As the Chinese Communist Party has intensified its policy of assimilation for cultural and ethnic minority groups in recent decades, language has been a key part of that effort. Standard Tibetan is recognized as the official language of the Tibetans, who live throughout the Tibet Autonomous Region as well as in Tibetan areas in current Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. Yet government practice has made it increasingly difficult for Tibetans to live, work, and study in their own language; Mandarin is now the primary language of instruction in many schools, official communications and education have been Sinicized, and hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children are forced to attend boarding schools where they are cut off from their families, cultures, communities, and language. (Read more about the impact of the boarding schools in our interview with activist Lhadon Tethong.) Activist Tashi Wangchuk has been repeatedly detained for his efforts to advocate for the protection of the Tibetan language.

But within the Tibetan population exist smaller communities who speak their own languages, which are not widely understood or acknowledged by the Chinese government, the Han Chinese population, global scholars, or even by many fellow Tibetans. These languages are facing extinction as they are forced to assimilate both to Tibetan and to Chinese. According to researcher Gerald Roche, “The Chinese state policy about those languages is essentially that they don’t exist.” As a result, speakers of these languages receive neither the respect from society nor the resources needed to continue using and teaching their languages to younger generations.

Gerald Roche

Roche is an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. His work focuses on issues of power, the state, colonialism, and race in Asia, particularly the transnational Himalayan region. Much of his research explores how these issues manifest in the language politics of this linguistically diverse area, through state-sponsored language oppression and the social movements and community practices which seek to resist it. He lived in Qinghai for several years in the 2010s, working as an anthropologist and studying the communities who speak Manegacha and other minority languages. His new book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, examines the ways these languages are being erased amid forced assimilation. In the latest installment in our interview series focusing on Tibet, we spoke to Roche about the Tibetan communities that speak minority languages and the threats their languages face. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

China Digital Times: When most people think about language in Tibet, they generally think about the standard Tibetan language, but as you’ve researched and written about, there are, I believe, about 30 languages spoken in the Tibetan region. Today, how many people living in Tibet still speak those minority languages?

Gerald Roche: As a disclaimer, a lot of the statistical estimates that I’m giving, they’re just estimates, because the Chinese state is committed to denying the existence of these languages and is also committed to denying the people who speak these languages the kind of basic political rights that would enable them to exert their own existence in public forums. So all of the numbers that I’m going to give you are just best guesses, and I think that they’re reasonable guesses, but they’re not watertight demographic statistics. So the best guess that I have is that around a quarter of a million Tibetans speak these minority languages. That’s around four percent of the Tibetan population. As to the number of languages themselves, there are at least two sources of complexity and confusion. One source is that academic research on these languages is still ongoing. A lot of the languages are still being described by linguists, and that’s in part because the Chinese state doesn’t encourage research on these languages and also because some of the regions where these languages are spoken are closed to outsiders, not just foreigners, but also they are sometimes restricted to Han Chinese people. So, for example, there have been a number of languages described in the last five years that are spoken in some villages around the city of Chamdo in the eastern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and it’s very difficult for outsiders to access those areas, and it’s very difficult for people from those areas to access research institutions. So it’s hard for these languages to be put on record for those reasons.

The second footnote on that number of 30 is that counting languages is not like measuring temperature with a thermometer or looking for radiation with a Geiger counter. It’s not a scientific endeavor. It’s a social and political endeavor, and the answers that you get when you count languages will depend on aspects such as local culture, but also the extent to which those people are politically empowered to engage in public processes around the production of knowledge. Tibetan understandings of what constitutes a language are different from your understanding or my understanding, and the Chinese state also completely excludes the people who speak those languages from any political processes that would give them a voice in making that decision. The literature is the best thing that we have to go off because of that, and the literature suggests that there’s about 30 of these minority languages which are spoken by Tibetans, and if you add up all the numbers that exist in the different literature about how many people speak those languages, a quarter of a million people, four percent of Tibetans. But we don’t know for sure.

CDT: Linguistically, how do these languages relate to standard Tibetan?

