be used in the Lepcha language. The lazong is very systematic, scientific and exhaustive. (Ibid.)

Mainwaring was so convinced about the originality of the Lepcha language that he mentioned it to be “unquestionably far anterior to the Hebrew or Sanskrit. It is preeminently an Ursprache, being probably, and I think, I may, without fear of representation, state it to be the oldest language extant” (Mainwaring, 1876, p. xx). Mainwaring is celebrated as a Lepcha hero because he spoke highly of the language and his grammar was key in laying the foundation for it. Scholars credit him for publishing “the most systematic, scientific and authentic grammar of the Lepchas” (Roy, 2013) as his work “has been of pivotal importance for the survival of Lepcha” (Plaisier, 2007, p. 5). His statement about the anteriority of Lepcha gave affirmation to the Lepchas, who believed in the divine theory of language origin and that their language was one of the oldest because god spoke to them in Lepcha when the first man and woman were created. They believe that their language is so pure that there are hardly any negative words in it that mean harm to others. For example, they mention that they do not even have a word for ‘sin’ and claim that their word for this concert, layuo, is borrowed from Tibetan. The second reason why they think their language was the oldest was because they had a script. The majority of the Tibeto-Burman languages in Northeast India do not have their own script, so the fact that Lepchas have a script provides evidence of its anteriority. In their view Lepcha had achieved a superior status compared to those languages that lacked a writing system, or those that used the Roman alphabet to write in their mother tongues. Indeed, the superiority is placed in the written word as those without are seen to be inferior. But the question now arises, if god gave Lepchas the spoken word, who gave them the script?

The Lepcha script The creation of the Lepcha script is highly contested and there is no general consensus regarding its origins. Lepchas believe they already had a literary

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tradition long before the arrival of Tibetan Buddhism in the seventeenth century. However, there is no historical evidence to support this claim and it is highly probable that the invention of the Lepcha alphabet was motivated by the religious activities of Buddhist missionaries. Tibetan Buddhist morals and values were translated into the local language and written in a new script. Besides “plain copying down from the original Tibetan texts, the stories have been presented and given out to the readers in a complete Lepcha aura. The readers will feel that these stories, etc. were written by the Lepchas themselves, and for themselves, exclusively” (Foning, 1979, p. 24). The Buddhist missionaries were able to give an Indigenous flavour to the Buddhist texts translated into Lepcha. The invention of the script is, however, credited to Chagdor Namgyal, the third king of the Namgyal dynasty who ruled from 1700 to 1716. He was a popular king among Lepchas, whom they lovingly called Rong pano, meaning king of the Lepchas. But, despite his popularity, Lepchas do not believe Chagdor Namgyal invented the Lepcha script. Popular narratives talk about a scholar and a bongthing named Thikung Mensalong, who is credited with devising the Lepcha script. He was supposed to have lived in West Sikkim and the remains of his script is believed to be inscribed in the caves of Famrong. Marvels of Mensalong are told and retold, as especially in recent times a huge statue of him is under construction in Dzongu, in North Sikkim. The only problem is that Mensalong is also supposed to have fought with Guru Rinpoche/Padmasambhava when the latter was passing through Sikkim on his way to Tibet in the eighth century BC. The two had argued when the former asked the latter to “follow the lessons of the Lord Buddha” (Kotturan, 1983, p. 17), hence they decided to compete with their supernatural powers to settle the dispute. Mensalong is believed to have won the battle and Guru Padmasambhava accepted his defeat but did not leave before saying that these people were “primitive and wild […] and [it is] just not profitable to preach them the doctrine of the Buddha” (ibid.). He further added that this area was not ready to be tamed, and that the population was ‘barbarian’ ‘savage’ or ‘wild’ (Grothmann, 2012, p. 130), terms typically used to characterise the non-Buddhist population in Padmasambhava narratives. It was also predicted that a lama would later return, subdue the demons, and convert the Lepcha people to Buddhism. It can be seen as one of the Tibetan “civilizing project[s]” (Shneiderman, 2006, p. 9) amongst the Lepchas, whom they called the Mons, just like those living as a little more than “southern or western mountain-dwelling, non-Indian, non-Tibetan barbarian[s]” (Aris, 1980). The Lepcha people were not only converted to Buddhism but a new script had been devised

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to facilitate Buddhist religious activities. Thikung Mensalong is a powerful personality who keeps appearing in different narratives across time and space. If he fought with Guru Pandmasambhava, he had managed to be a contemporary of Chagdor Namgyal as well. He is also believed to have had supernatural powers so he could have even lived for a long period of time. However, it is also unlikely that a single individual could have completed devising the Lepcha script, so there is another theory – that representatives of the Lepchas and the Bhutias came together to formulate the Lepcha script, as recorded in accounts in the History of Sikkim (Namgyal & Dolma, 1908) of the third king and Mensalong meeting at Chukar Pang-shong for the first time. The most likely reason for the invention of the Lepcha script was to enable the dissemination of Buddhist texts. The third king who is credited with the invention of the Lepcha script was also a devout Buddhist and is known to have been a reformist with a new set of dos and don’ts for Tibetan Buddhism. Therefore, it is quite likely that Chagdor Namgyal, motivated by his religious inclination, and aided by his Lepcha assistants, might be responsible for the invention of the Lepcha script. Prior to that, the Lepchas did not require a written system as everything was learned orally by speech and memory. The bongthings were the repository of local knowledge as the word bongthing is derived from abong, meaning a mouth in the open position as it speaks and transmits knowledge. Sprigg even argues that “Lepchas did not have a writing system before the arrival of Tibetans because they had no use for one” (Sprigg, 1982, p. 29). The controversy regarding the invention of the Lepcha script is an unfinished argument; it differs heavily from both emic and etic viewpoints8 and the distinct perspectives create further boundaries in the minds of those engaged in the dispute.

Lepcha religious texts Lepchas have ancient, sacred texts popularly known as namtho naamthars. These are claimed to be Lepcha religious texts whose manuscripts contain the stories and histories of the Lepcha people. The word namtho comes from nam, meaning ‘year’, and tho, meaning “incidents/events that occurred in that year” (Lepcha, 2009, p. 2). Naamthar is a word borrowed from Tibetan – namtar, or ‘biography’, that is, a text containing a sacred legend, 8 I have tried to look into both oral sources and written history on the invention of the Lepcha script.

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a piece of native lore, or a hagiography about the life of a saint or miracle worker. In Lepcha, it is a derivation of two words: naam, meaning ‘year’, and thar, meaning ‘record/account of incidents and events’, implying the documentation of a Lepcha story. Namtho naamthars are usually handwritten manuscripts that have either been dictated or copied from other texts. The earliest of these manuscripts have been dated to the second half of the nineteenth century (Plaisier, 2015). More than 200 Lepcha manuscripts are to be found in European universities,9 museums,10 and libraries.11 There are many local private collections and a significant number of manuscripts at the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Sikkim. Plaisier (2015) worked on documentation and digitisation of these manuscripts and mentions the “direct loans” (Plaisier, 2015, p. 24) from Tibetan, especially in terms of the titles. She mentions “an indication of genre, such as sung (story, narrative), cho (book, learning), munlom (prayer, blessing), or namthar (legend, biography). Their designations are borrowed from equivalent terms and categories in Tibetan literature, i.e. Tibetan Gsung, chos, sMon-lam and rNam-thar.12 Therefore, the boundary separating Lepcha religious texts from their Tibetan counterparts may not be rigid, as there are many examples of loan words from Tibetan appearing in the Lepcha texts. Indeed, colonial scholars have been quick to discount these manuscripts as either “fictitious writings” (Waddell, 1895) or heavily influenced by “lamaist missionary publications” (Siiger, 1967, p. 23). Some have even claimed that there is nothing Lepcha about them. But Lepcha traditionalists beg to differ and claim that these manuscripts contain original stories based on Lepcha subjects, topics, and issues (Tamsang, 2009, p. 9). In Ngassey village in Kalimpong, naamtho naamthar reading day is observed every year in the 9 The Kern Institute at Leiden University consists of 182 manuscripts collected by Johan van Manen (1877-1943); SOAS also has a collection of five manuscripts.although it becomes ever is not necesary st influence as the question s their religion, they have laos been r the soico-politica 10 The Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna houses the collection of René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz (1923-1959), while the National Museum in Copenhagen has manuscripts collected by Halfdan Siiger (1911-1999). 11 The British Library in London has the collections of Brian Hodgson (1800-1894) and L. A. Waddell (1854-1938). 12 ‘A Lepcha book, referred to as cho, typically conveys a canonical message, whereas a munlon is usually a prayer book of some kind. A Lepcha naamthahr is generally a text containing a sacred legend, some chapter of native love or a hagiography about the life of a saint or miracle worker. The Lepcha term sung is used specifically for traditional stories that were originally not written down, but transmitted orally. In a broader sense, sung refers to narratives or stories in general’ (Plaisier, 2015, p. 74).

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first week of November when “ancient Lepcha manuscripts” are read aloud. From the story of creation to the flood story, the importance of bamboo to the tower of earthen pots, to various religious references, readers are encouraged to use rhythmic tones that accompany the narration. They categorise the manuscripts into different themes and read out loud with the sounds of nature. There are also some contemporary naamtho naamthar calligraphers who have continued the tradition of hand-written copying of the texts as the coming of computers and the creation of Lepcha fonts have allowed these manuscripts to be published by modern printing presses and produced for local circulation and consumption. With this background in mind, we ask, Are naamtho naamthar Lepcha religious texts or not? Religious texts hold an important position in society. It is the usage of text by both ritual specialists and lay people that strengthens the text’s position in society. In the case of the namtho naamthar, the books are written in Lepcha script with religious references, thus pointing to their likelihood of being Lepcha religious texts. But these namtho naamthars are not always referred to or used by either ritual specialists or lay people. Instead, naamthar,13 which could be understood as religious books or Tibetan Buddhist texts, are used in everyday religion by monks while performing rituals in homes or monasteries. A Lepcha bongthing does not refer to a namtho naamthar because his incantations do not refer to a written script. The bongthing is able to invoke the various chants orally while conducting different rituals that do not include readings from namtho naamthar as such. The readings of namtho naamthar in private homes is, however, encouraged, and it is not always a religious affair. Instead, we can see the prominence occupied by Tibetan Buddhist scriptures as naamthars or religious texts as a part of the everyday experience where no ritual would be complete without referring to stanzas from Tibetan Buddhist scriptures. In discussing the absence of the role of namtho naamthars in the everyday religious practice of the Lepchas, the author is not trying to negate its position as a Lepcha religious text. Rather, it is an attempt to broaden the idea of how our understanding of Lepcha religion might be very limited and that Tibetan Buddhist texts can also be seen as religious texts for Lepcha Buddhists. It also shows how religion and religious texts are able to transcend borders and defy strict religious boundaries as well as reveal how the script of the text is not important when we talk about the functionality of religious space. The focus is not on what is says, but what it does.

13 Usage of naamthar without namtho, to merely imply the Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.

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Lepcha script vs Tibetan script The invention of the Lepcha script did not result in the replacement of the Tibetan script. Indeed, Tibetan script had managed to lay a strong foundation in religious spaces and in the everyday lives of the Lepcha people. Tibetan sacred texts still occupy a very prominent place in Lepcha monasteries. In the Lepcha ‘reserve’ of Dzongu,14 in North Sikkim, different villages host the annual bumkor procession where Buddhist scriptures are taken out of monasteries15 and carried on the shoulders of those participating in the procession. It is part of an important community event in Dzongu as people line up near their houses to receive blessings from the contingent carrying ‘holy’ books as it makes a full circle of the village before returning to the monastery. Since Dzongu is a culturally homogenous Lepcha area, it is also the only place in the world where Lepcha is spoken by both old and young, and where the reading and writing of the script is part of the school syllabus. In this context, the procession of Tibetan scriptures in a Lepchadominated landscape reveals how the exclusive borders of the ‘reserve’ have not necessarily contained or isolated the Indigenous residents. Dzongu was set aside as a ‘Lepcha reserve’ since the time of the chogyal16 with a royal proclamation in 1958 that barred entry and residence of non-Dzongu natives in the reserve area (Government of Sikkim, 1984, p. 38). Interestingly, Dzongu has been strongly influenced by Tibetan Buddhism and each village has a monastery which has often fostered religious solidarity among the villagers. Hence, the bumkor event displays how Buddhist festivals of Tibetan scriptures have been accepted as a part of the Lepcha belief system, granting a kind of respect and veneration that is both symbolic and meaningful, despite the fact that the Tibetan texts cannot be read by everyone in the locale. The annual household rituals that take place in Dzongu where lamas are called to deliver prayers and to conduct various rituals to bless the household also show the influence of Tibetan Buddhism in the area. Prayer flags representing all family members are erected, and the Tibetan inscriptions/prayers on these flags continue to be in Tibetan. Even though the Lepcha script exists, there has been no effort to create prayer flags using 14 Dzongu is the only place in the world that has a homogenous Lepcha population. It was set aside as a ‘reserve’ for Lepchas following an official notification during the king’s time. Any outsider needed a permit to enter the area, including non-Dzongu Lepchas. 15 Each village has a monastery and these texts were either brought from Tibet or provided by a larger monastery where they are safeguarded. 16 Sikkim was ruled by Chogyals of the Namgyal dynasty before it merged with India in 1975.

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this script. Wasn’t the point of devising a Lepcha script to facilitate such religious activities? All prayers are performed in Tibetan. When the lamas are summoned to homes to deliver prayers, they know which book has the correct prayer for the desired ritual and proceed to read it. However, it is known that lamas often memorise the scriptures and recite them, instead of reading them from the book. As Tibetan is not the first language of the Lepcha lamas, they would not necessarily be able to read the Tibetan scriptures. Indeed, some probably memorise the texts for each occasion without understanding their content. Younger lamas often don’t understand what is being recited in Tibetan, but they are seen to be making efforts to become more fluent in Tibetan. At one ritual I attended, the assistant lama could be heard using Tibetan words while conversing in Lepcha. He also attempted to show his proximity to Tibetan while engaging in the practice of Buddhism. For instance, he kept saying ‘Thank you’ in Tibetan to the members of a Lepcha household who hardly spoke Tibetan. The persistent association between the Tibetan language and religion has even turned Lepcha lamas into carriers of Tibetan Buddhist culture and religion. As of late, Tibetan and Bhutia lamas in Sikkim are hard to find. The lamas that have joined the ecclesiastical order of Sikkim are either Lepcha or Bhutanese or Tamang. There are Lepcha families who still send their second sons to train to become monks, even though it is no longer mandatory. Although they loyally carry out their lama duties, senior Lepcha lamas have voiced their grievances regarding the inferior treatment of Lepcha lamas in the monastic order. The usual complaint was how a Lepcha lama could only be a head lama but never a rinpoche17 – a recognised, respected, and reincarnated lama in Tibetan Buddhism – despite having served in the monastery all his life. The upper hand of Tibetan Buddhist religion and language has been highly visible since its arrival in Sikkim. Tibetan was the language of those in power and to be able to communicate in it was an achievement for a regular person. One can also observe how Tibetan exercises its authority in the smallest instances. Even today, if a Lepcha is seen to be doing well in society, the term of reference for ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, which is anum and anom in Lepcha, automatically becomes aagya and aaie, respectively, in Bhutia. You have made it in society if you are called aagya or aaie. It is not just the borrowing of the words – it is also the borrowing of the meaning attached to those words – that is of importance in our understanding of 17 Rinpoche is also used for the abbot of monasteries and used to refer to learned and accomplished monks in Tibetan Buddhism.

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the influence of the Tibetan language and the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that still persists in Lepcha society, despite the fact that the monarchy is dead and Hinduism is the majority religion in Sikkim. Nonetheless, the dominance of Tibetan Buddhism among Lepchas is evident in their everyday beliefs, conversations, and practices. Oftentimes they are not aware of the imposing nature of Tibetan Buddhist characteristics as they have internalised and follow their culture. For instance, Dawa Lepcha, Nima Lepcha, and Lakpa Lepcha are popular Lepcha names, but these are actually days of the week in the Tibetan calendar, and hence Tibetan words. It is not unknown for a Lepcha lama to officiate at a naming ceremony, look at the book, and give a Lepcha boy a Tibetan name. One could again ask the question, wasn’t the Lepcha script invented for these purposes? But a higher status is credited to the Tibetan language, and one would not even know whom to blame in these instances. While one could ask, what’s in a name? I say, everything is in a name. A person is never called by their full name, so they would just be called, for example, Dawa or Nima. The names do not give any indication that a name like Dawa is Lepcha, thus blurring the boundary between a Lepcha, a Bhutia, and a Tibetan person. It is not always easy to differentiate where Tibetan Buddhist language begins and where it stops. Are Lepchas even aware of the occurrence of Tibetan words in their vocabulary? Most of the examples I have provided in this chapter come from people who live in heterogeneous areas. But it is even impossible to be certain about the Lepcha population of Dzongu, whose interactions (unless they leave their village) mostly occur in Lepcha. There is no way of knowing how their language use has been influenced by other languages.

Students’ perceptions In order to get a sense of how aware Lepchas are about their shared linguistic characteristics with the Tibetan language, I went to the Lepcha Department of Sikkim University and distributed questionnaires related to the language’s origin, the invention of the Lepcha script, namtho naamthar, and loanwords from Tibetan. There were 30 responses from postgraduate Lepcha students. The first question that I asked was about the antiquity of the Lepcha language, to which most respondents stated that Lepcha was one of the oldest languages in the Himalayas, and referred to the written system of their language to justify their answer. However, one respondent did not agree with the rest and said, “In the past, Lepchas did not have any

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written documents, so we cannot say that the Lepcha language is old.” It is notable that the superior position was credited to the written form of Lepcha and even the lone response that differed from the majority identified the Lepcha script as a qualifying factor for the supposed antiquity of Lepcha. Upon asking who invented the Lepcha script, all students credited Thikung Mensalong, the Lepcha bongthing (mentioned above), as its creator. Their unified response could have been because, as students of the Lepcha language, they would have been exposed to talk about Mensalong as the scholar who invented the Lepcha script. The next question inquired if the invention of the Lepcha script was credited to the religious activities of Buddhist missionaries. The popular response was, “No, because the Lepcha script existed before the introduction of Buddhism.” Instead, the respondents talk about traditional religion and the orality of mun/bongthing performances. If we look closely at this response, we can definitely pick up on the prominence held by Mensalong and the confidence of the community about the existence of the Lepcha script before the arrival of Buddhism. There is a conscious effort on the part of the community to maintain a linguistic boundary in promoting a Lepcha scholar as the inventor of the Lepcha script. The long-standing dominance of Tibetan Buddhism among Lepchas accounts for these small efforts to counter the dominant narrative. There is a growing movement among Lepchas to differentiate between ‘us’ and ‘them’, as the historical pact between the Bhutias and the Lepchas has been broken and both parties have become wary of each other. However, the sociopolitical developments in the state and the growing Nepali population brought the two communities to the point of forging an artificial alliance based on “negative solidarity” (Subba, 1988, p. 369). They now share a hyphenated identity as ‘B-L’ (for Bhutia-Lepcha), with Buddhism as the common denominator. Though Lepchas have accepted Buddhism as their religion, they have also been conscious of the fact that Buddhism was a later entry into their religious worldview. Following the 18 September 2011 earthquake in Sikkim, a badly damaged old Buddhist monastery in Hee Gyathang, Dzongu, was being considered for demolition. The 6.9 Richter scale earthquake damaged the monastery in such a way that some villagers thought it best to destroy the structure and build a new one. But there were others who did not support the idea as this was a very old monastery and, as the cost was to be borne entirely by the villagers themselves, they preferred to keep it as it was. There was an attempt to save the site because of the community’s involvement despite it being a Buddhist place of worship. A third opinion came from those who did not want to promote the age-old monastery because it was a Buddhist place

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of worship and traditionally Lepchas were not Buddhists. The third opinion is a recent but important view that is being heard among Lepchas today. In the end, the monastery was to be renovated and it is being promoted as a “community building” (Little, 2011, p. 66) today. It is not just a Buddhist monastery but a Lepcha monastery because it represented the combined effort of Lepcha villagers. Going back to the questionnaire, most Lepcha students seemed to be aware of the Tibetan Buddhist influence on their language. When asked if they knew any religious words in Lepcha that were borrowed from Tibetan, the responses were varied. There were some who agreed and mentioned it was a few words and that these words were “mostly used in the puja ceremony”. One respondent said, “Yes, in the case of Lepcha Buddhist religion” there was a clear indication of the usage of Tibetan words in the religious sphere. One respondent even mentioned that it was “not borrowed from Tibetan but from Lamaism/Buddhism”. This distinction is important, but in the context of this chapter, it is not necessary as we are seeing the influence of Tibetan Buddhism as a collective ordeal instead of two separate ideas. Another question for them was to make a list of Lepcha words they know have been borrowed from Tibetan. Instead of providing the religion-specific terms, I thought it would be a good start to engage with the words they provided. These included choo, mani, reemro, rapray, lungta, zunyong, lai, lasso, lus, and thuchi, all of which were religious words, except for the last four, which are polite terms. The list gives us insight into how the Tibetan loan words are used today. The first part of the list contains words used for religious purposes. This underlines the point I am trying to make by looking into how Tibetan Buddhist influence is not just religion, but the religious words that are used in every day lives. Each Lepcha household constantly uses Tibetan words which they have been exposed to because of Buddhism. The second part of the list is a revelation of how Tibetan Buddhist language has changed the way Lepchas address each other. Compared to Tibetan Buddhist society, Lepcha society hardly has any honorific words, seso ring. They never needed them because they did not have the elaborate hierarchical structures that Tibetans and Sikkimese Bhutias had. Hence, contact with a society that had these words meant that the Lepchas picked up these phrases in everyday conversation. The honorif ic vocabulary consists, I am informed, entirely of loan words from Tibetan or Sikkimese; it is meant always to be used to social superiors, but in Zongu only a few of these honorific words are current, and then only in connection with religion. The honorific terms for the

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parts of the body are used in describing supernaturals, and the honorific terms for ‘presents’ and ‘to offer’ are used for religious gifts and sacrifices. Those who can manage this honorific vocabulary would use it in talking to representatives of the State. (Gorer, 2005, p. 265)

Today most Lepcha speakers are multilingual, and code-switching between languages is the norm while the “boundary-crossing behaviour” (Bal, 2000, p. 110) is quickly performed, depending on whom they are talking to. As quoted above, Tibetan honorific words are connected to religion and superiors, which also makes us realise that without words from Tibetan, it is impossible to imagine the Lepcha language today. After Buddhism, Lepchas were introduced to Christianity, and the religious terms borrowed from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition came in handy as Christian conversion took place among Lepchas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Conclusion This chapter has been an attempt to examine the dynamics of the linguistic borders between the Lepcha and Tibetan languages. One can see how Tibetan Buddhism has played a major role in influencing the Lepcha language as we know it today. In 1898, the first Dictionary of the Lepcha Language, written by General G. B. Mainwaring, was posthumously published by German Tibetologist Albert Grunwedel (1898), who criticised Mainwaring for not including Lepcha etymological derivations and not knowing Lepcha, thereby erasing the work done by this linguist. Grunwedel wrote: The so-called Lepcha alphabet used by General Mainwaring in his Grammar is pure fiction. The language has properly speaking no written character, though it is possible that on a few occasions a debased variety of the Tibetan character may have been resorted to. (Grunwedel, 1898, p. ix)

In making this claim, Grunwedel dismissed Mainwaring’s work on Lepcha and reduced the dictionary to a mere “indication of Tibetan loan words” (Gorer, 2005). This was an early indication of the influence of Tibetan on Lepcha. Today, we are not able to see this kind of distinction, especially in terms of religious language, because it is embedded in the lives of villagers. They do not always see the difference between what is Tibetan and what is Lepcha, especially because they live in a linguistically homogenous Lepcha area and all they hear is Lepcha. The syncretic nature of their religion reveals

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the absorption of Tibetan words into the vocabulary of Lepcha, where the boundary is often blurred. This process is imperceptible to a lay person. Despite this, there has been a degree of consciousness about the Tibetan influence on Lepcha. This can be seen in the actions of Lepcha traditionalists who want to rid their namtho naamthars of Tibetan words. There is also a ‘purist’ campaign to keep their ‘unique’ language free from Tibetan influence. Why has this become important to traditionalists? In drawing this boundary, Lepcha traditionalists might be on the losing side, as it would further open up questions about the authenticity of the Lepcha script. Why did the Lepchas need a script if it was not for the propagation of Buddhist activities? Fortunately, we know that all languages across the world have borrowed and lent words in the process of helping each other open different worldviews; the contact between Lepcha and Tibetan has proven to be no different. While Tibetan may have gained the upper hand in due course, it is not to be forgotten that Lepcha in its spoken form has existed for a long time in the eastern Himalayan borderlands. While the region is a linguistic diversity hotspot in many ways, it has been Tibetan that has influenced Lepcha the most. Therefore, a reimagining of Rongring without the influence of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition may not be possible unless we forget religion, which is difficult to do.

References Aris, M. (1980). Notes on the history of the Mon-yul corridor. In M. Aris & Aung San Suu Kyi (Eds.), Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh Richardson: Proceedings of the International Seminar on Tibetan Studies, Oxford, 1979 (pp. 9-20). Aris and Phillips/Vikas. Arora, V. (2009). Framing the image of Sikkim. Visual Studies, 24(1), 54-64. Bal, E. (2000). ‘They ask if we eat frogs’: Social boundaries, ethnic categorization, and the Garo people of Bangladesh. Ellen Bal. Bhasin, V. (2002). Ethnic relations among the people of Sikkim. Journal of Social Sciences, 6(1), 1-20. Foning, A. (1979). A short account of the Lepcha language and literature. Bulletin of the Cultural Research Institute, 13(3 & 4), 20-30. Foning, A. (1987). Lepcha, my vanishing tribe. Sterling Publications. Gorer, G. (2005). Himalayan village: An account of the Lepchas of Sikkim. Pilgrims Publishing. Government of Sikkim, Law Department (Ed.) (1984). Sikkim code, vol. III: Old laws of Sikkim. Law Department.

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Grothmann, K. (2012). Migration narratives, off icial classif ications, and local identities: The Membas of the hidden land of Pachakshri’. In T. Huber & S. Blackburn (Eds.), Origins and migrations in the extended eastern Himalayas (pp. 121-151). Brill. Grunwedel, A. (Ed.). (1898). Dictionary of the Lepcha language. Unger. [Reprinted in 1979, Bibliotheca Himalayica 2:6, Ratna Pustak Bhandar.] Klafkowski, P. (1980). Rong (Lepcha), the vanishing language and culture of eastern Himalaya’. Lingua Posnaniensis, 23, 105-118. Kotturan, G. (1983). The Himalayan gateway: History and culture of Sikkim. Sterling Publishers. Lepcha, C. K. (2009, November 2). Namtho Namthar Rok Sitney. Sikkim NOW. Little, K. (2011). Between the earthquakes stands a monastery. Bulletin of Tibetology, 47(1-2), 65-68. Macdonald, D. (1930). Touring in Sikkim and Tibet. Asian Educational Services. Mainwaring, G. B. (1876). A grammar of the Róng (Lepcha) language as it exists in Dorjeling and Sikim hills. Baptist Mission Press. Mullard, S. (2011). Opening the hidden land: State formation and the construction of Sikkimese history. Brill. Namgyal, S. T. & Dolma, Y. 1908. History of Sikkim (‘Bras ljongs lung bstan gsal ba’i me long). Translated from the Tibetan by Dawa Lama Kazi Samdup. Unpublished Manuscript. Plaisier, H. (2006). A grammar of Lepcha. Brill. Plaisier, H. (2007). In awe of so many múng: Halfdan Siiger in the Sikkim Himalayas. Bulletin of Tibetology, 43(1-2), 7-23. http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/bot/pdf/bot_2007_01-02_full.pdf Plaisier, H. (2015). Unravelling Lepcha manuscripts. In M. Kominko (Ed.), From dust to digital: Ten years of the Endangered Archives Programme (pp. 67-87). Open Book Publishers. Roy, D. C. (2013, October 3). George Byres Mainwaring: A more Lepcha than most Lepchas. Aachuley. https://aachuley.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/george-byres-ma​ inwaring-a-more-lepcha-than-most-lepchas Shneiderman, S. (2006). Barbarians at the border and civilising projects: Analysing ethnic and national identities in the Tibetan context. In C. Klieger (Ed.), Tibetan Borderlands (pp. 9-34). Brill. Siiger, H. (1967). The Lepchas: Culture and religion of a Himalayan People, part I: Results of anthropological fieldwork in Sikkim, Kalimpong and Git. National Museum of Denmark. Sprigg, R. K. (1982). The Lepcha language and three hundred years of Tibetan influence in Sikkim. Journal of the Asiatic Society, 24, 16-31.

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Subba, T. B. (1985). The quiet hills: A study of agrarian relations in Hill Darjeeling. Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society. Subba, T. B. (1988). Interethnic relationship in Northeast India and the ‘Negative Solidatrity’ thesis. Human Science, 37(4), 369-377. Tamsang, L. (2009). Lepcha manuscripts purely based on the original Lepcha subjects, topics and issues. International Lepcha Language and Literary Seminar Souvenir. Indigenous Lepcha Tribal Association. http://aachuley.blogspot. com/2011/03/naamtho-naamthaar-lepcha-manuscripts.html Torri, D. (2010). In the shadow of the devil: Traditional patterns of Lepcha culture reinterpreted. In F. Ferrari (Ed.), Health and religious rituals in South Asia: Disease, possession and healing (pp. 148-165). Routledge. Waddell, L. A. (1895). The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism: With its mystic cults, symbolism and mythology, and in its relation to Indian Buddhism. W. H. Allen and Co.

About the author Charisma K. Lepcha teaches anthropology at Sikkim University, India. Her research interests include religion, identity, indigeneity, and linguistic anthropology in the eastern Himalaya borderlands. She was a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla (2018-2019). She was also a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Cambridge, MA (2021-2022).

5

Glottonyms, Identity, and Language Recognitionin the Eastern Tibetosphere1 Hiroyuki Suzuki

Abstract This chapter examines issues of language naming and language recognition practised by local Tibetans and scholars in the eastern Tibetosphere and discusses how and why Tibetans border their various speeches actively by naming them in various ways. It focuses on three cases: ‘Tibetic’, ‘logs-skad’, and ‘mixed language’ as separate instantiations of language recognition. Firstly, the term ‘Tibetic’ triggers controversy both amongst linguists and between linguists and the Tibetan community. Secondly, the use of the Tibetan term ‘logs-skad’ marks the recognition of unintelligible speeches to mainstream Tibetans. Thirdly, the label of ‘mixed language’ can be a crucial part of speakers’ identity. The chapter argues that linguists have a responsibility to balance their commitments to specificity with Tibetans’ practice of naming languages. Keywords: naming, language recognition, language classification, Khams, Tibeto-Burman

Introduction Language names in the eastern Tibetosphere have long been discussed by academics as well as Tibetans. Naming both makes and marks a boundary between a designated object and others; language names thus produce specificity and separation. In this chapter, I focus on a variety of language 1 This study was funded by grants-in-aid from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science: ‘International Field Survey of Tibeto-Burman Link Languages’ (headed by Yasuhiko Nagano, no. 16H02722) and ‘Investigation of Undescribed Languages in the Eastern Tibetosphere and Their Geolinguistic Research’ (headed by Hiroyuki Suzuki, no. 17H04774).

Roche, Gerald, and Gwendolyn Hyslop (eds), Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 DOI: 10.5117/9789463725040_CH05

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names and their places with systems of language classifications in the eastern Tibetosphere. These names include those used by scholars and members of local communities: ‘Tibetic’, ‘logs skad ལོགས ་ སྐད་ ’, ‘Minyag’, ‘Lamo’, and ‘Selibu’. In discussing these names, I explore how these labels operate as means for Tibetans to engage in recognition and bordering; I also examine how scholars working in this area have considered language names and how they might respond to Tibetan ways of recognising and labelling languages. Linguists generally recognise a language by giving it an independent name, that is, a glottonym. Glottonyms can be considered as proper names in their meaning and function (see Zink, 1963; Katz, 1977; Van Langendonck, 2008). Numerous debates around glottonyms exist, because these labels are typically not uniformly determined, and several different names may be provided for a single language or a language group, as seen in the entries of the widely used linguistic reference work, the Ethnologue (Eberhard et al., 2019). The recognition and partition of new ‘languages’ by linguists often triggers debate between academic and native communities (see Sun, 2013). Additionally, there is, to some extent, divergence between the practice and ideals of naming languages, even amongst linguists (see Haspelmath, 2017). This chapter explores these issues in the context of the eastern Tibetosphere, which is home to more than 50 minority languages (Roche & Suzuki, 2017, 2018). It is traditionally divided between two areas: Khams and Amdo. However, as far as minority languages are concerned, the language situation in Khams is far more complex than any other region of the Tibetosphere, a fact already recognised by such well-known scholars as Fei (1980) and Sun (1983). A Tibetan proverb – bla ma re la chos lugs re / lung pa re la skad lugs re / བླ ་ མ ་ རེ ་ ལ ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ རེ། ལུང ་ པ ་ རེད་ ལ ་ སྐད་ ལུགས ་ རེ། (Each lama has his own sutra, and each valley has its own language) – accurately describes the linguistic situation in Khams, where every valley has its own speech, which is often unintelligible to people in neighbouring valleys (Suzuki, 2016). In contrast, speech forms in Amdo, especially among pastoralists, are largely intelligible, though there are regional differences (sKal bzang ’Gyur med and sKal bzang dByangs can, 2002, p. 173); this is also the case in dBus-gTsang, Central Tibet (Qu & Jing, 2017). Focusing on the eastern Tibetosphere, we may note that many languages recognised principally in the ‘Ethnic Corridor’ in West Sichuan since the 1980s have been assigned glottonyms that have become the subject of significant debate (Sun, 1983; Dai et al., 1991; Huang, 2001). Both glottonyms and language classification have triggered conflicts between scholars and local Tibetans, amongst Tibetans, and also amongst linguists. See, for example, Sun’s (2013) recent discussion of language classification.

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There are many reasons for the conflicts that emerge regarding glottonyms. However, linguists have typically avoided discussing this issue from wider, interdisciplinary perspectives, including discussions of extralinguistic factors. Glottonyms and definitions of what a language is can reflect academic as well as native perspectives; if these two do not accord with each other, there should be two standards to recognise a given language. In the Tibetan context, the word skad སྐད ་ denotes all the following: ‘language’, ‘dialect’, and ‘speech’, including spoken (kha skad ཁ་ སྐད་ ) and written (yig skad ཡིག་ སྐད་ ) varieties. Therefore, in the Tibetosphere, debates frequently occur regarding whether a given variety is a language or a dialect. One of the most intense debates that has taken place regarding the languages of the Tibetosphere concerns the speech varieties of the rGyalrong (rgyal rong རྒྱལ་རོང ་ ) Tibetans. We find significant disputes between insiders (native Tibetans) and outsiders. rGyalrong is primarily a toponym, but when talking about the speech forms practised by local Tibetans there, the existence of ‘the rGyalrong language’ frequently triggers debate. Let us consider, for example, the question, ‘Is there a language called ‘rGyalrong’?’ From an insiders’ view, this question focuses on the existence of the language as a language rather than a dialect. Except for a very small number of cases (such as Lin [1993]), they would likely answer that there is no independent language called rGyalrong, but it is instead a dialect of Tibetan. From the linguists’ point of view, the question would be interpreted as relating to the number of languages, rather than to the language/dialect distinction. They would thus discuss how many languages the rGyalrong people speak. Based on the mainstream understanding within current Tibeto-Burman studies, rGyalrong people (limited to the rGyalrong region) speak several languages, including Situ-rGyalrong, bTsanlha (btsan lha བཙན་ལྷ་ , aka Southern rGyalrong), Japhug ( ja phug ཇ ་ ཕུག), Tshobdun (tsho bdun ཚོ ་ བདུན་ ), Zbu (aka Showu or sMarrong, smar rong སྨར ་ རོང ་ ), Khroskyabs (khro skyabs ཁྲོ ་ སྐྱབས ་ ), sTodsde (stod sde སྟོད་ སྡེ་ ), and Geshitsa (dge bshes rtsa དགེ་ བཤེས ་ རྩ་ ) (Gates, 2014; Roche & Suzuki, 2018), as well as Khams (khams ཁམས ་ ) Tibetan (Rongbrag dialect group), traditionally named ‘24 villages patois’ (Suzuki, 2011), and Amdo (a mdo ཨ་ མདོ་ ) Tibetan as a lingua franca of some areas in rGyalrong. Linguists generally identify the speech form they are dealing with by these names, although there are disputes on the boundaries between individual languages, the number of languages, and their classification. In the case of the label rGyalrong, we could consider that it originates from a toponym abridged from rGyal mo tsha ba rong རྒྱལ་མོ་ཚ་བ་རོང་ , which is attested in Literary Tibetan. It occupies a part of the eastern Tibetosphere, and the Tibetans living in this region are rGyalrong people. Their autonym differs from

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the Literary Tibetan term and has at least three independent forms: ‘kəru’, ‘rongbe’, and ‘bo’. The first form is a native word, whilst the others are Tibetic loans, derived from rong ba རོང ་བ་ ‘farmer’ and bod བོད་ ‘Tibetan’, respectively. rGyalrong itself cannot originally specify a language; however, linguists chose it for a specific variety to distinguish other spoken varieties, including Amdo Tibetan. Due to the discordance and careless choice as a glottonym as explained above, insiders have difficulties in accepting linguists’ view. The issues described above have emerged not only in the Tibetosphere but also over that area. Although my focus is the eastern Tibetosphere, similar issues are found in other chapters in this book. For instance, Gwendolyn Hyslop’s chapter is devoted to the relationship between the literary and spoken languages in the Kurtöp area in Bhutan. She demonstrates a rigorous historical linguistic approach elucidating lexical borrowings from Literary Tibetan, called Chöke, due to the dominant religion. Charisma K. Lepcha’s chapter deals with a language purification movement in the Rongring language in India. Her discussion shows the difficulties of bordering Tibetan loanwords from native Rongring words given the cultural and religious influence of the language. Cathryn Donohue’s work describes the language ecology and the language shift of a Tibetic language (Nubri) in Nepal. She describes the language attitudes as varying according to speakers’ social practices in the younger generations. These various topics are reflected in the scope of this chapter, putting its weight on language names and the naming process. How and why do Tibetans border their various speeches by naming them? To answer this question, let us begin with ‘Tibetic’ – a key concept regarding languages in the Tibetosphere.

Tibetic: How linguists’ discourses function within native language communities The term Tibetic was coined by Tournadre (2014) and replaces the expression ‘Tibetan dialects’ due to its état de langue (status of a language) with many unintelligible varieties. Tournadre (2016, p. 48), as well as Tournadre and Suzuki (2022), clearly define ‘Tibetic languages’ as “a language family derived from Old Tibetan”. However, scholars such as Hill and Gawne (2017, p. 31) have criticised the creation of this new term. This critique arises, at least in part, from the fact that the term ‘Tibetic’ is not persuasively explained by Tournadre (2014). Nonetheless, Van Driem (2017, p. 152) evaluates this term as ‘felicitous’ in regard to its parallel to ‘Sinitic languages’, instead of ‘Chinese dialects’. And although this is a

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neat solution for academic contexts, the broader problem arises in the nature of the English lexicon itself: the word ‘Tibetan’ cannot distinguish the ethnicity from the glottonym. The expression ‘Tibetan language’ can denote “the Tibetan language, equivalent to “Tibetic” defined by Tournadre (2014)” as well as “any language spoken by Tibetans (regardless of whether it is Tibetic or not)”. In this regard, it is necessary to establish a new term which can only denote the language group, whether a language is spoken by ethnic Tibetans or non-Tibetans. It is also worth pointing out that Van Driem (2017, p. 152) notes that the distinction between ‘Tibetic’ and ‘Tibetan’ works well in English and French, but not in Dutch and German; however, German, for example, distinguishes the ethnicity (Tibetaner) from the language (Tibetisch) in its lexicon, and hence one would not have to consider the issue above if the discussion was in German. From a linguistic perspective, there are Tibetans whose mother tongue is non-Tibetic, and there are non-Tibetans whose mother tongue is Tibetic. The latter case, for example, includes people in Ladakh, India, who speak Ladakse skat (Ladaks; see Tournadre & Suzuki, 2022), and in Baltistan, Pakistan, who speak Balti. Their ethnic identity is not ‘Tibetan’, but they speak Tibetic languages. However, amongst linguists in China, we find claims that the Dzongkha and Ladaks language are dialects of Tibetan (Jiang, 2002). From a certain linguistic perspective this can be considered reasonable, since it parallels the argument that the Romance languages are dialects of Latin (Walter, 2012); however this claim would not be easily accepted by people in Ladakh and Baltistan, because they do not recognise their mother tongue as Tibetan. This background should also considered when one uses the term ‘Tibetic’. As mentioned above, the fundamental issue concerning ‘Tibetic’ is the relationship between ethnicity and language. Following this problem, another debate emerges: whether Tibetic denotes a group of languages, or dialects. However, I do not intend to discuss this issue here; in contrast to many scholars’ position on this topic (cf. Maxwell, 2018), I would say that the answer is up to individuals. There is no simple answer to this question. Linguists, especially those working in descriptive linguistics, should consider maximising their potential scientific contributions. Although Hill and Gawne (2017, p. 31) point out that “such a division [between languages and dialects], even if possible, would still do violence to the full picture of Tibetan linguistic diversity”, every variety should receive equal attention in the contrastive, comparative, and typological disciplines, as necessary. Meanwhile, linguists should keep in mind the potentially negative connotations of the term ‘dialect’ in contrast to ‘language’ (see Chambers & Trudgill, 1998, p. 3).

