Gerald Roche

Tibet's Minority Languages: Mapping Tibet's Linguistic Diversity
and its Contemporary Transformation

time:  May 22nd, 14:00
place: room no 106

Tibet is home to a surprisingly high degree of linguistic diversity. This talk will focus on one aspect of this diversity that has previously received little scholarly or popular attention, namely, Tibet's non-Tibetan minority languages. I will present some basic background information about these languages: how many there are, where they are spoken, how many people speak them, and so on. I will also examine the complex sociolinguistic context faced by these languages as enclaves within larger Tibetan communities, inside the Chinese state, in an intensely interconnected, increasingly globalized world. I will describe some of the most significant social, historical, economic, cultural, and political dynamics that are impacting Tibet's minority languages, and will discuss several of the perhaps unexpected sociolinguistic trends that these languages are currently subject to. I will describe how, and attempt to explain why, some of Tibet's minority languages are thriving, while others are likely to disappear in the near future, to be replaced by Tibetan or Chinese. This talk will be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about language diversity and contemporary social trends in Tibet, and to those interested in issues of language diversity and endangerment more broadly.


Gerald Roche is an anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork among several minority populations on the northeast Tibetan Plateau, and has also collaborated with a range of scholars and others from the region in documenting cultural and linguistic diversity in the region. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Uppsala University' Hugo Valentin Centre. His publications have covered a wide range of topics including oral traditions, participatory cultural documentation, cultural change, and ethnohistory, and have appeared in Asian Ethnology, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Asian Ethnicity, Multiethnica, and Language Documentation and Description. He also co-founded the journal Asian Highlands Perspectives, and worked with the Plateau Cultural Heritage Group, a participatory cultural documentation project, to create the world's largest online archive of oral traditions from the Tibetan Plateau.

Academic website: https://uppsala.academia.edu/GeraldRoche
Twitter: @GJosephRoche
Tibetan translation blog: http://gjroche.weebly.com/