Roche: They are very different. That’s why I separate them off from the Tibetan language. To give a parallel, we can think of the European case. You have a group of languages in Europe, like French, Castilian or Spanish, Catalan, Italian, et cetera, which all have a historical relationship to Latin, and so they form a language family of connected languages called the Romance languages. But we recognize that those are separate and distinct languages. There is a similar situation in Tibet, where you have the Tibetic languages, which all have a historical relationship with the written Tibetan language, and on the level of intelligibility, so whether people can understand each other in conversation or not, those different Tibetic languages are different. They’re distinct languages in the same way that French is not Spanish. And that doesn’t include the minority languages. There is another distinct group of languages which have absolutely no historical relationship with the written Tibetan language. So if we go back to the case that I introduced before in Europe, those Romance languages and their connection to Latin, you have languages in the region which don’t have any connection. Basque is the perfect example. Basque is not just a different language; it exists in a different language family and it’s completely distinct from those Romance languages. The minority languages’ relationship to Tibetan is more like that. These languages are in a couple of different language families. And as a non-linguist, I’m less interested in that. What is important is that these languages are recognized by Tibetans themselves as being extremely distinct from other Tibetan languages, so that linguistic difference, that historical difference, maps onto local understandings, and it also maps onto the understandings of the Chinese state policy as well. The Chinese state policy about those languages is essentially that they don’t exist.

CDT: You focus your research primarily on one of the languages, Manegacha, which you write is spoken by about 8,000 people currently. Where in the Tibetan region do they live primarily?

Roche: Just a point of clarification: Manegacha is spoken by 8,000 Tibetan people. There’s actually another group of people who speak the same language, a couple of hundred kilometres away in Gansu province, but they are a different minority group. They are called the Bao’anzu and there’s no connection between the two populations. Even though they share the same language, they have completely different identities. The Bao’anzu in Gansu province are Muslims. And the Manegacha speakers in Qinghai province consider themselves Tibetan and are Buddhists. So it’s the same language but different populations. The 8,000 [Tibetan] Manegacha speakers live in about four villages on the northeast Tibetan plateau. It traditionally was known as the Tibetan region Amdo, which covers the northern part of the Tibetan plateau, and it’s a specific cultural region within Amdo, known as Rebgong, which is basically a valley and its hinterland on the northeast Tibetan plateau in today’s Qinghai province. So you have this long, wide, beautiful river valley running through the mountains of the Tibetan plateau and villages scattered along the river and up in the hills. The Manegacha-speaking villages are four villages spread along the river from north to south, and the majority of other people in the region are all Tibetans that speak a more standard form of Tibetan.

CDT: How much has the population of Manegacha speakers declined? What was it when it was at its peak?

Roche: This is tricky because we don’t have any of these statistics, but I would say that 8,000 is probably the peak, because you have this complicated situation where historically, the population of Manegacha speakers has increased as living conditions have improved. But at the same time, the transmission of the language across generations has decreased. So even though objectively, there’s a higher number of speakers, the language is not being passed down at the same rate that it used to be. It used to be that there were only a couple of thousand speakers, but all of them passed the language on. So the population was sustainable. Now you have 8,000 speakers, which is probably more than in the past, but about a third of the families that speak Manegacha are not passing it onto their children. That means that even if the population keeps increasing, the number of speakers is going to decline from now on.

CDT: So you expect a rapid decline in speakers in the coming generations?

Roche: Yeah. I expect the decline will be really rapid because the pressures on the language have been mounting over the last 75 years. Since the area was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China, there’s been assimilatory pressures. Those pressures really intensified in the 21st century. When you had the Develop the West program, big infrastructural development, big investment in institution building in Tibet and other parts of what is today western China—those are the things that are really starting to drive people away from the Manegacha language and towards Tibetan. And then you have these collective decision-making processes. Of those four villages, in one of the villages, the entire population has decided to stop using the language at home. So with the collective, communal decision, there’s a few families who [say] “No, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to keep teaching [our children] Manegacha.” But the majority of families in that village decided collectively to do that. And so if another village does that, and another village does that, that decision only has to happen four times and then there are no Tibetans that speak Manegacha.

CDT: Do you know about efforts that people are making to try to change that, to try to preserve it for the future generations, and how are they doing that?