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Tibetic languages have their own categories regarding the terms describing languages. The word skad is the literary as well as the spoken word to denote ‘language’, ‘dialect’, ‘speech’, and ‘variety’. For example, in the Khams region, we find khams skad ཁམས ་ སྐད་ ‘Khams language’, a mdo’i skad ཨ་ མདོའི ་ སྐད་ ‘Amdo language’ (regional varieties), rong skad རོང་ སྐད་ ‘farmers’ language’ and ’brog skad འབྲོག་ སྐད་ ‘pastoralists’ language’ (sociolinguistic varieties), and logs skad ལོགས ་ སྐད་ ‘side language’. The last term is employed to denote ‘unintelligible languages’, which, in fact, denote non-Tibetic languages from a linguistic perspective. The relationship between literary and spoken languages is also debated among Tibetans. For example, the pha skad gtsang ma ཕ་ སྐད་ གཙང ་ མ ་ ‘pure father tongue’ movement, had a profound influence on local spoken languages (Thurston, 2018; Roche, 2021). It is a grassroots movement in rural villages, with a desire for a ‘clean’ Tibetan language, without using any Chinese loanwords (Tsering Samdrup & Suzuki, 2022). Additionally, establishing a ‘norm’, that is, standardisation, has also been discussed (Prins, 2002; Dpal ldan bkra shis, 2016; Rigdrol Jikar, 2022). These phenomena often criticise ‘being local’, and even attack natural ways of speaking (see Tsering Samdrup & Suzuki, 2019, 2022). The framework of ‘Tibetic’ can also recognise this type of variation. What, then, is a Tibetan term for ‘Tibetic language’? As far as I know, there is no appropriate term corresponding to it within the existent lexicon. The term bod skad བོད ་ སྐད ་ more or less corresponds to ‘the language of Tibetans’, including most languages spoken by ethnic Tibetans (Zangzu) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, a minority might use bod skad as the Tibetans’ languages, except for logs skad; in this case, it would mostly correspond to Tibetic languages in the PRC. However, taking into consideration languages like Dzongkha and Ladaks, bod skad does not satisfy the condition to correspond to ‘Tibetic languages’, since they are locally not regarded as bod skad. Tournadre and Suzuki (2022) give a Tibetan translation of ‘Tibetic languages’ as gangs ljongs bod kyi skad yig rnying pa las byung ba’i skad rigs kyi khyim rgyud གངས ་ ལྗོངས ་ བོད་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ རྙིང ་ པ ་ ལས ་ བྱུང ་ བའི ་ སྐད ་ རིགས ་ ཀྱི ་ ཁྱིམ ་ རྒྱུད ་ ‘a family of languages derived from Old Tibetan in the Land of Snows’, since the concept ‘Tibetic’ has never previously existed in the Tibetosphere. Glottonyms of Tibetic languages in academic contexts should, in most cases, be based on toponyms – respecting the locality – whether it is a traditional name, or a contemporary administrative label, as practised by Zhang (1996); however, it is considered best to avoid transliterated forms of non-Tibetic languages, such as Mandarin Chinese and English. An

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exceptional case is Amdo, to which we should consider applying another approach (for details, see Tsering Samdrup & Suzuki, 2017). Hence, scholars need the competence to distinguish an autonym of a toponym from an exonym derived from non-Tibetic languages. Beyond this, whilst the term ‘Tibetic’ itself is controversial between and amongst academics and Tibetans, some names of the constitutive members of this group are also in dispute. As mentioned earlier, the Tibetan term skad can follow any toponyms to indicate a local variety, whether the range is broad or narrow. Hence, to give a name based on a toponyms is easily acceptable in both the linguistics and the Tibetan communities. The problem is about which toponym is valid in a given region. The so-called ‘three greater dialects of Tibetan’ in the PRC, that is, dBus-gTsang (dbus gtsang དབུས་གཙང ་ ), Khams, and Amdo, are also based on toponyms. However, strictly speaking, the exact geographical range of these three is not defined. Furthermore, for the last two regions, there have existed other appellations, such as mDo stod མདོ་ སྟོད་ and mDo smad མདོ་ སྨད་ . However, most linguists have not seriously discussed these toponyms and their internal commonalities and discrepancies, though some recognise that the terms ‘Khams’ and ‘Amdo’ are inappropriate (Tournadre, 2014; Suzuki, 2016). Another problem is when a non-Tibetic term is used for a Tibetic variety without sufficient justification. This is the case of ‘Kami’, proposed by Chirkova (2012). Kami, also spelt Gami, is a Prinmi word to denote people who speak Tibetic varieties in Muli County. When giving the name, Chirkova unfortunately misunderstood the implication of ‘Kami’ in regards to two points: ‘Kami’ is not a Tibetic word, and it simply indicates Tibetic speakers in general, without specifying any location. In conducting interviews with several ‘Kami’ people from Muli, I have found that no single definition of who Kami people are is shared among them. The most extreme view that I have heard is that Kami denotes Khams-speaking people whether they live inside or outside Muli County. In this case, Kami Tibetan is equivalent to Khams Tibetan – if so, what is the purpose of naming a variety in this way within the context of the Khams region? Even when trying to localise a language name, this endeavour can fail if the diverse meanings of local expressions are not taken into account. Instead, I argue that ‘Kami Tibetan’ should be called by another name, based on administrative toponyms that reflect local pronunciations in Tibetic varieties. Currently, my opinion of the dialectal position of ‘Kami Tibetan’ is under the southern Nyagchu subgroup of the sPomborgang (spo ’bor sgang སྤོ་འབོར་ སྒང་ ) dialect group (Suzuki, 2018b). Any linguistic varieties under the Tibetic languages can be called with toponyms plus skad སྐད ་ (or kha ཁ་ according to the varieties) in a local,

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native manner, and hence this might provide a widely acceptable method for ‘bordering’ languages with labels. Natural and human geographies are common to insiders and outsiders. With glottonyms containing a geographical location and community, we can obtain the function that a proper name should possess: specification of an individual category, that is, a linguistic variety in the present context. Nevertheless, unfortunately, issues remain. For example, urbanisation and migration can change language communities, as well as the languages themselves, drastically (see Roche & Yudru Tsomu, 2018). In such situations, we cannot avoid considering what a variety called with a toponym represents and re-defining the glottonym (cf. Suzuki & Sonam Wangmo, 2017).

Autonyms, exonyms, and ‘logs skad’ within Tibetans’ contexts I discussed the term ‘Tibetic’ above, and mentioned that this term does not include languages referred to as logs skad. The term logs skad originates from a Tibetan lexical form, and it is assumed that the classification was first provided by Tibetic speakers. It is difficult to translate into other languages, but it can be interpreted to mean ‘side language’ or ‘reversed language’. Which translation is accurate depends on the speakers; this question is not so simple that it is possible to provide a clear-cut definition of logs skad (Suzuki & Sonam Wangmo, 2016). We also cannot access information regarding what it meant in the first use. However, at present, negative connotations are attached to this term. The word logs ལོགས ་ means ‘to reverse’, which triggers a negative sense that a language is non-standard, unofficial, incorrect, or inauthentic. However, the case would have been different if Tibetic speakers had intended to describe a language that differed from the Tibetic languages. The understanding of such a language as a ‘side language’ would not carry a negative connotation, but it would be an objective classification based on the fact that its speakers were unintelligible to speakers of the mother tongue. However, it is speakers of non-Tibetic languages who generally understand the term as having negative connotations, though this interpretation differs between communities. There are also language communities where speakers of non-Tibetic languages positively employ the term logs skad to describe their mother tongue, for example, Lamo and Larong sMar (Tashi Nyima & Suzuki, 2019). Unlike logs skad, a similar term – skad logs སྐད ་ ལོགས ་ – contains a derrogatory sense in both Tibetic and non-Tibetic languages in some regions. As Suzuki and Sonam Wangmo (2016) report, Lhagang Choyu, a newly

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recognised non-Tibetic language spoken in the Minyag Rabgang area, is called skad logs by its native speakers and members of the surrounding Khams Tibetan-speaking communities. An interviewee said that their language was skad logs, which was different from Khams Tibetan, without providing any specific language names. Speakers of this language do not want to speak their mother tongue to outsiders, and they usually use Khams Tibetan in their everyday life. When I mentioned the term skad logs, their response was typically negative. As this situation shows, skad logs is indeed a derogatory term which we should avoid. A similar issue arises with another term, ’dre skad འདྲེ ་ སྐད་ . This term is understood as ‘ghost language’ by Tibetans (Sonam Lhundrop, 2017). It is true that ’dre འདྲེ་ , its first morpheme, means ‘ghost’ as a noun; however, Thurston (2018, p. 205) reminds us of another interpretation – it could mean ‘mix’ as a verb, though it would be spelt ’dres འདྲེས ་ . Under the latter interpretation, ’dre(s) skad འདྲེ(ས) ་ སྐད་ denotes ‘mixed language’ or, more precisely, a way of speech in which an utterer mixes two or more language unintentionally, since the verb ’dre(s) ‘mix’ is monovalent (so-called intransitive). I will discuss ‘mixed languages’ in relation to language recognition in detail later. Since I have not found any written documents explaining what logs skad and ’dre skad originally meant to Tibetic-speaking people, I simply suggest a range of interpretations. The fact that there are Tibetans who consider logs skad as a neutral word, categorising non-Tibetic languages separately from Tibetic languages, suggests that the term has denoted an objective linguistic category in limited areas. The intention of the use of logs skad and the understanding by addressees could be different; an originally intended neutral categorisation could trigger a feeling of alienation amongst the people being described. We can hypothesise the following case: Tibetic speakers once intended to describe non-Tibetic languages as ’dres skad ‘mixed language’ due to their massive Tibetic loans; however, the people speaking such languages understood the term as ’dre skad ‘ghost language’, a derogatory term, and thus Tibetic speakers also began to misunderstand its implication and to employ it as a derogatory term. The term ’dre skad does not exist in the south-eastern corner of the Tibetosphere, Yunnan; it might be because the word ’dre is not used alone for ‘ghost’, but sngags ’dre སྔགས ་ འདྲེ ་ or lha ’dre ལྷ་ འདྲེ ་ in most Tibetic languages in Yunnan, and hence ’dre skad འདྲེ ་ སྐད་ in this context does not carry the meaning of ‘ghost language’. The term logs skad is principally known to Tibetans in the Khams region. Being recognised as a logs skad implies that a given language is spoken by ethnic Tibetans, not by Chinese (rgya skad རྒྱ ་ སྐད་ ), Naxi (’jang skad འཇང ་ སྐད་ ), or Yi/Lolo. Based on this fact, we can conclude that to be recognised

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as logs skad contains two implications: marginalisation as a linguistic minority, and recognition of a speaker belonging to the Tibetan ethnicity. In other words, applying the label logs skad indicates that a speaker is an ethnic Tibetan, but they are meanwhile stigmatised by Tibetic-speaking Tibetans and, in combination, this means that they are also stigmatised as inauthentic, incomplete, or aberrant Tibetans. They are recognised as Tibetans, but imperfectly so. The label logs skad therefore includes the speaker within the borders of Tibetanness, but problematises that belonging and marginalises the speaker. Another glottonym is discussed by Sonam Lhundrop et al. (2019), who focus on the terms ‘Hor’ (hor ཧོར ་ ) and ‘Horpa’ (hor pa ཧོར ་ པ ་ ), referring to a language complex spoken mainly in the central area of dKar mdzes Prefecture. They conclude that this glottonym may lead to misrecognition and should be avoided. Hor or Horpa is used by some scholars such as Sun (2007) for a glottonym of a non-Tibetic language. Their use of this term is fundamentally based on Hodgson’s (1853) description ‘Hórpa’. However, as Sonam Lhundrop et al. (2019) discuss, the term ‘Hor’ is ambiguous in both diachronic and synchronic aspects. Sun’s (2014) approach, that linguists need an archi-name for several speech forms or a language complex, is understandable; however, the evidence to which he refers is unbalanced and the discussion lacks a Tibetological perspective. ‘Hor’ is an exonym provided by Tibetan outsiders. The term ‘Hor’ denotes ethnically non-Tibetan people or people regarded as those who had a relationship with Mongols or Manchurians, in particular. Currently, we find Tibetans called ‘Hor’ or ‘Horpa’ in the eastern Tibetosphere around Kandze and Drango Counties, who speak either Tibetic or non-Tibetic languages (see Moriyasu, 1977). ‘Hor’ has never been used as an autonym. Hor skad ཧོར ་ སྐད ་ as a Tibetic term can denote either khams skad or logs skad, and thus it cannot specify a kind of language. According to an interviewee from Kandze County who self-identifies as a ‘Hor’, Tibetic-speaking people in some areas of the county identify themselves as ‘Hor’ and are unsatisfied with the situation of some linguists using ‘Hor’ as a glottonym of logs skad because ‘Hor’ is a toponym, and it is not related to their languages. The use of ‘Hor’ in any forms to denote Tibetans’ languages in the eastern Tibetosphere is therefore inadequate, and exemplifies once again the ways in which mis-labelling can lead to mis-bordering and misrecognition. Another example of the misrecognition of a glottonym is ‘Lavrung’. Through a rigorous linguistic analysis, Huang (2001) successfully recognised an independent language within rGyalrong Tibetans’ speech forms. However, Huang (2003) mistakenly ascribed another glottonym, Lavrung (Lawurong),

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to the language, although she claims that a language name should follow an autonym. Lately, we learnt that ‘Lavrung’ is not an autonym. When I interviewed a native speaker of this language, in 2009, he did not understand the word ‘Lavrung’ and suggested to me that it was related to ‘Labrang’, one of the biggest monasteries in Amdo. Recent publications substitute ‘Lavrung’ with ‘Khroskyabs’ (Lai, 2017; Roche & Suzuki, 2017, 2018), which originates from the name of the chieftain once governing the area where the language is spoken. Linguists have now chosen a toponym as a glottonym. In order to examine the complex ways in which glottonyms relate to bordering and recognition in more detail, I focus on two cases of varieties classified as logs skad: Minyag and Lamo. Minyag The term ‘Minyag’ (mi nyag མི ་ ཉག) is multidimensional. It denotes a clan, an ethnic subgroup, and a geographical territory. In the historical context, it is assumed that Minyag corresponds to the lDong (ldong ལྡོང ་ ) clan, one of the six greater clans in the Tibetosphere (Stein, 1962; Tashi Nyima & Suzuki, 2019, pp. 52-57). Additionally, a part of the ethnic groups forming the ‘Tangut’ used ‘Minyag’ as their autonym (Stein, 1951). At present, ‘Minyag’ is also understood as a toponym, which is related to Minyag Rabgang (mi nyag rab sgang མི་ ཉག་ རབ་ སྒང ་ ), one of the six plateaus in Khams (Wylie, 1962), the centre of which is located in the current Kangding Municipality; however, its exact geographical extent is disputed (Suzuki & Sonam Wangmo, 2017, pp. 65-68). In the linguistic context, ‘Minyag’ principally denotes a language spoken by Minyag Tibetans living around Mount Gangkar in Dartsendo Municipality. Diachronically, the language known as Tangut (Xixia) is also Minyag, if one follows the autonym of the Tangut people. Additionally, even synchronically, another language called Minyag exists outside of Dartsendo: Nyagrong Minyag (nyag rong mi nyag ཉག ་ རོང ་ མི ་ ཉག; Suzuki, 2012; Van Way & Bkra shis bzang po, 2015). Other than these, Tashi Nyima and Suzuki (2019, pp. 39-40) describe another use of ‘Minyag’ as a language label in the Chamdo (chab mdo ཆབ་ མདོ་ ) region in the historical literature (see also Wylie, 1962, p. 41) and current locals’ use, and have found it to be linked with the lineage name lDong. For this argument, dKon mchog rGyal mtshan (2018) provides preliminary statistics that 18% of 2,036 word forms collected for one of the languages, called ‘sMar’ (smar སྨར ་ ) spoken in Brag g.yab (brag g.yab བྲག ་ གཡབ ་ ) County of Chamdo, have Minyag cognates. However, the speakers themselves do not identify as Minyag.

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Though Minyag has a broad sense in terms of history and lineage, it is considered within the borders of Tibetanness by Tibetans, in the sense of either clan name, ethnic subgroup, or territory. Thus, as a glottonym, ‘Minyag’ is used appropriately with a toponym – to specify the distribution area. A combination of a toponym and an autonym as a glottonym is probably acceptable to a wide range of people as well as scholars. In the case of ‘Minyag’, for example, Roche and Suzuki (2017) recognise three ‘Minyag’ languages: Darmdo Minyag, Shimian Minyag, and Nyagrong Minyag. The first two are closely related, whilst the last is a rGyalrongic language. Each of them forms a distinct language island. Suzuki (2012) suggests that we can regard a variety as an independent language if it has existed as a language island for several generations. Additionally, Suzuki (2012) also applies Huang’s (2003) suggestion that “a language name should follow an autonym”. This analysis does not receive any strong opposition from native speakers, except from those who oppose the fact that linguists do not recognise the Minyag languages as Tibetan ‘dialects’. The general acceptance of the proposed glottonyms is in large part due to the fact that the glottonyms follow speakers’ identity, which connects them to their geography, toponym, history, and autonym. They border themselves by using toponyms and lineages; meanwhile, they commonly belong to the Tibetan ethnicity. Linguists should therefore be attentive to the multiple ways that Minyag people border themselves. Lamo Lamo is one of the newly described non-Tibetic Tibeto-Burman languages in Chamdo Municipality, in the Tibet Autonomous Region, officially introduced in Tashi Nyima and Suzuki (2019). The speakers of Lamo, as well as other non-Tibetic Tibeto-Burman languages in Chamdo, seem to be linked with the lDong clan, which is to some extent interchangeable with Minyag, as mentioned earlier. Preceding this work, Suzuki and Tashi Nyima (2016, 2017, 2018) presented conference papers, among which the first paper gave a different glottonym for Lamo: ’Bo skad འབོ་ སྐད་ . The background of modifying the glottonym is a clear example that enables us to consider the issues at stake when choosing a glottonym. The research carried out on Lamo is a collaboration between a native speaker of the language (Tashi Nyima) and the present author. When we first named the language, we chose ’Bo skad, following a claim of a native speaker who had left his hometown many years ago. However, upon further investigation, it turned out that the name was an exonym with a derogatory

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connotation, used by surrounding Khams Tibetan speakers. However, for the speaker we consulted, the name ’Bo skad had become so comfortable that he had adopted it as an adequate glottonym, because he had been outside his home area and living amongst Tibetic-speaking people for a long time. When we interviewed some people in Chamdo regarding their impressions of the term ’Bo skad, native speakers clearly stated that it was an exonym with a derogatory connotation which referred to people who do not speak correctly. Receiving these comments, we carefully examined the origin of the word ’Bo in vain; however, we also obtained the information that ’Bo skad was a Tibetic exonym, but Lamo was the autonym for the language. Nevertheless, most native speakers who have lived outside of Chamdo for a long time consider ’Bo skad to be a neutral word. The terms Lamo and ’Bo skad both specify a language that differs from Khams Tibetan spoken in a specific area: a part of the banks of the rGyal-mo rNgul-chu རྒྱལ ་ མོ ་ རྔུལ ་ ཆུ ་ (Nujiang) River in mDzogong County. These terms do not denote sister languages spoken near that area, for example, Larong sMar, spoken along the banks of the Zla-chu ཟླ་ ཆུ ་ (Lancangjiang) River in mDzogong and sMarkhams Counties (Tashi Nyima & Suzuki, 2019; see also Suzuki et al., 2018, for lexical features between Lamo and Larong sMar). Hence, neither Lamo nor ’Bo skad is equivalent to ‘non-Tibetic language in mDzogong or Chamdo’. Therefore, the action of naming a language by local Tibetans exclusively borders the language itself, as well as its geographical distribution from the others, although local Tibetans neither want nor intend to distinguish ethnicity by naming a group speaking a different language. Lamo thus exclusively borders a language rather than a group of people. We thus do not use this term to refer to the people who speak Lamo. Its origin is presently unclear; we have not found any clues even in the Lamo lexicon. With long-term contact with Tibetic-speaking people, Lamo’s lexicon has borrowed many words from Tibetic languages. ’Bo skad has, at least for my colleague’s lexicon, become a loanword without any negative connotations. Then, from where did the ‘negative connotations’ emerge, although some speakers do not recognise them? From the experience described above, we can say that derogatory meanings emerge when the term is used compared with other forms which do not originate from a given native tongue. Since we cannot specify what the word ’Bo initially meant in the Tibetic languages, we cannot assert that it was originally a derogatory term. Lamo speakers living in Chamdo probably have a feeling of being marginalised by other Tibetans when they are called ’Bo. Meanwhile, Lamo speakers living outside the original speech community do not have such a feeling, because no one compares Lamo with ’Bo.

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Through the descriptions concerning Minyag and Lamo above, we notice the non-uniqueness of glottonyms. Minyag primarily designates a lineage and hence it can denote multiple languages from the linguistic perspective. The opposition of ’Bo and Lamo within the community of native speakers depends on the surrounding social, political, and linguistic environment. The implication of glottonyms is not common to every speaker but fluctuates according to the sociolinguistic background.

Recognising ‘mixed’ languages: ‘Speaking in a mixed way’ as a part of an identity In the eastern Tibetosphere, we find “mixed languages” (Matras, 2000) or, more specifically, “converted languages” (Bakker, 2003, p. 116), of which Daohua (A tshogs, 2004) and Wutun (Sandman, 2016) are the best-described varieties; both are considered Chinese-Tibetan mixed languages. The Daohuaspeaking region is located in Khams (Nyagchukha County of Kandze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province). Despite its distribution inside the Tibetic-speaking region, the language is named in Chinese (‘Daohua’) rather than in Tibetan. This appellation literally denotes ‘reverse language’, derived from the ‘reversed’ structure of the position of verbs: Mandarin is typologically regarded as a language with the SVO word order, but Daohua consistently displays SOV order, which is shared by the surrounding non-Han languages, such as Tibetic and Qiangic languages. In the Tibetan context, we cannot confirm that the name ‘Daohua’ is related to the Tibetic term logs skad. Indeed, there are no alternative Tibetic appellations, although most speakers of the language are Tibetan. According to Kun dga’ dBang mo and Suzuki (2008), ‘Daohua’ denotes not only the variety that A tshogs (2004) describes, but also all types of South-western Mandarin (Sichuanese) with the SOV order spoken by Tibetans. However, from a descriptive linguistic viewpoint, there should be differences between them, and the latter do not possess several linguistic features described by A tshogs (2004). Zhou (2018, 2019) has recently described a ‘mixed’ language of Southwestern Mandarin and Khams Tibetan spoken by Chinese Muslims (Huizu) in Shangri-La Municipality of Yunnan Province. The basis of this language, formerly called Shuimofang speech, is Mandarin, but has received massive influence from the local variety of Khams Tibetan called Alangu, derived from the village name Alangu (a lags mgo ཨ་ ལགས ་ མགོ་ ), and has developed by absorbing Alangu’s grammatical marking system and its lexical forms. This ‘mixed’ language is considered ‘mixed’ by local Tibetans as well as Hui

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people, because they call it ‘Selibu’ (pronounced as [ɕəlibu]), provisionally derived from a Tibetan expression sre gleng ba po སྲེ ་ གླེང ་ བ ་ པོ ་ ‘one who speaks in a mixed way’ (Zhou & Suzuki, 2020). Even local Tibetans do not understand its exact meaning; however, the first morph sre སྲེ ་ means ‘mix (something)’, which fits well with a dialect sound form (see Suzuki, 2018a, for details), and implies intentionality of an agent, that is, a person who intentionally speaks by mixing two languages, thus deliberately transgressing and obscuring borders. The term ‘Selibu’ originates from a local Tibetan expression. In other words, for Hui people, speakers of Selibu, this glottonym is an exonym given by Tibetans; however, they use it as if it were their own label, without any negative connotations. Zhou (2018, 2019) and Zhou and Suzuki (2020, 2022) show that Selibu has its own system consisting of Mandarin as a basis and Tibetic grammatical words, which expand the concept of the case marking system and verb morphology, as well as the aspectual and evidential systems. Selibu has already become a creole, which means that there are native speakers of this language. Hence, Selibu should be treated as an independent language, and native speakers also recognise the feature of independence, although there will be arguments regarding the linguistic affiliation among scholars. It has become a language that originated from two other languages. Therefore, the name ‘mixed language’ can mislead us; the use of Tibetic words here is not code-switching. Instead, the Tibetic words have been merged into Selibu’s lexicon, even though Tibetans, as well as Han Chinese living in the surroundings of Selibu speakers, regard their language as a mixed language with a degraded and simplified structure, and hence consider Selibu speakers as people who are competent in speaking neither Chinese nor Tibetan, rendering them in some ways ‘languageless’ (Rosa, 2016). As far as Selibu is concerned, this view is mistakenly analyzed by non-native locals. Selibu is not used outside Alangu village, but only within families and amongst villagers. Hui people in Alangu are thus generally bilingual in Selibu and Yunnanese. Speaking Selibu implies that the speaker comes from Alangu, because Hui people in the Town (rGyalthang, Shangri-La) do not speak it, and Selibu speakers consider it as a part of their identity. This case also indicates a strong relationship between the people and the region where they belong. Selibu speakers, even by using an exonym, border themselves as a community, marking themselves as distinct from others who do not speak Selibu. Although local Tibetans may have had the intention of marginalising Selibu by distinguishing it from Mandarin dialects (Yunnanese) spoken elsewhere, for instance, in the municipality centre (rGyalthang town), it has nonetheless become a part of speakers’ identities, and none of them

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dislikes this appellation. The Hui people do not accept the glottonym as a Tibetic loanword, but have recognised their language as ‘mixed’, and thus Tibetic words occupy an integral part of their language.

Conclusion Tibetans’ recognition of languages and language borders in the eastern Tibetosphere is closely connected with ethnicity, lineage, and geography, as well as intelligibility. Ethnicity emerges in several aspects; one is that Tibetans’ language is singular, called bod skad; another is, together with intelligibility criterion, a recognition of logs skad, which denotes languages spoken by people within the borders of Tibetanness that are unintelligible to Tibetic-speaking Tibetans. And although describing someone as speaking logs skad contains a connotation that they are within the borders of Tibetanness, using this label also implies that the speaker is marginal as well as marginalised: they are borderline Tibetans. Meanwhile, Tibetans also refer to their lineage, e.g., Minyag. The languages spoken by Minyag Tibetans vary from linguists’ perspective, including three ‘Minyag’ languages, and Khams Tibetan. Tibetans’ concern with geography – the place they live – is also so strong that we can call Tibetans a name composed by a place name and ‘Tibetan’. Tibetans rarely disagree with such appellations. The multilayered categorisation described above is the principal factor that triggers conflicts with linguists’ recognition of languages, which often consider linguistic criteria, including intelligibility. How should a glottonym be decided upon in the Tibetosphere? It is still difficult to answer this question. Through the discussions above, we can see that there are various perspectives to be considered. As far as the Tibetosphere is concerned, the preferable way of naming a variety is to refer to toponyms in connection with ethnic autonyms. This approach still contains inaccuracy and ambiguity, which are only exacerbated by the ongoing drastic social changes currently taking place in communities throughout the Tibetosphere. However, it is the closest way to specify varieties in more precise wording for native speakers as well as scholars. Regardless of whether individual scholars follow this recommendation or not, the above discussion has at least demonstrated that naming practices have important implications regarding languages and bordering. Language names can suggest whether a person or population are considered to belong inside or outside a border, and even their proximity to the border. Language names thus have consequences for inclusion, exclusion, and marginalisation.

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References A tshogs, Ye shes ’Od gsal (2004). Daohua yanjiu. Minzu Chubanshe. Bakker, P. (2003). Mixed languages as autonomous systems. In Y. Matras & P. Bakker (Eds.), The mixed language debate: Theoretical and empirical advances (pp. 107-150). Mouton de Gruyter. doi: 10.1515/9783110197242.107 Bkra shis bzang po (2012). May all good things gather here: Life, religion, and marriage in a Mi nyag Tibetan village. Asian Highlands Perspectives, 14, 1-369. http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ahp/pdf/AHP_14.pdf Chambers, J., & Trudgill, P. (1998). Dialectology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511805103 Chirkova, K. (2012). Extralinguistic factors, language change, and comparative reconstructions: Case studies from South-West China. Yuyanxue Luncong, 45, 67-111. Dai, Q., Huang, B., Fu, A., Rig ’dzin dBang mo, & Liu, J. (1991). Zangmianyu shiwuzhong. Beijing Yanshan Chubanshe. Dpal ldan bkra shis (2016). Amdo Tibetan language: An introduction to normative oral Amdo. Asian Highlands Perspectives, 43, 1-668. http://himalaya.socanth. cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ahp/pdf/AHP_43.pdf van Driem, G. (2017). Review: Le prisme des langues (préface de Claude Hagège) by Nicolas Tournadre. Himalayan Linguistics, 16(1), 151-156. doi: 10.5070/H916134680 Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.) (2019). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (22nd ed.). Dallas: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com Fei, X. (1980). Guanyu woguo minzu de shibie wenti. Zhongguo Shehui Kexue, 1, 94-107. Gates, J. P. (2014). Situ in situ: Towards a dialectology of Jiarong (rGyalrong). München: Lincom Europa. Haspelmath, M. (2017). Some principles for language names. Language Documentation & Conservation, 11, 81-93. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24725 Hill, N. W., & Gawne, L. (2017). The contribution of Tibetan languages to the study of evidentiality. In L. Gawne & N. W. Hill (Eds.), Evidential systems of Tibetan languages (pp. 1-38). De Gruyter. doi: 10.1515/9783110473742-001 Hodgson, B. (1853). Sifan and Hórsók vocabularies. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 22, 121-151. Huang, B. (2001). Guanyinqiaohua yushu wenti yanjiu. Language and Linguistics, 2(1), 69-92. Huang, B. (2003). Lawurongyu gaikuang. Minzu Yuwen, 3, 60-80. Jiang, D. (2002). Zangyu yuyinshi yanjiu. Minzu Chubanshe. sKal bzang ’Gyur med & sKal bzang dByangs can (2002). Zangyu fangyan gailun. Minzu Chubanshe.

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Katz, J. J. (1977). A proper theory of names. Philosophical Studies, 31(1), 1-80. doi: 10.1007/BF01857252 dKon mchog rGyal mtshan (2018). Khams brag g.yab smar skad la thog mar dpyad pa. MA thesis, Bod ljongs slob grwa chen mo. Kun dga’ dBang mo & Suzuki, H. (2008). Daofuyu de shiyongqingkuang he yuyan huoli: Xianshuizhen Daofuyu de gean yanjiu. Kyoto University Linguistic Research, 27, 223-240. https://doi.org/10.14989/73218 Lai, Y. (2017). Grammaire du khroskyabs de Wobzi. PhD thesis, Université Sorbonne Paris Cité. https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01571916v4 Lin, X. (1993). Jiarongyu yanjiu. Sichuan Minzu Chubanshe. Matras, Y. (2000). Mixed languages: A functional-communicative approach. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3(2), 79-99. doi: 10.1017/S1366728900000213 Maxwell, A. (2018). When theory is a joke: The Weinreich witticism in linguistics. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 28(2), 263-292. Moriyasu, T. (1977). Tibet-go siryoo tyuu ni arawareru hoppoo minzoku: DRUGU to HOR. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 14, 1-48. http://hdl.handle. net/10108/21656 Prins, M. (2002). Towards a Tibetan common language: Amdo perspectives on attempts at language standardization. In T. Huber (Ed.), Amdo Tibetans in transition: Society and culture in the post-Mao era (pp. 27-52). Brill. Qu, A., & Jing, S. (2017). Zangyu Wei-Zang fangyan yanjiu. Zhongguo Zangxue Chubanshe. Rigdrol Jikar (2022). Language standardization for Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China. In N. McLelland & H. Zhao (Eds.), Language standardization and language variation in multilingual contexts: Asian perspectives. Multilingual Matters. Roche, G. (2021). Lexical necropolitics: The raciolinguistics of language oppression on the Tibetan margins of Chineseness. Language & Communication, 76, 111-120. Roche, G., & Suzuki, H. (2017). Mapping the linguistic minorities of the eastern Tibetosphere. In K. Kurabe & M. Endo (Eds.), Studies in Asian geolinguistics VI: ‘Means to count nouns’ in Asian Languages (pp. 28-42). Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. https://publication.aa-ken.jp/sag6_count_2017.pdf Roche, G., & Suzuki, H. (2018). Tibet’s minority languages: Diversity and endangerment. Modern Asian Studies, 52(4), 1227-1278. doi: 10.1017/S0026749X1600072X Roche, G., & Yudru Tsomu (2018). Tibet’s invisible languages and China’s language endangerment crisis: Lessons from the Gochang language of Western Sichuan. China Quarterly, 233, 186-210. doi: 10.1017/S0305741018000012 Rosa, J. D. (2016). Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 26(2), 162-183. doi: 10.1111/jola.12116

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Sandman, E. (2016). A grammar of Wutun. PhD thesis, University of Helsinki. http:// hdl.handle.net/10138/168427 Sonam Lhundrop (2017). Language vitality and glottonyms in the Ethnic Corridor: The rTa’u language. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 245, 147-168. doi: 10.1515/ijsl-2017-0006 Sonam Lhundrop, Suzuki, H., & Roche, G. (2019). Language contact and the politics of recognition amongst Tibetans in China: The rTa’u-speaking ‘Horpa’ of Khams. In S. K. Sonntag & M. Turin (Eds.), The politics of language contact in the Himalaya (pp. 18-42). Open Book Publishers. doi: 10.11647/OBP.0169 Stein, R. A. (1951). Mi-ñag et Si-hia: géographie historique et légendes ancestrales. Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient XLIV, Fasc. 1, 223-259. doi: 10.3406/ befeo.1951.5048 Stein, R. A. (1962). La civilisation tibétaine. Dunod. Sun, H. (1983). Liujiang liuyu de minzu yuyan ji qi xishu fenlei: Jianshu Jialingjiang shangyou, Yaluzangbujiang liuyu de minzu yuyan. Minzu Xuebao, 3, 99-273. Sun, H. (2013). Lun Shixingyu de neibu chayi – Jianlun yuyan shibie de tongjiedu fangfa. Minzu Yuwen, 2, 21-30. Sun, J. T.-S. (2007). Morphological causative formation in Shangzhai Horpa. Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 2(1), 211-231. doi: 10.1163/2405478X-90000031 Sun, J. T.-S. (2014). Argument-number marking via reduplication in Brag ’go-Rta’uRong brag (Central) Horpa. Paper presented at the 47th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (Kunming). Suzuki, H. (2011). Dialectal particularities of Sogpho Tibetan: An introduction to the ‘Twenty-four villages’ patois’. In M. Turin & B. Zeisler (Eds.), Himalayan languages and linguistics: Studies in phonology, semantics, morphology and syntax (pp. 55-73). Brill. doi: 10.1163/ej.9789004194489.i-322.25 Suzuki, H. (2012). Ergative marking in Nyagrong-Minyag (Xinlong, Sichuan). Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 35(1), 35-48. doi: 10.15144/LTBA-35.1.35 Suzuki, H. (2016). Zangyu fangyanxue yanjiu yu yuyan ditu: Ruhe kandai ‘Kang fangyan’. Minzu Xuekan, 2, 1-13 and 92-94. doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-9391.2016.02.001 Suzuki, H. (2018a). Kamutibettogo rGyalthang kaihoogengun ni okeru si-sikeion no zenbukookoogaika gensyoo to sono syuuhen. Journal of Kijutsuken, 10, 1-11. http://id.nii.ac.jp/1422/00001999/. Suzuki, H. (2018b). Kangba Zangyu Bengbogang fangyanqun ji qi yuyin tezheng. Sichuan Minzu Xueyuan Xuebao 5, 66-71. doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-8824.2018.05.012 Suzuki, H., & Sonam Wangmo (2016). Lhagang Choyu: A first look at its sociolinguistic status. In M. Endo (Ed.), Studies in Asian geolinguistics II: ‘Rice’ (pp. 60-69). Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. https://publication.aa-ken.jp/sag2_rice_2016.pdf

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Suzuki, H., & Sonam Wangmo. (2017). Language evolution and vitality of Lhagang Tibetan: A Tibetic language as a minority in Minyag Rabgang. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 245, 63-90. doi: 10.1515/ijsl-2017-0003 Suzuki, H., & Tashi Nyima (2016). ’Bo skad, a newly recognised non-Tibetic variety spoken in mDzo sgang, TAR: A brief introduction to its sociolinguistic situation, sounds, and vocabulary. Paper presented at 4th Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Languages of Southwest China (Seattle). Suzuki, H., & Tashi Nyima (2017). Outline of verb morphology of Lamo (mDzo sgang, Tibet). Paper presented at 50th International Conference for Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (Beijing). Suzuki, H., & Tashi Nyima (2018). Historical relationship among three non-Tibetic languages in Chamdo, TAR. In Proceedings of the 51st International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (pp. 885-891). http://hdl.handle. net/2433/235308 Suzuki, H., Tsering Samdrup, & Sonam Wangmo (2018). Contrastive word list of three non-Tibetic languages of Chamdo: Lamo, Larong sMar, and Drag-yab sMar. Kyoto University Linguistic Research, 37, 79-104. doi: 10.14989/240980 Tashi Nyima, & Suzuki, H. (2019). Newly recognised languages in Chamdo: Geography, culture, history, and language. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 42(1), 38-82. doi: 10.1075/ltba.18004.nyi Thurston, T. (2018). The purist campaign as metadiscursive regime in China’s Tibet. Inner Asia, 20, 199-218. doi: 10.1163/22105018-12340107 Tournadre, N. (2014). The Tibetic languages and their classification. In T. OwenSmith & N. W. Hill (Eds.), Trans-Himalayan linguistics: Historical and descriptive linguistics of the Himalayan area (pp. 105-129). Walter de Gruyter. doi: 10.1515/9783110310832 Tournadre, N. (2016). Le prisme des langues (2nd ed.). L’Asiathèque. Tournadre, N., & Suzuki, H. (2022). The Tibetic languages: An introduction to the family of languages derived from Old Tibetan (with the collaboration of X. Becker and A. Brucelle). LACITO Publications (CNRS). Tsering Samdrup, & Suzuki, H. (2017). Migration history and tsowa divisions as a supplemental approach to dialectology in Amdo Tibetan: A case study on Mangra County. In M. Endo (Ed.), Studies in Asian Geolinguistics VII: ‘Tone and Accent’ (pp. 57-65). Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. https://publication.aa-ken. jp/sag7_tone_2017.pdf Tsering Samdrup, & Suzuki, H. (2019). Humilifics in Mabzhi pastoralist speech of Amdo Tibetan. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 42(2), 222-259. doi: 10.1075/ltba.17008.sam

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Tsering Samdrup, & Suzuki, H. (2022). Politeness strategies, language standardization, and language purism in Amdo Tibetan. In N. McLelland & H. Zhao (Eds.), Language standardization and language variation in multilingual contexts: Asian perspectives (pp. 223-240). Multilingual Matters. Van Langendonck, W. (2008). Theory and typology of proper names. De Gruyter. doi: 10.1515/9783110197853 Van Way, J., & Bkra shis bzang po (2015). Nyagrong Minyag: Prestige and maintenance of a traditional language on the Tibetan periphery. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 38(2), 245-255. doi: 10.1075/ltba.38.2.06van Walter, H. (2012). Aventures et mésaventures des langues de France. Honoré Champion. Wylie, T. V. (1962). The geography of Tibet according to the ’Dzam-gling-rgyas-bshad: Text and English translation. Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente. Zhang, J. (1996). A sketch of Tibetan dialectology in China: Classif ications of Tibetan dialects. Cahiers de Linguistique – Asie Orientale, 25(1), 115-133. doi: 10.3406/clao.1996.1496 Zhou, Y. (2018). Yunnan Shuimofanghua de gebiaoji ji qi laiyuan. Fangyan, 3, 357-369. Zhou, Y. (2019). Shuimofanghua panduanju de hunhe tezheng. Yuyan Yanjiu, 2, 65-71. Zhou, Y., & Suzuki, H. (2020). Shuimofanghua ti fanchou de hunhe tezheng. Minzu Yuwen, 4, 43-56. Zhou, Y., & Suzuki, H. (2022). Evidentiality in Selibu: A contact-induced emergence. Diachronica, 39(2), 268-309. doi: 10.1075/dia.19055.zho. Zink, S. (1963). The meaning of proper names. Mind, 72(288), 481-499.

About the author Hiroyuki Suzuki holds a D.Litt. in linguistics from Kyoto University (2007) and is currently a part-time lecturer teaching the Chinese language at Kyoto University, Japan. His principal research interests are descriptive linguistics, geolinguistics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics of languages in the Tibetosphere.

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On the Yak Horns of a Dilemma Diverging Standards in Diaspora Tibetan Dirk Schmidt Abstract ‘Standard Tibetan’ – a state-building project of the Tibetan Empire – dates to the seventh-eleventh centuries CE. This medieval variety of Central Tibetan remains a cultural touchstone today. Its traditional spellings and grammars are still the reference points that define ‘proper’ Tibetan. However, while this standard has been maintained for writing, speech forms have continued to evolve over the last thousand years. In Himalayan settlements especially, movement, migration, and mixture have quickened the pace of language change. The result is diglossia – two horns of a dilemma, between which the borders grow ever taller. This chapter takes a closer look at these borders between traditional ‘Standard Tibetan’ and modern ‘Diaspora Tibetan’, and the dilemmas they create for education and literacy. Keywords: Diaspora Tibetan, Standard Tibetan, language change, diglossia, education, literacy, language ideology, language insecurity, language anxiety, readability

Introduction ‘Standard Tibetan’ is the result of a state-building project of the Tibetan Empire. Tradition says that the Tibetan Emperor, Srongbtsan sGampo, sent one of his ministers, Tönmi Sambhoṭa, to India in the seventh century CE. It’s reported that, when he came back, he created a script for Tibetan, and wrote several grammars (Tournadre, 2010).1 In each of the three following centuries, 1

This well-known story may well be historical fiction; also see Miller (1976).

