About the book The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet by Gerald Roche, published by Cornell University Press in 2024.
Living in times of multiple high-speed crises, it’s easy to overlook slow-moving trends that play out over centuries instead of days. But in doing so, we often fail to see the crucial background structures driving today’s events.
Take Trump’s current attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, for example. Although clearly tied to the US president’s far right agenda, we can also see systemic drivers of this crisis by looking at long-term trends.
One long-term trend that helps us understand the current US anti-diversity campaign is the ongoing collapse of global linguistic diversity. Extending back to the birth of European colonialism, this crisis now threatens to wipe out around half the world’s languages by the end of the century.
My book argues that the global collapse of linguistic diversity is being driven by states, and is rooted in the underlying source of their power: sovereignty.
My new book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet (Cornell University Press) explores this crisis of linguistic diversity through an anthropological study of four villages in Tibet. Although I focus on a very specific local context, my findings also teach us important lessons about the bigger picture of global language loss, and also reveal the roots of Trump’s anti-diversity campaign.
One key lesson from the book is that global language loss has political drivers. In contradiction to much popular wisdom, language loss is not an inevitable, spontaneous trend, caused by globalization, modernization, or technological progress. It is the outcome of deliberate policies and practices that aim to eliminate diversity. In this sense, global language loss is like Trump’s anti-diversity campaign, but played out in slow motion, at world scale.
But the links between language loss and Trump’s anti-diversity policies go deeper if we look at how and why linguistic diversity is being destroyed, and who is driving that destruction.
For the four villages in northeast Tibet I researched, attacks on diversity emerged from the modern Chinese state, which invaded the area in the mid-twentieth century. However, my book also argues that the global collapse of linguistic diversity is being driven by states, and is rooted in the underlying source of their power: sovereignty. As I show here in the conclusion, this is the same source that Trump is tapping into, driven by similar logic, in his current attack on diversity.
Sovereignty Destroyed
In my book, I show how the sovereignty of the modern state rests on the destruction of older, non-state sovereignty. Since vast populations and enormous territories have never come together spontaneously to form a state, conquest and coercion, not consent, are the founding principles of the modern state. Such conquest always involves obliterating existing sovereignties and replacing them with that of the conquering state.
In northeast Tibet, where I undertook my research, sovereignty before the state was messy. It mostly rested in the village and its governing council of male elders. But villages also existed within networks of powerful institutions, like Buddhist monasteries, which also exercised sovereignty. Local gods, who communicated through spirit mediums, were also sovereign over the community.
The state’s sovereign claim to exclusive power over everyone in a given territory is the primary driver of language loss.
This messy sovereignty meant that communities were defined by autarky, or self-rule. Autarky enabled communities to decide for themselves what languages they would use and pass on to their children.
And in the communities I studied, this was a language called Manegacha, which literally means ‘our language’.
That autarky came to an end in 1958, when the Chinese state reacted with massive violence to local unrest in parts of Tibet it had invaded a decade earlier. Thousands were killed and imprisoned and all local political institutions were destroyed.
After this, Manegacha speakers lost the power to make decisions about their lives and languages. Their autarky was buried beneath state sovereignty, with disastrous, ongoing consequences.
Seeing Like a Sovereign
Following this massive spasm of violence, the Chinese state could only assert itself slowly and clumsily in Tibet. It was poor and weak, and had access only to blunt instruments of social control.
At first, the state sought to replace the institutions it had destroyed with its own sources of power. While monks and spirit mediums were locked up and monasteries and temples lay in ruins, teachers, barefoot doctors, and Party cadres entered the villages. Schools, clinics, and government bureaus were built.
But more subtle and radical transformations were to come.
Laying claim to a vast territory, home to millions of people that spoke hundreds of languages, the Chinese state needed to develop knowledge of this diversity in order to control it. In the words of the late anthropologist James Scott, the state had to make the population legible.
It did this by carrying out an ethnic classification process that sorted this vast and complex population into 56 ethnic groups: one for the Han majority, and 55 for the so-called ‘ethnic minorities’. This act of classification achieved two things.
- First, it established a simple hierarchy with two tiers. The Han were above, and the ethnic minorities below. Diversity was permitted to exist only as a vehicle for domination.
- Secondly, the ethnic classification process created an insidious mechanism for destroying linguistic diversity. This involved cramming China’s 300 spoken languages into 56 ethnic groups, each of which was supposed to have only one language.