Roche: I did surveys of Manegacha-speaking households, asking their views on the language and views on Chinese and Tibetan languages, and the different related issues. And the response was always that they want to keep the Manegacha language, that they value it. However, those decisions that they are making are working against those interests to maintain the language. And that’s because of how local understanding of language works. People locally think if they don’t speak Manegacha to the kids, the kids are still going to learn it because it’s their language. They’ll just figure it out and pick it up. And this just doesn’t happen. We know from those survey responses, people want their children to have the language, and they want the language to survive. We can see that from other actions that they engage in. In the villages where Manegacha is spoken, everyone is bilingual or trilingual. They know Manegacha, Tibetan, and Mandarin. But when two Manegacha speakers meet, they still speak in their language. They don’t speak in Tibetan. If Manegacha speakers wanted to, they could just stop speaking the language entirely tomorrow. But they don’t do that, and that’s an active choice. It’s important to recognize that, because there are these huge pressures that are coercing Manegacha speakers into giving up the language and to stop using it. In some sense, just to use the language, even in private, is an act of resistance against those assimilatory pressures. People also do things like push the language into new areas of life when they have the opportunity. When I was there, smartphones and social media started to spread. When I was living in Qinghai, I saw this happen over the course of years, and when it happened, people started making memes in Manegacha recording fun, little dialogues, doing movies and stuff. That’s indicative of people’s desire to put the language into these new situations. Normally, for other languages, they would be supported by the state policies to do that, because the languages would be taught in school, there would be money to fund the media, to develop publications, and things like that. But Manegacha speakers just have to do it on their own. Despite the fact that this comes at the cost to them, they do it themselves anyway. So those are some of the things that Manegacha speakers do today.

CDT: In addition to these pressures that you’re talking about, you also say that the Manegacha speakers face more explicit discrimination, specifically they face what you call “banal violence.” Could you explain what you mean by that and what you saw when you were there?

Roche: Banal in one sense just means everyday, like taken for granted and accepted, and this was very much the nature of the violence against Manegacha speakers. I did interviews with Manegacha speakers about the discrimination that they face, and I also worked with a research assistant who went and spoke to Tibetan speakers about the discrimination that they enact against Manegacha speakers. And I thought those second interviews would be kind of difficult, and people would not want to say very much about it, but local Tibetans were just like, “yeah, this is what we do. We think that they are not really Tibetan. We think that they need to use Tibetan better. We think that they are maybe traitors to the Tibetan cause,” and so on. So people were just very unashamed of the way in which they discriminate against Manegacha speakers. So if you’re a Manegacha speaker in Rebgong, the main problem that you face in relation to language is that everyday discrimination from other Tibetans. Other Tibetans will dehumanize Manegacha speakers—they will compare them to animals or say that they are not really human in the same way as Tibetan speakers. They will describe Manegacha [language] by comparing it to animal noises, so that they will call it bird talk or compare it to the sound of frying beans–it’s not really language. It’s just noise.

And then you have another form of discrimination called disparagement humor. You can think of, for example, sexist or racist jokes. We also have these kind of jokes about languages in the context of Rebgong. We know from other studies that these jokes are never harmless, that they do incite people to further violence, to entrench their negative views further and to normalize discrimination against those populations. That happens all the time for Manegacha speakers; people make jokes about them, make jokes about their language. It’s just a constant thing that they face. There’s also a label in the local language that Tibetans use to refer to Manegacha speakers. I had to think long and hard about whether to include this term in the book, because it’s kind of normalized in local life. People use it every day, including Manegacha speakers, but I think if you sit down and think about it and compare it to other situations, it’s correct to refer to that term as a slur, because what that slur does is that it triggers a bunch of negative associations about those people. The word itself doesn’t mean anything. It’s more about the negative associations that it contains. And so when people use that slur, it triggers all those negative connotations that they’re not really human, their language is just noise, that they are funny, that they should assimilate, and things like this. So all of those things I’m talking about, I would consider violence because they aim to subordinate a particular population. But there are also examples of what people will more classically consider violence–of insults, of hate speech, and of physical violence of people getting into fist fights over language issues. So there is that sort of real violence as well. In the lives of Manegacha speakers, their exposure to that violence correlates with their exposure to Tibetan-speaking Tibetans. Whenever they are around other Tibetans, they’re subjected to this violence–jokes, slurs, insults, etc–and so this comes back to this label I use of banal violence.