Roche, Gerald, and Gwendolyn Hyslop (eds), Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 DOI: 10.5117/9789463725040_CH06

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special councils updated the written language (Hill, 2015). This medieval variety of Central Tibetan was the language of literacy and learning, and of Buddhist scripture and liturgy; as such, it had institutional support across the Tibetan Empire. These works still define ‘proper’ Tibetan to this day. While this historical variety of Central Tibetan has been prescriptively maintained in writing, the modern spoken languages of that region have naturally diverged over the span of the last thousand years. Standards in speech change informally and organically: Speakers adapt, adopt, interact, and innovate. New words get added, old words are subtracted, syntax drifts, and pronunciations shift. Such changes are natural responses to migration, movement, and mixture; as such, they are also especially apparent in the emerging ‘standard speech’ of the Himalayan settlements and greater Tibetan diaspora. The result is diglossia – two horns of a dilemma, two competing standards, two diverging roads between which the borders grow ever taller and thicker. While it’s common to equate Diaspora Tibetan2 with Central Tibetan; Central Tibetan with Standard Tibetan3; and Standard Tibetan with ‘the Tibetan language’, as a general, unifying term, in this chapter, I’ll argue that these are all distinct varieties of Tibetan, with distinct borders. This leads to a dilemma: Two competing ‘Standard’ Tibetans, one for reading and writing, and one for listening and speaking. Further, this diglossia is highly problematic for community-held goals like secular education and universal literacy.4

Overview Divergence, diversity, diglossia There are many varieties of Tibetan spoken today. They are spoken differently enough that they are not ‘mutually intelligible’ – meaning that a speaker of one variety cannot understand and communicate with a speaker 2 Also called ‘Settlement Tibetan’ (gzhis-chags-skad). Izzard (2014) renders it ‘shejak-skad’, and is perhaps the first published work to clearly state that Central and Diaspora varieties are ‘different things’. 3 As Tournadre says in his manual (2014): “Lhasa Tibetan, a variety of Central Tibet […] is often referred to as spyi-skad, ‘the Common Language’ [or] ‘Standard (Spoken) Tibetan’ […] it is used by Tibetan emigrants in the diaspora in India, Nepal or elsewhere in the world.” 4 Ex., the stated aim of the Department of Education is “to achieve 100% literacy among the Tibetan refugee community” (Central Tibetan Administration, 2019).

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of another variety upon first meeting. For linguists, this is commonly what defines language borders. And by that measure, there are some 50 Tibetan languages (Tournadre, 2014).5 Some of the best-known spoken outside China’s borders include Ladaks,6 Sherpa, and Dzongkha. Those within are often divided into the three biggest dialect groups: Amdo, Khams, and Central. Yet, despite their differences in speech, Standard (Literary) Tibetan unites speakers across the Himalayas and Eastern Asian Steppe, where it acts as the standard-bearer of Tibetan identity. Khenpo Tsultrim Lodrö, an influential scholar from Tibet, explains it this way: Nowadays, the gap between Amdo, Khams, and Central vernaculars is getting wider and wider. If we think of olden times, the language found in our religious and specialized literature was extremely consistent. We should be aware that this literary language is actually the standardized language of the Tibetan ethnicity. Apart from some pronunciation differences, the literary language standardizes our language perfectly.7

Important to this quote are two things: 1) ‘Standard Tibetan’ here refers to the standardized literary register, the true prestige variety of Tibetan (which is also the view I will argue for here)8; and 2) the diversity of modern spoken languages are seen as diverging from this standard, and growing further and further apart.9 The dilemma facing Tibetan is this divergence, or widening gap. On the one hand, the forces of nature change speech. On the other, the forces of society preserve rules. The dilemma Tibetan faces is how to resolve these opposing forces. Key to discussing these issues are the overlapping sets of borders that define ‘Tibetan’ as a language. This includes the borders of modern countries; the historical borders of the Tibetan Empire; and the linguistic borders between Tibetan languages. Briefly, these borders interact in this way: What is or isn’t ‘Tibetan’ is defined by 1) what originates inside or 5 This is updated from a previous estimate of 25 (Tournadre, 2003). It does not include Diaspora Tibetan as a variety. Though not covered here, Roche (2017) also adds at least 52 non-Tibetic languages to the count of languages spoken by Tibetans in Tibet. 6 This language is also known in the literature as ‘Ladakhi’. However, Tournadre and Suzuki (2021) give compelling arguments for justification to use ‘Ladaks’ instead. 7 mkhan-po tshul-khrims blo-gros (2011). Translation mine. 8 Throughout, “Standard Tibetan” – without qualifiers – refers to the literary standard. 9 I’d be remiss not to point out that modern regional varieties most likely evolved from older regional varieties (Hill, 2010), and thus aren’t diverging directly from the Literary Standard, which (predominantly) reflects an older variety of Central Tibetan.

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outside China’s borders; and 2) what is found in historical textual sources (seventh-eleventh centuries). Yet orientations and attitudes that elevate these political, religious, and cultural concerns do so at the expense of linguistic realities. This reality of difference, divergence, and diversity across Tibetan languages creates real, ever-higher borders between a people and their literature.

The politics of a standard Tibetan Modern geopolitical borders Linguists tend to draw borders based on factors like shared linguistic features and mutual intelligibility; this gives us a large group of languages that are related, and considered ‘Tibetan’– or ‘Tibetic’ (Tournadre, 2014). But it also gives us a wide variety within that group: a diversity of Tibetan languages, with many borders between many languages. Yet these linguistic borders do not match the political reality Tibetan people face. There, the geopolitical borders of the Chinese State play the defining role in determining what is and isn’t ‘Tibetan’. The popular view, again, is that varieties of Tibetan spoken inside the borders of modern-day China are ‘Tibetan’. Tibetans from (and in) China generally admit three kinds: Amdo, Khams, and Central (མདོ་དབུས་ ཁམས་གསུམ). Quite often, these are called ‘dialects’ rather than ‘languages’ – a perspective emphasizing unity over difference (there is but one ‘Tibetan language’, བོད་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ ཡིག). In contrast, Tibetan languages beyond Chinese border are not generally considered ‘Tibetan’. They are official languages or minority languages of other countries (like Dzongkha in Bhutan, Ladaks in India, Sherpa in Nepal, and Balti in Pakistan, to name a few) (Tournadre, 2014). As Shannon Ward’s chapter in this volume also notes, key to the role of a single Standard Tibetan is countering a single Standard Chinese – hence the importance of national, rather than state, borders.10 A unified Standard Tibetan serves this political purpose, while also acting as a symbol of a modern ‘national identity’ for Tibetans both within and without China (Shneiderman, 2006). The commonly held view – that “the Tibetan language

10 The attempt to impose vernacular reform to the orthographic standards of Tibetan in post-Mao China is an example of how language issues become politicized. Dhondup Tashi (2019) provides the Tibetan perspective in his section on language reform.

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Figure 6.1 A map showing the twelve largest Tibetan languages, as given by Tournadre (2003). Circles show rough locations and relative population sizes of these dialect families.

is the lifeblood of the Tibetan people”11 – expresses this sense of identity, unity, and nationalism. This national identity informs a powerful language ideology: There is but a single Tibetan language (བོད་ སྐད་ ) for the Tibetan people (བོད་ མི ་ རིགས ་ ) of Tibet (བོད་ ). Yet, there are also languages spoken in settlements across India, Nepal, and Bhutan that – despite being within these country’s borders – are considered ‘Tibetan’. These are Tibetan speakers who themselves were born and raised inside China’s borders (and brought their languages with them there), as well as their children (and their children’s children). The settlements where they live are off icially established by the CTA – the Central Tibetan Administration – also commonly called the Tibetan Government in Exile. Though it operates within these other countries’ borders, it is itself a nation-building project: it performs political, administrative, and institutional functions on behalf of a people. Its Department of Education, for example, oversees 73 schools across India and Nepal. We see the language

11 “bod-kyi skad-yig-ni bod mi-rigs-kyi srog-rtsa yin.” bshad-sgrub bstan-pa’i rgyal-mtshan. Translation mine.

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Figure 6.2 A map of the Tibetan settlements established by the CTA’s Home Department dotting India, Nepal, and Bhutan (based on Asfuroglu, 2012)13

ideology of a nationalistic, unified Tibetan language reflected in the CTA’s documents and practices.12 The attitude expressed there is: For a people to have a long-lasting, cohesive story, they must cultivate their language, and put it to use. Failing that cuts them from their roots; a people who lose their language lose themselves.14

We also see this nationalism in an important way in which settlement schools break from tradition: where Tibetan monasteries divide their monks into residential colleges on the basis of region (Jansen, 2015), in diaspora secular education, borders of region (ཕ ་ ཡུལ ་ ) and mother tongue (ཕ ་ སྐད་ ) are dissolved in favor of national unity.15 Residency in schools, like the TCV – Tibetan Children’s Village – schools, is based on peer groups rather than 12 See Central Tibetan Administration (2019) and BEPT (2013). Note: When ‘Tibetan’ is spoken in the classroom, it’s the teacher’s own dialect; when ‘Tibetan’ is taught, or written in textbooks, it’s the literary register. 13 In total, “there are 46 Tibetan Settlement Offices, 71 Settlements and Cluster Units, 12 Major Agricultural Settlements, 21 Small Agricultural Settlements, 20 Co-operative Societies, 20 Handicraft Centers and 20 Cluster Units in India, Nepal and Bhutan” (Central Tibetan Administration, 2020). 14 Translation mine. 15 The majority of new enrollments in Tibetan monasteries in India today are not fromTibet Tibetans, but children from across the Himalayas who use a mix of linguistic forms to communicate on a daily basis (including Hindi, Nepali, and/or other languages, Tibetan and non-Tibetan alike).

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regional groups. Diaspora Tibetan is thus defined by a kind of cross-regional diversity, where speakers of various Amdo, Khams, and Central varieties live and interact together in a broader community on a daily basis. Historically, although the CTA itself is a direct continuation of the governiing council (བཀའ ་ ཤག) of Lhasa that was founded in 1721 (Dawa Norbu, 2012, p. 76), this sense of cultural unity and nationhood harkens all the way back to the borders of the Tibetan Empire (seventh-ninth centuries CE). This time period is key to understanding the modern identity, ideology, and heritage of Tibetan-ness. It is an era of religious masters, mythological figures, and high culture; as such, the Standard Tibetan it helped define lives on as ‘pre-accumulated linguistic capital’ (Gerald Roche, this volume). It is the prestige language of the Tibetan identity, heavily influencing modern norms in spelling and grammar and reading and writing.

The history of Standard Tibetan Drawing the borders of a nation Standard Tibetan was founded as part of the state-building project of the Tibetan Empire in the seventh-ninth centuries.16 Its script and standards were imported from India alongside the new state religion, Buddhism, and were codified in Central Tibet, at the behest of a Central Tibetan king. As such, it encoded the Central Tibetan language of its day (Beyer, 1992; Hill, 2010). The standard for translating the vast literature of Buddhism,17 Standard Tibetan was propagated throughout the empire via public institutions, like monasteries. As an imperial project, the translation of the Buddhist canon was wildly successful.18 This success is indicated by the fact that it established a standard ‘language ideology’ (Inoue, 2006) that provides a point of unity for Tibetans to this day. But because this project took place beginning in the seventh century, in Central Tibet, under the auspices of a Central Tibetan king, the borders drawn around ‘Standard Tibetan’ reflect the language of seventh-century Central Tibetans – that is, Standard Tibetan is of a particular place, at a particular time. 16 While it’s famously the sacred language of Tibetan Buddhist scripture, its first testified use is actually administrative (Hill, 2010). 17 See, for example, the “dkar chag ‘phang thang ma”, the Tibetan imperial catalog listing translations of Sanskrit Buddhist texts into Tibetan (compiled in Central Tibet). 18 This entailed inventing a new script; maintaining a large network of international scholars and translators traveling to and from India, across the Himalayas, on foot; translating a massive canon of Buddhist works; recording, tracking, editing, and updating standard terminology throughout; and more.

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Figure 6.3 A map showing the extent of the Tibetan Empire in the eighth and ninth centuries (based on Kapstein, 2006)

Divergence to diglossia In other words, seventh-century Central Tibetan writing more or less reflects how people spoke in seventh-century Central Tibet. (We know this is true because writing, in general, represents speech; also, because of historical evidence, like transcriptions into other languages, and modern evidence, such as the way different Tibetan languages are spoken today.19) And so long as the leaders of the Tibetan Empire retained centralized power, they actively maintained the language. Special councils, under the authority of the empire, tracked changes in pronunciation and common usage up and until Middle Tibetan (from the twelfth century CE [Beyer, 1992]).20

19 Beyer (1992, p. 18) puts it this way: “When Tibetan was first reduced to writing, […] the written form was, in fact, an attempt to render a word pronounced something very much like skra.” He goes on to give scholarly evidence on this consensus view (see also Hill, 2010), which includes the fact that phonological reconstructions of Old Chinese independently corroborate Old Tibetan pronunciations. 20 “Middle Tibetan” is commonly called “Classical Tibetan”; along with other adjectives, like “ancient”, this is extremely problematic – it makes Standard Tibetan appear older than it is. There is Old, Middle, and Modern Tibetan just like Old, Middle, and Modern English. Note, for example, that Middle English (from the eleventh century CE) and Middle Tibetan (from the twelfth century CE) are much closer in timeframe than other languages called “Classical”, i.e., Classical Latin (from the first century BCE) or Classical Sanskrit (from the first century BCE).

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­ s the way people spoke diverged from the literary standard, these councils A worked to bridge the gap.21 For example, the spelling reforms of the ninth and eleventh centuries show clear patterns of sound changes taking place in Central Tibetan speech – for example, consonant-cluster reduction – that have continued into the modern day. Yet, in some other Tibetan languages, ‘how people speak’ still reflects the older spellings.22 And while there are different patterns of pronunciation shifts among different Tibetan varieties, they are surprisingly consistent, and generally traceable to the spellings of old (Hill, 2011; Beyer, 1992). Here, I’ll provide a few brief examples: 1) the number ‘twenty’ (‘two-tens’) in Old Tibetan has spelling variants that suggest clusters-mid-reduction; by the eleventh century, its standardized spelling is fully reduced, just as in modern pronunciation; 2) the modern pronunciation of the number ‘two’ reflects the same sound change in the same syllable (‘two’), but this change clearly occurred after the eleventh century; its spelling, to this day, reflects the older pronunciation; and 3) the numbers ‘two’ and ‘ten’ in modern Balti speech attest to the older spellings. 1

The number ‘twenty’ (literally ‘two-tens’); early spelling variation suggests incomplete cluster reduction23: Table 6.1 Textual evidence showing a spelling change that reflects pronunciation Central Tibetan

7th c. (Old)

11th c. (Middle)

21st c. (Modern)

 spelling

*gnyis-shu ‘*gnyis-shu’ /*gɲis-ʃu/

nyi-shu ‘nyíshu’ /ɲí-ʃu/

nyi-shu ‘nyíshu’ /ɲí-ʃu/

  pronunciation

21 See, for example, the “li shi’i gur khang” (fifteenth-sixteenth century). Also Hill (2010, 2015). While these councils were also standardizing translation terminology for religious purposes, this paper focuses on the spelling changes that clearly reflect pronunciation changes. 22 Even in Central Tibetan, a handful of words retain the old pronunciations represented by their spellings, especially in the second syllable of some compounds, like in: bla-brang, /labɹaŋ/; rdo-rje, /dordʑe/; bzhi-bcu, /ʑibtʃu/, etc. – similar to how the ‘k’ sound is still heard in the word ‘acknowledge’. 23 It seems that some speakers in some places still pronounced the “g-” initial onset of “twoten(s)”, and/or didn’t elide the internal “-s”, as we find a variety of Old Tibetan spellings: while nyi-shu was common, we also find variants like nyis-cu, nyis-shu, and gnyis-shu (ILCAA, 2020); meanwhile, the “li shi’i gur khang” attests to gnyis-bcu.

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2 Compare that to the number ‘two’; modern pronunciation has followed the same shift as the ‘two’ syllable of the compound ‘two-tens’ (cluster reduction and leveling in /gɲis/ > /ɲi/, with the addition of a high tone on the following vowel), but too late to be captured in standard spelling: Table 6.2 Textual evidence showing a ‘frozen’ spelling that no longer reflects pronunciation Central Tibetan

7th c. (Old)

11th c. (Middle)

21st c. (Modern)

 spelling

gnyis ‘gnyis’ /gɲis/

gnyis ‘gnyis’ /gɲis/

gnyis ‘nyí’ /ɲí/

  pronunciation

3 Still, pronunciations in some modern Tibetan languages point back to these older pronunciations. Specifically, speakers in the Western Himalayas, in languages like Balti, still pronounce the final ‘-s’ of the number ‘two’ and the initial ‘b-’ in the number ‘ten’ (Yugovi, 2016, 2020). As seen in Table 6.3, modern pronunciations across Tibetan varieties is evidence that old spellings were phonetic. Here, Balti retains some of Old Tibetan’s consonant clusters. Table 6.3  Modern pronunciations across Tibetan varieties Modern

Central Tibetan

Balti

Central Tibetan

Balti

 spelling

gnyis ‘nyi’ /ɲi/

gnyis ‘nyis’ /ɲís/

bcu24 ‘chu’ /tʃu/

bcu ‘fchu’ /ɸtʃu/

  pronunciation

As a quick aside, I think it’s important to say that sound changes, like cluster reduction, are very normal, and happen across all languages. In English, for example, we have lost our initial ‘k-’ sound whenever there is a cluster combination ‘kn-’, as in ‘knight’, ‘knife’, and ‘know’. Historically speaking, we

2 The letter “c” in Tibetan (ཅ་ ) is pronounced as an unaspirated “ch” sound (that is, a voiceless palatal stop).

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know that this ‘k-’ was pronounced.25 Evidence includes our common sense (in all other spellings, the letter ‘k’ represents the sound /k/); loanwords into other languages (like French ‘canif’, /ka.nif/, from English ‘knife’); and pronunciations in modern languages (compare English ‘knee’, /niː/ to German ‘knie’, /kniː/). Today’s ‘silent letters’ are yesterday’s pronunciations. For Tibetan, these sound changes – like cluster reduction – reflect the same general patterns found in other Tibetan languages (changes also noted by Gwendolyn Hyslop in this volume).26 And, they show a clear pattern – we know how Old Tibetan was pronounced, and we know how Modern Tibetan is pronounced. The Middle Tibetan spelling reforms show a middle step that is consistent with both of these pictures. Yet, because of the thousand-year gap in reforms after the fall of the Tibetan Empire, divergence has led to dilemma: across many words, Standard Tibetan spellings no longer reflect their common pronunciations. They are full of ‘silent letters’, and other spellings that, as I explore below, lack ‘transparency’. Diglossia to dilemma In literacy research, writing systems like that of Standard Tibetan – ones with ambiguous, inconsistent, or contradictory relationships between symbols and sounds – are called ‘opaque’ (Perfetti & Dunlap, 2008). Children who speak languages with ‘opaque’ writing systems learn to read measurably slower than ones who speak languages with ‘transparent’ writing systems (ibid.). In other words, learning to read and write eleventh-century Central Tibetan as a speaker of eleventh-century Central Tibetan was relatively easy; but learning to read and write eleventh-century Central Tibetan as a speaker of twenty-first-century Central Tibetan is significantly harder! Sociolinguists refer to this gap between speech and writing as ‘diglossia’ (Ferguson, 1991). In our context, ‘diglossia’ means that Tibetan language speech communities use two language varieties: one for informal, everyday speech (‘L’, ‘low’), and another for literature, which is always formal (‘H’, ‘high’). In Ferguson’s definition of diglossia, these two varieties are related. But, the ‘H’ variety is from an older time period, and used for a culturally defining literature. In the case of Tibetan, this literature is the Tibetan 25 “Chaucerian English does not seem to have had any ‘silent’ letters […] was pronounced [x], as in knyght [knɪxt] […] [and] spellings such as dafter DAUGHTER still appear in the eighteenth century” (Horobin, 2002, section 4.4, note 2). 26 Specif ically, sound changes like kr > ʈ, tonogenesis, and velar palatalization in Kurtöp (Hyslop, this volume).

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Buddhist canon of the seventh-eleventh centuries. These standards influence the literary register to this day, which remains extremely conservative in spelling, vocabulary, and grammar (Tournadre, 2003). Table 6.4 Contrasting descriptions and features of literary Tibetan (H) and the Tibetan vernaculars (L) Literary Tibetan (H)

Tibetan vernaculars (L)

– Standardized – National – ‘Classical’ – Prestigious – Formal – Requires education – Sacred – Pure – Written – ‘H’, high – Superior – ‘Correct’

– Not standardized – Regional – ‘Colloquial’ – Common – Informal – Acquired naturally – Vulgar – Impure – Spoken – ‘L’, low – Inferior – ‘Incorrect’

This is, again, the dilemma of defining a single, standard, universal Tibetan. While Literary Tibetan is a Standard Tibetan in many ways (‘H’), it is not generally spoken. To learn it requires formal education, and high-level literacy remains an “elite accomplishment” (Beyer, 1992, p. 18). The informal variety that has been termed ‘Standard (Spoken) Tibetan’ by some, on the other hand, is usually equated with Central Tibetan (Tournadre, 2003). This language (as a vernacular, ‘L’) is generally not written, nor is it formally taught to speakers of the many other Tibetan varieties. In other words, neither standard is universally accessible – for most speakers, accessing either requires crossing borders. The ‘standard-ness’ of Standard Tibetan Again, Standard Tibetan was defined in seventh-century Central Tibet by a centralized power in the region of Lhasa. Enacted in grammars, dictionaries, and religious institutions, it was actively maintained through the eleventh century. This prestige variety lives on today as the literary standard across the modern Tibetan languages. However, patterns of significant language change – already noted in the textual record from the seventh to the eleventh centuries – have continued in speech until today. Because language maintenance ended after the eleventh century, however, the last thousand year’s worth of linguistic changes are not recorded by Standard Tibetan writing.

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Making these borders even taller is the fact that Central Tibetan speech shows perhaps the most change of the Tibetan varieties. The capital city of Lhasa was a site of movement, migration, and mixture.27 These factors of language change have come to define the diaspora community, too. This leads to a Catch-22 – the more common the “common language” (ཕལ ་ སྐད་ ) gets, the more it changes; the more it changes, the more different it is from the literary standard; the more different it is, the more prestige it loses.28 This is why, more recently, dialect groups perceived as “closer” to literature – like Amdo Tibetan – are gaining ground in prestige when compared to Central Tibetan.29 As seen in Table 6.5, old, traditional forms are seen favorably, while new, modern ones are seen unfavorably. Table 6.5  Language prestige in the Tibetan context + prestige

– prestige

– vocab contains old words (བརྡ་ སྙིང ་ ) – grammar reflects or ‘upholds’ literary standards – dialect is ‘pure’ (བོད་ སྐད་ གཙང ་ མ ་ )

– vocab is new (བརྡ་ གསར ་ ) – grammar is ‘degraded’ or ‘doesn’t align’ with literary standards – dialect is ‘mixed’ (ར ་ མ ་ ལུག ་ / འདྲེས ་ མ ་ )

Again, Standard (Literary) Tibetan’s association with Buddhist scripture gives it power and prestige that extends across the Himalayas – for example, in languages like Rongring in Sikkim and Nubri in Nepal, as documented by Lepcha’s and Donohue’s chapters in this volume. However, while Lhasa Tibetan specif ically has a historical claim to prestige (as the seat of centralized political power), its modern variety lacks many other important features common to ‘Standard Languages’ in general. If we analyze these languages carefully, it becomes clear that Literary Tibetan is ‘standard’ in many ways that modern spoken Central Tibetan is not (Table 6.6). Directly comparing Literary Tibetan with Lhasa Central Tibetan across features of standard languages suggests that one is more ‘standard’ than the other.

27 It is long-recognized that language change “proceeds more rapidly in urban than in rural areas” (Johnson, 1976, p. 65), while Tournadre, on pronunciation, calls dialects not showing the same extreme cluster reduction as Central Tibetan “archaic” (2003, p. 44). 28 Native speaker opinions include things like: “When the Chinese speak English that’s just what Shejak are like speaking Tibetan”; “‘Shejak speaking is similar to spyi-skad but with bad grammar”; it is also described as “mixed”, “broken”, “simple”, and “bad” (Izzard, 2014, pp. 214-215). 29 Lama Jabb (2013, p. 29), among others, notes the “prodigious literary production in Amdo.”

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Table 6.6 Directly comparing standard features of literary Tibetan with Central Tibetan Features of ‘standard language’

Literary Tibetan

Central Tibetan

1 codified in spelling rules, dictionaries, and/ or grammars 2 used in public communications (in media, speech, and writing across geographic regions)30 3 associated w/centers of commerce and/or government; serves a political purpose 4 used for cultural products (literature, the arts, religious purposes, etc.) 5 has social prestige (it is the linguistic baseline used to judge other varieties) 6 used in formal education (L1 and L2)

 Yes

 No

 While it influences speech, it’s not generally spoken  Yes

 Spoken mainly regionally; generally not written  Historically; regionally31  Regionally; sometimes  In some cases

7 use is widespread among varying social, economic, or ethnic groups (establishing a shared identity)

 Yes  Yes

 Yes. As ‘Tibetan’ in  Regional medium L1; as ‘Classical’ in L2 of instruction; as ‘Colloquial’ in L232  Yes  Regionally; in some cases33

To summarize, modern spoken Central Tibetan has not been officially standardized34; its use is not universal for public communications or formal education; and it is not a baseline by which other spoken varieties are judged in ‘correctness’. While it plays a functional role for some speakers communicating across some borders, and has a lingering association with a historical prestige, it is superseded by its historical form – Literary Tibetan – by almost every measure. Rather than having any true ‘standard’ speech 30 Outside China, there are many media sources for many languages (Dzongkha, Balti, Ladaks, Bhutia, Tamang, etc.). Inside China, Xizang Television (XZTV) provides Lhasa Tibetan; Qinghai Radio and TV Station, Amdo Tibetan; and Sichuan Radio and Television, Khams Tibetan (Wikiwand, 2020). Even with all this diversity, public communications does not cover the full range of speech varieties. For example, Media Amdo Tibetan is not intelligible to all speakers of Amdo Tibetan languages (Green, 2012). 31 Lhasa is the historical center; however, its role in the diaspora is better explained by the “Founder Principle” (Geissler, 2018), and its relationship to other varieties in China as “polycentric” (Stewart, 1968). 32 However, when shown the colloquial forms in these textbooks, native speakers find them controversial (for having been written down). 33 Only common amongst the educated elite (Tournadre, 2014). 34 “Many Tibetans […] consider that only Literary Tibetan has a true grammar” (Tournadre, 2003, p. 26).

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variety, then, Tibetan is better described as ‘polycentric’ (Stewart, 1968) or ‘polynomic’ (Izzard, 2014; Roche & Lugyal Bum, 2018) – that is, there are multiple, acceptable standards for speaking Tibetan.

Movement, migration, and mixture Diverging from the standard There are two ways a language can ‘standardize’: 1) it can be standardized, prescriptively, by a government or central authority; or 2) it can become standard, naturally (McArthur, 1992). Standard (Literary) Tibetan is an example of this first type; but the emerging ‘standards’ in Central and Diaspora Tibetan are an example of the second.35 I describe these standards as emerging because they are still in process.36 As detailed above, it remains to be seen if this natural ‘standard’ will ever become fully standardized (codified, formalized, instituted in education, or otherwise made official). And again, the natural process of ‘becoming standard’ is the result of movement, migration, and mixture.37 The diaspora is a space where many Tibetan varieties mix; where there is extended language contact with Hindi, Nepali, and English; where people move in and out; where speakers are confronted with new cultural, institutional, and physical environments; and where speakers shift occupations, attend schools, quit the monastery, or make friendships and/or marry inter-regionally (BBG & Gallup, 2012). These factors all increase the novelty and number of communicative interactions, which, in turn, drives language change (as speakers work, naturally, to accommodate one another). All of these factors of movement, migration, and mixture also create borders between Diaspora Tibetan and Central Tibetan speech. While Central Tibetan is the ‘founder’ variety of Diaspora Tibetan,38 its speakers 35 If we look to European standard languages, French is an example of the first (standards are set by France’s Académie Française); English is an example of the second (standards naturally emerged from the mixing of various dialects). 36 Tournadre admits in a footnote: “It would be more accurate to speak of ‘language in the process of standardization […] taking place naturally’” (2003, p. 25). 37 For a brief intro into historical migration in Tibet, see Roche (2017). 38 Roemer (2008): 70% of the first wave of Tibetan migration to India came from Central Tibet. Later waves are weighted much more towards Amdo and Khams (80-90% per BBG and Gallup [2012]). Geissler (2018) suggests the “Founder Principle” to explain why Diaspora Tibetan looks like Central Tibetan; I’d add that these sorts of changes (i.e. reduction, leveling) look common to

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Figure 6.4 Traditional nomads, farmers, and monastics from Tibetan-speaking China move to secular education or small business opportunities in the diaspora (BBG & Gallup, 2012)

do not live in, nor travel to, Central Tibet; the majority were not born or raised there; nor did they ever formally study its language in school. These varieties also exist in different landscapes, environments, and countries, and are in contact with different cultures and languages. Perhaps most importantly, not all speakers report that Diaspora Tibetan and Central Tibetan are mutually intelligible (Izzard, 2014).39 Given its diversity, it can be hard to nail down exactly what defines ‘Diaspora Tibetan’ linguistically – it is marked by flexibility, ambiguity, and adaptability. Still, Table 6.7 attempts to answer the question: If Diaspora Tibetan is indeed a unique variety, what distinguishes it from Central Tibetan?

the mixing of Tibetan varieties in general, which also suggests a kind of “path of least resistance”, or “Principle of Least Effort” – a natural directionality for Tibetan language change. 39 Some Central Tibetan speakers report not understanding diaspora speech upon arrival and take several years to learn it. While Tournadre’s titular “Manual of Standard Tibetan” (2003) equates Central and Diaspora Tibetan, a footnote in a more recent work clarifies this point: “Standard Tibetan (spyi skad) should definitely not be called Lhasa Tibetan when it applies to the diaspora” (2014, p. 119). I suggest taking this further: ‘Diaspora Tibetan’ deserves recognition beyond simply equating it with ‘general speech’ (spyi-skad), a term that discludes many of its important features (like its ‘impure’ lexicon and ‘bad’ grammar).

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Table 6.7  Distinguishing Diaspora Tibetan from Central Tibetan Distinguishing features

Notes and examples

Lack of vowel harmony

While Lhasa Central Tibetan shows vowel harmony, Diaspora Tibetan does not (Geissler, 2018) Not all speakers of Diaspora Tibetan make ­pitch-accented distinctions (i.e. use ‘tones’)40 While honorifics are frequent in formal education, their use in everyday conversation is low. For example, ming is ten times more frequent than mtshan in everyday speech, but mtshan is emphasized in textbooks (Tournadre, 2003; Chonjore, 2003): – “ ཁྱེད་ རང ་ གི ་ མཚན་ ལ ་ ག ་ རེ ་ ཞུ ་ གི ་ ཡོད། (H)”, “What’s your name?” (textbook) versus “ ཁྱེད་ རང ་ གི ་ མིང ་ ག ་ རེ ་ རེད། (L)” (speech) Hedges, tag questions, emphasis markers, or fillers of the type red-ba? and red-da! are extremely common. For example: – “ མི ་ གཅིག ་ ཁ་ ལག ་ ཟ ་ བསྡད་ ཡོད་ རེད་ ད་ ར།”, “A guy was eating some food, yeah?”4 An example of verb-tense leveling (Esukhia, 2020): – In writing: “ཟས ་ ཚང ་ མ ་ ཁྱོད་ ཀྱིས ་ བཟས ་ ཚར ་ འདུག”, “You’ve eaten all the food” – bzas, past tense – In speech: བག ་ ལེབ ་ ཟ ་ ཚར ་ རེད་ པ། “The bread’s all been eaten, right?” – za, leveled – For the verb “to go”, the past-tense personal ‘groyin (I went), leveled, is three times as frequent in speech than ‘proper’ phyin-yin

Diminished role of pitch accent (‘tone’) Diminished use of the honorific register41

Increased use of hedge and emphasis markers42 to end utterances

Increased verb-tense leveling and use of general verbalizers44

40 This includes speakers of non-tonal Tibetan languages who don’t adopt tones when they move to the diaspora, as well as diaspora-born speakers, who don’t all use contrastive tone (Geissler, 2018, 2020). 41 Anecdotally, honorifics have diminished in Lhasa Tibetan, too; how much, in comparison, is an open question. Izzard (2014, p. 216) notes speakers view Diaspora Tibetan as being less honorific. 42 Tournadre categorizes these as “expressive particles” (2003). In Diaspora Speech, however, they play a much more central role. Forms of the tag question “red-ba?” are top 20 in frequency, appearing as frequently as words like dgos, “to want / need”, ‘gro, “to go”, and gcig, “one” (Esukhia, 2020). 43 A real-world sentence (Esukhia, 2020) showing some common features of Diaspora Tibetan speech, like an unmarked agent, “bsdad” in an auxiliary construction, and “yod-red” ending in the emphasis marker “da”, followed by a hedge, “ra?” (a contraction of “red-ba”). 44 See: g.yu sgang ‘od zer for a detailed list of verbs replaced by verbalizers.

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Distinguishing features

Notes and examples

Variation in use and frequency of helper verb constructions (evidential and epistemic auxiliaries)

Ex., the increased use of bsdad in auxiliary constructions45; different frequency pattern of evidential and epistemic endings, i.e., yod-sa red (Diaspora) compared to yod-pa ‘dra (Lhasa)46: – “རྨོ ་ མོ ་ དེ་ ལམ ་ ཁ་ ལ ་ འགྲོ ་ བསྡད་ ཡོད་ རེད་ ད་ ར།”, “The grandma was walking down the road, yeah?” – “Download བྱས ་ ར། ཀློག ་ ཡ་ ཡིན་ ས ་ རེད།”, “(So) I downloaded it, yeah? I think it’s a text.” It’s common to drop genitive or agentive markers; it’s also possible for speakers to double them, for example, in “ ངའི ་ གི”, ‘my’.4 Examples: ‘download’, ‘bill’, ‘wechat’, ‘computer’, ‘sugar’, ‘battery’, ‘juice’, ‘palak’, and ‘PDF’ (Esukhia, 2020)

Omission/hypercorrection of adjoiners Increase in loanwords (esp. from English and Hindi)48

To reiterate, while changes like those above are ‘standard’ in that they are common and useful, they are also not standard in that they deviate from Standard Tibetan. In fact, Diaspora Tibetan is perceived as one of the least prestigious forms of Tibetan. Hiroyuki Suzuki’s chapter in this volume lists some words for languages that have negative connotations, like ‘dre-skad, ‘ghost language’, and logs-skad, ‘side language’ – here, I add ra-ma-lug, ‘mixed language’, to the list. Contrasted with bod-skad gtsang-ma, ‘pure language’ (Thurston, 2018), then, Diaspora Tibetan is seen as ‘mixed’, ‘impure’, ‘degraded’, ‘broken’, and ‘ungrammatical’ (Izzard, 2014, pp. 214-215). In this sense, it has more in common with non-standard languages of multilingual societies than standard ones. And this non-standard-ness also leads to ‘language anxiety’ – a vicious cycle, or self-fulfilling prophecy, where perception of poor language skills leads to harsh judgment; harsh judgment discourages reading and writing; and not reading and writing leads, inexorably, to poor literary skills.49 Meanwhile, Tibetans outside Tibet also carry an extra sense of responsibility to preserve their national identity and cultural heritage. These sorts of attitudes are also on display in the recent song ‘ སྐད་ ཡིག’, ‘Language’, by Tenjungney (2018). Its verses emphasize the sacred nature of the Tibetan language, which is described as a lamp that lights the darkness; the gift 45 Tournadre (2003) calls this the “aspectual” function of “to stay”; it plays a big role in Diaspora Tibetan, where it marks continuous action; it’s extremely frequent (Esukhia, 2020). 46 Vokurková (2017) theorizes this specific example is a feature borrowed from Khams Tibetan. Corpus analysis verifies its frequency (Esukhia, 2020). 47 English also has a double genitive, as in “just a friend of Maudie’s” – both of and ’s mark possession. 48 Lhasa Tibetan also shows an increase in loanwords, but mainly from Chinese (Vokurková 2013). 49 “There is a feedback loop, a vicious circle, between self-perceived language competence, language use, and language anxiety” (Sevinc, 2017, p. 9).

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Figure 6.5 A satirical comic (from WeChat) is an example of these perceptions

and prejudices: The new arrival (a Tibetan from Tibet, གསར་འབྱོར་པ་)

is doing all the work for the Tibetan language (བོད་སྐད་ཡིག), while

dragging the diaspora speakers up the hill behind him (གཞིས་ཆགས་པ་).

of dharma-kings; and the cultural heritage of a blessed people. Its tone is serious and somber, and it ends with the plea: Tibetan People, speak, speak; Speak Tibetan! Study, study; Study Tibetan! Each of us have the duty, as people of the Snowlands – Since it’s the Lifeblood of the Snowlands, And the Treasure of the Snowlands!50 50 My translation.

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Education and literacy The effects of diglossia This attitude – “Study, study; study Tibetan!” – reflects the common belief that language skills are the result of formal education, and the fruit of a good student’s active labor. In reality, however, language skills are primarily oral, and acquired naturally from speech environments (Brooks & Kempe, 2014). Further, significant language change can happen quickly, especially when speakers shift speech communities: for example, from tightly knit, monolingual kinship groups (from rural, Tibetan-speaking regions of China) to multilingual and multi-dialectical peer groups (to boarding schools; urban China; or settlements in the diaspora). Because literatures fail to change alongside speech, borders between speech and literature arise naturally. These issues are not unique to Tibetan. All modern languages that lack vernacular literature struggle with regards to universal literacy.51 Arabic’s literary standard, for example, shares much in common with Tibetan: it dates to the seventh century; is tied to a sacred body of literature; and shows diversity across mutually unintelligible speech varieties. The resulting diglossia is a well-known cause of literacy issues: across the Arab-speaking world, literacy is about 60% (Magin, 2010). Table 6.8 provides a comparison between the features of traditional and modern reading, showing that ‘reading’ describes a different activity for different readers in different contexts. Table 6.8  A comparison between the features of traditional and modern reading Traditional reading

Modern reading

– Literary – Elite – Difficult – Aloud – Memorized upon repeated readings – Formal – Professional – For accessing specialized knowledge/ doing business/high literature

– Vernacular – Universal – Easy – Silent – Understood upon first reading – Informal – Nonprofessional – For daily communication/accessing information/entertainment

51 See Kellner (2018) for a general overview of vernacular literature (or rather, the lack thereof) in Tibet over its history.

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Similarly, literacy remains a concern across the Tibetan-speaking world.52 Underappreciated is the role linguistic borders play in education and learning to read. Orientations and attitudes that adopt a nationalistic language ideology – for example, “there is but one Tibetan language” – have a tendency to overlook basic linguistic facts that have a measurable impact on language education.53 One way to understand how and why linguistic borders create obstacles for reading and writing is through the concept of ‘readability’. Borders in readability Very briefly, ‘readability’ is a measure of reading ease.54 An easy-to-read text is ‘readable’; a difficult-to-read text is not. Texts that are easy to read reach a wider audience; they are read more times, by more people; and a large selection of easy-to-read material in a language leads to more readers reading more books at younger ages. These young readers later become adult readers, reading progressively more difficult texts, which has a positive impact on overall literacy in a language (ERF, 2011). Key to this process is that the more speech-like a book is, the easier it is to read. This link between oral and literary skills is well-established in the scientific literature, and ‘learning to read’ starts well before children even pick up a book – it starts with being read to, out loud, by caregivers (Wolf, 2007). By linking symbols to sounds, ‘reading comprehension’ is, at first, ‘oral comprehension’ (ibid.). Thus, the borders of Standard Tibetan block the road to literacy by simply not being anyone’s modern, natural, spoken language. Table 6.9 (below) shows the path to literacy from a science-ofreading perspective, and the roadblocks to achieving it in Tibetan language contexts. Since Standard Tibetan is highly conservative, with established borders for how to spell, what words to use, and how to use them grammatically, speakers’ natural skills in their spoken languages become less and less applicable to the learning-to-read process, generation by generation. Paradoxically, then, while the greater educational opportunities in urban areas and diaspora communities have led to quantitative gains in literacy, this 52 Reliable statistics on literacy rates for Tibetan are diff icult to come by. UN reports on human development cite the rate of illiteracy at 45.7% in the TAR (China Institute for Reform and Development & UNDP, 2008). 53 Dak Lhagyal (2021) details nationalistic language ideology in an Amdo educational context. 54 For discussions on readability specific to Tibetan, see Schmidt (2016, 2020).

