The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya

Selma K. Sonntag, Mark Turin

Description

This highly original and timely collection brings together case studies from salient areas of the Himalayan region to explore the politics of language contact. Promoting a linguistically and historically grounded perspective, The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya offers nuanced insights into language and its relation to power in this geopolitically complex region.

Edited by respected scholars in the field, the collection comprises five new research contributions by established and early-career researchers who have been significantly engaged in the Himalayan region. Grounded in a commitment to theoretically informed area studies, and covering Tibet (China), Assam (India), and Nepal, each case study is situated within contemporary debates in sociolinguistics, political science, and language policy and planning. Bridging disciplines and transcending nation-states, the volume offers a unique contribution to the study of language contact and its political implications.

The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya is essential reading for researchers in the fields of language policy and planning, applied linguistics, and language and literary education. The detailed introduction and concluding commentary make the collection accessible to all social scientists concerned with questions of language, and the volume as a whole will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, sociolinguistics, political science and Asian studies.
 

Sujets

• SOCIOLOGY
• Linguistics
• Language politics

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 16 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9781783747078
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya


The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya
Edited by Selma K. Sonntag and Mark Turin






https://www.openbookpublishers.com


© 2019 Selma K. Sonntag and Mark Turin. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Selma K. Sonntag and Mark Turin (eds.), The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0169
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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-704-7
ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-705-4
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-706-1
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-707-8
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-708-5
ISBN XML: 978-1-78374-709-2
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0169
Cover image: Edward Lear, Kinchinjunga (1877). Yale Center for British Art, public domain, https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1670566
Cover design: Anna Gatti.
All paper used by Open Book Publishers is sourced from SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) accredited mills and the waste is disposed of in an environmentally friendly way
Contents
Contributors
vii
Preface
xi
Introduction: Language Politics and Language Contact
1
Selma K. Sonntag
1.
Language Contact and the Politics of Recognition amongst Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China: The rTa’u-Speaking ‘Horpa’ of Khams
17
Tunzhi (Sonam Lhundrop), Hiroyuki Suzuki, and Gerald Roche
Vertical and Horizontal Politics of Language Contact in Tibet
17
The rTa’u-speaking ‘Horpa’: Ambiguous Origins and Shifting Polysemy
20
rTa’u-speakers and Contemporary Tibetan Language Politics
30
Conclusion
40
2.
What Happened to the Ahom Language? The Politics of Language Contact in Assam
49
Selma K. Sonntag
The Mandala State
52
The Ahom Kingdom
57
The Colonial State
66
The Modern State
70
Conclusion
74
3.
Transforming Language to Script: Constructing Linguistic Authority through Language Contact in Schools in Nepal
79
Uma Pradhan
Linguistic Authority Through Language Contact
81
Writing Language, Claiming “Authenticity”
85
Language, Dialect, and Making “Corrections”
93
Language, Script, and Social Acceptability
98
Language, Education and Frames of “Legitimacy”
102
Conclusion
105
4.
The Significance of Place in Ethnolinguistic Vitality: Spatial Variations Across the Kaik e-Speaking Diaspora of Nepal
109
Maya Daurio
Kaike Speakers
110
Language and Identity
115
Intergenerational Transmission
126
Conclusion
130
5.
Speaking Chone, Speaking ‘Shallow’: Dual Linguistic Hegemonies in China’s Tibetan Frontier
137
Bendi Tso and Mark Turin
The Shape of Linguistic Hegemony: Coercion and Consent
138
Situating Chone County in Time and Place
140
Research Methods and Subject Position
144
Coercion as an Aspect of Linguistic Hegemony
145
The Role of Consent in Shaping Linguistic Hegemony
154
Conclusion
159
6.
Concluding Thoughts on Language Shift and Linguistic Diversity in the Himalaya: The Case of Nepal
163
Mark Turin
List of Tables and Figures
177
Index
179


Contributors
Bendi Tso completed a Master of Arts in Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests lie in linguistic nationalism, linguistic identities, and language ideologies. Her current research explores how the ideology of ‘authentic Tibetanness’ — the idea that speaking Tibetan is taken as a claim to be an authentic Tibetan person — has been played out among Chone Tibetans in Kanlho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture by the Chinese state and by Tibetan ethno-nationalists. Her research also examines the ways in which Chone Tibetans engage, mediate, resist, and reject such ideology based on their own linguistic realities and experiences, in history and at present.
Maya Daurio earned a Master of Science in Geography from the University of Montana, where her research focused on language maintenance and social-ecological resilience within an endangered language community in Nepal. She has worked for over eight years in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and is interested in anthropological, ecological, and humanitarian applications of GIS. Concurrent research interests include language endangerment and maintenance, traditional ecological knowledge, social-ecological resilience, indigeneity, and mountain geographies. Maya will be pursuing a doctorate in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.
Uma Pradhan is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Oxford School for Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. Prior to this, Uma was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Education Anthropology, Aarhus University, Copenhagen. Uma’s research focuses on power-laden dimensions of education and examines the interconnection between state, society, and schooling. Uma holds a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford, where she studied the cultural politics of minority language use in schools. She received the Dor Bahadur Bista Prize 2015 and Nations and Nationalism Prize 2018 for articles based on this research. Before joining academia, Uma worked in the development sector for several years.
Gerald Roche is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University, and has previously held positions at the University of Melbourne, Uppsala University, and Qinghai Normal University. His research focuses on the politics of language endangerment and revitalization, particularly within Tibet and the Himalayas. Recent edited publications include the Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization (with Leanne Hinton and Leena Huss) and two open access publications: Indigenous Efflorescence : Beyond Revitalization in Sapmi and Ainu Mosir (with Hiroshi Maruyama and Isa Virdi-Kroik), and Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet : Texts in Mongghul , Chinese , and English (with Limusishiden).
Selma K. Sonntag is Professor Emerita of Politics at Humboldt State University in California and Affiliate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research area is the politics of language, primarily in South Asia, but also in the United States, Europe and South Africa. Her numerous publications on language politics in South Asia have appeared in Language Policy , The Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics , and Nationalism and Ethnic Politics , among other journals, as well as in over a dozen edited volumes. Her books include The Local Politics of Global English : Case Studies in Linguistic Globalization (2003) and State Traditions and Language Regime s (2015). Dr. Sonntag was a Research Fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Studies in New Delhi in spring 2012 and the recipient of two Fulbright research awards. She recently completed her tenure as chair of the Research Committee on the Politics of Language of the International Political Science Association.
Hiroyuki Suzuki holds a D.Litt. in linguistics from Kyoto University (2007) and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway, and a visiting scholar at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan. His principal research interests are descriptive linguistics, geolinguistics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics of languages in the Tibetosphere. He has published various works on preliminary descriptions of individual Tibetic languages, grammar sketches, geolinguistic analysis, and narrative analysis with interlinear glossing. He is an author of two books: Dongfang Zangqu Zhuyuyan Yanjiu (2015) and 100 Linguistic Maps of the Swadesh Word List of Tibetic Languages From Yunnan (2018).
Tunzhi (Sonam Lhundrop) is a Ph.D. student in linguistics at La Trobe University, Australia. He is writing a descriptive grammar of the rTa’u language, a rGyalrongic language spoken in western Sichuan Province, China. He is a native of the rTa’u community and for the last decade he has been engaged in language and cultural documentation proje