Banal has a second meaning, beyond everyday, which goes back to the Latin etymology and the origin of the term in Roman law, where banality is tied up with words like “abandonment” and “bandits” and so on. And banal was something that existed outside of the law, something that existed outside the protection of the state. To be banished was to be pushed outside the state’s protection. And the violence against Manegacha is banal in that second sense in that the Chinese state lets it happen all the time. We know that the Chinese state can be highly punitive when it wants to. For example, it can crack down on Tibetans who have a picture of the Dalai Lama in their home. It can be very invasive, very punitive, very controlling when it wants to. And when the Chinese state chooses not to be punitive and controlling, I think we have to assume that that has some kind of significance. That you have this situation where a specific population is just subject to this constant, everyday discrimination by someone else, and the state just says, “That’s fine. We are happy to let that continue.” I would make the same argument about a lot of racist violence in Western countries that the state just steps back and is basically like, “well this looks too difficult. We can’t really define whether this is technically and legally discrimination or not. So we’re just going to let it happen” and maybe express some regret. But they do not legally enforce their own rules relating to particular populations. So the violence against Manegacha speakers is banal in that second sense. And I think that this is one of the most challenging and confronting aspects of the book, because essentially what I’m arguing is that there is violence between Tibetans that is structured and allowed to continue by the Chinese state. So we have to look at the way that the Chinese state implements its policies against Tibetans through other Tibetans.

CDT: Do Manegacha speakers face this kind of discrimination from the Han population or from other populations? Or are they just viewed as Tibetan by the Han, so they’re not differentiated from other Tibetan groups?

Roche: Yeah, they tend to just be viewed as Tibetans. So for Manegacha speakers, their encounters with Han Chinese people are fairly limited. In Rebgong, there is a local Han Chinese population and there are Hui, Muslim Chinese people, in the local area. And Manegachas interact with them and in those contexts, they are just viewed like other Tibetans. There’s no specific discrimination that comes to them from that. The main contact that Manegacha speakers have with Han Chinese comes in two situations. One is when people migrate to large Han Chinese cities to go to university, because there are no universities in Tibetan areas, except for Lhasa. So if you’re a Tibetan in Qinghai, for example, and you want to go to university, you have to go to Xining, which is a Han-dominated city. It’s like that for a lot of Tibetans, that’s their first exposure to a Han majority environment when they go to university. I spoke to Manegacha speakers about this, they were just like, “yeah, when I go there, I’m just Tibetan, and they just consider me another Tibetan and they discriminate against me on that basis.” But that’s it, it’s nothing to do specifically with being a Manegacha speaker. The other situation when Manegacha speakers might meet Han Chinese is when they do migrant labor. They go to other places to do work; Manegacha speakers have a preference for doing migrant labor in other Tibetan towns and cities. So it’s kind of rarer for them to go to spend long times in Han Chinese cities. But when they do, they face discrimination as a Tibetan, not as a Manegacha speaker.

CDT: Can you explain how standard Tibetan became the language that’s acknowledged by the Chinese government and most widely spoken in the Tibetan areas, and the process that that took?

Roche: It’s kind of like a covert and ad hoc process. There’s never been a real explicit policy to advance this, and there are even some on-the-ground practices that work against standard Tibetan language, so it’s pretty messy. But one thing that the Chinese government has done consistently since invading Tibet is to promote the written Tibetan language a bit. Not much, but a bit. So the Chinese state promotes the written Tibetan language enough that they can show that they’re doing something, enough that they can demonstrate to external observers: “Look, we respect minority rights. We put Tibetan on the sign. We let them learn Tibetan in one school. We have a publishing house for Tibetans.” The Chinese state has always done this kind of limited support of the written Tibetan language to wow external stakeholders, but also as a way of getting legitimacy amongst Tibetan people. The Chinese state is concerned about perceptions of legitimacy among Tibetan people, and the two main ways that it has tried to get that legitimacy is through economic development–improving people’s standards of living and cash incomes. And secondly, by having a shallow, superficial program of cultural preservation, which includes language and performing arts, but essentially not very much else. And so through those two things, it attempts to gain legitimacy for the Party-state rule in Tibet. The language is an important element of that. So that’s led to this ad hoc emergence of a standard form of Tibetan across Tibet in the written language. When it comes to the spoken language, on some level, the Chinese state recognizes that Tibetans can’t understand each other when they speak to one another. But the Chinese state wants to use spoken Tibetan for propaganda purposes [and] Tibetan is technically only one language for the Chinese government. So what it does is it says that there are dialects, and we use the dialects in broadcast media. So for example, there is an Amdo Tibetan TV, which uses a kind of standardized form of Tibetan that’s spoken in the north. There is Kham Tibetan TV, which uses a form of standardized Tibetan, which is spoken in the east and southeast. And then there’s another one for Central Tibetan spoken around Lhasa. So there’s this tension in the state’s own aims and goals.