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Table 6.9  The path to literacy and the roadblocks in Standard Tibetan Path to literacy

Standard Tibetan’s roadblocks

1 Children’s exposure to oral language leads to acquiring speech skills; being read to (out loud) by caregivers creates motivation and good reading habits 2 Then they make connections between sounds (phonemes) and symbols (graphemes) – the alphabetic principle 3 By ‘sounding things out’ they’re able to connect words on the page to words they already know (from daily speech), leading to oral comprehension, then reading comprehension55 4 By reading simple, age-appropriate texts extensively, they build up their word-recognition skills (automaticity) 5 Speech vocabulary grows as they read more and more; understanding and enjoying reading leads to more reading

1 Oral language speech skills are less useful for reading due to diglossia – the gap between speech and writing 2 Connections between sounds and symbols (decoding) is blocked by opaque spellings 3 This makes ‘sounding things out’ hard; meanwhile, a high frequency of unknown words blocks ‘reading comprehension’56; “not comprehending” blocks motivation 4 A lack of extensive, age-appropriate reading material and competition from other, easier literatures (English and Chinese) leads to less reading 5 Reading less and less leads to not being good at reading; not being good at reading leads, again, to less reading.

isn’t always reflected by qualitative ones. The measurable consequence is that there is little or no correlation between how much education a Tibetan speaker receives, and how well they read (Esukhia, 2016). While higher education levels do not correlate with higher reading levels, there are two factors that do: 1) using Standard Tibetan to read and write on a regular basis; and 2) being born and raised in Tibetan-speaking China (rather than in the diaspora). These findings support the view that the language change in Diaspora Tibetan, especially among diaspora-born speakers, is probably not ‘minor’, but actually rather significant. And, that this process of natural standardization is a border-making process that creates a distinct and real border between Standard (Literary) Tibetan, Central Tibetan, and Diaspora Tibetan. Speakers of Diaspora Tibetan can’t simply learn to read and write in the 55 This is called “developing phonemic awareness” of the “alphabetic principle”. The resulting skill is called “decoding” – turning symbols into sounds. Combined with oral language comprehension, this leads to “reading comprehension” – symbols link to sounds, and sounds link to meaning (Wolf, 2007). 56 Research suggests 98% vocab coverage as ideal (Nation, 1992). Standard Tibetan children’s literature generally contains only 40-80% known words (Schmidt, 2020). Traditional pedagogies (like rote memorization and recitation) emphasize “decoding” at the expense of “reading comprehension”.

On the Yak Horns of a Dilemma

Figure 6.6 Plotting reading levels versus grade levels in diaspora speakers (Esukhia, 2016). There is no significant correlation; grade level’s R2 = 0.03.

Figure 6.7 A survey shows Literary Tibetan is used far more by Tibet-born speakers (Esukhia, 2016). This higher use is predictive of higher reading levels (R2 = 0.43). Note the effect of language anxiety: a full third of diaspora-born speakers report they do not use Literary Tibetan at all.

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Figure 6.8 High vocabulary levels (left) and reading levels (right) correlate more strongly with being born and raised in Tibetan-speaking China than the diaspora (Esukhia, 2016).

language they already know.57 Instead, they must learn new spellings for sounds they do not pronounce; new words for vocabulary they have never heard; and new grammar rules for language patterns they do not use in their everyday speech.

Closing thoughts All of this means that today, speakers of the Tibetan languages find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Standards in reading and writing were established based on the language of the centralized political power held by the Tibetan Empire of old. This medieval variety of Central Tibetan – used to translate a culturally defining Buddhist literature – was standardized in dictionaries and grammars from the seventh to the eleventh centuries. This historical standard now acts as a symbol of national identity, drawing a border around what is ‘Tibetan’ (and what is not). 57 While much is made, for example, of “mother-tongue language education”, this concept has very little meaning if that language is “the Tibetan language”. Tibetan children only know the variety of Tibetan they themselves speak; they do not automatically benefit from other varieties of Tibetan they don’t naturally understand (like Standard Tibetan) just by “being Tibetan”.

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The last thousand years, however, have led to divergence, diversity, and diglossia. While the Standard Tibetan of reading and writing has remained a long-lived cultural touchstone decidedly resistant to change, the natural Tibetan languages have evolved over time. Diaspora Tibetan, in particular, has been defined by mixture, migration, and movement. Paradoxically, as these diaspora dialects become more useful for more people, the differences and divergences mount. This negatively impacts language education and literacy, along with speakers’ own perceptions of, and confidence in, their true (and distinct) mother tongues. While I’ve made some general observations in this chapter, significant research is still very much needed. The literature on Diaspora Tibetan is lacking in many ways, including: 1) recognizing it as a distinct variety, with its own dialects,58 in the first place; 2) describing its linguistic borders (in phonology, lexicon, syntax, and so on); and 3) discussing diglossia’s effects on literacy and education in Tibetan. Even so, recent years have seen more people thinking about, discussing, and addressing issues like early education and literacy than ever before. There is still reason to hope that developments in linguistics, readability, and language education will start contributing real solutions to the dilemmas of divergence and diglossia sooner rather than later. Doing so, however, will take contending seriously with the polycentric diversity found in Tibetan speech communities. This will require recognizing many unique voices – both literal and literary – as contributions to a greater Tibetan identity, rather than a threat to its unity. This kind of real recognition would benefit a wide range of Tibetan languages and their speakers in the years to come.

References Asfuroglu, P. (2012). The politics of representation: The construction of the Tibetan national identity in exile. MA thesis, Leiden University. https://studenttheses. universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/19802 Bass, C. (1998). Education in Tibet: Policy and practice since 1950. Tibet Information Network. BBG & Gallup (2012). Tibet media use 2012. BBG Research Series. Broadcasting Board of Governors and Gallup. https://www.bbg.gov/wp-content/media/2012/07/ BBG_research_Tibet_presentation_FINAL.pdf 58 Native speakers suggest school and settlement-specific dialects like: TCV-skad; dha-sa-khulgyi-skad; padma-bkod-pa’i-skad; la-dwags-khul-gyi-skad; and more (Izzard, 2014, pp. 203-205).

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BEPT (2013). Basic education policy for Tibetans in exile. https://sherig.org/en/ wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Basic-Education-Policy.pdf Beyer, S. (1992). The classical Tibetan language. SUNY Press. Brooks, P. J., & Kempe, V. (2014). Encyclopedia of language development. John Wiley & Sons. Central Tibetan Administration (2019). Department of Education. https://tibet. net/department/education/ Central Tibetan Administration (2020). Department of Home. https://tibet.net/ department/home/ Central Tibetan Relief Committee (2015). Tibetan refugee settlements. Website for Department of Home, Central Tibetan Administration, Gangchen Kyishong, Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India. https://web.archive.org/ web/20160924042050/https://centraltibetanreliefcommittee.org/doh/tibetansettlements.html China Institute for Reform and Development & UNDP (2008). Human development report: China 2007/08: Access for all: Basic public services for 1.3 billion people. United Nations Development Programme. China Translation & Publishing Corporation. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/china_2008_en.pdf Chonjore, T. (2003). Colloquial Tibetan: A textbook of the Lhasa dialect. Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA). Dak Lhagyal (2021). ‘Linguistic authority’ in state-society interaction: Cultural politics of Tibetan education in China. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 42(3), 353-367. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2019.1648239 Dawa Norbu (2012). China’s Tibet policy. Routledge. Dhondup Tashi (2019). Muge Samten’s (1913-1993) autobiography and his role as a vernacular intellectual. MA thesis, University of British Columbia. ERF (2011). Guide to extensive reading. Extensive Reading Foundation. https:// erfoundation.org/guide/ERF_Guide.pdf Esukhia (2016). Full report: Tibetan literacy. https://docs.google.com/document/d/ 1LPYlqBIjWpXgjCtDAxETg5GyGPSZY61anWyY-u7wbB0/edit?usp=sharing Esukhia (2020). Corpora. https://github.com/Esukhia/Corpora Ferguson, C. (1991). Diglossia revisited. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 10(1), 214-234. Geissler, C. (2018). Phonological koinéization in Kathmandu Tibetan. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting on Phonology. https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress. yale.edu/dist/7/1839/files/2019/08/4242-6293-1-PB1.pdf Geissler, C. (2020). Consistent C-V timing across speakers of diaspora Tibetan with and without lexical tone contrasts. Paper presented at the 94th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. https://campuspress.yale.edu/geissler/ files/2019/08/LSA_abstract_EMA_Jun2019_5.pdf

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Green, R. J. (2012, May). Amdo Tibetan media intelligibilit y. SIL Electronic Survey Report 2012-019. https://www.sil.org/system/f iles/reapdata/25/97/22/25972228094121828277416194632503321089/silesr2012_019.pdf Hill, N. (2010). An overview of Old Tibetan synchronic phonology. Transactions of the Philological Society, 108(2), 110-125. Hill, N. (2011). An inventory of Tibetan sound laws. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 21(4), 441-457. doi:10.1017/S1356186311000332 Hill, N. (2015). Languages: Tibetan. In J. A. Silk, O ‎ . von Hinüber, & V ‎ . Eltschinger (Eds.), Brill’s encyclopedia of Buddhism, Vol. 1: Literature and languages (pp. 917924). Brill. Horobin, S. (2002). An introduction to Middle English. Oxford University Press. ILCAA (2020). OTDO: Old Tibetan documents online. Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa. https://otdo.aa-ken.jp/ Inoue, M. (2006). Standardization. In K. Brown (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (vol. 12, pp. 121-127; 2nd ed.). Elsevier. Izzard, J. R. (2014). Language attitudes and identity in the Tibetan Dharamsala diaspora. PhD thesis, SOAS University of London. https://doi.org/10.25501/SOAS.00022824 Jansen, B. (2015). The monastery rules: Buddhist monastic organization in pre-modern Tibet. PhD diss., Leiden University. Johnson, L. (1976). A rate of change index for language. Language in Society, 5(2), 165-172. doi:10.1017/S0047404500007004 Kapstein, M. (2006). The Tibetans. Blackwell. Kellner, B. (2018). Vernacular literacy in Tibet: Present debates and historical beginnings. In N. Kössinger, E. Krotz, S. Müller, & P. Rychterová (Eds.), Anfangsgeschichten/Origin Stories (pp. 381-402). Brill. L a m a Ja bb (2 0 13) . Mo d e r n Ti b e t a n l i t e r a t u r e a n d t h e i n e s c a p able nation. PhD thesis, University of Oxford. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/ uuid:dd216865-df8b-4973-b562-4e6dc3d525eb Magin, S. (2010). Illiteracy in the Arab region: A meta study. GIALens, 2. https:// www.diu.edu/documents/gialens/Vol4-2/Magin-Arab-Illiteracy.pdf McArthur, T. (1992). The Oxford companion to the English language. Oxford University Press. Miller, R. A. (1976). Studies in the grammatical tradition in Tibet. J. Benjamins. Nation, P. (1992). What vocabulary size is needed to read unsimplified texts for pleasure? Reading in a Foreign Language, 8, 689-696. Perfetti, C. A., & Dunlap, S. (2008). Learning to read: General principles and writing system variations. In K. Koda & A. M. Zehler (Eds.), Learning to read across languages: Cross-linguistic relationships in first- and second-language literacy development (pp. 13-38). Routledge.

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Roche, G. (2017). Introduction: The transformation of Tibet’s language ecology in the twenty-first century. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 245, 1-35. Roche, G., & Lugyal Bum. (2018). Language revitalization of Tibetan. In L. Hinton, L. Huss, & G. Roche (Eds.), Routledge handbook of language revitalization (pp. 417427). Routledge. Roemer, S. (2008). The Tibetan government-in-exile: Politics at large. Routledge. Schmidt, D. (2016). Practical applications for corpora: The role of research-based linguistics in literacy and education for the Tibetan language. Himalayan Linguistics, 15(1), 167-185. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qn512vh Schmidt, D. (2020). Grading Tibetan children’s literature: A test case using the NLP readability tool ‘Dakje’. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 19(6), art. 75, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3392046 Sevinc, Y. (2017). Anxiety, language use and linguistic competence in an immigrant context: A vicious circle? International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22(6), 1-19. Shneiderman, S. (2006). Barbarians at the border and civilising projects: Analysing ethnic and national identities in the Tibetan context. In P. C. Klieger (Ed.), Tibetan Borderlands (pp. 9-34). Brill. Stewart, W. (1968). A sociolinguistic typology for describing national multilingualism. In J. A. Fishman (Ed.), Readings in the sociology of language (pp. 531-545). Mouton. Tenjungney ft. Tsering Gyurmey and Choedak (2018). སྐད་ ཡིག།. Video. https://www. facebook.com/watch/?v=678736405871053 Thurston, T. (2018). The purist campaign as metadiscursive regime in China’s Tibet. Inner Asia, 20(2), 199-218. Tournadre, N. (2003). Manual of standard Tibetan. Ithaca: Shambhala Publications. Tournadre, N. (2010). The Classical Tibetan cases and their transcategoriality: From sacred grammar to modern linguistics, Himalayan Linguistics, 9(2), 87-125. Tournadre, N. (2014). The Tibetic languages and their classification. In T. OwenSmith & N. Hill (Eds.), Trans-Himalayan linguistics: Historical and descriptive linguistics of the Himalayan area (pp. 105-130). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110310832.105 Tournadre, N., & Suzuki, H. (2022). The Tibetic languages: An introduction to the family of languages derived from Old Tibetan (with the collaboration of X. Becker and A. Brucelle). LACITO Publications (CNRS). UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report Team (2005). Education for all: Literacy for life. EFA global monitoring report 2006 (Chapter 7). UNESCO Publishing. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000141639 Vokurková, I. (2013). Tibetan mixed speech: The influence of Chinese and English on modern spoken Tibetan. Mongolo-Tibetica Pragensia, 13(1), 135-171.

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Vokurková, I. (2017). Epistemic modality in Standard Spoken Tibetan. Karolinum Press. Wikiwand (2020). Television in China. Wikiwand. https://www.wikiwand.com/ en/Television_in_China Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. Harper. Yugovi, I. (2016). Counting 1 to 10 in Balti. https://w w w.youtube.com/ watch?v=2Jqm3LDBovo Yugovi, I. (2020). Counting in Balti language 1 to 30. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ecxbkEILOVI དཀར ་ ཆག་ འཕང ་ ཐང ་ མ།. པེ་ ཅིན། མི ་ རིགས ་ དཔེ་ སྐྲུན་ ཁང ་། (2003 ed., orig. ninth century). སྐྱོགས ་ སྟོན་ རིན་ ཆེན་ བཀྲ ་ ཤིས། (1476, 1536). བརྡ་ གསར ་ རྙིང ་ གི ་ ཁྱད་ པར ་ ལི ་ ཤིའི ་ གུར ་ ཁང ་།. པེ་ ཅིན། མི ་ རིགས ་ དཔེ་ སྐྲུན་ ཁང ་།. མཁན ་ པོ ་ ཚུལ ་ ཁྲིམས ་ བློ ་ གྲོས། (2011). ཆད ་ ཁྲིད ་ རིག ་ པའི ་ དགའ ་ ཚལ། https://youtu.be/ gTVDVs8YMso?list=FL23sw-7fUVR1i8-wRpHD_ww བཤད་ སྒྲུབ་ བསྟན་ པའི ་ རྒྱལ ་ མཚན། (2012). ཛིན་ རིམ ་ བདུན་ པའི ་ སློབ་ དེབ། Sherig Parkhang. གཡུ ་ སྒང ་ འོད་ ཟེར། བྱ ་ ཚིག་ སྦྱོང ་ ཐབས ་ གསར ་ མ ་ གྲངས ་ ངེས ་ ཀུན་ གྲོལ།. Yugang Odser.

About the author Dirk Schmidt graduated with an MA in Tibetan Studies in 2008. He then went to India to learn Tibetan. He has worked with Esukhia since 2011 on a variety of research and development projects related to Tibetan language education, children’s literature, and translation technology. Dirk is currently a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

7

Changing Identity and Linguistic Practices in Nubri Veiled Language Endangerment in the Nepalese Tibetosphere1 Cathryn Donohue

Abstract This chapter introduces Nubri Valley – the people, the place, the language – presenting results from a recent sociolinguistic survey that establishes internal variation as well as external pressures on the language. As a community of ethnic Tibetans in Nepal, crossing the border has slowly resulted in a shift of focus towards Kathmandu in many ways. Changing attitudes and evolving social practices are resulting in a marked shift in language use in the younger generations. Superficially, the Nubri language appears quite vital within the valley. However, I show how an examination of different borders in the sociolinguistic landscape helps leads us to a much clearer understanding of the actual linguistic vitality, revealing a serious threat to its continued survival. Keywords: Nubri, sociolinguistics, language attitudes, linguistic practices, language vitality, language endangerment, Tibeto-Burman, Nepal

1 I would like to acknowledge the Nubri speakers who participated in the sociolinguistic survey, and especially Jhangchuk Sangmo and Nyima Samdup for all their help on the ground in Nubri. I would also like to express my gratitude to colleagues for their helpful comments, especially Gerald Roche and other participants of the ICSTLL52/HLS25 workshop ‘Talking Borders: Making and Marking Languages in the Transnational Himalayas’, held at the University of Sydney on 27 June 2019, and to both Gerald Roche and Gwen Hyslop for their invaluable editorial contributions. The work described in this paper was substantially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. PolyU 17600020)

Roche, Gerald, and Gwendolyn Hyslop (eds), Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 DOI: 10.5117/9789463725040_CH07

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Tibetic languages in Nepal Situated between the Tibet Autonomous Region of China and India, Nepal is home to about 29 million people and more than 120 languages. Most of the languages of Nepal belong to the Indo-Aryan group of Indo-European languages, including the national language, Nepali. The majority of people (more than 80%) are speakers of an Indo-Aryan language, but the greatest diversity is found in the Sino-Tibetan languages, spoken by about 17% of the population, though constituting over half the languages represented in the last census (and there are potentially more that are as yet undescribed). The remaining less than 1% of the population use Austro-Asiatic or Dravidian languages, sign languages, or language isolates (or did not participate in the 2011 census) (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2012; Grimes, 1992; Bradley, 1997; Genetti, 2004). The over 60 Tibeto-Burman languages found in Nepal are typically spoken outside of urban centres. Some major groups that are found in Nepal include Tibetic, Magaric, Tamangic, Newar, and Kiranti, as well as other smaller groups such as Raji-Raute, Chepangic, Baram-Thami, and Kuke (e.g. Hale, 1982; DeLancey, 1987; Matisoff, 1991; Van Driem, 2001). The Tibetic languages within Nepal are spoken by communities situated in the mountainous regions along the ~ 1,400 km northern border with Tibet that runs through the Himalayas (See Figure 7.1). This region is home to eight of the ten tallest peaks in the world, where the deep valley floors may be at altitudes over 4,000 m, in a landscape scored by gorges and rivers, clearly delineating regions and hindering easy movement. The difficulty of the terrain and largely subsistence farming lifestyle have minimised movement from these valleys, possibly enabling a great degree of linguistic diversity to remain until the present time. Indeed, such diversity is refreshing, given that it is estimated that worldwide a language is lost every few months (e.g. Krauss, 1992; Campbell & Belew, 2018). The Tibetic language communities are typically Buddhist, and identify strongly as ethnically Tibetan, resulting in a complex of interactions in their identity (for a more detailed study of related phenomena in Sikkim, see Lepcha, this volume). Tibetan remains the liturgical language and is featured in important festivals and rites. Like so many aspects of this complex cultural terrain, Tibetan ethnic identity creates a sense of shared heritage and community from within, but is also a source of discrimination from without, where they are labelled as Bhotiya (Tibetans), a term that has come to refer to a range of culturally diverse groups of Tibeto-Burman origin, many with very little connection to Tibet (Ramble, 1997; Roche, this

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Figure 7.1 Location of Tibetic languages in Nepal, showing Nubri. Kathmandu is marked with a star2

volume, Chapter 8). The term carries with it very negative connotations (e.g. Höfer, 1979; Samuels, 2018) and has resulted in many groups distancing themselves from Tibet to try to overcome this prejudice. Another significant border found throughout these communities is a generational one, where expressions of culture such as wearing traditional clothing, listening to traditional music, following traditional subsistence farming and cooking practices, etc. define the older generation’s lifestyle. The younger generation meanwhile is exposed to aspects of the modern Nepalese world through time spent in schools outside the valley, especially in Kathmandu, and through online access to contemporary culture from around the globe through increasingly available smartphones. For this generation, the overt expressions of culture are heart-warming, creating a sense of self-understanding and belonging, but at some level they also represent historical ties to a life of hardship and chance, of stagnation and lost opportunities, of forever remaining an outsider, a Bhotiya. As the interest in educating children beyond the primary level grows, many children must relocate to Nepali-speaking areas, resulting in a growing cultural and linguistic disconnect between generations as many of the youth of these small communities experience a rapid shift in language. Evolving 2 Figure adapted from the map by Noahhoward licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/4.0/legalcode).

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identities necessarily result in evolving linguistic practices, rendering these local varieties definitely endangered. This is a situation only too familiar in Nubri. With just about 2,000 speakers (Simons & Fennig, 2018), the language is definitely endangered. Its current level of usage is perhaps the result of its relative isolation having delayed the process of language shift until more recently than in other, less remote areas. How can we identify and understand this language endangerment? We will see that by examining the complex sociolinguistic situation in terms of the language’s many borders, we can reach a much more enlightened understanding of the evolving linguistic landscape.

The Nubri Valley The Nubri Valley lies in the Manaslu Conservation Area in the upper Gorkha district, northern Central Nepal, near the border with Tibet. The journey to the valley from Kathmandu is long and arduous, comprising a day of driving, after which the journey must continue on foot.3 About three to four days of walking and an elevation gain of about 2,000 m will bring you to the lower Nubri Valley, after which it is another two to three days of walking, gaining another 2,000 m, to reach the end of the valley. To the west, the continuation of the journey towards the Annapurna Conservation Area means crossing the Larkya La Pass, a 25 km walk through permafrost starting at over 4,000 m and ending at over 3,500 m, reaching heights of over 5,160 m along the way. To the north lies the current border with Tibet through the similarly high Lajyang Bhanjyang/Rui La mountain pass, but this is only open for petty trade within 30 km of the border on a barter system for two weeks every year. The Nubri people, or Nubripa, are said to have crossed over the border from Tibet about 400 years ago to settle this beyul or ‘hidden valley’ near the base of the protector deity, the world’s eighth tallest peak, Mount Manaslu, known as Pungyen (lit. ‘Ornamented Heap’ [Childs, 2004]). The remote location of this community has meant that Nubri has remained relatively free of external influences. Perhaps this explains how about a quarter of the population are still monolingual, and Nubri is still the primary means of communication in the valley. However, Nubri evolved significantly from the variety of Tibetan from which it descended, in large part due to the 3 It is now possible to fly by helicopter, but costing up to US$2,000 one-way, this is prohibitively expensive for most.

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evolving geopolitical borders. Significant among these is the conquest of the Gorkha kingdom in the eighteenth century, and the inclusion of Nubri within Nepal. This resulted in the start of a reorientation of the Nubri people away from their Tibetan roots and towards Nepal as a key part of their national identity. A striking piece of evidence of this comes from the word Nubri itself. It is cognate with Tibetan, from ནུབ nup + རི ri or ‘west’ + ‘hill’ as the valley’s location is to the far south-west from Lhasa. However, as the Nubris align themselves more with the nation state of Nepal, nup has undergone a semantic shift to now mean ‘north’, reflecting that they are now redefining their identity and sense of place as belonging to Nepal. A second key historical moment in defining new borders for the Nubri Valley was the annexation of Tibet by China and the establishment of the Tibet Autonomous Region. During this period (circa 1961), another group migrated to Samdo village from Kyirong in Tibet. While ethnically Tibetan, and contemporarily labelled as Nubris, this group is known to speak a variety that is much closer to Kyirong Tibetan, and which is quite different from Nubri, as I discuss in the next section (see also Suzuki, this volume, for a discussion on the intricacies of ethnic and language labelling).

Language within the Nubri Valley The languages spoken around the Nubri Valley are shown in the maps given in Figure 7.2. Figure 7.2a illustrates how people from Nubri Valley consider themselves a single ethnic group, with the inclusion of Kuke speakers in the south and the Samdo villagers in the north. Linguistically, however, the languages bordering Tibet – Nubri, Samdo, and Tsum, spoken in the neighbouring valley to the east – are all related Tibetic languages, while Kuke is part of a different Tibeto-Burman group altogether (with Ghale, to the south). Given the isolation of the region and the fact that the languages spoken there are unwritten and undescribed, their linguistic subgroupings are typically based on little data, relying heavily on short wordlists (e.g. Webster, 1992; Hildebrandt & Perry, 2011). For the most part, these subgroupings are not unjustified. For example, most of the Tibetic shibboleths are attested in Samdo-Nubri and not in Kuke-Ghale, which belong to the Tamangic subgroup. Nubri attests linguistic features expected to be shared by members of the subgroup, such as a reflex of Tibetan ཁྱོད khyod for ‘thou’ (Nubri: khyo) and ཁོ kho for ‘he’ (Nubri: kho) in the modern language.4 Further, the typical 4

By ‘Tibetan’ I refer here to standard written Tibetan.

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Figure 7.2  Ethnic identity (left) and linguistic affiliation (right) in the Nubri region

Tamangic case markers found in Ghale, Gurung, and Tamang are not found in Nubri, whose morphological cases are clearly coming from Tibetan, with forms such as གིས/ཡིས -gis/-yis to mark transitive subjects or possession, and ལ -la as a marker of location. As a relatively unknown linguistic area, there was much uncertainty about the linguistic composition in the valley until very recently. The linguistic situation in the Nubri Valley is described in the next section, in some sense showing additional internal borders within the valley, further subdividing the Nubri identity. A recent sociolinguistic survey of the Nubri Valley shed light on the language situation and linguistic practices in the region (Donohue, 2019). The study was carried out in six villages throughout the valley and was based on participation in a survey that was conducted through a question/ response as well as an open-ended interview format in the Nubri language. One of the main results from the study is that while the Nubri Valley, the physical space, was defined by inclusion in respondents’ self-referencing as a Nubripa or ‘Nubri (person)’, this did not extend to the use of the Nubri language. The region where Nubri is spoken extends from Samagaun in upper Nubri, down to Namrung and Prok in lower Nubri, as shown in Figure 7.3. In Kutang, at the south-eastern edge of lower Nubri, which centers on Bi village, a different Tibeto-Burman language, Kuke, is spoken. In the far north, in Samdo village, as noted, a variety much closer to Kyirong Tibetan is spoken. The study establishes that there are three main dialects of Nubri spoken in the valley, with the loci being Sama village in the north/west (upper Nubri), Prok village in the south/east (lower Nubri) and Lho village,

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Figure 7.3  Areas of the Nubri Valley where Nubri is spoken

Figure 7.4 Languages spoken in the Nubri Valley: Samdo (Kyirong) is spoken in the north near the border with Tibet; Sama, Lho, and Prok varieties of Nubri are spoken within the valley; Kuke predominates in the Kutang area

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the largest of the central villages, defining the locus of the third variety. This division is indicated on the map in Figure 7.4. The Kuke speakers are relatively few, so many have a passing knowledge of Nubri for communicating with neighbouring villages.

Bordering varieties: Negotiating linguistic interactions With just a couple of thousand speakers of Nubri, it is perhaps surprising that there are three distinct varieties in a relatively small area (as the crow flies). But considering the difficulty of the terrain, the lack of transport, and the dependence on subsistence agriculture, it is less surprising that different norms have emerged, especially considering the unique contact situations at each point in the valley. Understanding how Nubris negotiate these ‘cross-border’ interactions is quite revealing of the current linguistic situation in the valley, highlighting the critical role of the speakers’ (relative) perceptions of prestige in learning and using different varieties and how this impacts language practices.

Prestige and intelligibility and linguistic accommodation Tibetan (or Chöke ཆོས ་ སྐད , sometimes referred to as clerical Classical Tibetan) is the liturgical language, and thus retains a high prestige status throughout the Nubri-speaking areas, while Nepali has a middling prestige. Perhaps due to its small number of speakers (and their relative poverty), Kuke is uniformly perceived as a language with low prestige, both from within as well as without. Within the Nubri varieties, Sama dialect speakers perceive their variety as having high prestige, though this is a view not shared by anyone else. The effect this has on negotiating linguistic interacttions is discussed later. Conversely, no other villages perceive their own varieties as having particularly ‘high prestige’, but from outside villagers, the Lho variety was perceived as the most prestigious in the valley. From within, both Prok and Lho villagers perceived their own varieties as having ‘middling prestige’, but from outside, Prok variety is viewed as having low prestige. This sits with another asymmetry discussed later: while Prok identifies with the Lho variety, speakers from Lho claim that they do not speak exactly the same in Prok village. These results are summarised in Table 7.1 and represented graphically in Figure 7.5 (adapted from Donohue, 2019).

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Table 7.1  Perceived prestige of different varieties spoken in the Nubri Valley Language

Self-perception

Others’ perception

Samdo/Kyirong Sama/Nubri Lho/Nubri Prok/Nubri Kuke Tibetan Nepali

Middle High Middle Middle Low

Low Middle High Low Low High Middle

Note: ‘Tibetan’ refers to Chöke as noted above.

Figure 7.5 Bar chart of perceived prestige of different varieties spoken in the Nubri Valley

Given the differences in perception of prestige, there are obviously significant differences in the dialects and thus in how mutually intelligible the varieties are. As shown in Table 7.2 and Figure 7.6, Lho villagers basically understand Prok Nubri, but only about two-thirds of what Sama Nubri speakers are saying. At the same time, all Nubris understand the Lho variety well. This is perhaps due to its central location, increasing the chance of exposure to all varieties while moving through the valley, and its situation making it easier to travel to both ends of the valley. The Sama variety is only understood about two-thirds of the time by Lho villagers, but even less by

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Table 7.2  Reported Intelligibility between Nubri Varieties

Listener

Speaker Sama

Lho

Prok

Sama Lho

100% 67%

93% 100%

89% 95%

Prok

58%

100%

100%

Figure 7.6 Bar chart of reported intelligibility (in %, y-axis) for each Nubri variety (as shown on the x-axis) by speakers from the different villages (indicated by the label of each cluster along the top)

those from Prok. Indeed, at only a reported 58% intelligibility rate for Prok villagers listening to Sama Nubri, it raises the question of whether they are indeed different dialects or different languages. The Sama people claim to understand the Prok variety at a much higher rate. This is explained to some extent by the language choices made for communicating with different speakers (Table 7.3). Note the use of Tibetan here and below refers to spoken varieties derived from the written standard (such as Chöke) that people (mostly monks or those who attended monastic schools) have learned. Table 7.3 shows that nearly everyone speaks Sama Nubri with people from Sama, and people from Sama speak their own variety with Nubris across the valley. This unwillingness to accommodate fits with the sense of high prestige the Sama villagers have of their variety, and the knowledge

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Table 7.3  Preferred language of communication in Nubri

Speaker’s village

Interlocutor’s village Samdo

Samdo Samdo

Sama Sama

Lho Tibetan

Sama

Sama

Sama

Lho

Tibetan/ Sama Tibetan/ Sama Tibetan

Sama

Sama/ Tibetan Lho

Lho

Sama

Lho

Prok

Prok

Prok

Prok

Prok Kuke

Prok Tibetan/ Nepali Sama

Kuke Tibetan/ Nepali Sama/ Nepali Lho/ Nepali Prok/ Nepali Kuke

from the outside that the Sama people are (perhaps consequently) not very proficient in other varieties. The villagers from Samdo, aside from accommodating to Sama Nubri with nearby Sama villagers, will speak Tibetan outside their home village (or Nepali, if proficient, further afield in lower Nubri/Kutang). Similarly, those from outside Samdo will use either Tibetan or Sama Nubri to talk to Samdo villagers. The Lho villagers use Tibetan or Sama Nubri to talk to the Samdo/Sama villagers north of them, but use the Lho variety throughout the rest of the valley. This language choice is reciprocated by others around the valley in interactions. Prok villagers similarly speak Tibetan or Sama Nubri with Samdo/Sama villagers, and Prok variety with their own villagers and in Kutang. This is also true of how others perceive their interactions with the Prok villagers. The Kuke villages in Kutang speak Tibetan with those from Samdo, Prok Nubri throughout the rest of the Nubri-speaking part of the valley, and Kuke in the Kuke-speaking villages in Kutang. Other villagers from outside the Kukespeaking area will speak their own variety of Nubri or Nepali with Kuke speakers. These data reflect the perceptions of prestige and explain the perceived degrees of intelligibility. Recall that the Sama villagers, believing themselves to speak the most prestigious variety, typically choose to interact with other Nubris from around the valley in the Sama dialect, so it is perhaps not surprising that they have a greater sense of mutual intelligibility, or that the results appear one-sided, because the communicative situations are one-sided. Let us turn now to the question of how these sociolinguistic data bear on the issue of Nubri’s ongoing linguistic vitality and the role of borders in reaching a clearer understanding of this.

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Nubri’s evolving identity Against this complex backdrop of linguistic distinctions within Nubri, there are also many external influences on the language. Nubri has faced many challenges, necessarily resulting in a changing state of affairs. In large part, Nubri’s remote location has meant it is relatively overlooked by the modern Nepalese central government, which has little incentive to engage with the area due to the decreased opportunity to trade with China to the north and the limited access to the valley. Furthermore, Nubri has a small population and engages more with Buddhist institutions than with national ones. Economically, Nubri is largely limited to subsistence agriculture, with the collection of seasonal cordyceps or yarsagumba (Tibetan དབྱར ་ རྩྭ་ དགུན་ འབུ yartsa gunbu; Nepali यार््ससा गु म् बा yarsha gumba) in the upper valley (above 3,500 m) and seasonal tourism in the form of trekkers. Furthermore, Nubri was heavily affected by the 2015 earthquake: trails were destroyed, nascent micro-hydro systems were lost, and trekking income disappeared. It is estimated that about 80% of housing and temples were destroyed (fortunately, with little loss of life). In the absence of institutional attention from Kathmandu, the Nubris have continued development on their own. There is a large Nubri community in western Kathmandu. Originally this was a landing site for children who left the valley for schooling, but many are now year-round residents. Economic activity in the valley is largely driven by the Nubris outside the valley, not by those resident in Nubri Valley.

Border creation: Evolving social practices, linguistic influences The strongest influences now come from Kathmandu and can be observed in many spheres. Linguistically, there has been an increase in the shift to the casual use of Nepali by younger people, even between Nubris. As the Manaslu Circuit gains popularity as a trekking route, there is an increase in Nepali as the (mandatory) guides typically organised in Kathmandu or through a trekking agency are often from outside the area. Health workers and government primary school teachers stationed in Nubri are often from outside the valley and speakers of Nepali, forcing a growing accommodation in the community. In terms of the local diet, there is now a higher consumption of rice, though traditional staples (potatoes and grain-based pasta such as dhindo or sen [Nepali ढिँ ड ो dhido, Tibetan ཟན་གོང sengong]) still dominate. Among the younger Nubris, there is an increased participation in popular

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culture (music, movies, television series, dress) through the availability of smartphones and solar-powered cellular towers. These links to the ‘outside world’ with a focus shifting towards Kathmandu are likely responsible for the changes that we see: a greater uptake of Nepali (at least in some domains) even by those who do not spend much time outside the valley, and the decline in traditional dress and cultural practices among the younger Nubris. What is clear is that proficiency in Nepali increases with proximity to the south (and easier access to Nepali speakers), as indicated in Figure 7.7. Tibetan remains the second language for the older, non-monolingual Nubris. Its evolving sphere of influence remains strongest in the north, where it is spoken by the nearest neighbours and where trade across the border (or even across the Larkya La Pass into Manang, where varieties of Tibetan are spoken) are still a regular part of life. There are two prominent monasteries, which operate in Tibetan, and it is much harder to exit the valley from the north. The influence of Tibetan dwindles the further south one travels in the valley (see Figure 7.8). This creates a situation where the second language for Nubris will vary: it is typically Tibetan in upper Nubri and Nepali in lower Nubri, a difference often reflected in the choice of medium of instruction of the chosen school for those sent outside the valley for post-primary education. Figure 7.7  Nepali exerting a greater influence in southern Nubri

Figure 7.8  The influence of Tibetan is strongest in upper Nubri

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In sum, there are competing forces at play in the ongoing shaping of language choices in Nubri. Tibetan remains the language of Buddhism, of the education and training that the young monks receive, and of formal rituals carried out in the valley. Nubri people are usually devoutly Buddhist and Tibetan is the liturgical language. However, closer to lower Nubri, there is a much greater pull towards Nepali. This is in part due to geography: it is simply a lot easier to exit the valley from the south, and there is much more contact with neighbouring communities that speak Ghale/Gurung and/or Nepali. However, this shift towards Nepali transcends geographic boundaries. The tendency of young people in the region is to align with the south: their focus is much more on Nepal and Kathmandu. To the youth who have lived and attended school in Kathmandu, there is the lure of an easier, more prosperous life and Nepali represents the key to much greater socioeconomic opportunity. It is also symbolic of modernity and popular culture, of urbanity in contrast to the difficult, rural, subsistence-farming life, largely devoid of modern conveniences like running water and electricity found in the city. This shift is fuelled by the speakers’ evolving identities and serves to highlight the growing divide demarcating borders between young and old, near and far, urban and rural, educated and uneducated, modern and traditional, contemporary and historical, wealthy and poor.

Conclusion: Making and marking languages A strong ethnic identity coupled with strong pressures to shift result in evolving language ecologies. There are many borders and juxtapositions relevant for a much clearer understanding of the contemporary linguistic situation in Nubri and which go a long way toward explaining the shifting language practices. There are obvious geopolitical borders between Nepal and China, but other geographical pulls play a role as well – such as being remote or more central (from the perspective of Nepal, as it has impacted Nubri, or in the eyes of the young people, and where they want to be), and the urban/rural, modern/traditional, and wealthy/poor oppositions that this brings with it. The situation of the Nubri people is not so different from many other Tibetic people in Nepal (e.g. Syuba, see Gawne et al., 2020). However, one way in which it differs is that, unlike many other places, roads and other infrastructural developments have not yet been extended into the Nubri Valley, or even to the start of the valley. Once the near/far border has been softened through road access, language (and identity) shift follows quickly.

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For Nubri, the location and difficulty of the terrain, coupled with its low socioeconomic profile, has thus far prevented this from happening. Among the ethnic Tibetans in China we see a very different story. With greater access to education and being a more literate population, standard Tibetan, which more closely approximates the writing system, is replacing the minority Tibetan varieties and even then is still competing with Mandarin (see Chapter 8 by Roche, and Chapter 2 by Ward, this volume). This different tale does, however, have a similar ending with the loss of language vitality through language shift. Language is a vehicle for constructing one’s social identity, so it is not surprising that the younger generations are shifting towards varieties that represent a much more alluring lifestyle than the traditional, rural (and difficult) lives of the older generations. In China, this typically results in a shift to Mandarin; for the Nubris, this leads to a shift to Nepali. Nubri is currently only a spoken language, so there is no competition with a written standard, but the lack of a writing system also comes with a greater risk of imminent loss. Perhaps this highlights some of the final borders shaping this complex linguistic ecology: that of the written/spoken divide, a border recognised in largely literate communities (e.g. Schmidt, this volume), but relevant now as the educated/uneducated divide deepens. Many borders have conspired to create this veiled language endangerment. Indeed, identifying and understanding different borders, and their dynamics and interactions, goes a long way towards recognising the key linguistic ecology of Nubri: how the language still exists, how there are monolingual speakers, how it is used as a result of its internal politics in the backdrop of broader cultural and social attitudes, where the key pressure points are on the relatively recent language shift. The complex of social, cultural, and linguistic factors are best understood as the unique result of border interactions. This is a critical moment in Nubri’s linguistic history, as we now see that the outwardly vital language is actually on the brink of disappearing, with its future lying in the hands of the youngest generations.

References Bradley, D. (1997). Tibeto-Burman languages and classif ication. In D. Bradley (Ed.), Papers in Southeast Asian linguistics no. 14: Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas (pp. 1-72). Pacific Linguistics. Campbell, L., & Belew, A. (Eds.) (2018). Cataloguing the world’s endangered languages. Routledge.

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Central Bureau of Statistics (2012). National population and housing census 2011. National Planning Commission, Government of Nepal. Childs, G. (2004). Tibetan diary: From birth to death and beyond in a Himalayan valley of Nepal. University of California Press. DeLancey, S. (1987). The Sino-Tibetan languages. In B. Comrie (Ed.), The world’s major languages (pp. 797-810). Croom Helm. Donohue, C. (2019). A preliminary sociolinguistic survey of Nubri Valley. Nepalese Linguistics, 34, 10-17. van Driem, G. (2001). Languages of the Himalayas: An ethnolinguistic handbook of the greater Himalayan region, containing an introduction to the symbiotic theory of language (2 vols.). Brill. Gawne, L., Roche, G., & Gamble, R. (2020). ‘The bus doesn’t stop for us’: Multilingualism, attitudes and identity in songs of a Tibetic community in Nepal. Multilingua, 40(1), 1-31. Genetti, C. (Ed.) (2004). Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal: Manange and Sherpa. Pacific Linguistics. Grimes, B. (1992). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (11th ed.). Summer Institute of Linguistics. Hale, A. (1982). Research on Tibeto-Burman languages: Trends in Linguistics: Stateof-the-art Report 14. Mouton. Hildebrandt, K., & Perry, J. (2011). Preliminary notes on Gyalsumdo, an undocumented Tibetan variety in Manang District, Nepal. Himalayan Linguistics, 10(1), 167-185. Höfer, A. (1979). The caste hierarchy and the State of Nepal: A study of the Muluki Ain of 1854. Universitätsverlag Wagner. Krauss, M. (1992). The world’s languages in crisis. Language, 68(1), 4-10. Matisoff, J. (1991). Sino-Tibetan linguistics: Present state and future prospects. Annual Review of Anthropology, 10, 469-504. Ramble, C. (1997). Tibetan pride of place: Or, why Nepal’s Bhotiyas are not an ethnic group. In D. Gellner, J. Pfaff-Czarnecka, & J. Whelpton (Eds.), Nationalism and ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom: The politics of culture in contemporary Nepal (pp. 379-414). Harwood Academic Publishers. Samuels, J. (2018). Banishment of the B-word: Interpreting ethnic and religious revival among the Tamang people of Nepal. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 52, 17-45. Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.) (2018). Languages of the world (21st ed.). SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com/language/kte UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages (2003). Language vitality and endangerment. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000183699 Webster, J. (1992). A sociolinguistic survey of the Tibeto-Burman dialects of North Gorkha District, Nepal. SIL.

