Some disturbing news from Tibet: Protests have erupted over the Chinese government's plan to severely limit the use of the Tibetan language in schools, sometimes even relegating it to the status of an elective course.
I did my master's thesis on the syntax of Lhasa Tibetan, a rare type of language that exhibits ergative case-marking patterns (Basque is another famous ergative language, but the ergative pattern only appears in certain tenses in Tibetan), so I am particularly disturbed by this development.
At heart, language policing is a veiled exercise of political power. Indeed, restrictions on the use of Tibetan go hand in hand with other forms of political oppression -- Tibetans are restricted in their ability to practice their form of Buddhism and are not allowed to display images of the Dalai Lama. Tibetans rightfully see this move as an assault on their very identity, and it's not an innocuous one either: Languages typically die when their domain of use shrinks -- they stop being the language of commerce and government, newspapers and literature stop printing in them, and finally they becomes a "home language" before disappearing altogether. (This is why language-revival efforts in places like Ireland have sought to expand the use of Irish -- also known as Gaelic -- by printing government documents in Irish and encouraging business to take place in Irish.) Tibetan is nowhere near becoming a dead language -- and linguistic pride goes a long way in preserving languages under assault -- but restricting its use in academia is certainly a blow.
It's worth noting that his sort of thing doesn't just happen in Tibet. In the U.S. we police which dialects and languages are spoken, too -- and it's not just English-only people throwing a fit when they see road signs marked in Spanish. Even educated, liberal commentators -- well, especially educated, liberal commentators -- will mock a speaker of a Southern dialect who uses ain't instead of isn't or is quick to say that double negatives like I don't want nothing in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) are "incorrect" or, worse, "illogical." But it should be pointed out that ain't was used by educated classes in the 19th century and languages like French and German regularly employ double negatives. There's nothing inherently bad about these forms -- they are just not the way the dominant group speaks. Nowhere is there a case in which the dominant group speaks one way but the subordinate group's dialect is the standard.
The linguistic stigma associated with Southern American English has led many of my Southern friends to try to rid themselves of their accent, and it's no wonder -- teachers rail against Southernisms, and Southern accents are widely used to convey lack of intelligence. That's a shame, but also shows that when it comes to language, we exhibit similar intolerance as regimes we consider far more autocratic.
-- Gabriel Arana