The root of the standardization practice for Tibetan is the Chinese ethnic classification project. The Chinese state formally recognizes 56 ethnic groups or nationalities in China, including the Han Chinese and 55 minorities. The theory behind that is that each of those ethnic groups only speaks one language. That’s the assumption. And I think nowhere is that empirically true. It’s not true for the Han, for Tibetans, for the Yi, or for Mongolians. There might be some smaller minzu [ethnic groups] that only have one language, but they would be the exception rather than the rule. The Chinese government set the system up like that deliberately so that there would be a gap between linguistic diversity and ethnic diversity, and that that gap is a policy that’s designed to assimilate languages. So you take all of those 300 languages and you give a constitutional freedom for each minority to use one language. And you outsource the assimilation to the minority groups. And then once you’ve gotten rid of most of those 300 languages, you have 55 minorities each with one language, and a Han majority with one language, and then you assimilate the minorities into the Han majority. This was the plan that was laid out back when China was a Marxist-Leninist state, which it absolutely no longer is. Because those structures, those categories, and those processes are still in place, we see linguistic minorities assimilating to a dominant language of ethnic minorities. And that’s what’s happening with Manegacha speakers and other Tibetans that speak minority languages. Not all of them, some of them are assimilating to Chinese, but some of them are assimilating towards Tibetan.

CDT: You described the protests that erupted across Tibetan regions in 2008 as a kind of a turning point for awareness of many Tibetan people’s sense of identity and nationality. Can you describe that and how that’s impacted the potential survival of languages like Manegacha?

Roche: The 2008 protests were the first Tibetan protests against Chinese rule which transcended locality. There had been lots of isolated protests before, but they were typically in one place and they didn’t spread to other locations. But in 2008, the protests started in Lhasa and then they spread all across the Tibetan plateau, so there were also protests in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and less so in Yunnan–throughout the Tibet Autonomous Region and including Tibetans living in Beijing. So you had these very widespread ongoing protests among Tibetans explicitly against Chinese rule. It was a very significant event in those terms, and for many Tibetans, it was a kind of profound awakening to their own political situation. Many Tibetans began viewing themselves through the lens of a shared Tibetan identity for the first time. Tibetans have these very strong regional attachments to the valley that they grew up in, the village that they grew up in, the province that they grew up in. And there has always been a sense of Tibetanness, in the background of those things because it’s printed on your ID card and you’re reminded of your minzu every day. But those 2008 protests, from the evidence we see in Tibetan essays, poetry, pop music, from the evidence I saw in everyday conversations while I was living in Qinghai through this stuff, is suddenly that Tibetan identity becomes the most important identity for people in a way that it hadn’t been before.

An important part of that Tibetan identity that emerged from those protests, or that consolidated through those protests, was the role of Tibetan language in Tibetan identity–this idea that to be Tibetan means to speak Tibetan, to know Tibetan, to use Tibetan. And in particular, in the years following the 2008 protests, this idea emerged that Tibetan should be of a particular form and it should be pure Tibetan. This was the way that it was phrased by Tibetan activists and everyday people. Pure Tibetan in this context means Tibetan that doesn’t use any loan words from Chinese. Tibetan, like every language, is full of words from other languages. Tibetan is full of loan words from dozens of languages, but it has been extremely heavily influenced by Mandarin and other local Sinitic languages over the past 50 years. People started expressing this concern that if Tibetan language is the core of Tibetan identity, but Tibetan language is mixed with Chinese, then maybe our identity is also mixed with Chinese. And we need to defend that boundary. We need to defend our Tibetanness by defending the Tibetan language. So at that time, you saw this spread of pure Tibetan language associations in the villages, in schools, in universities, online through social media, where people were encouraging each other to speak pure Tibetan and to stop using Chinese loan words when they spoke Tibetan. So they would do things like print dictionaries to make sure that people knew the correct Tibetan words for it. They would hold spelling competitions. It would enter into people’s lives in contexts like restaurants and taxis where you would get a discount if you spoke pure Tibetan, and you would get charged double the price if you spoke in mixed Tibetan. So it became this really pervasive aspect of Tibetan everyday life, I would say from the year 2008, maybe almost for the next decade, but not quite.