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About the author Cathryn Donohue (PhD, Stanford University) is a field linguist specializing in Sino-Tibetan, with a primary focus on Himalayan languages. Her linguistic interests center on morphosyntax, tonal phenomena, and language variation, including documentary and outreach components. She is currently a Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

8

Borderline Dominance Transnational Tibetan Language Politics in the Himalayas1 Gerald Roche Abstract This chapter examines the politics of the Tibetan language in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Pakistan, Nepal, India, and Bhutan. It shows how a legacy of imperial borders, coupled with the indifference of contemporary states, has allowed Tibetans to exert linguistic dominance over smaller languages in the region. However, the dominance that Tibetans exert over other languages is borderline, insofar as it is tenuous and takes place in the context of the minoritization of Tibetan by the region’s states. This borderline dominance nonetheless seriously impacts smaller languages of the region. Within the PRC, Tibetan is replacing several languages. In Pakistan, Nepal, India, and Bhutan, Tibetan serves as a scriptal model and hinders the autonomous development of smaller languages. Keywords: Tibet, Himalayas, language politics, language oppression, borders, standpoint theory

Introduction: Ruination and duress in the Himalayan borderlands The borders that Himalayan states today contest and defend are largely the legacy of an imperial world order that was ostensibly dismantled in the mid-twentieth century (Cribb & Li, 2004). The continued violence of these borders (Jones, 2017), and their ongoing capacity to wreak ruination on the living (Stoler, 2013) disproportionately impact the region’s most vulnerable 1 Many thanks to Joseph Lo Bianco, Matt Treyvaud, Sagar Boro and a reviewer of the book manuscript for providing feedback on this article. Research for this chapter was funded through an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award grant (DE150100388), and writing was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (DP180101651).

Roche, Gerald, and Gwendolyn Hyslop (eds), Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 DOI: 10.5117/9789463725040_CH08

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populations (Hughes, 2011; Gamble, 2019). This chapter examines how this violence against vulnerable populations manifests as domination and oppression in relation to languages. I argue that states achieve this violence, in part, by enlivening a political substrate below the hyper-visible surface activity of state policy and international relations (Davis et al., 2021), by animating and manipulating political projects carried out across state borders by non-state actors, and by drawing on narratives and legacies that tap into histories predating both state and empire. I examine this phenomenon through an exploration of how Tibetans exert linguistic dominance over other populations throughout the transnational Himalayas. Tibetans may seem like an unlikely, and perhaps unimportant, political agent in a region characterized by the rising super-states of China and India: Tibetans are currently spread throughout the states of the region, fragmented into enclaves and islands, interned within the physical and political margins of states. In every country where Tibetans live today, they are a demographic and political minority, and their languages are subordinated and oppressed. They are dominated by non-Tibetan populations who speak, and insist on Tibetans speaking, other languages. Nonetheless, when it comes to language, several features enable Tibetans to exercise ‘non-state sovereignty’ (Yeh, 2019) over and against other populations. The first feature is ‘pre-accumulated linguistic capital’, consisting of all the historically accrued resources associated with the Tibetan language: a script, a voluminous literature, libraries, pedagogies, enormous symbolic capital, and a network of institutions that produce and reproduce the language.2 Secondly, as I show below, in the absence of an actual state apparatus, this pre-accumulated linguistic capital is defended, enlivened, and mobilized by material and symbolic support from other states, both inside and outside the region. This imbues Tibet with a high degree of ‘stateness’ (McConnell, 2016) and enables it to pursue its own language policies. Finally, for this mobilized, pre-accumulated linguistic capital to exert dominance over other populations, a final ingredient is needed, namely, the vulnerability of certain groups in the region. For a stateless, minoritized language to exert linguistic dominance, the languages of the populations over whom they enact this domination must themselves be even more subordinated: materially deprived, juridically undermined, and socially disesteemed.

2 I am drawing here on Wolfe’s (2016) concept of cultural and material pre-accumulation in colonial contexts.

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This chapter draws on ‘standpoint theory’ to look at the transnational politics of language in the Himalayas from the position of these vulnerable populations. Derived from Marxist theory (Lukács, 1971) and developed most extensively by feminist philosophers (Harding, 2004), standpoint theory relies on the observation that “a life led at the sharp end of any given set of power relations provides for critical understanding” (Fricker, 2000, p. 147). In this chapter, I show how the ‘sharp end’ of power relations in the Himalayas, when it comes to languages, is located at the numerous social sites where imperial borders, state domination, and linguistic preaccumulation intersect. In pursuing this standpoint perspective on Himalayan transnational language politics, I take the reader on a tour across the region, visiting numerous communities in five countries: Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and the People’s Republic of China. In doing so, we see the diverse ways in which Tibetan dominates other languages. Examining all of these communities together creates a composite picture of the transnational life of the Tibetan language, which I describe below as ‘borderline dominance’: a precarious form of domination that takes place across national boundaries in defense of a subordinated language’s borders. We can begin to get a sense of how this ‘borderline dominance’ works by looking at the situation in Himalayan South Asia.

Scripting borderline dominance: Tibetan in South Asia Across the Himalayas’ southern arc, through India and Nepal, are a number of populations generically referred to as Bhotia (variously spelled as Bhotiya, Bhutia, etc.). The name is clearly cognate with the term bod – Tibet – but, as we will see, the relationship of these populations to Tibet, Tibetan identity, and the Tibetan language is complex. In addition to the presence of these Bhotia populations, entanglements with Tibetan language and identity are found broadly throughout the region, including not only India and Nepal, but also northern Pakistan and Bhutan, through the influence of the Tibetan script. It is important to note from the outset that, even when it is being used to write non-Tibetan languages, there is frequently a perceived relationship between the script and Tibetan identity; I have elsewhere (Roche, 2020) referred to this relationship as an ‘alphabetical order’, which collapses Tibetan script, language, and identity onto each other as an indexical chain. Given the significance of the script and its indexical relation to Tibetan identity, it is therefore important to note that, throughout the region, at least

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eleven languages currently use (or have used in the past) the Tibetan script as a basis for their writing system: Dzongkha, Khengkha, and Tshangla in Bhutan; Gahri, Ladakhi, and Purik in India3; Gurung, Mugom, Sherpa, and Tamang in Nepal; and Balti in Pakistan (Chamberlain, 2008). This review of Tibetan’s borderline dominance in South Asia will begin in Baltistan, not only because it represents a unique case of the relationship between script, language, and identity, but also because it then allows us to follow an eastward journey along the southern fringe of the Himalayas. At present, the Balti language, which is a Tibetic language spoken by around 300,000 people in northern Pakistan and India, is most frequently written in the Perso-Arabic script. However, since the late 1990s, there has been a push to develop and promote the Tibetan script as an alternative written form (Khan, 1998). In a 2006 article, Kenneth MacDonald (2006) described how this movement has involved not only script reform, but also a revisionist historical and geographical imaginary that ties Baltistan and the Balti people to Tibet. This realignment is seen as primarily aiming to distance the population from Pakistan. Whilst Khan (1998) sees this distancing as an effort to resist cultural and political domination, MacDonald interprets the pivot to Tibet as an attempt to capitalize on Western sympathies towards Tibet. Significantly, MacDonald documents how the Baltistan script reform movement was initiated with support from the Tibet Foundation London, as well as from “Tibetan diasporic communities in Europe, North America, and Australia” (MacDonald, 2006, p. 195). Efforts in Baltistan to promote the Tibetan script are also intended to signal historical and cultural ties, and perhaps political sympathies, with Tibetic communities across the line of control in India. Here, in Ladakh, a large population of people speak a Tibetic language, Ladakhi, with approximately 130,000 speakers. In this context, Bettina Zeisler (2008) has written about the unsuccessful efforts to develop a writing system for the local vernacular, which she poignantly calls “a language which must not be written.” She discusses how Ladakhi intellectuals see themselves as agents of a sacred mission to preserve the Tibetan language, given its decline inside China. This mission involves not only teaching and promoting the written language, but also opposing the development of a Tibetan orthography for Ladakhi, in the fear that it would ‘corrupt’ and ‘split’ the Tibetan language. 3 Chamberlain’s list excludes Drenjongke, the Tibetic language of Sikkim, and also likely excludes other smaller-scale language documentation and description projects that have been carried out in the Himalayas over the past few decades, but which are not widely known and have not been recorded.

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To the southeast of Ladakh are the provinces of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. In Himachal Pradesh, speakers of Tibetic languages live in the Lahaul-Spiti region, whilst in Uttarakhand, there are a number of populations referred to as Bhutia (Chaterjee, 1976, 1977). Willis (2007), in her research on the Darma language (see also Martin, 2010), discusses how speakers of Darma are labeled as Bhutia, along with speakers of Byansi and Chaudangsi, despite these not being Tibetic languages. She describes how speakers of these languages prefer the self-appellation Rung,4 and resent the label Bhutia because “they have been in contact with Tibetans historically, and consider Tibetans to be substantially different physically, culturally, and linguistically” (Willis, 2007, p. 3). Willis also describes how, although many Darma speakers were able to communicate in Tibetan in the past, such competency has disappeared since the border with Tibet closed in 1962. The Rung, then, demonstrate trends we will see again further east along the Himalayas: efforts to disaffiliate from Tibetans, and decreasing contact with the language. In Nepal, the capacity for communities to position themselves relative to Tibetan script, language, and identity emerged in the 1990s, following democratization and a turn away from assimilationist policies, and towards greater support for “ethnolinguistic differentiation” (Sonntag, 1995, p. 118); this capacity was further consolidated with the promulgation of the 2015 constitution and its recognition of all of Nepal’s citizens’ “rights to speak/use, preserve, and promote their languages and cultures” (Phyak, 2021, p. 325). Within this context, there have been numerous efforts by communities to disaffiliate from Tibet, amongst the country’s diverse population generically labeled as Bhotiya (Ramble, 1997; see also Cathryn Donohue’s contribution to this volume). This includes not only populations that speak Tibetic languages, such as the Sherpa, Syuba, Yolmo, and Dhol-wa, and who live adjacently to Tibetan parts of the PRC, but also groups with fewer linguistic, cultural, and historical connections to Tibet, such as the Tamang and Thakali. Part of the reason for the widespread disaffiliation with Tibet is the existence of negative stereotypes towards Bhotiya in Nepal; Samuels (2018, p. 34) describes Bhotiya as a “racial slur,” whilst Höfer (1979, p. 147) refers to the Bhotiya category as a “reservoir for degraded persons.” One example of how this discrimination and the ensuing disaffiliation influences language 4 Willis’s text uses the spelling ‘Rang’; however, according to the Rung scholar Sandesha RayapaGarbiyal, the preferred spelling is ‘Rung’ (personal communication, October 2019). Rayapa-Garbiyal also notes that although linguists recognize three distinct languages, the Rung community recognizes a single language, Runglwo, with three clearly identifiable but mutually intelligible varieties.

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can be seen in the use of the Devanagari script, and the rejection of the Tibetan script, in the creation of writing systems for the smaller languages of Nepal. Chamberlain (2008) lists the following Bhotiya groups as having Devanagari scripts, often after having selected against Tibetan, despite having experimented with it in the past: Gurung, Jirel, Lhomi, Tamang, and Yolmu. Lauren Gawne (2014) also describes Syuba speakers as having chosen Devanagari over the Tibetan script in creating their writing system. Some communities in Nepal, however, have chosen to affiliate themselves with Tibetan identity and language. Samuels (2018), for example, has argued that the collective discrimination experienced by people labeled as Bhotiya has also brought them closer to Tibetans – solidarity via shared marginalization. This solidarity has been bolstered, furthermore, by Tibetans efforts to recruit Himalayan peoples into Buddhist monasteries, and to the broader cause of Tibetan nationalism (Tsering Topgyal, 2016). Ramble (1997) also points to the complex role played by foreign converts to Tibetan Buddhism: “The process of Tibetanization receives substantial impetus from foreign sources” (p. 406) including people form Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, Europe, and North America, many of whom are “keen to subsidize Tibetanization” (p. 409). Furthermore, Nepal is also home to a number of Tibetan languageteaching institutes which serve Tibetans from the exile community, as well as Nepali Bhotiyas and Tibetan Buddhist converts from around the world. Therefore, despite systemic discrimination against Bhotiyas, and the deliberate disaffiliation from Tibetan language this has caused, many Bhotiya populations in Nepal nonetheless find themselves attracted to the affordances enabled by affiliation with Tibet and its language. Across the national border, in the Indian state of Sikkim, these tensions inherent in disaffiliating from Tibet are again prevalent. Although the spoken language has been vernacularized in writing since the 1980s (Yliniemi, 2019), the script chosen was Tibetan, meaning that the boundary between Tibetan and Drenjongke is both blurry and subject to slippage. Sikkimese identity, meanwhile, still relies in no small measure on the prestige associated with historical and cultural ties to Tibet. Meanwhile, linguistic anxieties in Sikkim are (legitimately) focused on Nepali and its role not only as a recently arisen lingua franca (essentially a by-product of British imperialism), but also a dominating language that threatens many of Sikkim’s other languages (Turin, 2011). Nonetheless, Charisma K. Lepcha (this volume), describes a movement to remove Tibetan loanwords from the scriptures of the Lepcha people – one of the Indigenous people of Sikkim. Meanwhile, in Bhutan, the orthography of the country’s official language, Dzongkha, is based on the Tibetan script. George van Driem (2017) notes

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that written Tibetan remains, in many ways, a model for written Dzongkha, which still retains many of the ornate, opaque spellings of written Tibetan. He argues that retention of Tibetan spelling distances the written from the spoken language, making it difficult for students to learn, and limiting the development of the language, for example, by leading Dzongkha speakers to prefer English loanwords over complex Tibetan neologisms. Within Bhutan, the Tibetan script has also been used to create a script for Tshangla, Bhutan’s most widely spoken mother tongue, according to the Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research (2016), although the script is not widely used (Andvik, 2012). Another project is also underway to develop a Tibetan-based orthography for the Kurtöp language (Hyslop, 2014; see also Gwendolyn Hyslop’s contribution on Kurtöp in this volume). Despite the widespread, and increasing, role of the Tibetan script, the official status of Dzongkha means that Tibetan has an indirect impact in the country. Finally, we come to Arunachal Pradesh. Although parts of this region were targets of Tibetan expansionary military campaigns in the early twentieth century (Huber, 2011; Gamble, 2019), Tibetan influence has been minimal, and is primarily restricted to the west of the province, bordering Bhutan. As described by Gohain (2012), this historical legacy is presently being activated in contemporary language movements in the area. At present, the Tibetan language, under the name of Bhoti, is being vigorously promoted amongst Arunachal’s Monpa population, who actually speak several distinct, non-Tibetan languages (Blench, 2014). This campaign has sought to obtain recognition for Tibetan as the ‘mother tongue’ of the Monpa people, and to impose Tibetan-medium education on them. Gohain sees this language movement as part of a broader campaign to make Tibetan an officially recognized language in India, with similar movements currently active throughout the Indian Himalaya, in Zanskar, Ladakh, Spiti, Kinnaur, Uttarkashi, Sikkim, Kalimpong, and Darjeeling (see also Nawang Tsering Shakspo, 2005). These individual movements have coalesced into a national campaign to have Bhoti registered in the constitution as an officially recognized language of India. A bill to this effect was proposed in 2011 (Government of India, 2011), arguing that not only was the language itself “bestowed with wisdom and prosperity”, but that it also served to unite India’s diverse Himalayan populations, and bind them to the nation.5 And although the Indian state has thus far not bestowed official recognition on Tibetan, this does not mean that it rejects the possibility of promoting the language for instrumental reasons: a 2012 strategy paper 5

Stanzin Dawa (2006) expands these arguments.

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(Gautam et al., 2012) proposed that Tibetan should be promoted in the region to provide a Buddhist buffer against China, and that learning Tibetan should also be promoted in the Indian military, to improve intelligence gathering capacities. Pan-communal, as well as state-led efforts, have therefore worked to promote the Tibetan language across the Indian Himalayas, primarily in the sort of educational contexts discussed by Dirk Schmidt in this volume. Across Himalayan South Asia, we therefore see Tibetan’s dominance manifesting in several ways. In Baltistan, Tibetan script is used to re-envision not only language, but also historical connections and contemporary belonging. In Ladakh, concern for the preservation of Tibetan had suppressed the development of vernacular Ladakhi, whilst in Sikkim and Bhutan, the dominance of Tibetan has hindered the independence of local written vernaculars. In Nepal, although many groups are distancing themselves from the stigma of the Bhutia label, a combination of solidarity amongst the marginalized, strategic engagement by the Tibetan exile community, and foreign investment have seen Tibetan maintain an important role in the country. Amongst the Monpa in Arunachal Pradesh, efforts are currently underway to promote Tibetan as a formally recognized mother tongue, despite this population’s linguistic diversity. This effort is part of a broader campaign to gain official national recognition for the Tibetan language in India. What we therefore see across the region is Tibetan’s important role primarily as a scriptal model, which either provides a basis for devising new written languages, or as a substitute written language for communities that presently lack their own.

Speaking borderline dominance: Tibetan in the People’s Republic of China In the PRC, the situation of the Tibetan language, and its relation to smaller languages, is very different. Unlike in South Asia, where Tibetan dominance seems to primarily manifest through the written language, within the PRC it is seen in regard to spoken languages; several languages in the region are undergoing shift to some form of spoken Tibetan, to the detriment of these communities’ mother tongues.6 6 The materials presented here come from a variety of sources. Information about Manegacha comes from my fieldwork: semi-structured qualitative interviews and households surveys. Other information was gathered from the Survey of Tibet’s Linguistic Minorities, which collected expert testimony from linguists and community members who live and work in these communities. The

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Starting on the northeast Tibetan Plateau, in the predominantly Tibetan (and Tibetan-speaking) valley of Rebgong (Yangdon Dhondup, 2011), two minoritized linguistic populations are found. Both are formally classified by the government as Tu (Monguor), but primarily identify as Tibetans (there has been an ongoing campaign by communities and individuals to be formally recognized as such). Local Tibetan speakers refer to people in both communities using a single term; members of those communities generally find this label offensive. Given that this term is a hypernym referring to two populations speaking different languages, it serves only to mark their inclusion within the Tibetan collective, and their linguistic deviance therein. One of these minoritized populations speaks a language they refer to as Ngandehua (Tshe ring skyid, 2015) but which linguists call Wutun (Janhunen et al., 2008). The language currently has about 3,500 speakers, and is spoken nowhere else. Sandman (2016, p. 10) observes that Ngandehua “remains a living language spoken by all generations in the community and the children in Wutun-speaking villages acquire it as their first language,” but also notes that the language is potentially vulnerable due to its small size and lack of official recognition, and observes that “some speakers are switching their language to Amdo Tibetan” (p. 13). Meanwhile, in a brief ethnographic introduction to one Ngandehua-speaking community, Tshe ring skyid (2015) describes the language as threatened, highlighting rising participation in Tibetan-medium education, including the recent advent of Tibetan-medium preschool education. Sandman (2016, p. 12) also describes Ngandehua speakers being “scolded and ridiculed by local Tibetans because of their language.” Thus, lack of official status, discrimination from Tibetans-speakers, and participation in Tibetan-medium education are all contributing to incipient language shift from Ngandehua to Tibetan. A similar situation prevails amongst the other minoritized linguistic population in Rebgong, speakers of Manegacha. Fried (2010, p. xvii) claimed that “language shift is underway among the language community, and language death appears to be imminent.” Although Fried based this impression on anecdotal evidence (Fried, 2010, p. 11), household survey data collected in the four villages where the language is spoken confirm this impression (Roche, 2019). Self-reported language use patterns provided by the head of 200 households provide the following information: 22% of households had a child that was unable to speak Manegacha; 31.5% of households survey collected information on language use patterns across domains, and asked respondents to give estimates of the degree of language endangerment and direction of language shift (Roche, 2018). I also relied on secondary literature in English.

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had a child who could speak Manegacha but preferred not to; and, the youngest mother7 in 29.1% of households spoke a language other than Manegacha to her children. Self-reported data from the survey also suggest significant intergenerational differences in the use of the language, with young people using the language less often, speaking it less competently, and comprehending the language less than their elders. Moving south from Rebgong, we find the Oirat Mongol community of Henan. Sociolinguistic research by Balogh (2017, p. 59) suggests at present, only some “100-200 people are able to hold at least a simple conversation in [Henan Oirat], but only a minority of them, maybe one or two dozen, speak it with their elderly relatives.” Although it is unclear how large the Oirat-speaking population ever was (Roche, 2016), it is clear that the population is headed towards zero, due to shift to Amdo Tibetan. In part, this is due to misplaced attempts to revitalize the local Oirat variety by importing language teachers who speak another Mongolic language that is not the local variety of Oirat. More prominently, however, this language shift is due to the complete lack of support for the language in any formal institutions, such as education. To the south of this region, in western Sichuan, is a hotspot of linguistic diversity amongst Tibetans (Roche & Yudru Tsomu, 2018; Roche & Suzuki, 2017). There is a rough geographical divide here, with languages in the east shifting to Chinese, and those in the west shifting to Tibetan. As seen below, in some cases, this line runs through the middle of language communities, with portions of the population shifting to Chinese, and others to Tibetan, depending on their location. One of the languages of western Sichuan that is shifting towards Tibetan is the rTa’u language, spoken by about 4,500 Tibetans in Rta’u and Brag mgo counties. Around one quarter of rTa’u-speaking families appear to be transmitting Tibetan rather than rTa’u. The rTa’u-speaking linguist Sonam Lhundrop (Tunzhi, 2017) in a vitality assessment of the language, based on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s nine-factor vitality model (UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages, 2003), found the language to be endangered, resulting primarily from two factors: “the language’s exclusion from new domains, and the complex relationship between speakers’ ethnic identity as Tibetans and their language.” In a subsequent publication (Tunzhi et al., 2019), he elaborates on this latter point, explaining how local Tibetans increasingly collapse ethnic identity and linguistic practice, increasing pressure on rTa’u speakers to shift 7 Manegacha households are extended, rather than nuclear families, containing an average of around five people and three generations.

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to Tibetan. In particular, he draws attention to how the rise of the ‘pure Tibetan’ movement (Thurston, 2018; Yang, 2018), aimed at removing Chinese loanwords from the language, and local folk ideologies that see rTa’u as a mixed language, have intensified assimilatory pressures on rTa’u speakers. Moving further south we come to the hamlet of Tage, where Lhagang Choyu is spoken by fewer than a hundred people (Suzuki & Sonam Wangmo, 2016). Hiroyuki Suzuki suggests that there are currently no native speakers of Lhagang Choyu – it is only spoken as a second language by people who otherwise speak the local variety of Tibetan. Suzuki also points out that not only has the speaker population decreased, but so has the geographic range of the language: now confined to a single hamlet, locals remember when Lhagang Choyu was spoken in the neighboring hamlet. To the west of Lhagang, the Nyarong Minyak language is spoken by about a thousand people, in a handful of communities along the Yalong River, within a single county (Bkra shis bzang po, 2012). Research by John van Way and Bkra shis bzang po (2015) shows that the language is currently undergoing shift to the local variety of Tibetan. Their sociolinguistic study of the language notes that it is generally considered ‘useless’ in comparison to both Tibetan and Chinese, which are seen as having significance for ethnic identity and pragmatic value for social mobility, respectively. They additionally note that language shift is being exacerbated by the relocation of Nyarong Minyak speakers from their homelands, in order to build a hydroelectric dam. Downstream to the east of Nyarong are several Tibetan communities that are currently shifting to Chinese, but originally spoke non-Tibetic languages: Choyu, nDrapa, and Daohua. Further east, and directly south of Lhagang, is a Tibetan population that appears to be shifting from its mother tongue, Darmdo Minyak, to Tibetan. Although the language shares a name with Nyarong Minyak, being distinguished only by a descriptive place tag (Nyarong vs Darmdo), the two languages are only distantly related. Darmdo Minyak is spoken by about 10,000 people within Kangding Municipality. At present, the rate of language shift seems relatively low compared to the other cases: it is estimated that less than a quarter of the population is shifting to some form of Tibetan. Darmdo Minyak represents one of very few efforts to develop a Tibetan-based writing system for a minoritized language amongst Tibetans in the PRC. This project was carried out just before 2008, involving a collaboration between a US NGO (the Kham Aid Foundation), Han Chinese linguists, and the local community. Although the project developed a writing system, produced a textbook,8 and trained 8

This textbook is available online at: http://en.calameo.com/read/00043297764534ed34467.

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teachers to teach the writing system, the project was abandoned in the wake of the 2008 uprisings. Recently published research has begun revealing a new context of language shift towards Tibetan within the TAR. Tashi Nyima and Suzuki (2019) introduce four previously un-described languages spoken in southern Chamdo Prefecture: Lamo, Larong sMar, Drag-yabs sMar, and gSerkhu. Their preliminary research suggests that all of these communities are undergoing rapid language shift towards the local variety of Tibetan, though not all languages are in the same predicament: “gSerkhu and Lamo are particularly vulnerable compared to the sMar languages in Drag-yab and Larong” (p. 58). In seeking to explain this language shift, they suggest that it is due to “migration, development, public education and lack of interest in preserving the languages” (p. 12). Their discussion places particular emphasis on migration and education. They describe how local schools make no effort to include the languages in their programs, and how advancement through the educational system involves migration away from the villages where the languages are spoken, to urban centers. They also mention that many communities have been resettled in the name of poverty alleviation and development. In total then, we have reason to believe that some eleven languages spoken by Tibetans in the PRC are currently undergoing shift towards some form of Tibetan. In addition, two other communities are undergoing shift towards Tibetan and Chinese, based on a geographical split in their populations. The Zbu language is spoken by 5,000 people (Gong, 2014) in 28 villages, primarily in ’Bar khams County (Gates, 2014). Zbu is one of the languages labeled with the hypernym Rgyal rong (Gyarong/Jiarong) in Tibetan, as discussed in Hiroyuki Suzuki’s contribution. Gong (2014, p. 45) describes Zbu as “poorly transmitted to the younger generation” and identifies a pattern of shift towards Sichuan Mandarin, concluding that “[p]henomena characteristic of language attrition and death are already visible from younger speakers” (Gong, 2014, p. 45). Gates (2014), meanwhile, notes that there is also a population of Zbu speakers in Rnga ba County that are shifting towards Amdo Tibetan. This split, between communities shifting towards Chinese (in the east) and those shifting towards Tibetan (in the north and west), was confirmed in the Survey of Tibet’s Linguistic Minorities. Zbu-speaking communities in both Rnga ba and ’Dzam thang counties are presently well-advanced in shifting towards Amdo Tibetan: no children presently learn the language. Meanwhile, in ’Bar khams, it is estimated that 51-75% of all households still maintain intergenerational transmission of the language; those that do not are shifting to Sichuan Mandarin. Using the UNESCO language endangerment scale, Gong (2019) describes Zbu in

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Rnga ba and ’Dzam thang as between unsafe and definitively endangered, whilst in ’Bar khams, it is stable yet threatened. A similar case is found amongst the approximately 1,800 speakers of Shuhi (also known as Xumi and Shuhing) in a single township of Muli County, in southwest Sichuan Province. Chirkova (2007) describes the population as living with tensions between Tibetan and Chinese identity, a predicament that Huber et al. (2017) expand upon by describing Shuhi speakers as being ‘between reformist China and revivalist Tibet’. As with the Zbu community, speakers of Shuhi are shifting towards either Tibetan or Chinese, depending on their location: Tibetan in the north, Chinese in the south. Huber et al. note an overall decrease in the Shuhi population from 2,500 to 1,500 between 1990 and 2005. Büeler (2010) describes one aspect of this shift when, in one Shuhi community of 25 households, between 2005 and 2010, 22 households shifted to the local Tibetan variety. The two responses for this language in the Survey of Tibet’s Linguistic Minorities listed the language as stable and threatened. Given the small population size, and the recent large decreases in the number of speakers, ‘threatened’ seems the most reasonable assessment. Finally, in addition to these populations where all or part of the population is shifting towards Tibetan, we may also note several cases where Tibetans speak a minoritized language which is undergoing shift towards Chinese, but where revitalization efforts promote only Tibetan. This situation has not been adequately studied, but my own observations indicate that Tibetan is being promoted and taught in extracurricular programs in communities where the following languages are spoken: Namuyi, Gochang, Situ Gyalrong, and Pumi. In these cases, although language shift towards Tibetan is not occurring, social mobilization in defense of these languages, which are all shifting towards Chinese, is being suppressed by the presence of movements to promote Tibetan as the sole legitimate language of all Tibetans.

Combining script and speech: Tibetan’s borderline dominance The preceding discussion demonstrates Tibetan’s dominance across a large, linguistically diverse region. This dominance manifests in two very different forms inside and outside the PRC. In South Asia, it is scripted (Choksi, 2014), relating primarily to the written language; the Tibetan script is used to create new vernaculars for languages like Balti, Dzongkha, and Drenjongke, whilst in some cases, attachment to written Tibetan has prevented the emergence of new vernaculars (as with Ladakhi) whilst in other cases, the written language is being promoted as the ‘mother tongue’ of various groups whose

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actual mother tongues are not Tibetan (such as the Monpa). Within the PRC, meanwhile, Tibetan’s dominance is spoken: it manifests primarily as language shift towards spoken Tibetan. In addition to this, we also see efforts to promote Tibetan in communities in the PRC where non-Tibetan mother tongues are spoken, including Namuyi, Pumi, Situ Gyalrong, and Gochang. Taken together, I refer to the predicament of Tibetan in the transnational Himalayas as ‘borderline dominance’. By dominance, I am referring to the ways in which the Tibetan language lays claim to higher status, greater prestige, superior resourcing, and more entrenched legitimacy than other languages of the region. This dominance is seen in two ways. One is language shift – the replacement of one language by another within a population (Pauwels, 2016), which is typically preceded by language endangerment (Rehg & Campbell, 2018), broadly referring to the condition whereby a language gradually approaches a state of shift, leading to the loss of that language. The second aspect of dominance, meanwhile, consists of a discursive emphasis that repeatedly positions the Tibetan language at the forefront of language debates, over and against other languages, thus undermining the emergence of other language movements. In this sense, dominance means that Tibetan language is repeatedly taken as a legitimate topic of social and political anxieties, whereas other languages are not. However, this dominance is borderline. It is, firstly, borderline in the sense of being tenuous; it is always relative to the subordination of the dominating language within a hierarchy in which it does not occupy the apex. Languages exhibiting borderline dominance are, in significant ways, underdogs – but there exist other communities and languages further down the hierarchy, ‘beneath the underdog’.9 The curtailed supremacy of these borderline dominant languages does not imply any sense of security about their future, nor does it necessarily imply anything about their capacity to resist dominant languages. Indeed, wherever Tibetan is spoken, it is undergoing language shift. Within the PRC, for example, anxieties abound about the demise and annihilation of Tibetan (Robin, 2014; Roche, 2021; Roche & Lugyal Bum, 2018; Thurston, 2018; Yang, 2018). The language itself has a borderline existence, teetering on the edge of oblivion, and the anxieties this generates are fundamental to the operations of borderline dominance. This dominance is also borderline in the way it results from processes of language differentiation and standardization – of persistent attempts to draw a border that aligns linguistic and ethnic boundaries. For example, although 9 The phrase ‘beneath the underdog’ was used by jazz musician Charles Mingus as the title of his autobiography (Mingus, 1971).

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numerous authors have noted that Tibetans generally consider their language in the singular (Tsering Shakya, 1984; Hill & Gawne, 2017), everyday practices and vernacular discourses reveal a more complex situation. We may note, for example, the widely known proverbs that normalize the existence of linguistic diversity (Roche, 2017), persistent efforts to standardize Tibetan language (Rigdrol Jikar, 2021; Prins, 2002), and anxieties about linguistic unity (Roche, 2021). All of which suggests that linguistic diversity, whilst certainly not valorized, is unambiguously acknowledged by Tibetans. The tensions between desired unity and acknowledged diversity in the context of linguistic domination produce what Shannon Ward (this volume) refers to as a “heteroglot standard language ideology” in which “speakers orient to [multiple, competing] standard languages.” In many ways, attempts to border the Tibetan language imbue it with a resemblance to Anderson’s ‘imagined community’: it is a collectivity characterized by “deep, horizontal comradeship” with “finite, if elastic, boundaries” (Anderson, 1991). However, rather than establishing sovereignty, as with Anderson’s nation, the language as imagined community provides a foundation for a mutual intelligibility that is not only communicative, but also political, social, cultural, and historical. To speak the same language is to be understood, on multiple levels. This linguistic utopia (Pratt, 1987) of imagined intelligibility is therefore both descriptive and prescriptive; it refers to both a perceived present reality and a desired future goal. As a project of inclusion, it aims to unite Tibetans in a linguistic community against threatening external forces. But as this chapter shows, this process also requires the linguistic transformation or exclusion of certain populations. The attempt to draw a communal border based on shared language is thus also a project of dominance over other languages and communities. Borderline dominance also takes place by exploiting state borders – by working simultaneously within and across them. Working within state borders, borderline dominance makes use of the differing political affordances and resources available within different policy regimes; the separation of the Tibetan community amongst several states has been instrumentally deployed to support the imagining of a single language. Borderline dominance is therefore dominance through the exploitation of borders. At the same time, borderline dominance also operates by drawing lines through and across borders that in some sense negate their importance and permanence. Gohain (2012), for example, describes the role of the Tibetan language in the context of an emerging ‘Himalayan spatial imagination’ that promotes a pan-regional, transnational religious community. Zeisler

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(2008), meanwhile, claims that Tibetan’s dominance in Ladakh emerges from a kind of Tibetan Buddhist subaltern globalization. And MacDonald (2006, pp. 191, 192), exploring the promotion of the Tibetan script in northern Pakistan, highlights the role of “spatially extensive networks of interaction” and “transnational exchanges of people and information.” These features, then, combine to form Tibetan’s borderline dominance: transnational cross-border traffic, distinct policy regimes within borders, and the creation of ethno-linguistic borders, all within the context of anxieties produced by the subordination and oppression of Tibetan.

Conclusion: The border starts at the tip of the tongue Tibetan’s borderline dominance reveals the existence of an invisible transnational border across the Himalayas. It exists at the tip of the tongue wherever Tibetan is imposed on people who speak other languages, and also at the tip of the pen wherever written languages struggle for autonomy from the Tibetan script. Rather than a hard line on a map, this border appears in interpersonal interactions and is embedded in institutions. It is a multiple, mobile, and non-territorial border. It is the border of Tibet, a stateless nation, erased by imperialism. Although it defines a stateless nation, this border is not independent of the state. In fact, it is tolerated, legitimized, and enlivened by the uncanny and perverse cooperation between competing states (Miller, 2019) in the region and beyond. It is state intervention and investment that enables Tibetan’s pre-accumulated linguistic capital to be mobilized. And it is state oppression that has created anxieties which have intensified that mobilization. The border of Tibet is not a state border, but it is a border made by states. For the speakers of Manegacha, Tshangla, Darma, rTa’u, Yolmu, Kurtöp, Zbu, and other languages discussed in this chapter, this border is far more salient than the borders of the states they live in. Although they may never encounter state borders, they meet the mobile, multiple borders drawn around the Tibetan language repeatedly in their daily life and throughout their life course. From their standpoint, the world is not so much a world of state borders, but a world of borders created by states. Examining this world of borders created by states enables us to see the full scope of the violence of imperialism, and both the durable persistence and transformation of this violence within contemporary states. For the region’s most vulnerable populations, they must suffer the harms of engulfment within the state’s imperial borders, and their minoritization and

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marginalization therein. This is compounded by the state’s refusal to provide the support needed to secure the future for their languages. These harms of minoritization and abandonment are further compounded by exposure to a state-sponsored (or at very least state-tolerated) assimilatory program. The standpoint of these populations therefore reveals a world where imperial and nationalist violence compound to wreak ruination on both languages and language ecologies.

References Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the spread and origin of nationalism. Verso. Andvik, E. (2012). Tshangla orthography. North East Indian Linguistics, 4, 121-144. Balogh, M. (2017). Henan Oirat: A shrinking pool of unique linguistic features. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 245, 37-62. Bkra shis bzang po (2012). May all good things gather here: Life, religion, and marriage in a Minyak Tibetan village. Asian Highlands Perspectives. Blench, R. (2014). Sorting out the Monpa: Relationships of the Monpa languages of Arunachal Pradesh. Unpublished manuscript. https://s3.amazonaws.com/ academia.edu.documents/34544700/Sorting_out_Monpa.pdf Büeler, F. (2010). Ethnobotanical study among ethnic groups in the Shuiluo Valley, southwest China: Local knowledge of ritual plant use. MA diss., University of Zurich. Centre for Bhutan Studies & GNH Research (2016). A compass towards a just and harmonious society: 2015 GNH survey report. http://www.bhutanstudies.org.bt/ wp-content/uploads/2017/05/2015-Survey-Results.pdf Chamberlain, B. L. (2008). Script selection for Tibetan-related languages in multiscriptal environments. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 192, 117-131. Chatterjee, B. B. (1976). The Bhotias of Uttarakhand. India International Centre Quarterly, 3(1), 3-16. Chatterjee, B. B. (1977). Literature on Bhotias of Kumaun-Garhwal and a bibliography. Indian Anthropologist, 7(2), 125-137. Chirkova, K. (2007). Between Tibetan and Chinese: Identity and language in the Chinese southwest. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 30(3), 405-417. Choksi, N. (2014). Scripting the border: Script practices and territorial imagination among Santali speakers in eastern India. International Journal of the Sociology of Languages, 227, 47-63. Cribb, R., & Li Narangoa (2004). Orphans of empire: Divided peoples, dilemmas of identity, and old imperial borders in East and Southeast Asia. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 64(1), 164-187.

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Davis, A., Gamble, R., Roche, G., & Gawne, L. (2021). International relations and the Himalaya: Connecting ecologies, cultures, and geopolitics. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 75(1), 15-35 https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2020.1787333 van Driem, G. (2001). Languages of the Himalayas: An ethnolinguistic handbook of the greater Himalayan region, containing an introduction to the symbiotic theory of language (2 vols.). Brill. van Driem, G. (2017). Linguistic topography and language survival. In R. Korkmaz & G. Dogan (Eds.), Endangered languages of the Caucasus and beyond (pp. 244257). Brill. Fricker, M. (2000). Feminism in epistemology: Pluralism without postmodernism. M. Fricker & J. Hornsby (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to feminist philosophy (pp. 146-165). Cambridge University Press. Fried, R. W. (2010). A grammar of Bao’an Tu, a Mongolic language of northwest China. PhD thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo. Gamble, R. (2019). How dams climb mountains: China and India’s state-making hydropower contest in the eastern-Himalaya watershed. Thesis eleven, 150(1), 42-67. Gates, J. (2014). Situ in Situ: Towards a dialectology of Jiāróng (rGyalrong). Lincom Europa. Gautam, P. K., Panda, J. P., & Hussain, Z. (2012). Tibet and India’s security: Himalayan region, refugees, and Sino-Indian relations. Delhi: Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses. https://idsa.in/system/files/book/bookTibet-India.pdf Gawne, L. (2014). Similar languages, different dictionaries: A discussion of the Lamjung Yolmo and Kagate dictionary projects. Paper presented at the conference Endangered Words, Signs of Revival, 25-28 July 2013. Gohain, S. (2012). Mobilising language, imagining region: Use of Bhoti in west Arunachal Pradesh. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 46(3), 337-363. Gong, X. (2014). The personal agreement system of Zbu Rgyalrong (Ngyaltsu variety). Transactions of the Philological Society, 112(1), 44-60. Gong, X. (2019). Le rgyalrong zbu, une langue tibéto-birmane de Chine du Sud-ouest. Une étude descriptive, typologique et comparative. PhD thesis, CRLAO – Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale. https://tel.archives-ouvertes. fr/tel-01894726 Government of India (2011). Bill no. VII of 2011. The constitution amendment bill. http://164.100.24.219/BillsTexts/RSBillTexts/AsIntroduced/eight%20schd.pdf Harding, S. (Ed.) (2004). The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies. Routledge. Hill, N. W., & Gawne, L. (2017). The contribution of Tibetan languages to the study of evidentiality. In L. Gawne and N. W. Hill (Eds.), Evidential systems of Tibetan languages (pp. 1-38). De Gruyter.

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Höfer. A. (1979). The caste hierarchy and the state of Nepal: A study of the Muluki Ain of 1854. Universitätsverlag Wagner. Huber, F. K., Weckerle, C. S., & Hsu, E. (2017). The Shuhi house between reformist China and revivalist Tibet. Asiatische studien/Études Asiatiques, 71(1), 353-374. Huber, T. (2011). Pushing south: Tibetan economic and political activities in the far eastern Himalayas, ca. 1900-1950. In A. McKay and A. Balicki-Denjongpa (Eds.), Buddhist Himalaya: Studies in religion, history and culture (pp. 259-276). Namgyal Institute of Tibetology. Hughes, C. (2011). Soldiers, monks, borders: Violence and contestation in the Greater Mekong sub-region. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 41(2), 181-205. Huss, L., & Lindgren, A. (2011). Introduction: Defining language emancipation. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 209, 1-15. Hyslop, G. (2014). Kurtöp orthography development in Bhutan. In M. Cahill & K. Rice (Eds.), Developing orthographies for unwritten languages (pp. 211-230). SIL International. Janhunen, J., Peltomaa, M., Sandman, E., & Xiawu Dongzhou (2008). Wutun. Lincom Europa. Jones, R. (2017). Violent borders: Refugees and the right to move. Verso. Khan, T. A. (1998, May 1). Little Tibet: Renaissance and resistance in Baltistan. Himal Southasian, https://www.himalmag.com/little-tibet-renaissance-andresistance-in-baltistan/ Lukács, G. (1971). History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics. MIT Press. MacDonald, K. I. (2006). Memories of Tibet: Transnationalism, transculturation and the production of cultural identity in northern Pakistan. India Review, 5(2), 190-219. Martin, D. (2010). Zhangzhung dictionary: Introduction. Revue d’études tibétaines, 18, 5-32. McConnell, F. (2016). Rehearsing the state: The political practices of the Tibetan government-in-exile. John Wiley & Sons. Miller, T. (2019). Empire of borders: The expansion of the US border around the world. Verso. Mingus, C. (1971). Beneath the underdog: His world as composed by Mingus. Alfred A. Knopf. Nawang Tsering Shakspo (2005). Tibetan (Bhoti): An endangered script in TransHimalaya. The Tibet Journal, 30(1), 61-64. Pauwels, A. (2016). Language maintenance and shift. Cambridge University Press. Phyak, P. (2021). Subverting the erasure: Decolonial efforts, Indigenous language education and language policy in Nepal. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 20(5), 325-339.