In this process, the Manegacha speakers of Tibet were lumped into an ethnic group called Tuzu, a term they’d never heard before. Now, faced with a menu of state-sponsored identities, most of these Manegacha speakers came to feel that the label that best applied to them was Tibetan. The problem was, Tibetans were only supposed to have one language: Tibetan.
Manegacha speakers therefore found themselves caught in a predicament. Like millions of people across the country, Manegacha speakers were forced to choose between the language they spoke and the limited ethnic identities the state recognized. This contradiction could only be removed by assimilating to the dominant language of an officially recognized ethnic group.
The state tried to drive this destruction of diversity using institutions like education. But as long as the state was poor and weak, it remained incapable of really forcing people to choose between their language and ethnicity. People found ways to live with the contradiction, and diversity persisted.
The Slumbering Sovereign Awakes
All this changed after China opened itself to the global economy in the 1980s. As foreign capital flowed into the country, the state grew stronger. And as it grew stronger, it began to realize its sovereign dreams of streamlined diversity.
The first to be impacted were the Han, China’s dominant ethnic group. Although they spoke dozens of mutually unintelligible languages, these were downgraded to dialects. Meanwhile, the national language, Mandarin, was imposed on them. This was achieved through compulsory schooling, mass media, urbanization, and the manipulation of employment opportunities, all enabled by massive investment in material infrastructure: roads, rail, electricity, buildings, and communication networks.
Changes were slower in Tibet. Electricity and mass media, in the form of portable radios and cassette players, arrived first. As money began to trickle in from China’s Han heartlands, Tibetans were drawn into a labor market where they worked for wages. Participation in schooling increased, exposing more people to the need to learn Mandarin for a chance at social and economic mobility.
But things really took off at the start of the twenty-first century. Fearful of instability in occupied territories like Tibet, China began pumping massive amounts of money into the region, carrying out state-building under the name of development.
When I moved to the region in 2005, electricity pylons were being planted on snow-capped peaks, high rise apartment blocks were sprouting in mountain valleys, and freeways were being laid across the highland plains. The internet, smartphones and digital surveillance soon followed, while development projects dismantled traditional villages and, for the first time ever, entire generations went to school.
These decades of intensifying state power were disastrous for Manegacha speakers. The enforced contradiction between language and ethnicity became a source of daily suffering for Manegacha speakers. They could either choose to succeed through Mandarin at the expense of their Tibetan identity, or embrace their Tibetan identity through Tibetan language. But Manegacha was completely denied a place in this new world.
By the time I started doing household surveys in 2016, about one third of all families in those four villages in Tibet had stopped speaking Manegacha to their children. This situation was being repeated across Tibet, where dozens of communities speaking distinct languages were having the same choice pushed on them.
Languages that are not learned by children typically do not survive long, and so most of Tibet’s languages will not survive the century if things continue on their current trajectory. And this destruction of linguistic diversity in Tibet is just one part of a larger pattern in China: around half the country’s languages will no longer be spoken at the end of the century.
When Manegacha is gone, when dozens of languages across Tibet are gone, when half of China’s languages are gone, it will not be an accident. What is happening now is the result of deliberate, consistent attacks on diversity. These attacks are carried out by the state, and enabled by its unique claim to exclusive sovereignty over the people and territory of China.
A World of Diversity Under Attack
Wherever we look around the world today, the state’s sovereign claim to exclusive power over everyone in a given territory is the primary driver of language loss. The destruction of all competing forms of sovereignty, and the exclusive monopoly on how state power is wielded, effectively create a de facto sovereign right to assimilate linguistic minorities.
That’s why the vast majority of states in the world today, regardless of their political system, continue to destroy linguistic diversity. It is an ongoing process in liberal, democratic states like Canada and Australia, as well as authoritarian states like Russia and China.
And although democracies do have more checks and balances in place than authoritarian states, Trump — and Orban, and Modi, and Erdogan, and Milei — show us that every democracy is only one election away from a tin-pot dictator doing away with the guard rails in order to increase their access to unfettered sovereign power.
That’s why, in my book’s conclusion, I talk about the need for trans-national networks of solidarity to counter states’ unchecked sovereignty. Given the ongoing failures of international mechanisms to prevent or halt increasingly muscular expressions of state sovereignty, I believe that only a trans-national grassroots movement has the capacity to halt ongoing language loss.
What this also suggests is that so long as states continue to wield exclusive sovereign power, attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion like we see in the USA today could happen anywhere. Much, much worse things could also happen. Without movements and mechanisms to circumvent and counter state sovereignty, anyone anywhere could wake up one day to find that they represent a kind of diversity the state no longer wishes to tolerate.