Languages like Manegacha got caught up in this dynamic, because in local understandings of language, Manegacha and other Tibetan minority languages were seen as mixed languages. The idea was that they had once been pure Tibetan, but they had now become mixed with Chinese to the extent that they were no longer recognizable as any kind of Tibetan language any more. And this is based partly on the truth and partly on a fallacy. The true part of it is that like Manegacha, for example, has been influenced by Tibetan and it has lots of Tibetan loan words in it. So the name of the language, Manegacha, “Mane” is a Mongolic word from an old Mongolian language. “Gacha” is local Tibetan for language. Manegacha means “our language,” but it includes elements of two different languages. People who speak minority languages use a lot of Tibetan loan words, because they’re constantly in contact with Tibetan people, speaking Tibetan, and they practice Tibetan culture and follow Buddhism and so on. During this historical moment, Tibetans would hear those loan words and take that as evidence that these languages used to be Tibetan. So they would say, “you need to speak pure Tibetan,” and what that essentially means is those people need to assimilate to speaking Tibetan and stop speaking their languages. Tibetans were putting pressure on these people to speak Tibetan and seeing it as a kind of a defense of Tibetan national unity, rather than a project of assimilation. However, from the perspective of Manegacha speakers and other Tibetans that speak minority languages, it was a project of assimilation. They were essentially being told, “don’t speak your language, speak our language, your language is bad, our language is good.” There has always been some element of hierarchy between Tibetan speakers and minority language speakers. There’s always been some mild pressure to assimilate. But after 2008, that just really intensified because Tibetan identity was coming under this new threat. The Chinese state just reacted with an extremely overwhelming disproportionate response to those 2008 protests–mass arrests, mass incarceration, torture, martial law, checkpoints, the securitization of everyday life, and so on. So Tibetans felt and were under threat, and one of the ways that they responded to this was trying to build national unity by assimilating their linguistic minorities. So it’s this really tragic dynamic that emerges from Chinese colonialism in Tibet.

CDT: You describe a similar situation globally when international organizations and advocacy groups that work on Tibet are discussing language in Tibet, they really only focus on the survival of that standard Tibetan language. Are there any groups or individuals, researchers (besides you, of course) who are raising issues related to minority languages?

Roche: I think it’s starting to change a little bit, but the recognition of diversity is still not the majority opinion amongst academics who study Tibet or advocates who work for Tibet. Most of the academics that acknowledge this linguistic diversity are linguists who are interested in this specific language and that specific language. They are less interested in putting those languages in their social and cultural context. When it comes to academic studies of Tibetan, [they] tend to overlook the linguistics literature, so they don’t acknowledge that diversity. It tends to be based on competence in the written Tibetan language, so people who formally train as Tibetologists, that training essentially is learning to read Tibetan and reading lots of Tibetan texts. You don’t have to necessarily interact with Tibetan people to be an academic Tibetologist. And that’s why there was this lack of awareness regarding Tibetan linguistic diversity. But beyond that lack of awareness, I would say that there is also a limited acceptance, or a refusal to accept, that linguistic diversity exists, both by Tibetan studies academics and the international Tibet movement. So the international Tibet movement is essentially promoting Tibet nationalism, which is the ideology that the Tibetan people have a territory, they have a language, they have a national identity, and they were invaded by the Chinese. A lot of Tibetan international organizations that are essentially advocating for Tibetan nationalism, the existence of linguistic minorities counters that narrative, so that acknowledgment threatens their core business, if you like.

Nonetheless, there has been some increasing acknowledgment. For example, I worked with Free Tibet, which is a UK-based organization, and they have updated their website text to acknowledge linguistic diversity in Tibet. I was recently invited by the International Campaign for Tibet to provide a talk about my research and about the unique challenges faced by Tibet’s minority languages, so they at least don’t view the concept with hostility. They are not totally rejecting the idea. But I think the future survival of these languages depends on something more than acknowledgment that these languages exist. There has to be organized activism and advocacy that explicitly aims to confront the unique forms of oppression that those languages face, because it’s different from other Tibetans. It’s simply a different form of oppression, and it needs unique strategies and, I would say, distinct funding and things like this. It’s great to see broader acknowledgement, but that acknowledgement is not going to mean anything until it’s backed up with tactics, strategy, and funding.

CDT: You lived in Qinghai for several years. And then you were not allowed to stay–forced might be too strong, but you had to leave China. When’s the last time you were in the Tibetan regions?