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Pratt, M. L. (1987). Linguistic utopias. In N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant, & C. MacCabe (Eds.), The linguistics of writing: Arguments between language and literature (pp. 48-66). Manchester University Press. Prins, M. (2002). Towards a Tibetan common language: Amdo perspectives on attempts at language standardization. In T. Huber (Ed.), Amdo Tibetans in transition: Society and culture in the post-Mao era (pp. 27-52). Brill. Ramble, C. (1997). Tibetan pride of place: Or, why Nepal’s Bhotiyas are not an ethnic group. In D. Gellner, J. Pfaff-Czarnecka, & J. Whelpton (Eds.), Nationalism and ethnicity in a Hindu kingdom: The politics of culture in contemporary Nepal (pp. 379-414). Harwood Academic Publishers. Rehg, K. L., & Campbell, L. (Eds.). (2018). The Oxford handbook of endangered languages. Oxford University Press. Rigdrol Jikar (2021). Language standardization for Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China. In N. McLelland & H. Zhao (Eds.), Language standardization and language variation in multilingual contexts: Asian perspectives. Multilingual Matters, 203-222. Robin, F. (2014). Streets, slogans and screens: New paradigms for the defence of the Tibetan language. In T. Brox & I. Bellér-Hann (Eds.), On the fringes of the harmonious society: Tibetans and Uyghurs in socialist China (pp. 209-234). NIAS Press. Roche, G. (2016). The Tibetanization of Henan’s Mongols: Ethnicity and assimilation on the Sino-Tibetan frontier. Asian Ethnicity, 17(1), 128-149. Roche, G. (2017). Introduction: The transformation of Tibet’s language ecology in the twenty-first century. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 245, 1-35. Roche, G. (2018). Draft report on Tibet’s linguistic minorities. https://osf.io/preprints/ socarxiv/sjnbk/ Roche, G. (2019). Does ideological clarification help language maintenance? Exploring the revitalization paradox through the case of Manegacha, a Tibetan minority language. Anthropological Linguistics, 60(4), 114-134. Roche, G. (2020). The alphabetical order of things: The language of place and the place of language in Tibetan song. In K. Howard & C. Ingram (Eds.), Presence through sound: Place in East Asian musical traditions (pp. 72-86). Routledge. Roche, G. (2021). Lexical necropolitics: The raciolinguistics of language oppression on the Tibetan margins of Chineseness. Language and Communication, 76, 111-120. Roche, G., & Lugyal Bum (2018). Language revitalization of Tibetan. In L. Hinton, L. Huss, & G. Roche (Eds.), Routledge handbook of language revitalization (pp. 417427). Routledge. Roche, G., & Suzuki, H. (2017). Mapping the linguistic minorities of the eastern Tibetosphere. In K. Kurabe & M. Endo (Eds.), Studies in Asian geolinguistics VI: ‘Means to count nouns’ in Asian Languages (pp. 28-42). Research Institute for

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Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. https://publication.aa-ken.jp/sag6_count_2017.pdf Roche, G., & Yudru Tsomu (2018). Tibet’s invisible languages and China’s language endangerment crisis: Lessons from the Gochang language of western Sichuan. China Quarterly, 233, 186-210. doi: 10.1017/S0305741018000012 Samuels, J. (2018). Banishment of the B-word: Interpreting ethnic and religious revival among the Tamang people of Nepal. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 52, 17-45. Sandman, E. (2016). A grammar of Wutun. PhD thesis, University of Helsinki. Sonntag, S. (1995). Ethnolinguistic identity and language policy in Nepal. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 1(4), 108-120. Stanzin Dawa (2006, September 27). Arguments for including Bhoti language in the 8th schedule of the Indian constitution. Boloji.com. https://www.boloji.com/ articles/7718/arguments-for-including-bhoti-language Stoler, A. L. (2013). Introduction ‘The rot remains’: From ruins to ruination. In A. L. Stoler (Ed.), Imperial debris: On ruins and ruination (pp. 1-35). Duke University Press. Suzuki, H., & Sonam Wangmo (2016). Lhagang Choyu: A first look at its sociolinguistic status. In M. Endo (Ed.), Studies in Asian geolinguistics II: ‘Rice’ (pp. 60-69). Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. https://publication.aa-ken.jp/sag2_rice_2016.pdf Tashi Nyima & Suzuki, H. (2019). Newly recognised languages in Chamdo. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 42(1), 38-81. Thurston, T. (2018). The purist campaign as metadiscursive regime in China’s Tibet. Inner Asia, 20(2), 199-218. Tsering Shakya (1984). The status of the Tibetan language on the Indian sub-continent. Paper presented at the Korosi Csomo Bicentenrary Symposium, SOAS, London, 17 April 1984. Tsering Topgyal (2016). China and Tibet: The perils of insecurity. Hurst & Company. Tshe ring skyid (2015). Introduction to Rgya tshang ma, a Monguor (Tu) village in Reb gong (Tongren). In G. Roche & C. Stuart (Eds.), Mapping the Monguor (pp. 276-300). Asian Highlands Perspectives. Tunzhi (Sonam Lhundrop) (2017). Language vitality and glottonyms in the ethnic corridor: The rTa’u language. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 245, 147-168. doi: 10.1515/ijsl-2017-0006 Tunzhi (Sonam Lhundrop), Suzuki, H., & Roche, G. (2019). Language contact and the politics of recognition amongst Tibetans in China: The rTa’u-speaking ‘Horpa’ of Khams. In S. K. Sonntag and M. Turin (Eds.), The politics of language contact in the Himalaya (pp. 11-36). Open Book Publishers. doi: 10.11647/OBP.0169

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Turin, M. (2011). Results from the linguistic survey of Sikkim: Mother tongues in education. Editors: Anna BalikciDenjongpa; Alex McKay. Publisher: Namgyal Institute of Tibetology. Buddhist Himalaya: Studies in religion, history and culture, 2, 127-142. UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages (2003). Language vitality and endangerment. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000183699 Van Way, J., & Bkrashis Bzangpo (2015). Nyagrong Minyag: Prestige and maintenance of a traditional language on the Tibetan periphery. Linguistics of the TibetoBurman area, 38(2), 245-255. Willis, C. M. (2007). A descriptive grammar of Darma: An endangered Tibeto-Burman language. PhD thesis, University of Texas, Austin. Wolfe, P. (2016). Trace of history: Elementary structures of race. Verso. Yang, M. (2018). Discourses on ‘authenticity’: Language ideology, ethnic boundaries, and Tibetan identity on a multi-ethnic campus. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 39(10), 925-940. Yangdon Dhondup (2011). Reb kong: Religion, history and identity of a Sino-Tibetan borderland town. Revue d’études tibétaines, 20, 33-59. Yeh, E. (2019). The land belonged to Nepal but the people belonged to Tibet: Overlapping sovereignties and mobility in the Limi Valley borderland. Geopolitics, 26(3), 919-945. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2019.1628018 Yliniemi, J. (2019). A descriptive grammar of Denjongke (Sikkimese Bhutia). PhD thesis, University of Helsinki. Zeisler, B. (2008). Why Ladakhi must not be written: Being part of the great tradition as another kind of global thinking. In A. Saxena & L. Borin (Eds.), Lesser-known languages of South Asia: Status and policies, case studies and applications of information technology (pp. 175-194). DeGruyter.

About the author Gerald Roche is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Australia, and a co-chair of the Global Coalition for Language Rights. He is an international expert in language revitalization and the politics of language in Tibet and the Himalayas.

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Borders: In Conclusion Gwendolyn Hyslop Abstract Like the Berlin Wall, borders have been known to inculcate pain and suffering, potentially trickling down across generations. Some borders are less salient, and their effects less obvious, but they are notable catalysts of change nonetheless. This final chapter summarizes how religion, education, names, and literacy have featured as bordering forces in shaping language and language change across the greater Tibetan Plateau. Keywords: historical linguistics, Tibeto-Burman languages, Buddhism, education, literacy, nomenclature

This final chapter was initially drafted in Berlin, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. International borders were suddenly sealed shut out of the fear that COVID-infected passengers could bring the novel coronavirus into countries where the disease had not yet reached. When this book was finalised, Australia’s borders were still closed, keeping families ripped apart indefinitely. While one can understand some of the drivers behind the compulsion to create and maintain borders, we can also learn from the history of the Berlin Wall about what effect borders have on those whose lives are shaped by them. The borders discussed in this book, though not always as prominent as the Berlin Wall, or as cruel as the Australian travel ban, are nonetheless influential in shaping the lives of the people whose linguistic ecologies are described in this book. Historical linguistics has tended to focus on the change and development of linguistic structures over time, either via the ‘tree’ model (e.g. Schleicher, 1853) or the ‘wave’ model (e.g. Schmidt, 1872). The focus has largely been on the linguistic structures themselves, and not the sociocultural context in which the languages change and develop. This book has examined several languages in their social, cultural, and political contexts. The chapters comprising this

Roche, Gerald, and Gwendolyn Hyslop (eds), Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2022 DOI: 10.5117/9789463725040_CH09

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volume have outlined case studies, showing how language is used and has developed in complex multilingual environments in the Greater Tibetan region. We find four themes, in particular, that resonate throughout the stories told in these chapters. These themes are religion, education, names, and literacy. I conclude that we may want to incorporate these themes back into our historical linguistic model, that these themes can stand in as bordering forces shaping the sociohistorical context that is so relevant to language and language change.

Religion Many of our chapters have addressed the role of religion in language use and development. My own chapter argued that Classical Tibetan, as a liturgical language, has had a profound impact on the development of Kurtöp, a nonTibetic language of Bhutan. I outlined how Classical Tibetan has influenced the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Kurtöp, and likely other East Bodish languages as well. In fact, the impact of Classical Tibetan on Kurtöp is so profound that to strip the layers of the language away would probably leave Kurtöp unintelligible to any Kurtöp speaker. Buddhism is also a prominent feature of language use and development in neighbouring Sikkim. In a similar vein, Lepcha argues that it may not be possible to imagine modern day Rongring (Lepcha language) without the influence of Buddhism, as evident in many of the Tibetan words borrowed into modern-day Lepcha. There is further speculation that the Rongring script, unique in the world, was perhaps developed under the influence of Buddhism. Cathryn Donohue’s chapter also points to the strong role that Tibetan, as a liturgical language, has on the northern dialects of Nubri in northern Nepal. The Nubris are a small multilingual group in northern Nepal, speaking Nepali, Nubri, and Tibetan. Donohue argues that those who live in upper Nubri are more influenced by Tibetan than by Nepali, whereas in the lower region, the stronger pull is from Nepali. One might also ask about the role that religion plays in these different regions. For example, is it the case that the upper Nubris are more devout Buddhists? Gerald Roche’s chapters provides a summary of the influence the Tibetan script has had in South and Inner Asia, noting its indexical relation to Tibetan identity. We can further extrapolate that Buddhism is an important aspect of the esteemed Tibetan identity. While most of this book touches on the role that Buddhism and Tibetan play on smaller, more minoritised languages, Roche also points to the attempt to use the Himalayas as a ‘Buddhist buffer’ in order to resist Chinese encroachment.

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Education The role of education in making and reinforcing linguistic boundaries is made clear in the chapters by Shannon Ward and Dirk Schmidt. Ward’s chapter considers how children use language in school, in song, and at home, alternating between the local Amdo variant and Mandarin Chinese. She concludes that heteroglot standard language ideology does not foster unity amidst diversity, but conspires with education policy and rural to urban migration to encourage children’s language shift to Mandarin. As stated in the introduction, we had to pull one chapter just before production, due to editing requirements from a powerful state authority. This chapter had examined education and educational policy in China. The author found that some Tibetan students do not speak Mandarin at all, for fear of speaking it incorrectly, but on the other hand, some students and teachers were reported to the school for speaking a local language that is unrecognised by the state and excluded from formal educational settings. The author also highlighted a beautiful example of what was referred to as ‘cultural ventriloquism’, in which ethnically Tibetan students proudly display their traditional dress and sacred landscapes in a video, while speaking Mandarin. This chapter was thus a formidable example of how even without official policy, a dominant language may exert extreme power. The final bordering effect of this ‘education’ is felt as the chapter was so sharply edited that it needed to be removed. Schmidt’s chapter outlines Tibetan language use in India, amongst the diaspora community in India. He shows many of the problems posed to anyone who studies literary Tibetan: the spoken language is far removed from the orthography. However, this difference is more pronounced in the linguistically complex diasporic community. All in all, literacy is a challenge in this context in particular.

Names There are few things more personal than an individual’s name. In India, for example, a person’s name gives away their religion, generally identifying them as being either Hindu or Muslim (or one of the minority religions). A name in tribal Northeast India will also often denote the person’s belonging to a particular ethnolinguistic group. And in the rich multi-ethnic and multilingual Greater Tibetan region, ethnolinguistic belonging is a core element of human identity.

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Suzuki’s chapter highlights issues involved in the names of languages, or glottonyms, in the eastern Tibetosphere. He shows a multilayered system of categorisation that is often at odds with the classification of linguists, a fact that has also been neatly pointed out in Northeast India by Burling (2011). Suzuki also reminds us that speakers of languages themselves have unique insights, sometimes overlooked by experts, as he states “[l]inguists should therefore be attentive to the multiple ways that Minyag people border themselves.” Roche’s chapter (Chapter 8) also references several local names for various ethnolinguistic groups, including ‘Bhoti’ and ‘Monpa’. Both terms have been used for different groups in different regions over time. The latter term, for example, can be used to refer to Tshangla (e.g. Dirang Monpa) or Dakpa (e.g. Northern or Tawang Monpa) speakers in Arunachal Pradesh (see e.g. Hyslop & Tshering, 2010) or various varieties of ‘Black Mountain Mönpa’ (e.g. Van Driem, 1995) in Bhutan, amongst other groups. These names have very personal meanings for the people who speak these languages. Some Dakpa speakers in eastern Bhutan, for example, report getting angry when they are called ‘Dakpas’ and much prefer the more linguistically vague ‘Monpa’.

Literacy Literacy itself is a border-maker, delineating written language from nonwritten language, and marking a line between those who are able to read and those who are not. Roche notices the rigid distinction between speech and writing in Tibetan in his introductory chapter, stating: “The Tibetan language of language therefore provides a complex case for translating the binaries and hierarchies imposed by both Westphalian borders and Western language ideologies,” noting that we see this particularly in the Tibetan philological tradition as literary Tibetan is taken as the standard. This theme is also strongly present in Schmidt’s chapter, who treats Written Tibetan as another ‘type’ of Tibetan. The theme of literacy is layered in Lepcha’s chapter. She shows how Tibetan (primarily as a literary liturgical language) has had a profound impact on the Lepcha language. This impact is also felt on the relationship the Lepchas have with their own indigenous script, as its history is contentiously linked to Tibetan orthography by some. The doubling of literacy borders has created an especially complex relationship between Tibetan language and Lepcha identity. The indexical use of a script is highlighted

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in Roche’s chapter (Chapter 8), showing us that literacy itself also has direct social impacts throughout the Greater Himalayan region. Literacy is indirectly shown to be a bordering theme in my own contribution in this volume (Chapter 3). The line between Kurtöp (and its East Bodish sisters) and Tibetan has been blurred over centuries of contact; no doubt Written Chöke (in addition to spoken varieties) has been one of the primary pressures. Donohue argued that the lack of a writing system in Nubri was a factor in the language’s impending loss. In other words, we can see literacy is again seen as a bordering force in Nepal’s linguistic landscape as a theoretical local writing system could be interpreted as such, possibly preventing language loss in the future.

Concluding thoughts Language is a formidable force; we communicate and misunderstand each other with it, we define ourselves by it, we structure our identity with it, we exert our power with it. Linguists give borders to diverse ways of speaking by naming languages versus dialects, usually without regard to the names and terms speakers themselves use. Even without linguists, languages change over time, creating natural (albeit often fuzzy) borders between intelligibility and unintelligibility. Borders between and across nation states and linguist groups manipulate these linguistic borders, for better or for worse. In order to fully understand language and how language changes in time and space, it is crucial for linguists to also deeply consider the social, ethnic, personal, and political contexts in which the languages exist and have been spoken. The chapters in this book have highlighted some of the ways in which borders and languages interact. Religion and education are among the most powerful drivers. At the end of the day, the decision of what to speak, when to speak, and how to speak appears to be made predominantly by children, as they acquire their language and identity in tandem. That is, children react to and grow in their local environments, especially in terms of schools and religious and political institutions. The language they come to speak reflects this environment and the powerful impact of these institutions on their development. Finally, the presence versus absence of a script can have a profound effect on a language and the identity of the people who speak, creating further borders between those who have the literary capacity to make use of a script and those who do not. The chapters in this book have helped us understand the various processes at play by considering language as mediated through, with, and across borders.

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References Burling, R. (2011). Three meanings of ‘Language’ and ‘Dialect’ in Northeast India. In G. Hyslop, S. Morey, & M. W. Post (Eds.)., North East Indian linguistics (pp. 35-45). Cambridge University Press. van Driem, G. (1995). “Black Mountain verbal agreement morphology, proto-TibetoBurman morphosyntax and the linguistic position of Chinese.” In Y. Nishi, J. A. Matisoff, & Y. Nagano (Eds.), New horizons in Tibeto-Burman morphosyntax (pp. 229-259). National Museum of Ethnology. Hyslop, G., & K. Tshering (2010). Preliminary notes on Dakpa (Tawang Monpa). In S. Morey & M. Post (Eds.), North East Indian linguistics 2 (pp. 3-21). Cambridge University Press. Schleicher, A. (1853). Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes. Allgemeine Zeitung für Wissenschaft und Literatur. Schmidt, J. (1872). Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der indogermanischen Sprachen. H. Böhlau.

About the author Gwendolyn Hyslop received her PhD from the University of Oregon and is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. She is a specialist in Tibeto-Burman languages, in particular those from Bhutan. She has written a grammar of Kurtöp and also specializes in historical linguistics.

1

Tibetan Language Summaries Introduction: Bordering Tibetan Languages Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia Gerald Roche

དེབ་འདིར ་གནས་གང ་ དུ ་ཇི ་ལྟར ་ དང ་ སུ ་ཞིག་གིས་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ ས་མཚམས་གསར ་ དུ ་ སྐྲུན་ བཞིན་པར ་ བརྟག་

པ་ སྟེ། སྐད་ ཡིག་ གི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ ཤིག་ གིས ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ གཞན་ རྣམས ་ཏེ ་ ཁྱད་ པར ་ རྒྱལ ་ ཁབ་ ཀྱི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ ལ ་ འབྲེལ ་ འདྲིས ་ བྱེད་ པར ་ བརྟག་ པ་ ཡིན། འདིར ་ ད་ དུང ་ རྒྱལ ་ ཁབ་ དང ་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ མཚམས ་

ཚིགས ་ཀྱི ་ འབྲེལ ་ འདྲིས ་ དེས ་ མི་ རྣམས ་ཀྱི ་ འཚོ ་ བར ་ ཤུགས ་ རྐྱེན་ གང ་ འདྲ ་ ཐེབས ་ པའི ་ སྐོར ་ ལའང ་ བརྟག་ གི་ ཡིན། ཡིན་ ནའང ་ འདིར ་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ དང ་ རྒྱལ་ ཁབ་ཀྱི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ གང ་ ཡིན་ ཡང ་ རང ་

བྱུང ་ ཞིག་ ཡིན་ པར ་ ཚོད་ དཔག་ བྱེད་ ཀྱིན་ མེད། མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ རིགས ་ གཉིས ་ ལས ་ གང ་ ཡིན་ ཡང ་ བགྲོ ་ གླེང ་ དང ་ རྩོད་ གཞི ་ ཡོད་ པ་ དང ་ བགྲོ ་ གླེང ་ དེ་ དག་ ལ ་ དབང ་ ཆས ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ ཐེབས ་ ཀྱི ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད།

རྩོད ་ གཞི ་ འདི ་ དག ་ གི ་ མཇུག ་ འབྲས ་ ཀྱིས ་ མི ་ མ ་ འདྲ ་ བར ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བ ་ ཐེབས ་ པ ་

སྟེ། མི ་ སྐོར ་ ཞིག་ ལ ་ ཁེ་ ཕན་ དང ་ སྐོར ་ ཞིག་ ལ ་ གྱོང ་ རེག་ པ་ རེད། གྱོང ་ གུད་ དེ་ ཧ ་ ཅང ་ ཚབས ་ ཆེན་ ཡིན་

པའི ་ སྐབས ་ཀྱང ་ ཡོད་ དེ། དཔེར ་ ན། གལ ་ སྲིད་ སྲིད་ གཞུང ་ གང ་ ཞིག་ གིས ་ སྐད་ གཉིས ་ཀྱི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་

བསུབ ་ པ་ ཡིན་ ན་ སྐད་ ཅིག་ ལ ་ ཡུལ ་ སྐད་ ཅེས ་ འདོགས ་ སྲིད་ ཅིང ་ དེ་ ལ ་ སྲིད་ གཞུང ་ གིས ་ དེར ་ མཐུན་ གྱི ་

སྐད་ ཡིག་ སྲིད་ ཇུས ་ གང ་ ཡང ་ ལག་ བསྟར ་ མི ་ བྱེད། སྐད་ དེ་ འཆད་ མཁན་ རྣམས ་ ལ ་ ཕ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ སློབ་ གསོ ་

མི ་ ཐོབ་ ཅིང ་ ཁོ་ ཚོར ་ རང ་ གི་ ཕ་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ ལམ་ ནས ་ བདེ་ ཐང ་ སྐོར ་ གྱི ་ ཤེས ་ བྱའང ་ མི ་ འབྱོར། ཁོ་ ཚོར ་ སྐད་

ཀྱི ་ ཆེད་ དུ ་ སྲིད་ གཞུང ་ གི་ མ་ དངུལ་ མི་ ཐོབ་ ཅིང ་ ཁོ་ ཚོའི ་ སྐད་ ལ་ ཐོབ་ ཐང ་ མི་ སྤྲོད་ པ་ སོགས ་ཀྱི ་ དོན་ དག་ འབྱུང ་ གི ་ རེད། གལ ་ སྲིད་ ས ་ གནས ་ ཀྱི ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ ཤིག ་ གིས ་ སྐད་ ཡིག ་ གི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ བསུབས ་ པ ་

ཡིན་ ན་ སྐད་ དེ་ བཤད་ མཁན་ གྱི ་ མི ་ རྣམས ་ ལ ་ བརྩི་ བཀུར ་ མི ་ ཐོབ ་ ཅིང ་། ཁོ་ ཚོ ་ གཞན་ དང ་ འདྲ ་ མཉམ ་ ཡིན་ པར ་ མི ་ བལྟ་ བར ་ རྒྱུན་ དུ ་ མཐོང ་ ཆུང ་ ཉོ་ དགོས ་ ཐུག་ གི ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད།

བོད་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ ཡིག ་ དང ་ འབྲེལ ་ བའི ་ གནད་ དོན་ འདི་ དག ་ ལ ་ ཞིབ ་ འཇུག ་ བྱེད་ པ ་ གལ ་ ཆེན་ ཡིན་ པར ་

རྒྱུ ་ མཚན་ ཁ་ ཤས ་ ཡོད ་ དེ། ཐོག ་ མར ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ དེ ་ རྩོད ་ གཞི ་ ཡོད ་ པའི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ འདུ ་ བའི ་ རྒྱལ ་ ཁབ ་ ཁ་ ཤས ་ ཀྱི ་ མངའ ་ ཁོངས ་ སུ ་ ཁྱབ ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ དང ་ རྒྱལ ་ ཁབ ་ དང ་ ས ་ ཁུལ ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བར ་ སྐད ་ ཡིག ་ གི ་

སྲིད་ ཇུས ་ཀྱང ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། སྐད་ ཡིག་ དང ་ མི ་ རིགས ་ ཁ་ ཤས ་ རྒྱལ ་ མཚམས ་ བརྒལ ་ ནས ་ ཡོད་ པ ་ རེད། མི ་ རིགས ་ ཀྱི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ དང ་ སྐད་ ཡིག ་ གི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ དེ་ རྒྱལ ་ མཚམས ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བའི ་ དབང ་ གིས ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བ ་ ཆགས ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། སྐད་ ཡིག་ གི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ ལ ་ ཆ ་ བཞག་ ནའང ་ བོད་ ཡིག་

དང ་ ཨིན་ ཡིག་ གི ་ ཐ་ སྙད་ དག ་ གི ་ མཚོན་ དོན་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ ཞིང ་ དེས ་ སྐད་ དང ་ ཡུལ ་ སྐད་ བགོ ་ སྟངས ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བར ་ བྱེད་ ཅིང ་ མཇུག་ འབྲས ་ ཀྱང ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བ་ ཡོང ་ གི ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད།

དེབ ་ འདིར ་ འཁོད ་ པའི ་ ལེའུ ་ རྣམས ་ སུ ་ སྐད ་ ཡིག ་ གཙོ ་ བོར ་ བཟུང ་ སྟེ་ རྒྱལ ་ ཁབ ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བར ་ བྱུང ་

བའི ་ གནད ་ དོན་ འདི ་ དག ་ ལ ་ བརྟག ་ དཔྱད ་ བྱས ་ ཡོད། ཀྲུང ་ གོའི ་ སྐོར ་ ལ ་ ལེའུ ་ གསུམ ་ དང ་ འབྲུག ་ ཡུལ ་

གྱི ་ སྐོར ་ ལ ་ ལེའུ ་ གཅིག རྒྱ ་ གར ་ གྱི ་ སྐོར ་ ལ ་ ལེའུ ་ གཉིས། བལ ་ པོའི ་ སྐོར ་ ལ ་ ལེའུ ་ གཅིག ད་ དུང ་ ས ་ ཁུལ ་

204 

Gwendolyn Hyslop

འདིའི ་ རྒྱལ་ ཁབ་ ཡོངས ་ ལ་ བརྟག་ དཔྱད་ བྱས ་ པའི ་ ལེའུ ་ གཅིག་ བཅས ་ འདུ། ལེའུ ་ ཚང ་ མས ་ བོད་ སྐད་ དང ་

སྐད་ གཞན་ པར ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ བཟོས ་ པ་ དང ་ རྩོད་ གཞི ་ ཇི ་ འདྲ ་ ཡོང ་ བ། འགྱུར ་ བ་ ཇི ་ འདྲ ་ བྱུང ་ བ ་ སོགས ་ ཀྱི ་ བྱས ་ འབྲས ་ ཁག ་ ལ ་ རྟོག ་ ཞིབ ་ བྱས ་ ཡོད་ ཅིང ་། དེབ ་ འདིའི ་ རྩོམ ་ པ་ པོ ་ རྣམས ་ ནི་ སྐད་ བརྡ་ རིག་ པ་ བ་ དང ་། མིའི ་ རིགས ་ རིག་ པ་ བ། སློབ་ གསོའི ་ ཆེད་ མཁས ་ བཅས ་ ཀྱིས ་ གྲུབ་ ཡོད།

ལེའུ ་ འདི་ དྲི་ བ་ ཁ་ ཤས ་ཀྱིས ་ མཇུག་ བསྡུས ་ ཡོད་ དེ། གལ་ སྲིད་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ ལ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ འགོད་ པ་

དེས ་ སྐབས ་ དང ་ སྐབས ་ སུ ་ མི་ རྣམས ་ ལ ་ གྱོང ་ གུད་ ཕོག་ ཏུ ་ འཇུག་ པ་ ཡིན་ ན་ ང ་ ཚོ ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ གནད་ དོན་ དེ་ ལས ་ གཡོལ ་ དགོས། རྒྱལ ་ མཚམས ་ དང ་ མི ་ རིགས ་ ཀྱི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས། སྐད་ ཡིག་ གི ་ མཚམས ་ ཚིགས ་ ཀྱི ་ འབྲེལ ་ བ་ ཅི་ ལྟ་ བུ ་ ཞིག་ ཡིན་ ན་ ད་ གཟོད་ མི ་ རྣམས ་ ལ ་ ཆེས ་ ཁེ་ ཕན་ དང ་ ལྡན་ པ་ ཞིག་ ཡིན།

2 Playing with Language Boundaries Heteroglot Standard Language Ideology and Linguistic Belonging among Amdo Children Shannon Ward ལེའུ ་ འདིར ་ སྨྱུག ་ ཐོགས ་ པས ་ སྤྱི ་ ལོ༢༠༡༦ལོ ་ ནས ་༢༠༡༨ལོའི ་ བར ་ དུ ་ཟླ་ བཅོ་ ལྔ་ ལྷག ་ གི ་ རིང ་ ཨ ་ མདོའི ་

ཞིང ་ པ་ མང ་ ཚོགས ་ དང ་ འབྲེལ ་ འདྲིས ་ བྱེད་ སྐབས ་ དིང ་ སང ་ ཨ ་ མདོའི ་ བྱིས ་ པའི ་ ཁྲོད་ དུ ་ ཕ་ སྐད་ གཙང ་ མའི ་ རྒྱུ ་འབྲས ་ལ་མི་རིགས ་རིག་པ་ དང ་ སྐད་ བརྡ་རིག་པའི ་ ཡུལ་ དངོས ་རྟོག་ཞིབ་ བྱས ་པའི ་ དཔྱད་འབྲས ་ ཡིན་ ལ། བྱིས ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱི ་ ཉིན་ རྒྱུན་ འཚོ ་ བའི ་ ཁྲོད ་ ཁྱིམ ་ མི ་ དང ་ ན་ མཉམ ་ དབར ་ གྱི ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ འབྲེལ ་

འདྲིས ་ ལ ་ བརྙན་ འབེབ ་ དང ་ སྒྲ ་ ལེན་ བྱས། འཚོལ ་ བསྡུ ་ བྱས ་ པའི ་ གཞི ་ གྲངས ་ ཀྱིས ་ ཚོ ་ བ ་ གཅིག ་ གི ་ ལོ ་ གཉིས ་ ནས ་ ལྔའི ་ བར ་ གྱི ་ བྱིས ་ པའི ་ སྐད ་ སློབ ་ སྟངས ་ ལ ་ ཞིབ ་ སྡུར ་ བྱས ་ པ ་ དང ་། བྱིས ་ པ ་ དེ ་ དག ་ གི ་

ཁྱིམ ་ ཚང ་ ཁག ་ གཅིག ་ ཞིང ་ གྲོང ་ དུ ་ ཡོད་ པ་ དང ་ ཁག ་ ཅིག ་ ཟི ་ ལིང ་ གྲོང ་ ཁྱེར ་ དུ ་ གནས ་ སྤར ་ ཡོད། བྱིས ་ པ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱི ་ ཉིན་ རྒྱུན་ གྱི ་ འབྲེལ ་ ལམ ་ བརྙན་ འབེབ ་ དང ་ སྒྲ་ ལེན་ བྱས ་ པས། གཞི ་ གྲངས ་ སུ ་ ལོ ་ ཚོད་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བའི ་ བྱིས ་ པ་ དང ་ ཁྱིམ ་ མི ་ ཚང ་ མ ་ འདུས།

གཞི ་ གྲངས ་ དཔྱད ་ ཞིབ ་ བརྒྱུད། ལེའུ ་ འདིར ་ དེང ་ གི ་ ཨ ་ མདོའི ་ བྱིས ་ པའི ་ མི ་ རབས ་ ཀྱིས ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་

དང ་ རྒྱ ་ སྐད ་ དབར ་ དུ ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ ཁོངས ་ གཏོགས ་ ཀྱི ་ དབྱེ ་ མཚམས ་ འབྱེད ་ ཚུལ ་ བསྟན་ པ ་ དང ་། སྨྱུག་ ཐོགས ་ པས ་ སྐད་ གཅིག་ གྱུར ་ ལ ་ མིའི ་ རིགས ་ རིག་ པའི ་ ལྟ་ ཚུལ ་ གྱིས ་ སྤྲོས ་ཏེ ་ དབྱེ ་ མཚམས ་ འདི་ ནི་ རང ་ བྱུང ་ གི ་ སྣང ་ ཚུལ ་ ཞིག ་ མིན་ པར ་ རིག ་ གནས ་ ཡུན་ གནས ་ ཀྱི ་ དམིགས ་ ཡུལ ་ གྱི ་ ཆེད ་ དུ ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ དང ་ རྒྱ ་ སྐད་ གཉིས ་ སྐད་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བ ་ གཉིས ་ ཡིན་ པའི ་ ཀུན་ སྤྱོད་ རྩ་ བར ་ བྱས ་ པའི ་ ཡིད་ རྟོན་ ཞིག་ ཏུ ་ གྲུབ ་

པར ་ འདོད། ཡིད་ རྟོན་ འདི་ ནི་ཨ་ མདོར ་ རྒྱའི ་ སྤྱི ་ སྐད་ རྒྱ ་ ཆེར ་ དར ་ བ་ དང ་ དེ་ དང ་ ལྷན་ དུ ་ ཁྲོམ་ རའི ་ དཔལ ་ འབྱོར ་ གྱི ་ འཕེལ ་ རྒྱས ་ཀྱིས ་ སྲོལ ་ རྒྱུན་ གྱི ་ འཚོ ་ ཚིས ་ བྱེད་ སྟངས ་ཀྱི ་ ཁྱབ་ ཆུང ་ ངུར ་ བཏང ་ ལ། གྲོང ་ གསེབ་ ནས ་ གྲོང ་ ཁྱེར ་ དུ ་ གནས ་ སྤོ་ བར ་ སྐུལ་ སློང ་ བྱས ་ པ་ ལས ་ བྱུང ་ ཞིང ་། སྤྱིར ་ ཡིད་ རྟོན་ འདི་ རིགས ་ ནི་ བོད་ཀྱི ་ རིག ་ གནས ་ དང ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ ཡུན་ གནས ་ ཆེད ་ དུ ་ ཡིན་ ཡང ་། སྨྱུག ་ ཐོགས ་ པས ་ ཡིད ་ རྟོན་ འདི ་ རིགས ་ ཀྱིས ་ ཤེས ་ མེད ་ ཚོར ་ མེད ་ དུ ་ ན་ ཆུང ་ བྱིས ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད ་ ལ ་ འགྱུར ་ བ ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ གཏོང ་ བཞིན་ པར ་ གསལ ་

བཤད ་ བྱས ་ ཡོད། ལྷག ་ པར ་ བྱིས ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ ཕ ་ སྐད ་ གཙང ་ མ ་ དང ་ རྒྱའི ་ སྤྱི ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ དག ་ ཆར ་ གཞོལ ་ ཆེ ་

བས ་ ཁོང ་ ཚོ ་ རང ་ གི ་ ཡུལ ་ སྐད ་ དང ་ རིང ་ དུ ་ གྱེས ་ པ ་ དང ་། ཡུལ ་ སྐད ་ དང ་ གྱེས ་ པས ་ ཁོང ་ ཚོས ་ ཡུལ ་

Tibetan L anguage Summaries

205

སྐད ་ ཤེས ་ རྒྱུད ་ ལ ་ ཞུགས ་ པ ་ དང ་ རིག ་ གནས ་ ཀྱི ་ དོན་ སྙིང ་ ཞིག ་ འགྲུབ ་ པ ་ ཕར ་ ཞོག །དེ ་ ལས ་ ལྡོག ་ སྟེ་

གྲོང ་ གསེབ ་ དང ་ གྲོང ་ ཁྱེར ་ དབར ་ གྱི ་ ཁྱད ་ པར ་ དབྱེ ་ འབྱེད ་ ཀྱི ་ ངོས ་ ལེན ་ ཞིག ་ བྱུང ་། བྱིས ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་

ལ ་ གྲོང ་ གསེབ ་ དང ་ གྲོང ་ ཁྱེར ་ གྱི ་ ཧེ ་ བག ་ ངོས ་ ལེན་ ཞིག ་ བྱུང ་ དུས། ཁོང ་ ཚོས ་ སོ ་ སོའི ་ ཁྱིམ ་ ཚང ་ གིས ་

སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ དཔལ ་ འབྱོར ་ གི ་ འཁོར ་ སྐྱོད ་ ཀྱི ་ མོས ་ འདུན ་ ལ ་ རྣམ ་ འགྱུར ་ སྟོན ་ བཞིན ་ མཆིས། གང ་ ལྟར ་ ཧེ ་ བག ་ འདིས ་ བོད་ སྐད་ དང ་ རྒྱ ་ སྐད་ དབར ་ གྱི ་ རིམ ་ པའི ་ གྲུབ ་ ཚུལ ་ ལ ་ སྔར ་ ལས ་ ལྷག ་ པའི ་ རྟིང ་ གནོན་ བྱས ་ པ་ དང ་། དེས ་ བྱིས ་ པ་ རྣམས ་ དང ་ ཁོང ་ ཚོའི ་ ཁྱིམ ་ མི ་ རྒན་ པ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱི ་ དབར ་ དང ་། དེ་ བཞིན་ གྲོང ་ གསེབ་ དང ་ གྲོང ་ ཁྱེར ་ དབར ་ གྱི ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ གྱེས ་ འཐོར ་ ཞིག་ ཀྱང ་ བཟོས།

3 The Role of Classical Tibetan (Chöke) on the Development of Kurtöp, a Language of Bhutan Gwendolyn Hyslop མི་ རྣམས ་ཀྱིས ་ ཕལ ་ ཆེར ་ འབྲུག་ དང ་ བོད་ཀྱི ་ རིག་ གནས ་ དང ་ འདྲ ་ བའི ་ ཆ་ དང ་ བོད་ ཡིག་ གི་ འབྲི་ སྟངས ་

རིགས ་ ཤིག ་ འབྲུག ་ ཡུལ ་ གྱི ་ གཞུང ་ ཕྱོགས ་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ དེ་ རྫོང ་ ཁར ་ བཀོལ ་ བཞིན་ ཡོད་ པས ་ ན་ འབྲུག ་ ཡུལ ་ གྱི ་ སྐད་ རྣམས ་ ནི་ བོད་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ ལུང ་ སྐད་ དུ ་ ངོས ་ འཛིན་ བྱེད་ ཀྱིན་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། སངས ་ རྒྱས ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་

འབྲུག ་ ཡུལ ་ གྱི ་ རྒྱལ ་ ཆོས ་ སུ ་ བཀོལ ་ ཞིང ་ རྒྱལ ་ འབངས ་ མང ་ ཤས ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ གང ་ དེའི ་ ཆོས ་ བརྒྱུད ་

ཁག ་ ལ ་ དད་ མོས ་ བྱེད་ མཁན་ ཡིན་ པ་ རེད། ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ འདི་ ཡང ་ ཡི་ གེ ་ བརྒྱུད་ བོད་ པ་ རྣམས ་ དང ་ ཐད་ ཀར ་ འབྲེལ ་ ནས ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ ཞིག ་ ཡིན། བོད ་ ཡིག ་ གམ ་ འབྲུག ་ ཡུལ ་ དུ ་ ཆོས ་ སྐད ་ དུ ་ འབོད ་ པ ་ དེ ་ འབྲུག ་ ཡུལ ་ གྱི ་ སངས ་ རྒྱས ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ཀྱི ་ ཆོས ་ བརྒྱུད་ ཁག་ གི་ བསྟན་ བཅོས ་ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ ཡིན་ ཞིང ་ རྒྱལ ་ ཁབ་ གང ་

དེར ་ ཐོབ་ ཐང ་ ཧ ་ ཅང ་ མཐོན་ པོ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། དེ་ བས ་ འབྲུག་ ཡུལ ་ གྱི ་ དེང ་ རབས ་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ བཅུ ་ དགུ ་ ཙམ ་ ལ ་ ཆོས ་ སྐད་ཀྱིས ་ གནོན་ ཤུགས ་ སྤྲོད་ཀྱིན་ ཡོད་ དེ་ སངས ་ རྒྱས ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ འབྲུག་ ཡུལ ་ དུ ་ དར ་ བའི ་ དུས ་

ཡུན་ཏེ། ཕལ ་ ཆེར ་ ལོ ་ ངོ ་ སྟོང ་ ཕྲག་ གཅིག་ ལྷག་ ཙམ ་ ལ ་ འདི་ ལྟར ་ ཡོང ་ ཡོད་ པར ་ སྣང ་། རྩོམ ་ ཡིག་ འདིར ་ ཆོས ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ ཆབ་ སྲིད་ དང ་ སྐད་ བརྡའི ་ མཐའ ་ མཚམས ་ སོགས ་ ཀྱིས ་ འབྲུག་ ཡུལ ་ གྱི ་ ཤར ་བྷོཊའི ་ སྐད་ དེ་ ཀུར ་ ཐོབ་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ འཕེལ ་ རྒྱས ་ ལ ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ ཅི་ ཙམ་ ཐེབས ་ ཡོད་ པ་ སོགས ་ གཙོར ་ བཟུང ་ སྟེ་ བཤད་ ཡོད།

ཀུར ་ ཐོབ་ སྐད་ ནི་ འབྲུག་ ཡུལ ་ བྱང ་ ཤར ་ གྱི ་ ཤར ་བྷོཊའི ་ སྐད་ ཅིག་ སྟེ། ཕལ ་ ཆེར ་ མི་ གྲངས ་ ཆིག་ ཁྲི་ ལྔ་

སྟོང ་ ལྷག་ གིས ་ སྐད་ དེ་ བཤད་ཀྱིན་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། ཀུར ་ ཐོབ་ སྐད་ ནི་ ཤར ་བྷོཊའི ་ སྐད་ གཞན་ དག་ དང ་ འདྲ ་ བར ་ བོད་ སྐད་ རྙིང ་ བའི ་ ཡན་ ལག་ ཐད་ ཀར ་ བ་ ཞིག་ མ་ ཡིན་ པར ་ བོད་ འབྲེལ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ གི་ སྐད་ བརྡ་ རིག་

