Tibetan Class No. 6

Yesterday Ngawang explained how Tibetan is developing differently according to the part of the world where it is spoken. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, many Tibetans went to live abroad, mainly in India and Nepal but also elsewhere.

Tibetan, as it was spoken until 1950, was a seriously medieval language. There was very little foreign influence, the country had very few infrastructures and travel was by horse or on foot. What was spoken on one side of a mountain often differed a lot from the language on the other side.

In Tibet, from 1959 until very recently, speaking and writing Tibetan was prohibited by the Chinese authorities. Material was only printed and developed outside the country. There’s no codgery institution like the Académie Française or the Real Academia Española so there has been no standardisation of new words or concepts (e.g. to establish whether a mobile phone is a "mobile", a "cellphone", a "hand phone" or all of them). Quite a large difference has therefore developed between the Tibetan in Nepal and that used, say, in Dharamsala in India.

In Spanish, a mobile is called a "móvil". That’s what the Tibetans here call it too.

In Spanish Tibetan (which sounds a bit mad), Khye rang tsö di móvil re pe? means "Is this your mobile?" whereas in India, the same question would be Khye rang tsö di cellphone re pe?

Idiotic linguistic policy is as old as politics itself. Banning the use of a language is a simple manifestation of this stupidity.

Mao wanted to stamp out reactionary feudalism in Tibet and bring "progress" to the country. The Tibetan culture and language were a symbol of backwardness so he forced those who insisted on speaking it into re-education camps to learn Chinese and discover the glories of Chinese Communism. It didn’t work of course, but flooding Tibet with millions of Chinese workers (who are paid comparatively huge bonuses for working there) did.

Here too, the Catalan and Basque languages were banned during the dictatorship until 1975, when Franco died. In the "tough" period of the dictatorship (1936 to the end of the 1950s) people could be imprisoned for speaking Catalan or Basque in public. I’ve been told it was common for people to be reprimanded by the Guardia Civil for speaking Catalan instead of Spanish in the street.

"¡Hable Cristiano!" (Speak in Christian!) they were apparently ordered.

Police, teachers and civil servants in Barcelona and Bilbao were recruited from elsewhere in Spain so there was no danger of Catalan and Basque being slyly spoken "on the side".

Wifey, who’s a Catalan speaker, went to school in a small town with a population of about 5,000 people, all of whom were Catalan speakers except for the teacher, who spoke Spanish. Teaching in the town was in Spanish. Wifey’s Mum has no idea at all how to write in Catalan. She’s often asked me to write things for her.

Anyway, despite the efforts of Chairman Mao, El Generalísimo and Disney, some form of multilingualism seems to be the norm in many places in the world.