Roche: When I say Tibet I’m talking about all Tibetan areas, not just the Tibet Autonomous Region, because that’s how Tibetans view Tibet as well. I lived in Qinghai and worked with Tibetans from 2005 to 2013. I couldn’t stay there because of new regulations that were brought in placing restrictions on international NGOs and international civil society organizations, essentially. It just became impossible for me to get a visa and a salary. So I couldn’t live there anymore. For the next five years, I was able to return there intermittently, but then my really critical publications that critique Chinese state policy in Tibet started coming out around 2014, ten years ago now. The last time I was able to go back to Rebgong was 2017. The last time I was back in China was 2018, so I was in Chengdu, where there’s a big Tibetan population where I was hanging out and seeing people. When I tried to go back in 2019, my visa was not denied, but just delayed continuously to the point where it no longer became meaningful to continue applying. I knew from my time in China that this was going to happen eventually if I published on these things. I knew how it was going to happen because I’d seen other examples. It’s very rare for them to explicitly ban anyone. They have done it but it creates bad publicity. So normally they just create friction where it’s harder for you to go. And I knew about this because this is exactly the same tactic that they use to prevent Tibetans from leaving China. When Tibetans are trying to apply for a passport, they’ll just send people back to the office over and over again, fill out new forms, new regulations, pay new fees, get new documents, over and over again, and people just give up because it’s too expensive and it takes too much time.

So I can’t go back to China anymore. I’m not surprised by that at all. It’s disappointing for me to be cut off from a place that I lived for so long, where I had connections with people that I care about. I would like to be able to go back for personal reasons related to that. I would like to be able to go back for academic reasons as well because the kind of research that I think is valuable can only be done on the ground in specific places by talking to people. The way that the Chinese state gets away with what it does is it’s very good at covering up stuff and and you can find lots of evidence in Tibetan language news reports from the Chinese state and so on, but you will never see them writing about Manegacha. You’ll never see them talking about these languages in Chinese propaganda in Tibetan. So for that on-the-ground perspective, to be able to see what the Chinese state covers up, you have to be in China. So I just have kind of given up on my research on Tibet, because I just don’t think that I can make a meaningful contribution to it anymore. I can access the same documents that everyone outside China can, but I think the real work has to be done from on the ground with people.

CDT: So what are you working on now? How have you shifted your focus?

Roche: I’ve shifted focus in a couple of different ways. I’ve shifted to look more regionally and comparatively. I’ve started doing a couple of comparative studies, looking at the relationship between human rights and language politics. In one study published in a journal called State Crime Journal, I worked with some coauthors, and we compared China, India, and Indonesia, looking at how the human rights record in each country impacts the space for language activism within those countries. It’s currently the United Nations decade of Indigenous languages, and the United Nations is saying everyone should do indigenous language activism on a human rights basis, and in China, you cannot do that. In India, the human rights situation has been declining very rapidly under Modi. If you just look at the political systems, you have democracy and authoritarianism–it would seem that there would be vast differences. If you look at the human rights records, China and India are rapidly converging. So I think it’s important to be aware of those developments. And China is a good base comparison for understanding what a terrible human rights situation looks like. So I’ve been working comparatively on that basis a bit. The other thing I’ve been doing is just looking practically at issues of language rights advocacy and activism. I think that there’s a lot of work to be done there academically just to think about what are the theories that we need to support communities in places like China to retain their language? How can we advocate from outside?

But practically there’s also lots of work to be done. I’ve been involved with different organizations. I’ve worked for two years with an organization called the Global Coalition for Language Rights, which I think does great work building a community of language rights activists around the world and bringing them together. More recently, I’ve been involved with efforts to set up a registered non-profit organization in the United States called the Linguistic Justice Foundation, trying to create a permanent, financially sustainable base from which to organize for language rights. I’m interested in continuing that work to look practically at these issues because I think it’s nice to have theories, but I think it’s more important to have suggestions for practical things that we can do to make a difference in a world which is very often unjust.

In such a repressive environment, how do Tibetans in Tibet hold onto their cultural identity? How does the world find out what is happening there? How do exiles stay connected with their families and homeland? Where can we find hope for the future of Tibet and Tibetans? CDT has launched this interview series as a way to explore these questions and to learn more about current conditions in Tibet, efforts to preserve Tibet’s religious and cultural heritage, and the important work being done every day by activists, writers, researchers, and others to help and support Tibetans inside and outside the region. Read previous interviews in the series.