པའི ་ ཚོགས ་ པ་ གཞན་ ཞིག་ ལ ་ གཏོགས ་ པ་ རེད། ཡིན་ ནའང ་ ཆོས ་ སྐད་ཀྱིས ་ ཀུར ་ ཐོབ་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ འཕེལ ་ རྒྱས ་ ཏེ། སྒྲ་ གདངས ་ དང ་ ཚིག བརྡ་ སྤྲོད་ སོགས ་ ལ ་ དུས ་ རབས ་ མང ་ པོར ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ ཆེན་ པོ ་ ཐེབས ་ ཡོད་ པ ་

རེད། ང ་ ཚོས ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ འདི ་ ཀུར ་ ཐོབ ་ ཀྱི ་ སྤུན་ ཟླའི ་ སྐད ་ རིགས ་ དག ་ དང ་ བསྡུར ་ བ ་ བྱེད ་ པ ་ དང ་ ལོ ་ རྒྱུས ་ གཤིབ་ བསྡུར ་ སྐད་ བརྡ་ རིག་ པའི ་ གོ ་ དོན་ སྤྱད་ ནས ་ མཐོང ་ ཐུབ་ པ་ ཡིན།

ཤར ་བྷོཊའི ་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ གཉུག་ མའི ་ ཐ་ སྙད་ ཁ་ ཤས ་ བསྐྱར ་ བསྐྲུན་ བྱེད་ ཐུབ་ པ་ ནི། *kwa ‘སོ’ *krɑm

‘སྲམ’ *khwi ‘ཁྱི’ *khɑr ‘དཀར’ *mlɑ ‘མདའ’ *nas ‘ནས’ *branma ‘སྲན་མ’ *kyabran ‘སྐྱ་བྲ’*gju ‘འོ་མ’

h གྲངས ་ ཀ ་ *t ek ‘ གཅིག’ དང ་ *ble ‘བཞི’ སོགས ་ དང ་ བྱ ་ ཚིག་ མང ་ པོ་ ཡོད་ པ་ ལས*rɑ ‘ ཡོང ་ ’ དང ་

*gal ‘ འགྲོ’, དྲི ་ ཚིག་ གི་ ཕྲད་ *loསོགས ་ སོ།།

206 

Bordering Tibe tan L anguages

ཀུར ་ ཐོབ ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ མེས ་ པོའི ་ སྐད ་ དེ ་ ག ་ འདྲ ་ ཞིག ་ ཡིན་ པ ་ ཧ ་ གོ ་ བའི ་ རྗེས ་ ལ ་ ང ་ ཚོས ་ དེ ་ བོད ་ ཡིག ་

དང ་ བསྡུར ་ བ ་ བྱས ་ པ ་ བརྒྱུད ་ ཆོས ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ མཐོང ་ ཐུབ ་ པ ་ ཡིན། ཀུར ་ ཐོབ ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ སངས ་ རྒྱས ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ དང ་ འབྲེལ ་ བའི ་ ཐ ་ སྙད ་ ཁག ་ ཅིག ་ ལས ་ གཞན་ ཞེ ་ ས ་ དང ་ བརྡ ་ སྤྲོད ་ ཀྱི ་ རྣམ ་ གཞག ་ སོགས ་ ལའང ་ ཆོས ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ ཐེབས ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ ནི་ དཔེར ་ ན། བུམ ་ པ ་ དང ་ མཁན་ པོ ་ སོགས ་ ལྟ་

བུ ་ དང ་ ཞེ ་ སའི ་ ཐ་ སྙད་ སྤྱན་ ལྟ་ བུའོ། ཁྱད་ པར ་ དུ ་ བྱེད་ སྒྲའི ་ ཕྲད་ “གིས ་” དང ་ མིང ་ ཚིག་ ཅན་ དུ ་ གཏོང ་ བྱེད་ “མཁན་” དང ་ གནས ་ གཞིའི ་ ཕྲད་ “རོ ་” སོགས ་ ཡོད་ དོ།།

སྤྱིར ་ དེང ་ རབས ་ ཤར ་བྷོཊའི ་ སྐད ་ རྣམས ་ ནི་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ རྙིང ་ བའི ་ ཡན་ ལག ་ ཐད ་ ཀར ་ བ ་ མིན་ ནའང ་

སྐད ་ དེ ་ དག ་ དུས ་ དང ་ བར ་ སྟོང ་ གཅིག ་ ཏུ ་ དུས ་ རབས ་ མང ་ པོར ་ མཉམ ་ གནས ་ བྱས ་ ཡོད། གཙོ ་ རྒྱུགས ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ཏེ་ སངས ་ རྒྱས ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ དང ་ དེར ་ འབྲེལ ་ བའི ་ ཆོས ་ སྐད་ཀྱིས ་ ཤར ་བྷོཊའི ་ སྐད་ ལ ་ ཐེབས ་ པའི ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ དེས ་ དུས ་ དང ་ སྐད་ དང ་ ཆབ་ སྲིད་ ཀྱི ་ ས ་ མཚམས ་ ལ ་ འགྲན་ བསླངས ་ ཡོད་ དོ།།

4 Reimagining Rongring without Tibetan Buddhist Influence Charisma K. Lepcha ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ སྐད་ ནི་ ཧི ་ མ་ ལ ་ ཡའི ་ ཤར ་ རྒྱུད་ཀྱི ་ ས ་ མཚམས ་ སུ ་ གནས ་ འཆའ ་ བའི ་ ས ་ སྐྱེས ་ རྡོ་ སྐྱེས ་ཀྱི ་ ལེབ་

ཅ ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ ཅིག ་ ཡིན་ ཞིང ་། ཁོང ་ ཚོས ་ སོ ་ སོའི ་ སྐད་ ལ ་ རོང ་ རིང ་ སྐད་ ཅེས ་ འབོད་ ལ ་ རྒྱ ་ གར ་ དང ་ བལ་ པོ་ དང ་ འབྲུག་ ཡུལ་ བཅས ་ རྒྱལ་ ཁབ་ གསུམ་ དུ ་ ཁྱབ། རོང ་ རིང ་ སྐད་ ནི་ བོད་ འབར ་ སྐད་ ཁྱིམ་ དུ ་

གཏོགས ་ ཤིང ་ ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ མིའི ་ གྲངས ་ ཉུང ་ གོ ་ གནས ་ ཀྱིས ་ སྐད་ གཉོམ ་ ཆུང ་ ཞིག་ ཆགས ་ ཡོད། སྐད་ རིགས ་ གཞན་ དག་ གི་ ཤུགས ་ རྐྱེན་ དང ་ དེང ་ གི་ སློབ་ གསོའི ་ མ་ ལག་ དང ་། གཞུང ་ དང ་ སྒེར ་གྱི ་ སྡེ་ ཚན་ དུ ་ མི་ སྤྱོད་

པ ་ བཅས ་ ཀྱིས ་ རོང ་ རིང ་ སྐད་ བཤད་ མཁན་ ཇེ ་ ཉུང ་ དུ ་ གྱུར། དེར ་ བརྟེན། ལེབ ་ ཅའི ་ སྐད་ བཤད་ མཁན་

རྣམས ་ ལ ་ བོད་ དང ་ བལ ་ པོ་ དང ་ ལུམ ་ བུའི ་ སྐད་ ཀྱིས ་ ཤུགས ་ རྐྱེན་ ཐེབས ་ ཡོད་ པ་ མ ་ ཟད། བལ ་ པོའི ་ སྐད་ དང ་ ཨིན་ ཇིའི ་ སྐད་ ཀྱིས ་ རིམ ་ བཞིན་ རོང ་ རིང ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ ཚབ་ བྱེད་ བཞིན་ འདུག།

ལེའུ ་ འདིར ་ བོད་ བརྒྱུད་ ནང ་ བསྟན་ དེ་ ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ དང ་། རིག་ གནས ་ དང ་ སྐད་ བཅས ་

ལ ་ རིམ་ བཞིན་ སིམ་ པ་ དང ་ དེས ་ ཐེབས ་ པའི ་ ཤུགས ་ རྐྱེན་ ལ ་ གཞོལ ་ རྒྱུ ་ ཡིན། དེ་ ནི་ འབྲས ་ ལྗོངས ་ སུ ་

བོད་ སླེབས ་ པ་ དང ་ བསྟུན་ ནས ་ འགོ་ བརྩམས ་ པ་ དང ་། བོད་ བརྒྱུད་ ནང ་ བསྟན་ གྱིས ་ ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ གདོད་ མའི ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ ལ་ འགྱུར ་ བ་ གཏོང ་ བཞིན་ པའི ་ ཕྱི ་ རྣམ་ ལ་ གཏུགས ་ ཆོག་ སྟེ། ཉམས ་ ཞིབ་ པ་ རྣམས ་

ཀྱིས ་ཀྱང ་‘ལེབ་ ཅ་ པ་ རྣམས ་ཀྱིས ་ སངས ་ རྒྱས ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ ལ་ དད་ མོས ་ ཡོད་ པར ་ བསྙད་ཀྱང ་། དོན་ ངོ ་ མས ་ རི ་ བོ ་ དང ་ ནགས ་ ཚལ ་ དང ་ ཆུ ་ བོར ་ གསོལ ་ མཆོད ་ བྱེད ་ པའི ་ རྣམ ་ ཤེས ་ སྨྲ ་ བ ་ ཡིན ་ པར ་

’(Macdonald, 1930, p. 8)རྟོགས། ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ གཏིང ་ ཟབ་ པའི ་ སངས ་ རྒྱས ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་

ཀྱི ་ ལྟ་ གྲུབ་ ནང ་ སིམ ་ ཞིང ་། དེས ་ ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ སྐད་ ནང ་ བོད་ ཀྱི ་ ཐ་ སྙད་ དང ་ བརྡ་ ཆད་ དང ་ འདུ ་ ཤེས ་

མང ་ པོ་ ཞིག་ མཚམས ་ སྦྱར ་ ཅིང ་ ཞུགས། ཐ་ ན་ ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ ཡི་ གེ་ ཡང ་ ནང ་ པའི ་ ཆོས ་ སྤེལ ་ པ་ དག་ གི་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ ཀྱི ་ བྱེད་ སྒོའི ་ སྐུལ ་ སློང ་ ལ ་ བརྟེན་ ནས ་ བཟོས ་ པར ་ འདོད།

རྒྱབ་ལྗོངས་འདི་འདྲའི ་འོག་ ཏུ་ལེབ་ཆ་དང ་བོད་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་དབྱེ་མཚམས་ནམ་ རྒྱུན་མག་མོག་ ཏུ་ གྱུར་ཡོད་

ཅིང ་། བོད་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ ཐ་ སྙད་ ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ ཐ་ སྙད་ ཀྱི ་ ཆ་ ཤས ་ ཤིག་ ཏུ ་ གྱུར ་ ནས ་ ཡུན་ རིང ་ འགོར ་ བས། ད་ ལྟ་ ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ སྐད་ མཁན་ རང ་ ཉིད་ཀྱིས ་ཀྱང ་ སྐད་ དེ་ གཉིས ་ཀྱི ་ ཁྱད་ པར ་ འབྱེད་ དཀའ། དཔྱད་ རྩོམ་ འདིར ་ ད་

Tibetan L anguage Summaries

207

དུང ་ འབྲས ་ ལྗོངས ་ སློབ་ གྲྭ་ ཆེན་ མོའི ་ ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ ཚན་ ཁག་ གི་ སློབ་ མའི ་ དྲི ་ ཤོག་ རྟོག་ ཞིབ་ཀྱི ་ གཞི ་ གྲངས ་ ཀྱང ་ འདུས ་ ཤིང ་། ལེབ ་ ཆ ་ དང ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ བརྡའི ་ ཐུན་ མོང ་ ཁྱད ་ ཆོས ་ མཉམ ་ སྤྱོད ་ བྱས ་ པ ་ བརྒྱུད ་ དེ།

ལེབ ་ ཅ ་ པ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ སྐད་ དེ་ གཉིས ་ ཀྱི ་ བར ་ དུ ་ སོ ་ སོའི ་ བརྡའི ་ དབྱེ ་ མཚམས ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ སྲུང ་ འཛིན་ བྱེད་

པ་ རྟོགས། དེར ་ བརྟེན། དཔྱད་ རྩོམ ་ འདིས ་ བོད་ བརྒྱུད་ ནང ་ བསྟན་ ནམ ་ བོད་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ གཡར ་ ཚིག་ དང ་ རྣམ ་ གཞག་ མ་ སླེབས ་ པའི ་ ཡར ་ སྔོན་ གྱི ་ ལེབ་ ཅའི ་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ གནས ་ སྟངས ་ ག་ འདྲ ་ ཡིན་ མིན་ ལ ་ དྲི ་ བ་ འདོན་ པ་

སྟེ། འདི་ ནི་ ད་ ལྟ་ ང ་ ཚོས ་ ཤེས ་ རྟོགས ་ བྱུང ་ བའི ་ ལེབ ་ ཅའི ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ འཕེལ ་ རིམ ་ ཁྲོད་ ཀྱི ་ བོད་ བརྒྱུད་ ནང ་ བསྟན་ གྱི ་ ལོ ་ རྒྱུས ་ ཀྱི ་ གལ ་ ཆེན་ རང ་ བཞིན་ ལ ་ ཕྱིར ་ རྟོག་ བྱ ་ བསམ ་ པ་ ཡིན།

5 Glottonyms, Identity, and Language Recognition in the Eastern Tibetosphere Hiroyuki Suzuki རིག་ གཞུང ་ ཉམས ་ ཞིབ་ པ་ དང ་ བོད་ མི་ རྣམས ་ཀྱིས ་ བོད་ ཤར ་ ཕྱོགས ་ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ མིང ་ ལ་ བགྲོ་ གླེང ་ གནང ་ ནས ་ ཡུན་ རིང ་ ཕྱིན། མིང ་ འདོགས ་ཀྱིས ་ ངེས ་ བཟུང ་ གི་ ཡུལ ་ དང ་ ཡུལ ་ གཞན་ དག་ དབར ་ དུ ་ དབྱེ ་ མཚམས ་ བཟོ་ བ་ མ་ ཟད་ དབྱེ ་ མཚམས ་ ལ ་ ངོས ་ འཛིན་ ཡང ་ བྱེད་ སྲིད་ པས ་ ན་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ མིང ་ འདོགས ་ཀྱིས ་ སྐད་ གང ་ ཞིག་ དམིགས ་ སུ ་ བཀར ་ ཞིང ་ སྐད་ དེར ་ དབྱེ ་ བ་ འབྱེད་ པའི ་ ལས ་ གཉིས ་ ཀ ་ བྱེད། ལེའུ ་ འདིར ་ སྨྱུག་ ཐོགས ་

པས ་ བོད་ ཤར ་ ཕྱོགས ་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ དབྱེའི ་ མ ་ ལག་ ཁྲོད་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བ་ ཁ་ ཅིག་ གི ་ མིང ་ དང ་། དེ་ དག་ གི ་ གནས ་ ཡུལ ་ གཙོ་ བོར ་ བཟུང ་ ནས ་ གླེང ་ རྩིས ་ ཡིན་ ཞིང ་། བོད་ སྐད་ དང ་ ལོགས ་ སྐད་ དང ་ མི ་ ཉག་ གི་ སྐད་ དང ་ རླ ་ མོའི ་ སྐད་ དང ་ སྲེ་ གླེང ་ བ་ པོའི ་ སྐད་ བཅས ་ ནི་ ཉམས ་ ཞིབ་ པ་ དང ་ ཡུལ་ མིས ་ སྐད་ འདི་ དག་ལ་ སྤྱད་

པའི ་ མིང ་ རྣམས ་ ཡིན། སྨྱུག་ ཐོགས ་ པས ་ མིང ་ འདི་ དག་ ལ ་ བགྲོ ་ གླེང ་ བྱེད་ སྐབས ་ བོད་ པ་ རྣམས ་ཀྱིས ་ མིང ་ འདི་ དག ་ ལ ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ ངོས ་ འཛིན་ བྱེད་ པ ་ དང ་ དབྱེ ་ མཚམས ་ འབྱེད་ པའི ་ ཐབས ་ སུ ་ སྤྱོད་ ཚུལ ་ དང ་། སྨྱུག ་ ཐོགས ་ པས ་ ད་ དུང ་ ཡུལ ་ འདིར ་ རྟོག་ ཞིབ་ གནང ་ བཞིན་ པའི ་ ཉམས ་ ཞིབ་ པ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ མིང ་ ལ ་

ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ ཐུགས ་ བསམ ་ གནང ་ ཚུལ ་ དང ་། དེ ་ བཞིན་ མིང ་ དེ ་ དག ་ གིས ་ བོད ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ སྐད ་ ལ ་ ངོས ་ འཛིན་ དང ་ མིང ་ འདོགས ་ ཚུལ ་ ལ ་ ལན་ འདེབས ་ ག་ འདྲ ་ གནང ་ ཡོད་ པར ་ དཔྱད་ ཞིབ་ བྱ ་ རྒྱུ ་ ཡིན།

གཅིག བོད ་ སྐད ་ ཅེས ་ པའི ་ ཐ ་ སྙད ་ ཀྱིས ་ སྐད ་ བརྡ་ རིག ་ པ ་ བའི ་ ནང ་ ཁུལ ་ དང ་། ཡང ་ སྐད ་ བརྡ་

རིག་ པ་ བ་ དང ་ བོད་ མིའི ་ དབར ་ དུ ་ རྩོད་ ཉོག་ ཅིག་ བཟོས ་ ཡོད། བོད་ ཡིག་ གི་ ལྟོས ་ གྲུབ་ ཐ་ སྙད་ བོད་ སྐད(Tibetic) ་ ཅེས ་ པར ་ བགྲོ་ གླེང ་ མ་ བྱུང ་ ཡང ་། དེ་ རྒྱས ་ པར ་ འགྲེལ ་ ན་ གངས ་ ལྗོངས ་ བོད་ཀྱི ་ སྐད་

ཡིག ་ རྙིང ་ པ ་ ལས ་ བྱུང ་ བའི ་ སྐད་ རིགས ་ ཀྱི ་ ཁྱིམ ་ རྒྱུད་ ཅེས ་ པ ་ ཡིན། བོད་ སྐད་ ཅེས ་ པ ་ དང ་ འབྲེལ ་ བའི ་ རྩ་ བའི ་ གནད་ དོན་ ནི་ རིགས ་ རྒྱུད་ དང ་ སྐད་ རིགས ་ དབར ་གྱི ་ འབྲེལ་ བ་ ཡིན། སྐད་ བརྡ་ རིག་ པའི ་ ལྟ་ ཚུལ ་ ཞིག་ གཞིར ་ བཟུང ་ ན་ ན་ ཕ་ སྐད་ བོད་ སྐད་ མིན་ པའི ་ བོད་ པ་ ཡོད་ པ་ དང ་། ཕ་ སྐད་ བོད་ སྐད་

ཡིན་ པའི ་ བོད་ མ་ ཡིན་ པ་ ཡང ་ ཡོད་ པར ་ འདོད། བོད་ སྐད་ དུ ་ གཏོགས ་ པའི ་ སྐད་ རིགས ་ གང ་ ལ ་ ཡང ་ ས ་ མིང ་ རང ་ གི ་ རྗེས ་ སུ ་ སྐད་ ཅེས ་ པ་ བཞག་ སྟེ་ མིང ་ བདགས ་ རུང ་ བ་ དང ་། འདི་ ནི་ ཅུང ་ དང ་ ལེན་ བྱེད་ བདེ་ བའི ་ བས ་ མཐའ ་ རུ ་ གྱར ་ བའི ་ སྐད་ རྣམས ་ ལ ་ མིང ་ འདོགས ་ ཚུལ ་ ཞིག་ ཡིན་ སྲིད།

གཉིས། བོད་ ཀྱི ་ ཐ་ སྙད་ ལོགས ་ སྐད་ ཅེས ་ པས ་ བོད་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ བརྡ་ དེ་ ཙམ ་ མི ་ འཕྲོད་ པའི ་ སྐད་

དག་ བོད་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ ཁབ་ ཁོངས ་ སུ ་ ངོས ་ འཛིན་ ཚུལ ་ མཚོན། སྨྱུག་ ཐོགས ་ པས ་ མི ་ ཉག་ དང ་ རླ ་ མོ ་ ཞེས ་ པའི ་

208 

Bordering Tibetan L anguages

ཐ ་ སྙད ་ ལ ་ དཔྱད ་ གླེང ་ བྱ ་ རྒྱུ ་ ཡིན་ཏེ། སྐད ་ བརྡ་ རིག ་ པའི ་ སྐབས ་ སུ ་ མི ་ ཉག ་ སྐད ་ ཅེས ་ པས ་ རྩ་ བའི ་ ཆ ་ ནས ་ དར ་ རྩེ་ མདོ ་ གྲོང ་ ཁྱེར ་ གྱི ་ གངས ་ དཀར ་ རི ་ བོའི ་ འདབས ་ སུ ་ གནས ་ འཆའ ་ བའི ་ མི ་ ཉག ་ བོད ་ པ ་

རྣམས ་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད ་ སྟོན་ ཞིང ་། ལོ ་ རྒྱུས ་ སུ ་ ཞི ་ ཤ ་ རུ ་ འབོད ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ རང ་ ལ ་ མི ་ ཉག ་ ཅེས ་ བཏགས ་ ཡོད ་ ཅིང ་། ད ་ ལྟའི ་ དུས ་ སུ ་ འང ་ ཉག ་ རོང ་ མི ་ ཉག ་ སྐད ་ ལྟ་ བུ ་ དར ་ རྩེ་ མདོའི ་ ཕྱི ་ རོལ ་ དུ ་ གནས ་ པའི ་

མི ་ ཉག ་ སྐད ་ དུ ་ བཏགས ་ པའང ་ ཡོད། སྤྱིར ་ མི ་ ཉག ་ ཅེས ་ པ ་ རྒྱ ་ ཆེ ་ བའི ་ དོན་ སྤྱི ་ ཞིག ་ ཡིན་ ཡང ་ བོད ་ པ ་

རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ དེ ་ ནི་ གདུང ་ རབས ་ ཀྱི ་ མིང ་ དང ་ རིགས ་ རྒྱུད ་ ཀྱི ་ གཏོགས ་ ཁུངས། རྒྱལ ་ ཁམས ་ གང ་ ཡིན་ ཡང ་ བོད ་ ཀྱི ་ ནང ་ ཁུལ ་ དུ ་ གཏོགས ་ པར ་ འདོད། དེ ་ བས ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ འབྱུང ་ ཡུལ ་ ཞིག ་ ཡིན ་ པའི ་ མི ་ ཉག ་ ཅེས ་ པ་ ས ་ མིང ་ ལྟར ་ སྤྱད་ ན་ འཚམས ་ཏེ། བོད་ པ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ སོ ་ སོའི ་ ས ་ མིང ་ དང ་ མི ་ རྒྱུད་ གཉིས ་ དང ་ ལྷན་ དུ ་ སྦྲེལ ་ བ ་ ཡིན་ ལ། ཁོང ་ ཚོ ་ སྤྱིར ་ བཏང ་ བོད་ ཀྱི ་ རིགས ་ རྒྱུད་ དུ ་ གཏོགས། གཞན་ རླ ་ མོ ་ ཞེས ་ པ ་ ཉེ་

ཆར ་ གསར ་ དུ ་ ངོས ་ འཛིན་ བྱུང ་ བའི ་ སྐད་ ཅིག་ ཡིན་ པ་ དང ་ སྐད་ དེ་ བཤད་ མཁན་ རྣམས ་ ཆབ་ མདོའི ་ མཛོ ་

སྒང ་ དུ ་ གཞིས ་ ཆགས ་ ནས ་ ཡོད། དེ་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ ཁམས ་ སུ ་ གཏོགས ་ པ་ འབའ ་ ཞིག་ ལས ་ ཚོགས ་ སྤྱི ་ ཞིག་ མིན་

པ་ དང ་ སྐད་ དེའི ་ འབྱུང ་ ཁུངས ་ ད་ ལྟའང ་ གསལ ་ འདོན་ བྱུང ་ མེད་ ལ། ང ་ ཚོས ་ ཐ་ ན་ རླ ་ མོའི ་ ཐ་ སྙད་ དུའང ་ ཁུངས ་ སྣེ་ཏོག་ ཙམ ་ ཡང ་ ཤེས ་ རྟོག་ མ ་ བྱུང ་།

གསུམ། སྨྱུག ་ ཐོགས ་ པས ་ བོད ་ མིང ་ ལ ་ སྲེ ་ གླེང ་ བ ་ པོ ་ ཞེས ་ པའི ་ རྒྱ ་ བོད ་ འདྲེས ་ མའི ་ སྐད ་ ཅིག ་ སྟེ་

བཤད ་ མཁན་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ རང ་ གི ་ ངོ ་ རྟགས ་ ཀྱི ་ ཆ ་ ཤས ་ ཤིག ་ ཏུ ་ འཛིན་ པ ་ ཞིག ་ གླེང ་ རྒྱུ ་ ཡིན། སྲེ ་ གླེང ་ བ ་ པོ ་ བཤད་ མཁན་ རྣམས ་ ནི་ ཡུན་ ནན་ ཞིང ་ ཆེན་ རྒྱལ ་ ཐང ་ ཤར ་ རྒྱུད་ ཀྱི ་ གྲོང ་ ཚོ ་ འགའ ་ ཞིག ་ ཏུ ་ གནས ་ འཆའ ་ བའི ་ ཧུའི ་ རིགས ་ ཡིན། ཁོང ་ ཚོར ་ ཐ ་ ན་ སྲེ ་ གླེང ་ བ ་ པོ ་ ཞེས ་ པའི ་ ཕྱི ་ ཡོང ་ གི ་ མིང ་ ཞིག ་ བཏགས ་

ཡོད ་ ཅིང ་། ཁོང ་ ཚོ ་ རང ་ ཉིད ་ འདུས ་ སྡེ་ ཞིག ་ ཡིན་ པའི ་ དབྱེ ་ མཚམས ་ ཕྱེས ་ ཏེ། སྲེ ་ གླེང ་ བ ་ པོའི ་ སྐད ་ མི ་ བཤད ་ མཁན་ རྣམས ་ དང ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བ ་ མཚོན། དེས ་ ནི་ ཁོང ་ ཚོའི ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ ཆ ་ ཤས ་ ཤིག ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ ཐ ་ སྙད ་ ཀྱིས ་ ཚབ་ བྱས ་ ཟིན་ པ་ བསྟན་ ཡོད།

དཔྱད་ རྩོམ་ འདིར ་ སྐད་ བརྡ་ རིག་ པ་ བ་ རྣམས ་ཀྱི ་ འོས ་ འགན་ སྟེ། ཁོ་ ཚོའི ་ མིང ་ འདོགས ་ཀྱི ་ ཞིབ་ ཆ་ དང ་

བོད་ པ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ སྐད་ ལ ་ མིང ་ འདོགས ་ ཚུལ ་ དབར ་ དོ་ མཉམ ་ ཡོང ་ བ་ བྱེད་ པར ་ སྤྱི ་ སྡོམ ་ བརྒྱབ་ ཡོད།

6 On the Yak Horns of a Dilemma Diverging Standards in Diaspora Tibetan Dirk Schmidt ང ་ ཚོས ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ ཅིག་ ལ ་ བསམ ་བློ ་ གཏོང ་ སྐབས། སྤྱིར ་ བཏང ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ དེའི ་ ངག་ རྩལ ་ དང ་ ཡིག་ རྩལ ་

གྱི ་ དབྱེ ་ བ་ གཉིས ་ སུ ་ ཕྱེས ་ ཆོག་ པ་ སྟེ། ངག་ རྩལ ་ ཞེས ་ པ་ ནི་ ཉན་ རྩལ ་ དང ་ བཤད་ རྩལ ་ གཉིས ་ ཡིན་ ཞིང ་

། རྩལ ་ འདི་ གཉིས ་ ནི་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ ཁོར ་ ཡུག་ ཅིག་ ཏུ ་ འཚོ ་ སྡོད་ བྱས ་ པ་ བརྒྱུད་ བསྐྱེད་ བསྲིང ་ བྱེད་ ཐུབ་ པ་ ཞིག་

ཡིན་ པ་ རེད། ཡིན་ ནའང ་ ཡིག་ རྩལ ་ ལམ་ ཀློག་ རྩལ ་ དང ་ འབྲི་ རྩལ ་ ནི་ དེ་ ལས ་ ལྡོག་ སྟེ་ ང ་ ཚོར ་ བསླབ་ ནས ་ ཤེས ་ དགོས ་ པ ་ ཞིག ་ གོ། དེ་ བས ་ ཉན་ རྩལ ་ དང ་ ཤོད་ རྩལ ་ དང ་ ཀློག ་ རྩལ ་ དང ་ འབྲི ་ རྩལ ་ སྦྱོང ་ བར ་ རང ་ བཞིན་ གྱིས ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བའི ་ ཆ ་ ཞིག་ སླེབས ་ ཡོང ་ གི ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད།

བོད་ སྐད་ ལ ་ ཆ ་ བཞག ་ ན་ ཤོད་ རྩལ ་ གྱི ་ ནི་ རང ་ གི ་ ཕ ་ ཡུལ ་ ལམ ་ ཕ ་ སྐད་ གང ་ ཡིན་ པར ་ བརྟེན་ ནས ་

ཤེས ་ རྟོག ་ བྱུང ་ བ ་ ཞིག ་ སྟེ། ཨ ་ མདོ ་ རུ ་ ནར ་ སོན་ པའི ་ བྱིས ་ པ ་ ཞིག ་ ཡིན་ ཚེ ་ ཨམ ་ སྐད་ ཤོད་ ཅིང ་ ཁམས ་

Tibetan L anguage Summaries

209

ནས ་ ནར ་ སོན་ པ ་ ཡིན་ ན་ ཁམས ་ སྐད ་ དང ་ ལྷ་ སར ་ ནར ་ སོན་ པ ་ ཡིན་ ན་ ལྷ་ སའི ་ སྐད ་ ཤོད ་ ཀྱི ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ རེད། གནས ་ སྟངས ་ དེ་ ནི་ ག ་ ས ་ གང ་ དུའང ་ གཅིག ་ པ ་ ཡིན་ ཞིང ་། ཧི ་ མ ་ ལ ་ ཡའི ་ ས ་ ཁུལ ་ཏེ ་ རྒྱ ་ གར ་ གྱི ་

གཞིས ་ ཆགས ་ སུ ་ སྐྱེས ་ པའི ་ བྱིས ་ པ་ ཞིག་ ཡིན་ ན་ གཞིས ་ ཆགས ་ སྐད་ ཤོད་ཀྱི ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། ཤོད་ རྩལ ་ འདི་

དག་ ནི་ སྐད་ ཆ ་ འཆད་ མཁན་ ཞིག་ ལ ་ མཚོན་ ན་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ གི ་ རྩལ ་ གྱི ་ རྨང ་ རྡོ་ ཡིན་ པ་ རེད། དེ་ བས ་ བོད་ སྐད་ ལ ་ མཚོན་ ན་ ས ་ ཆ་ མང ་ པོར ་ ཤོད་ ཀྱིན་ ཡོད་ པས ་ ན་ ཕ་ སྐད་ རིགས ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བ་ མང ་ པོ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད།

བོད ་ ཀྱི ་ ཡིག ་ སྐད ་ ལ ་ ཆ ་ བཞག ་ ན་ གཅིག ་ གྱུར ་ གྱི ་ བོད ་ ཡིག ་ ཅིག ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ རེད། སྲོལ ་ རྒྱུན་ གྱི ་ ཤོད ་

སྟངས ་ ལྟར ་ ན་ དུས ་ རབས ་ བདུན་ པར ་ བཙན་ པོ ་ སྲོང ་ བཙན་ སྒམ ་ པོའི ་ བློན་ པོ ་ ཐོན་ མི ་ སཾབྷོཊས ་ བོད ་ ཡིག ་ བཟོས ་ ཤིང ་ བརྡ ་ སྤྲོད ་ པའི ་ བསྟན་ བཅོས ་ གསར ་ དུ ་ བརྩམས ་ པར ་ བཞེད ་ ཅིང ་། ཡིན་ ནའང ་ ཆེས ་

སྔ ་ བའི ་ སྐབས ་ སུ ་ བོད ་ ཡིག ་ ཀྱང ་ སྣ་ མང ་ ཞིག ་ སྟེ། དཔེར ་ ན་ ཡུལ ་ སྐད ་ མ ་ འདྲ ་ བར ་ བསྟུན་ པའི ་ དག ་

ཆ ་ ཡང ་ མ ་ འདྲ ་ བ ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ རེད། དེ ་ བས ་ བོད ་ ཀྱི ་ བཙན་ པོས ་ འདུན་ མ ་ དམིགས ་ བསལ ་ བ ་ བསྡུས ་ ཤིང ་

སྐབས ་ དེའི ་ ཡུལ ་ དབུས ་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད ་ དང ་ བསྟུན་ ནས ་ གཅིག ་ གྱུར ་ བྱས ་ ཤིང ་། བཀས ་ བཅད ་ ཐ ་ མ ་ དེ ་ དུས ་ རབས ་ བཅུ ་ གཅིག་ པར ་ ལོ ་ ཙཱ ་ བ་ རིན་ ཆེན་ བཟང ་ པོས ་ དབུ ་ བཟུང ་ ནས ་ ཡུལ ་ དབུས ་ སུ ་ བགྱིས ་ པ་ རེད།

བོད ་ ཡིག ་ གི ་ ཀློག ་ རྩལ ་ དང ་ འབྲི ་ རྩལ ་ ནི་ ད ་ ཆ ་ ད ་ དུང ་ སྲོལ ་ རྒྱུན་ གྱི ་ ཡིག ་ ཆས ་ ཐག ་ གཅོད ་ ཀྱིན་

ཡོད་ དེ། ཁྱད་ པར ་ དུ ་ དག་ ཆ ་ དང ་ བརྡ་ སྤྲོད་ ནི་ དེ་ བཞིན་ ཡིན་ པ་ སྟེ། དེ་ དག་ རྒྱུན་ སྲོལ ་ ལྟར ་ འགྱུར ་ མེད་ གཏན་ ཆགས ་ སུ ་ གནས ་ ཡོད། ཡིན་ ནའང ་ དུས ་ མཚུངས ་ སུ ་ མི་ རྣམས ་ཀྱིས ་ རང ་ རང ་ གི་ ཕ་ ཡུལ་ དུ ་ ཕ་ སྐད་

བཤད ་ དེ ་ རྒྱུགས ་ ཆུ ་ ལྟར ་ འགྱུར ་ ལྡོག ་ བྱུང ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ རེད། སྐད ་ ཆའི ་ ཁོར ་ ཡུག ་ གི ་ འགྱུར ་ ལྡོག ་ རང ་ བྱུང ་ མ ་ དེས ་ སྐད་ ཡིག ་ ལའང ་ འགྱུར ་ ལྡོག ་ ཐེབས ་ ཡོད་ དེ། དེས ་ མི ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ བཤད་ པའི ་ སྐད་ ཆ ་ དང ་ བྲིས ་

པའི ་ ཡི་ གེ ་ གཉིས ་ ཀྱི ་ བར ་ ཐག ་ ཇེ ་ རིང ་ ནས ་ ཇེ ་ རིང ་ དུ ་ བྱས ་ ཡོད་ པ ་ རེད། དེ་ བས ་ ཤོད་ རྩལ ་ དང ་ ཡིག ་ རྩལ ་ བར ་ གྱི ་ ལོ ་ ངོ ་ ཆིག ་ སྟོང ་ གི ་ བར ་ ཁྱད་ འདིས ་ འབྲི ་ ཀློག ་ གི ་ ལས ་ ལ ་ ཐོག ་ མར ་ འཇུག ་ མཁན་ རྣམས ་ ལ ་ དཀའ ་ ཁག་ བསྐྲུན་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད།

རྒྱུ ་ མཚན་ ནི་ འབྲི ་ རྩལ ་ ནི་ ཤོད ་ རྩལ ་ ལ ་ བརྟེན་ ནས ་ ཡོད ་ ཅིང ་ ཤོད ་ རྩལ ་ ནི་ འབྲི ་ ཀློག ་ གི ་ རྨང ་ གཞི ་

ཡིན་ པས ་ རེད། གསལ ་ བྱེད ་ རེ ་ རེས ་ སྒྲ ་ རེ ་ མཚོན་ ཞིང ་ བྱིས ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ རང ་ གི ་ སྐད ་ ཆ ་ ལས ་ ཤེས ་

རྟོགས ་ བྱུང ་ བའི ་ ཐ་ སྙད་ དག ་ ངོས ་ ཟིན་ པ ་ བརྒྱུད་ ཀློག ་ སློབ ་ ཀྱི ་ ཡོད་ པ ་ རེད། གལ ་ སྲིད་ དེ་ ལ ་ བར ་ ཐག ་ ཆེན་ པོ ་ ཞིག ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ ཡིན་ ན་ ངག ་ ནས ་ ཀློག ་ མི ་ དགོས ་ པའི ་ ཡི་ གེའི ་ དག ་ ཆ ་ དང ་ བརྡ ་ རྙིང ་། བརྡ ་ སྤྲོད ་ སོགས ་ རང ་ གི ་ ཕ་ སྐད་ དུ ་ བཀོལ ་ ཀྱི ་ མེད་ པ་ རྣམས ་བློར ་ འཛིན་ དགོས ་ ཐུག་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། དེའི ་ འབྲས ་ བུ ་

ནི་ ཡིག ་ རྩལ ་ འབྱོར ་ བར ་ དཀའ ་ ཁག ་ ཡོད ་ ཅིང ་ འབྲི ་ ཀློག ་ གི ་ ཆུ ་ ཚད ་ དམའ ་ བ ་ དང ་ ཐ ་ ན་ ཡིག ་ རྨོངས ་ ཀྱི ་ གནས ་ སྟངས ་ འབྱུང ་ བ་ དེ་ རེད།

རྩོམ་ འདིར ་ སྐད་ བརྡ་ རིག་ པའི ་ ཐབས ་ ལམ་ བརྒྱུད་ གཞིས ་ ཆགས ་ སུ ་ ཡོད་ པའི ་ བོད་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ རིགས ་ ཁ་

ཤས ་ ལ ་ དབྱེ ་ ཞིབ ་ བྱས ་ ཡོད ་ དེ། རང ་ བྱུང ་ གི ་ སྐད ་ ཡིག ་ ལ ་ འགྱུར ་ ལྡོག ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ བྱུང ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ དང ་ སྐད ་ དང ་ ཡི་ གེ ་ ཡི་ བར ་ ཐག ་ དེ ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ ཇེ ་ རིང ་ ལ ་ སོང ་ བ ་ དང ་ དེས ་ འབྲི ་ ཀློག ་ དང ་ སྐད ་ ཡིག ་ སློབ ་ གསོར ་ ཐེབས ་ པའི ་ ཤན ་ ཤུགས ་ སོགས ་ གླེང ་ ཡོད། རྩོམ ་ འདིའི ་ དམིགས ་ ཡུལ ་ ནི ་ སྐད ་ ཡིག ་ དང ་ འབྲེལ ་ བའི ་

ཀླན་ ཀ ་ འཚོལ ་ བ ་ དང ་ ཁ་ སྐྱེངས ་ པར ་ བྱེད ་ པ། དགག ་ སྒྲུབ ་ བྱེད ་ པ ་ སོགས ་ དང ་ གྱེས ་ ཏེ ་ ཚན་ རིག ་ དང ་ མཐུན་ པའི ་ འགྲེལ ་ བཤད ་ རྒྱག ་ པ ་ དེ ་ ཡིན་ ཞིང ་། མཐར ་ འབྲི ་ ཀློག ་ དང ་ རྩོམ ་ རིག ་ ལ ་ འཇུག ་ པའི ་ སྒོ ་ མོ ་ ཕྱེས ་ཏེ ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ སྣ་ མང ་ གི ་ ཚོགས ་ སྡེ་ ལ ་ ཕན་ ཁེ་ བསྐྲུན་ རྒྱུ ་ དེའོ།།

210 

Bordering Tibetan L anguages

7 Changing Identity and Linguistic Practices in Nubri Veiled Language Endangerment in the Nepalese Tibetosphere Cathryn Donohue དཔྱད ་ རྩོམ ་ འདིར ་ བལ ་ ཡུལ ་ དབུས ་ བྱང ་ རྒྱུད ་ དེ ་ རི ་ བོ ་ མ ་ ནཱ ་ ས ་ ལུའི ་ འདབས ་ ཀྱི ་ སྦས ་ ཡུལ ་ ནུབ ་ རི ་

ལུང ་ པའི ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ ངོས ་ ལེན་ གྱི ་ སྐད་ བརྡའི ་ གྲུབ ་ ཚུལ ་ ལ ་ རྟོག ་ ཞིབ ་ བྱས ་ ཡོད། ནུབ ་ རིའི ་ མི ་ ཉིས ་ སྟོང ་ ལྷག ་ རིགས ་ རྒྱུད ་ ཀྱི ་ ཆ ་ ནས ་ བོད ་ ལ ་ གཏོགས ་ ཤིང ་། ལུང ་ པ ་ འདིར ་ བསྐྱས ་ ནས ་ ཕལ ་ ཆེར ་ ལོ ་ ངོ ་ བཞི ་

བརྒྱ ་ ལྷག ་ འགོར། བོད ་ སྐད ་ ནི་ སྔར ་ བཞིན་ རྨོ ་ འདེབས ་ འཚོ ་ ཚིས ་ སུ ་ བྱེད ་ པའི ་ མི ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱི ་ རིམ ་ གྲོའི ་ སྐད་ རིགས ་ ཤིག ་ ཡིན་ མོད། ནུབ ་ རི ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ མཐའ ་ མཚམས ་ བརྒལ ་ པ ་ ནས ་ བལ ་ ཡུལ ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ དང ་ མཉམ ་ གནས ་ བྱས ་ ཏེ། སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ དང ་ དཔལ ་ འབྱོར ་ གྱི ་ གོ ་ སྐབས ་ འཚོལ ་ བར ་ ཀ ་ ཐ ་ མན་ ཏུར ་ བསྟུན་ དགོས ་ ཡོད། སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ གང ་ དེ་ ཉམ ་ ཆུང ་ ཞིང ་ རིགས ་ མཐུན་ ཙམ ་ དུ ་ སྣང ་ ཡང ་། མཚན་ ཉིད་ རང ་ བཞིན་ གྱི ་ ཆོས ་ ཉི་ ཚེ ་ བ ་ རེ ་ ཡོད་ ཅིང ་། དེ་ དག ་ གིས ་ རིག ་ གནས ་ ཁོངས ་ གཏོགས ་ དང ་ བདག ་ ཉིད་ ངོས ་ ལེན་ གྱི ་ གོ ་ དོན་ རིམ ་ འགྱུར ་ བྱེད་ པར ་ འཇུག་ ལ། དེ་ དང ་ རྐྱེན་ བྱས ་ཏེ ་ རིམ ་ འགྱུར ་ ངེས ་ མེད་ དུ ་ བྱེད་ པའི ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ ཡུལ ་ ཁམས ་ ཤིག་ གྲུབ་ པ་ ཡིན།

ཞིབ་ འཇུག་ འདིས ་ སྤྱི ་ ལོ༢༠༡༦ལོ་ ནས ་༢༠༡༩ལོའི ་ བར ་ ལུང ་ ལག་ བརྒལ་ པའི ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ སྐད་ བརྡ་ རིག་

པའི ་ རྟོག ་ ཞིབ ་ དང ་ བཅས ་ པའི ་ བལ ་ ཡུལ ་ གྱི ་ རྒྱུ ་ ཆ ་ འཚོལ ་ བསྡུར ་ སྙན་ ཞུ ་ འབུལ ་ པ ་ ཡིན། གཞི ་ གྲངས ་ དག་ ནི་ བིའི ་ ནུབ་ རི ་ དང ་ ཕི་ རོག་ དང ་། ནམ་ རུང ་ དང ་། ལི ་ དང ་། ལྷོ་ དང ་། ས ་ མ་ དང ་། ས ་ མདོ་ གྲོང ་ ཚོ ་

བཅས ་ སུ ་ བཅར ་ འདྲི ་ བརྒྱུད་ དེ་ འཚོལ ་ བསྡུ ་ བྱས། གྲོང ་ ཚོའི ་ བརྡའི ་ མ ་ ལག་ འོག་ མའི ་ དཔེའི ་ གཞི ་ གྲངས ་ གང ་ མང ་ ལ ་ དབྱེ ་ ཞིབ ་ བྱེད་ པའི ་ སྔོན་ བཟོས ་ དྲི ་ ཚིག ་ དག ་ འཚོལ ་ བསྡུ ་ མ ་ བྱས ་ པའི ་ སྔོན། བཅར ་ འདྲིར ་

ཞུགས ་ མཁན་ དག་ གི་ སོ ་ སོའི ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ དང ་ སྐད་ཀྱི ་ རྒྱབ་ ལྗོངས ་ ལ་ རྒྱུས ་ ལོན་ བྱས ་ རྗེས། གཞི ་ ནས ་ ནུབ་ རིའི ་ གྲོང ་ ཚོ ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བར ་ གཏོགས ་ པའི ་ ཁོང ་ ཚོར ་ སོ ་ སོས ་ སྐད་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བར ་ བཟུང ་ བའི ་ རྣམ་ འགྱུར ་ དང ་ ། ནུབ་ རིའི ་ རིག་ གནས ་ ཀྱི ་ གསོན་ ཤུགས ་ དང ་ རྒྱུན་ མཐུད་ སྐོར ་ ཐད་ ཀར ་ དྲིས།

ཞིབ་ འཇུག་ ལྟར ་ ན། ནུབ་ རིར ་ ཕན་ ཚུན་ དབར ་ བརྒྱ ་ ཆའི ་ དྲུག་ ཅུ ་ ཙམ ་ གྱི ་ ཧེ ་ བག་ གསལ ་ པོར ་ མངོན་

པའི ་ ཡུལ ་ སྐད་ གཙོ་ བོ ་ གསུམ ་ ཡོད་ པ ་ ཤེས། གལ ་ སྲིད། ཨ ་ རུ ་ ག ་ ཐུའི ་ ཆེས ་ ཉེ་ བའི ་ གཞུང ་ ལམ ་ བརྒྱུད་ ཀྱང ་ ཉིན་ བཞི ་ ནས ་ བདུན་ ལ ་ གོམ ་ པས ་ འཇལ ་ དགོས ་ པའི ་ རྒྱང ་ མའི ་ ས ་ ཁམས ་ གནས ་ ཡུལ ་ གྱིས ་ མིན་ ན། མི ་ གྲངས ་ འདི ་ ཙམ ་ གྱི ་ ནུབ ་ རིའི ་ སྐད ་ སྔར ་ ནས ་ ཉམས ་ སྲིད ་ པ ་ སྨྲས ་ ཅི་ དགོས། ས ་ ཁམས ་ གནས ་

ཡུལ ་ ལྟར ་ ན། སྤྱིར ་ རི ་ རྒྱ ་ བསྡམས ་ པའི ་ ཆབ་ སྲིད་ ཀྱི ་ མཐའ ་ མཚམས ་ སུ ་ གྱུར ་ ཡང ་། ལུང ་ སྦུག་ བོད་ དང ་ འབྲེལ ་ ཞིང ་ དེར ་ བོད་ ཀྱིས ་ ཤུགས ་ རྐྱེན་ ཟབ ་ མོ ་ ཐེབས ་ ཡོད་ དེ། ནུབ ་ རི ་ པ་ རྣམས ་ ས ་ མདོ་ གྲོང ་ ཚོ ་༼དེར ་ སྐྱིད་ རོང ་ གི་ བོད་ སྐད་ དང ་ ཤིན་ ཏུ ་ ཉེ་ བ་ ཞིག་ བཤད།༽དང ་ མ་ ནང ་ གི་ ལ ་ བརྒལ ་ ནས ་ རྒྱལ ་ སུམ་ མདོ་ པ་

རྣམས ་ བརྒྱུད་ དེ་ བོད་ དང ་ འབྲེལ ་ ལམ ་ བྱེད་ བདེ་ པོ་ ཡོད། གལ ་ སྲིད་ ལུང ་ པའི ་ ཕྱི ་ རོལ ་ དུ ་ སློབ་ གསོ ་ མྱོང ་ བའི ་ གོ་ སྐབས ་ ཤིག་ ཡོད་ ན་ བོད་ཀྱི ་ སློབ་ གསོ ་ མྱོང ་ བའི ་ སྲིད་ ཕྱོད་ ཤིན་ ཏུ ་ ཆེ། དེ་ བཞིན་ ལུང ་ མདའ ་ བིའི ་

ཁུ ་ ཁེ་ དང ་ ཉེ་ ལོགས ་ཀྱི ་ ག་ ལི ་ དང ་། གུ ་ རུང ་ པ་ རྣམས ་ དང ་། བལ ་ ཡུལ ་ པ་ རྣམས ་ དང ་ འཕྲད་ ཆེས ་ པ་ སྟེ་

ཚོགས ་ པ་ གཞན་ དག་ དབར ་ འབྲེལ ་ ལམ ་ མང ་། གང ་ ལྟར ་ ང ་ ཚོས ་ གཞོན་ རབས ་ པ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ རྩ་ བའི ་ ཆ་ ནས ་ ཁ་པར ་ དང ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ སྨྱན་ སྦྱོར ་གྱི ་འབྲེལ་ བ་ བརྒྱུད་ དེ། ཀ་ཐ་མན་ ཏུར ་རིམ་འགྱུར ་འབྱུང ་ བཞིན་

པའི ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ བདག་ ཉིད་ ལ ་ དོ་ སྣང ་ བྱེད་ པ་ བཅས ་ ཀྱི ་ དབྱེ ་ འབྱེད་ འབྱུང ་ བཞིན་ པའི ་ འགྱུར ་ ལྡོག་ ཆེན་

Tibetan L anguage Summaries

211

པོ་ མཐོང ་ བ་ དང ་། གཞོན་ རབས ་ པ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ འགྱུར ་ བ་ སོགས ་ ཀྱི ་ རྐྱེན་ ལས ་ ནུབ་ རིའི ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ གསོན་ ཤུགས ་ ལ ་ ཉེན་ ཁ་ ཆེན་ པོ ་ མཆིས།

ས ་ ཁམས ་ ཆབ ་ སྲིད ་ དང ་། རིག ་ གནས ་ དང ་། སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ དཔལ ་ འབྱོར ་ དང ་། སློབ ་ གསོ ་ དང ་། མི ་

རབས ་ ཀྱི ་ མཚམས ་ དང ་ བཅས ་ ནུབ ་ རིའི ་ བར ་ ལམ ་ གྱི ་ སྐད ་ བབས ་ ལ ་ རྒྱུས ་ ལོན་ བྱེད ་ པའི ་ ཟུར ་ མང ་ པོ ་ ཡོད་ ཅིང ་། དེ་ དག་ གིས ་ དབང ་ ཐང ་ དང ་ ཐོབ ་ ཐང ་ གི ་ འབྲེལ ་ སྦྱོར ་ རྙོག་ དྲ ་ ཞིག་ བསྐྱེད་ དེ་ རྙོག་ འཛིང ་ ཆེ ་ བའི ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ སྐྱེ ་ ཁམས ་ ཤིག་ བསྐྲུན་ ཡོད།

8 Borderline Dominance Transnational Tibetan Language Politics in the Himalayas Gerald Roche བོད་ སྐད་ ནི་ སྐད་ གང ་ དེ་ ཁྱབ ་ ཡོད་ པའི ་ རྒྱལ ་ ཁབ ་ གང ་ དུའང ་ གྲངས ་ ཉུང ་ གི ་ སྐད་ རིགས ་ ཤིག ་ ཆགས ་ བསྡད་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། ཡིན་ ནའང ་ དེའང ་ དབང ་ ཐང ་ ཆེ ་ ཞིང ་ སྟོབས ་ ཤུགས ་ ཆེ ་ བའི ་ སྐད་ ཅིག ་ ཡིན་ པ་ རེད། ལེའུ ་ འདིར ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱིས ་ ཕ ་ ཀི ་ སི ་ ཐན་ དང ་ བལ ་ བོ། རྒྱ ་ གར། འབྲུག ་ ཡུལ། ཀྲུང ་ གོ ་ བཅས ་ སུ ་ བོད ་

སྐད་ ཀྱིས ་ སྐད་ གཞན་ ལ ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ ཐེབས ་ བཞིན་ པའི ་ སྐོར ་ ལ ་ བལྟ་ བ ་ ཡིན་ཏེ། ཁྱད་ པར ་ དུ ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱིས ་ སྐད ་ ཡིག ་ ཆུང ་ བ ་ རྣམས ་ ལ ་ ཆབ ་ སྲིད ་ དང ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ ཀྱི ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ ཅི་ ཙམ ་ ཐེབས ་ པ ་ ལས ་ དེའི ་ སྐད ་ ཆའི ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ ལ ་ བལྟ་ གི ་ མིན། ལེའུ ་ འདིར ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱི ་ ཆབ ་ སྲིད ་ དང ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་

ཀྱི ་ ཤན་ ཤུགས ་ ལ ་ བལྟས ་ པ ་ བརྒྱུད ་ གྲངས ་ ཉུང ་ བའི ་ སྐད ་ ཅིག ་ གིས ་ སྐད ་ ཡིག ་ གཞན་ རྣམས ་ དབང ་ དུ ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ བསྡུ ་ བའི ་ སྐོར ་ ལ ་ དབྱེ ་ ཞིབ་ བྱེད་ རྩིས ་ ཡིན།

ཨེ ་ ཤེ་ ཡ་ ལྷོ་ མ ་ སྟེ། པ ་ ཀི ་ སི ་ ཐན་ དང ་ རྒྱ ་ གར། བལ ་ པོ། འབྲུག ་ ཡུལ ་ སོགས ་ སུ ་ བོད ་ ཡིག ་ དེ ་ བོད ་

སྐད ་ ལས ་ སྟོབས ་ ཤུགས ་ ཆེན་ པོ ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ རེད། དེར ་ སྐད ་ རིགས ་ མང ་ པོ ་ ཞིག ་ བོད ་ ཡིག ་ གི ་ ལམ ་ ནས ་

འབྲི ་ བཞིན་ ཡོད ་ དེ། པ ་ ཀི ་ སི ་ ཐན་ དུ ་ སྦལ ་ ཏིའི ་ སྐད ་ དེ ་ བོད ་ ཡིག ་ གིས ་ འབྲི ་ བཞིན་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ དང ་། རྒྱ ་ གར ་ དུ ་ བོད་ ཡིག་ བོད་ སྐད་ དེ་ རྩ་ ཁྲིམས ་ སུ ་ འཁོད་ པའི ་ གཞུང ་ སྤྱོད་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ དུ ་ འཇུག་ དགོས ་ པའི ་ ལས ་ འགུལ ་ ཞིག་ སྤེལ ་ བཞིན་ ཡོད། མི་ རྣམས ་ཀྱིས ་ ལ ་ དྭགས ་ དང ་ འབྲས ་ ལྗོངས ་ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ སོགས ་ བོད་ ཡིག་ གིས ་

འབྲི ་ཨེ་ ཐུབ་ ལ ་ འབད་ བཞིན་ ཡོད། ད་ དུང ་ མི ་ ཁ་ ཤས ་ ཀྱིས ་ བོད་ ཡིག་ བོད་ སྐད་ དེ་ རང ་ གི་ ཕ་ སྐད་ མིན་ ནའང ་ གཞན་ ལ ་ ཁྲིད་ འདོད་ ཡོད་ པ་ ནི་ རྒྱ ་ གར ་ བྱང ་ ཤར ་ གྱི ་ མོན་ པ་ རྣམས ་ ལྟ་ བུའོ།། བལ ་ ཡུལ ་ དུ ་ བོད་ ཡིག ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ ལ ་ དམའ ་ འབེབས ་ ཀྱིན་ ཡོད ་ ནའང ་ བོད ་ ཡིག ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ དེ ་ དབང ་ ཐང ་ ཅན་ ཞིག ་ ཏུའང ་

བགྲང ་ གིན་ ཡོད ་ དེ། དེར ་ རྒྱལ ་ སྤྱིའི ་ སྒྲིག ་ འཛུགས ་ མང ་ པོའི ་ རོགས ་ རམ ་ ཐོབ ་ ཀྱི ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ རེད། འབྲུག ་ ཡུལ ་ དུ ་ རྒྱལ ་ ཁབ་ ཀྱི ་ གཞུང ་ སྐད་ རྫོང ་ ཁ་ དེ་ བོད་ ཡིག་ གི་ ལམ ་ ནས ་ འབྲི ་ གི་ ཡོད། བོད་ ཡིག་ རྨང ་ གཞིར ་ བྱས ་ པའི ་ ཡི་ གེ་ དེ་ སྐད་ གཞན་ གཉིས ་ ལའང ་ བཟོས ་ ཡོད་ དེ། དེ་ ནི་ འབྲུག་ ཡུལ ་ དུ ་ ཁྱབ་ རྒྱ ་ ཆེས ་ ཆེ ་ བའི ་ སྐད་ དེ་ ཚང ་ ལ ་ དང ་ ཀུར ་ ཐོབ ་ གཉིས ་ སོ།། གནས ་ སྟངས ་ མང ་ པོ ་ ཞིག ་ ཏུ ་ བོད་ ཡིག ་ སྤྱད་ ནས ་ སྐད་ ཡིག ་ གཞན་ ཞིག ་ འབྲི ་ སྐབས ་ སྐད ་ དེ ་ ཇི ་ བཞིན་ དུ ་ ཡིག ་ ཐོག ་ ཏུ ་ མི ་ འགོད ་ པར ་ བོད ་ ཡིག ་ གི ་ ཡིག ་ སྐད ་ དང ་

བསྟུན ་ པར ་ བྱེད ་ པས ་ བོད ་ ཡིག ་ གིས ་ ལྷོ་ ཨེ ་ ཤེ ་ ཡ ་ རུ ་ སྐད ་ ཆ ་ ཡིག ་ ཐོག ་ ཏུ ་ འགོད ་ པར ་ ཤན ་ ཤུགས ་ ཐེབས ་ ཀྱི ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད།

212 

Bordering Tibetan L anguages

ཀྲུང ་ གོ་ རུ ་ བོད་ སྐད་ དེ་ གྲངས ་ ཉུང ་ གི་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ ཅིག་ ཡིན་ ནའང ་ དེས ་ སྐད་ ཆུང ་ བ་ འགའ ་ རེར ་ ཤན་

ཤུགས ་ ཐེབས ་ཀྱི ་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། ཀྲུང ་ གོ་ རུ ་ བོད་ སྐད་ དེ་ བོད་ ཡིག་ ལས ་ སྟོབས ་ དང ་ ལྡན་ པ་ ཞིག་ ཡིན། སྐད་ ཆུང ་ བ་ ཤོད་ པའི ་ བོད་ པ་ རྣམས ་ཀྱིས ་ ཡུན་ གྱིས ་ ཕ་ སྐད་ བསྐྱུར ་ ནས ་ བོད་ སྐད་ བཤད་ པའི ་ འགྱུར ་ བ་ ཞིག་

འབྱུང ་ གིན་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། སྐད་ དེ་ དག་ ནི་ མཚོ ་ སྔོན་ གྱི ་ གཉན་ ཐོག་ སྐད་ དང ་། མ ་ ནི་ སྐད་ ཆ། རྨ ་ ལྷོའི ་ ཨོ ་ རོད། སི ་ ཁྲོན་ རྟའུ། ལྷ་ སྒང ་ ཆོ ་ ཡུལ། ཉག་ རོང ་ མི ་ ཉག དར ་ མདོ་ མི ་ ཉག བོད་ རང ་ སྐྱོང ་ ལྗོངས ་ ཀྱི ་ རླ ་ མོ ་

དང ་ ལ ་ རོང ་ སྨར། བྲག ་ གཡབ ་ སྨར། གསེར ་ ཁུ། དེ ་ དག ་ ཁྲོད ་ ཀྱི ་ སྐད ་ གཉིས ་ ནི ་ ཤོད ་ མཁན ་ གང ་ དུ ་ གནས ་ པ ་ བསྟུན་ ནས ་ རྒྱ ་ སྐད ་ དང ་ བོད ་ སྐད ་ གཉིས ་ སུ ་ འགྱུར ་ བཞིན་ ཡོད ་ ཅིང ་ དེ ་ གཉིས ་ ནི་ སི ་ ཁྲོན་

གྱི ་ སྦུ ་ དང ་ ཤུ ་ ཧིང ་ སྐད་ ཡིན། མཇུག་ མཐར ་ བོད་ སྐད་ དེ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ གཞན་ བཤད་ པའི ་ བོད་ ཀྱི ་ འདུས ་ སྡེ་

ཁག ་ ཅིག ་ ལ ་ བསླབ ་ ཚན་ ཞིག ་ གི ་ ལམ ་ ནས ་ ཁྲིད ་ བཞིན་ ཡོད ་ དེ། དེ ་ དག ་ ནི་ སི ་ ཁྲོན་ གྱི ་ ནམ ་ ཞིས ་ དང ་ འགོ ་ ཐང ་། རྒྱལ ་ རོང ་ རྒྱལ ་ བཞི། ཕྲིམ ་ མི ་ སོགས ་ ཡིན་ ནོ།།

མདོར ་ དེད་ ན། བོད་ སྐད་ དེ་ གྲངས ་ ཉུང ་ སྐད་ ཅིག་ ཡིན་ ནའང ་ སྐད་ ཆུང ་ ངུ ་ གཞན་ དག་ ལ ་ དབང ་ སྒྱུར ་

བྱེད ་ ཀྱིན་ ཡོད ་ ཅིང ་ ཀྲུང ་ གོ ་ རུ ་ སྐབས ་ ལ ་ ལར ་ སྐད ་ ཡིག ་ གཞན་ ཁ་ ཤས ་ ཤིག ་ གི ་ ཚབ ་ བྱེད ་ ཀྱི ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ རེད། དེ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ བྱུང ་ བ་ རེད་ ཅེས ་ ན་ གཤམ་ གྱི ་ རྒྱུ ་ རྐྱེན་ གསུམ་ གྱིས ་ གྲངས ་ ཉུང ་ སྐད་ དེས ་ སྐད་ གཞན་ ལ ་

དབང ་ སྒྱུར ་ བྱེད་ ཐུབ་ པ་ བྱུང ་ བ་ རེད། 1 བོད་ སྐད་ ལ ་‘སྔོན་ ནས ་ བསགས ་ པའི ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ མ ་ རྩ’་ ཡོད་ པ་ རེད། དེ་ ནི་ བོད་ སྐད་ ཀྱིས ་ ཡུན་ 2 3

རིང ་ བོར ་ ཐོན་ ཁུངས ་ གསོག ་ འཇོག ་ བྱས ་ ཡོད ་ པ ་ སྟེ། ཡི་ གེ ་ དང ་ རྩོམ ་ རིག ་ གྱ ་ ནོམ ་ པ། སློབ ་ གསོའི ་ རིག་ པ། དབང ་ ཐང ་། སྒྲིག་ གཞིའི ་ རྒྱབ་ སྐྱོར༼དགོན་ སྡེ༽ ་ སོགས ་ མང ་ དུ ་ ཡོད།

བོད་ཀྱི ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ བེད་ སྤྱོད་ བྱེད་ པ་ དང ་ རྒྱ ་ ཁྱབ་ དུ ་ སྤེལ ་ བ་ དེར ་ སྲིད་ གཞུང ་ ཁ་ ཤས ་ ཙམ་ མ་ ཟད་ སྲིད་ གཞུང ་ མ ་ ཡིན་ པའི ་ ཚོགས ་ པ་ མང ་ པོས ་ རྒྱབ་ སྐྱོར ་ བྱེད་ བཞིན་ ཡོད་ པ།

སྐད ་ ཆུང ་ ངུ ་ རྣམས ་ འཇིག ་ སླ ་ བ ་ ཡིན། ཀྲུང ་ གོ ་ དང ་ པ ་ ཀི ་ སི ་ ཐན། རྒྱ ་ གར། བལ ་ པོ། འབྲུག ་ ཡུལ ་ སོགས ་ ཀྱིས ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ དེ་ དག་ ལ ་ རྒྱབ ་ སྐྱོར ་ གང ་ ཡང ་ མི ་ སྤྲོད་ ཅིང ་ དེས ་ ནི་ སྐད་ དེ་ དག་ འཇིག་ སླ་ བའི ་ གནས ་ སྟངས ་ ཤིག་ ལ ་ འདེད་ བཞིན་ ཡོད།

9 Borders: In Conclusion Gwendolyn Hyslop དེབ་འདིས་ སྐད་ཡིག་ ཁ་ ཤས་ སྐད་རང ་ཉིད་ཀྱི ་ སྤྱི་ཚོགས་དང ་རིག་གནས། ཆབ་ སྲིད་ཀྱི ་གནས་ སྟངས་ ཁྲོད་

བཞག་ སྟེ་ ཞིབ་ འཇུག་ བྱས ་ ཡོད་ ཅིང ་། འདིར ་ འཁོད་ པའི ་ ལེའུ ་ དག་ ཏུ ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ དེ་ དག་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ བཀོལ ་ སྤྱོད་ བྱེད་ཀྱིན་པ་ དང ་འཕེལ་ རྒྱས ་ སུ ་ཇི ་འདྲ་ ཕྱིན་པ། ཁྱད་པར ་ དུ ་ བོད་ སྐད་ཆེན་པོའི ་ ཡུལ་ ཁམས ་ཏེ་ སྐད་

རིགས ་ སྣ་ མང ་ གི་ ཁོར ་ ཡུག་ ཅིག་ ཏུ ་ སྐད་ དེ་ དག་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ འཕེལ ་ རྒྱས ་ སུ ་ ཕྱིན་ ཡོད་ པ་ སོགས ་ གནད་ དོན་

ཞིབ་ འཇུག་ གི་ ལམ ་ ནས ་ བསྟན་ ཡོད། དེབ་ འདིའི ་ ལེའུ ་ ཁག་ ཏུ ་ འཁོད་ པའི ་ གཏམ ་ རྒྱུད་ རྣམས ་ གཤམ ་ གྱི ་ ནང ་ དོན་ འདི་ བཞིར ་ འདུས ་ པ་ ཡིན་ཏེ། ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ དང ་ སློབ་ གསོ། མིང ་། ཡི་ གེ་ ཤེས ་ ཚད་ བཅས ་ སོ།།

སྐད་ ཡིག་ ནི་ སྟོབས ་ ཤུགས ་བླ་ མེད་ ལྡན་ པ་ ཞིག་ སྟེ། ང ་ ཚོས ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ གིས ་ གཞན་ ལ ་ འབྲེལ ་ འདྲིས ་

བྱེད་ ཅིང ་རང ་ཉིད་ལའང ་དེ་ཡིས་མཚན་ཉིད་འཇོག་པར་བྱེད། ང ་ཚོས་རང ་གི་རིགས་ཀྱི ་ ངོས་ལེན་དེ་ཡིས་

Tibetan L anguage Summaries

213

འབྱེད་ ཅིང ་ དབང ་ ཤུགས ་ཀྱང ་ དེ་ ཡིས ་ བཀོལ ་ བར ་ བྱེད། སྐད་ བརྡ་ རིག་ པ་ བ་ རྣམས ་ཀྱིས ་ སྐད་ དང ་ ལུང ་

སྐད་ སྣ་ མང ་ ལ ་ སྐད་ ཆ་ བཤད་ མཁན་ རྣམས ་ཀྱིས ་ བཏགས ་ པའི ་ མིང ་ དང ་ མི ་ གཅིག་ པའི ་ མིང ་ གསར ་ པ་ བཏགས ་ ནས ་ མཐའ ་ མཚམས ་ གསར ་ བཟོ་ བྱེད་ ཅིང ་། གལ ་ སྲིད་ སྐད་ བརྡ་ རིག་ པ་ བ་ རྣམས ་ མེད་ པ་ ཡིན་

ནའང ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ ནི་ དུས ་ དང ་ བསྟུན་ ནས ་ འགྱུར ་ ལྡོག་ འབྱུང ་ སྲིད་ ཅིང ་ གོ་ བརྡ་ འཕྲོད་ མི་ འཕྲོད་ཀྱིས ་ རང ་

བྱུང ་གི་མཐའ ་མཚམས་ བཟོ་ སྲིད་པ་རེད། རྒྱལ་ ཁབ་ཀྱི ་མཐའ ་མཚམས་ དང ་ སྐད་ཡིག་གི་ཚོགས་ སྡེ་ རྣམས་ ཀྱིས ་ ཚན་ པ་ བགོ ་ སྟངས ་ འདིའི ་ རིགས ་ ལ ་ སྟངས ་ འཛིན་ ཡག་ ཉེས ་ གང ་ རུང ་ བྱེད་ པ་ རེད། སྐད་ ཡིག་ དང ་

སྐད་ ཡིག་ གི་ དུས ་ དང ་ བར ་ སྟོང ་ གི་ འགྱུར ་ ལྡོག་ སྐོར ་ ཧ ་ ཡག་ པོ་ གོ་ དགོས ་ ཚེ་ སྐད་ བརྡ་ རིག་ པ་ བ་ རྣམས ་ ནས ་ སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ དང ་ མི་ རིགས། མི་ སྒེར། ཡིག་ ཐོག་ དང ་ ཆབ་ སྲིད་ཀྱི ་ གནས ་ བབ་ གང ་ ཞིག་ གི་ འོག་ ཏུ ་ སྐད་ ཡིག་ གང ་ དེ་ གནས ་ པའི ་ སྐོར ་ ལ ་ བསམ ་ གཞིག་ གཏིང ་ ཟབ་ གཏོང ་ དགོས།

དེབ་ འདིར ་ འཁོད་ པའི ་ ལེའུ ་ རྣམས ་ སུ ་ མཐའ ་ མཚམས ་ དང ་ སྐད་ ཀྱི ་ འབྲེལ ་ འདྲིས ་ གཙོར ་ བཟུང ་ ནས ་

གླེང ་ ཡོད་ ཅིང ་ ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ དང ་ སློབ ་ གསོ ་ ནི་ དེའི ་ སྒུལ ་ ཤུགས ་ སྟོབས ་ དང ་ ལྡན་ པ ་ དེ་ ཡིན་ པ ་ དང ་། དེ་ ཡང ་ མཐར ་ གཏུགས ་ ན་ སྐད ་ ཅི་ ཞིག ་ བཤད ་ པ ་ དང ་ ཇི ་ ལྟར ་ བཤད ་ པ ་ དེ ་ བྱིས ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ ལ ་ ཐུག ་ ཡོད ་

པར ་ སྣང ་ སྟེ། ཁོ་ ཚོས ་ མཉམ ་ གཅིག ་ ཏུ ་ སྐད ་ དང ་ རིགས ་ ཀྱི ་ ངོས ་ ལེན་ དེ ་ རྙེད ་ པ ་ ཡིན། དེ ་ ཡང ་ བྱིས ་ པ ་ རྣམས ་ཀྱིས ་ རང ་ གི་ ཁོར ་ ཡུག་ སྟེ། སློབ་ གྲྭ། ཆོས ་ ལུགས ་ དང ་ ཆབ་ སྲིད་ཀྱི ་ སྒྲིག་ འཛུགས ་ སོགས ་ དང ་ ལྷན་

དུ ་ ནར ་ སོན་ ཅིང ་ དེ ་ དག ་ ལ ་ བརྡ ་ ལན་ སྤྲོད ་ པ ་ དང ་། ཁོ་ ཚོས ་ བཤད ་ པའི ་ སྐད ་ ཆ ་ ཡིས ་ ཁོར ་ ཡུག ་ དང ་

སྤྱི ་ ཚོགས ་ སྒྲིག་ འཛུགས ་ སྟོབས ་ དང ་ ལྡན་ པ་ རྣམས ་ཀྱི ་ གཟུགས ་ བརྙན་ རྗེན་ པར ་ སྟོན་ པ་ ཡིན། དེབ་ འདིའི ་ ལེའུ ་ རྣམས ་ ཀྱིས ་ ང ་ ཚོར ་ སྐད ་ ཀྱིས ་ མཐའ ་ མཚམས ་ བརྒལ ་ བའི ་ ཆ ་ ལ ་ བསམ ་ གཞིག ་ བྱེད ་ པ ་ དང ་ དེའི ་ བརྒྱུད་ རིམ ་ མི ་ འདྲ ་ བ་ མང ་ པོ ་ ཧ ་ གོ ་ བར ་ རམ ་ འདེགས ་ བྱེད་ ཐུབ་ བོ།།

Index abolition 25-26 Arunachal Pradesh 57, 181-182, 200 autonym 107, 111-112, 114-117, 120

état de langue 108 evolving identity 159, 161, 168-170 exonym 88, 111-112, 114, 116-117, 119

Balti 109, 130, 135-136, 140, 178, 187 Beyul 160 Bhotiya / Bhutia / Bhotia 85-86, 88, 92, 96-99, 140, 158-159, 177, 179-180, 182, Bhutan 13, 21, 23, 53-57, 64, 67, 72, 79-80, 84, 86, 88, 108, 130-132, 175, 177-178, 180-182, 198, 200 border creation 14, 168, 190 bordering 14, 17, 19-21, 24, 32, 106, 108, 112, 114-115, 120, 161, 164, 181, 197-199, 201 borderline dominance 23, 48, 175, 177-178, 182, 187-190 borders (state/ linguistic) 11-15, 17, 19-23, 25-26, 54-55, 80, 83, 100, 120 ,129-130, 123-133, 147, 151, 157, 160, 162, 167, 170-171, 175-177, 189-190, 197, 199-201 borrowing 18, 21, 54-55, 58, 60, 67, 69-71, 76, 78-80, 83, 96, 108 Bumkor 95

Ghale 161-162, 170 Gorkha 160-161 gSerkhu 186 Gurung 162, 170, 178, 180

capitalism 12, 30 Central Tibetan Administration 128, 131-133, 152 China 11-13, 15, 23-24, 31, 34-37, 46-48, 109-110, 129-131, 140, 142, 146-148, 150, 158, 161, 168, 170-171, 175-178, 182, 187, 199 cities (see also urban) 32, 44-45, 48, 139, 170 Classical Tibetan / Middle Tibetan 21, 53-55, 74, 77, 79-80, 134-138, 140, 164, 198 comparative method 21, 38, 53, 58-60, 62-63, 65, 72, 75-77, 80, 109 Darmdo Minyak 185 death 16, 183, 186 Dhol-wa 179 dialect/dialects 14, 17-18, 21, 35, 53, 63, 74, 107-111, 116, 119, 129-132, 139, 141, 146, 151, 162, 164-167, 198, 201 Diaspora Tibetan / Zhichag Tibetan / gzhischags skad  23, 46-47, 127-129, 132-133, 139, 141-151, 199 diglossia 127-128, 134, 137, 146, 148, 151 Drag-yabs sMar 186 Drenjongke 86 Dzongkha 54-55, 58, 62, 64, 67-71, 109-110, 129-130, 140, 178, 180-181, 187 East Bodish 18, 22, 53-78, 80-81, 198, 201 education 15-16, 21, 23-24, 34, 36, 38, 45-47, 89, 127-128, 131-132, 138, 140-143, 146-148, 150-151, 169-171, 181-184, 186, 197-199, 201 endangered 160, 184, 187

heteroglot standard language ideology 21, 31, 33-34, 36-37, 40, 42-43, 46-48, 189, 199, 204 Himachal Pradesh 179 Hor 114 identity 16, 18, 21-23, 34-44, 46-47, 86, 98, 105, 109, 116, 118-119, 129-131, 133, 140, 144, 150-151, 157-159, 161-162, 168, 170-171, 177-180, 184-185, 187, 198-201 India 11-13, 16, 19, 23, 84, 90-91, 95, 108-109, 127-128, 130-133, 141, 158, 175-178, 180-182, 199-200 Indigenous language 21, 84-87, 89, 91, 180, 200 inequality 11-12, 15-16, 25, 35, 38 intelligibility 22-24, 120, 130, 164, 166-167, 189, 201 interior frontiers 13-14, 26, 46 isolation 87, 95, 158, 160-161 Jirel 180 justice 25-26 Kami / Gami 64, 111 Kathmandu 157, 159-160, 168-170 Khams 58, 79, 106-107, 110-111, 113-115, 117-118, 120, 129-130, 133, 140-141, 144, 186-187 Khengkha 54, 56, 58, 61, 63-64, 66-74, 77, 178 Khroskyabs 107, 115 Kuke 158, 161-165, 167 Kurtöp 21-22, 53-58, 60-64, 67-68, 70-80, 108, 137, 181, 190, 198, 201 Ladakhi 109-110, 129-130, 140, 178, 182, 187 Lamo 106, 112, 115-118, 186 language ideology 21, 31, 33-37, 39-40, 42-43, 45-48, 127, 131-133, 147, 189, 199 language insecurity / language anxiety 36, 127, 144, 149 language shift 16, 21, 23, 32-33, 38-39, 41, 44, 46-47, 89, 108, 128, 135-136, 141, 146, 157, 159-161, 168-171, 182-188, 199 language vitality 157, 167, 171, 184 language/dialect distinction 17, 18, 20-21, 26, 35, 47-48, 88, 99-100, 107, 109, 143, 168, 200 Larong sMar 112, 117, 186 Lavrung 114-115

216  Lepcha 22, 83-101, 180, 200 Lepcha language 22, 64, 83-85, 87-101, 180, 198, 200 Lhagang Choyu 112, 185 Lhomi 180 linguistic disconnect 159 linguistic ecology 23, 35-36, 108, 171 linguistic purism / pure Tibetan / bod-skad gtsang-ma 22, 36, 90, 110, 138-139, 144, 185 literacy 23, 127-128, 137-138, 146-148, 151, 197-201 liturgical 21, 53-54, 80, 158, 164, 170, 198, 200 logs-skad 22, 36, 105-106, 110, 112-115, 118, 120, 144 Manaslu 160, 168 Manegacha  182-184, 190 minority language 23, 33, 85, 106, 110, 114, 130, 171, 176, 184 Minyag 106, 113, 115-116, 118, 120, 200 mixed language 22, 105, 113, 118-120, 139, 144, 185 monastic / monastery(ies) 19, 94-96, 98-99, 115, 132-133, 141-142, 166, 169, 180 Monguor 183 Monpa / Mönpa 19, 54, 56, 181-182, 188, 200 Mugom 178 mutual intelligibility 130, 167, 189 national identity / nationalism 12, 34-37, 39, 47, 130-133, 144, 150, 180 Nepal 11, 13, 15, 23, 84, 86, 88, 108, 128, 130-132, 139, 157-161, 170, 175, 177-180, 182, 198, 201 Nepali 23, 85, 86, 88-89, 98, 132, 141, 158-159, 164-165, 167-171, 180, 198 Ngandehua 183 Nubri 23, 108, 139, 157, 159-171, 198, 201 Nyagrong Minyag 115-116 Nyarong Minyak 185 Oirat Mongol 184 Pakistan 11, 13, 23, 109, 130, 175, 177-178, 190 perceived prestige 139, 164-165, 167 petty sovereigns 14-15, 25 practices 15, 18-21, 24, 26, 31, 33, 47-48, 97, 108, 120, 132, 157, 160, 162, 164, 168-170, 189 prestige 19, 23, 54, 129, 133, 138-140, 164-167, 180, 188 pure father tongue/pure Tibetan movement (see also linguistic purism/pure Tibetan/ bod-skad gtsang-ma) 36, 110, 185 Purik 178 ra-ma-lug 144 readability 127, 147, 151

Bordering Tibe tan L anguages

remote 12, 54, 160, 168, 170 rGyalrong 107-108, 114, 116 Rongring 14, 22, 83, 88, 101, 108, 139, 198 rTa’u 184-185, 190 Rung 179 Selibu 106, 119 settlement 127-128, 131-132, 146, 151 Sherpa 88, 129-130, 178-179 Shibboleth/Shibboleths 17, 37, 161 shift 13, 16, 21, 23, 32-33, 38-39, 41, 44, 46-47, 89, 108, 128, 135-136, 141, 146, 157, 159-161, 168-171, 182-188, 199 Shuhi/Xumi/Shuhing 187 Sikkim 14, 22, 83-88, 91-93, 95-99, 139, 158, 178, 180-182, 198 slur 179 socioeconomic opportunity 45, 170 sovereignty 13-14, 26, 176, 189 spelling reforms 135, 137 standard language / standardization / standardization 18, 21, 23, 31, 33-40, 42-43, 46-48, 55, 107, 110, 127-130, 133-142, 144, 146-148, 150-151, 166, 171, 188-189, 200 Standard Tibetan / Literary Tibetan 18, 21, 3638, 40, 42, 45-47, 107-108, 110, 127-130, 132-135, 137-142, 144, 146-151, 161, 171, 189, 199-200 standpoint theory 175, 177 structural violence (see also violence) 11-13, 20, 24-25 subsistence 38, 158-159, 164, 168, 170 Syuba 170, 179-180 Tamang 64, 96, 140, 158, 161-162, 178-180 Tibetan Buddhist 83, 85-88, 91-92, 94-101, 133, 139, 150, 180, 190 Tibetan Empire 127-129, 133-134, 137, 150 Tibetanization 22, 180 Tibetic 20, 22-23, 53-55, 58, 60, 70, 80, 105-106, 108-114, 116-120, 130, 158-159, 161, 170, 178-179, 198 Tshangla 54, 66, 178, 181, 190, 200 urban 13, 31, 33, 38-40, 43-48, 139, 146-147, 158, 170, 186, 199 urbanisation 112 Uttarakhand 179 vernacular literature 15, 129-130, 146, 189 violence 11-13, 16-17, 20-21, 24-25, 109, 175-176, 190-191 Yolmo 88, 179 Zbu 107, 186-187, 190



Asian Borderlands

Duncan McDuie-Ra: Borderland City in New India. Frontier to Gateway. 2016, isbn 9789089647580 Martin Saxer and Juan Zhang (eds): The Art of Neighbouring. Making Relations Across China’s Borders. 2017, isbn 9789462982581 Mona Chettri: Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland. Constructing Democracy. 2017, isbn 9789089648860 Dan Smyer Yü and Jean Michaud (eds): Trans-Himalayan Borderlands. Livelihoods, Territorialities, Modernities. 2017, isbn 9789462981928 Hyun Gwi Park: The Displacement of Borders among Russian Koreans in Northeast Asia. 2018, isbn 9789089649980 Caroline Humphrey (ed.): Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the ChinaRussia Borderlands. 2018, isbn 9789089649829 Reece Jones and Md. Azmeary Ferdoush (eds): Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond. 2018, isbn 9789462984547 Arik Moran: Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland. Rajput Identity during the Early Colonial Encounter. 2019, isbn 9789462985605 Antía Mato Bouzas: Kashmir as a Borderland. The Politics of Space and Belonging across the Line of Control. 2019, isbn 9789463729406 Stéphane Gros (ed.): Frontier Tibet. Patterns of Change in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands. 2019, isbn 9789463728713 Swargajyoti Gohain: Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands. Culture, Politics, Place. 2020, isbn 9789462989320 Alessandro Rippa: Borderland Infrastructures. Trade, Development, and Control in Western China. 2020, isbn 9789463725606 Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green, and Steven Denney (eds): Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands. 2021, isbn 9789462987562 Mona Chettri and Michael Eilenberg (eds): Development Zones in Asian Borderlands. 2021, isbn 9789463726238 Gunnel Cederlöf and Willem van Schendel (eds): Flows and Frictions in TransHimalayan Spaces. Histories of Networking and Border Crossing. 2022, isbn 9789463724371 Simon Rowedder: Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos. Mastering Smallness. 2022, isbn 9789463722360