Rethinking Tibeto-Burman: page 2
Discussing language and ethnicity in South and Southeast Asia, Harold
Schiffman draws a useful distinction between what are historically presented
as the ‘overt manifestations of “high” linguistic
culture’, the codified, written and official forms, and the covert
or ‘folk-cultural’ aspects which are more likely to be implicit,
unstated and unofficial (1999: 431). The same conceptual distinction
may be extended to Tibetan and Himalayan studies, in which Tibetan,
Dzongkha and Newar comprise the former category, and ethnic groups speaking
unwritten Tibeto-Burman languages make up the latter. Now that activists
in many minority ethnic groups across the Himalayan region are engaged
in the highly political process of re-creating or ‘inventing’
written traditions and developing scripts for their previously oral
languages, and while countless rural Tibetans remain illiterate, it
is apparent that we need to move towards a more nuanced understanding
of what, if anything, constitutes ‘high’ and ‘low’
linguistic culture.
A further hazard in using the term ‘Tibeto-Burman speaking’
as a convenient ethnic label is that it appears to locate the peoples
and groups it describes in a geographical space specifically related
to Tibet or Burma. What of the minority groups in Yúnnán,
Baltistan, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Spiti, who speak Tibeto-Burman
languages but who may have no dealings with Tibet or Burma? It serves
us well to remember that the Tibeto-Burman language family draws its
name from the status of two dominant ancient literary languages, Burmese
and Tibetan, and not from a field-based appraisal of contemporary linguistic
distribution and diversity.
While the linguistic classification of languages as Tibeto-Burman
(versus Austro-Asiatic or Indo-Aryan) is precise, the use of linguistic
terminologies and models of classification to label ethnic groups is
much more problematic. The construction of any group’s ethnicity
cannot simply be reduced to a one-to-one correlation with their spoken
language. As Joshua Fishman notes:
… the language and ethnicity link itself has also been subjected
to a good deal of scrutiny and speculation, some of it going back (and
still ongoing) across millennia of philosophical and scientific inquiry.
Although language has rarely been equated with the totality of ethnicity,
it has, in certain historical, regional and disciplinary contexts, been
accorded priority within that totality. (1999: 4)
The linguistic classification of a spoken language is clearly not diagnostic
for the cultural habits or ethnic worldviews of its speakers. For most
ethnic groups across the Himalayas, a spoken mother tongue is but one
of several important elements in the constellation of interlinked factors
making up their ethnic self-image, which also include descent structures,
residence patterns and religious practice.
Many publications in Nepal, in both English and Nepali, nevertheless
continue to use the phrase ‘Tibeto-Burman speaking’ or even
‘Mongolian’, to attribute putative ethno-racial characteristics
to communities speaking related languages. The political scientist Selma
Sonntag, writing on language planning in Nepal, favours the term ‘Tibeto-Nepalese’
instead (2001: 165). While not in widespread use, this term conveys
the sense that the languages spoken by the groups in question are both
less than the totality of the Tibeto-Burman language family and firmly
rooted within the national borders of modern Nepal.
An interesting issue emerges when organisations struggling for the
upliftment of specific ethno-linguistic groupings take on, proliferate
or even actively conscript the same essentialist terminology which social
scientists have sought so hard to reject. Such stereotypes then insinuate
themselves into ethnic communities’ own descriptions and representations
of themselves as indigenous and homogenous. It becomes clear, that as
linguists, social scientists and area studies scholars, we still lack
an effective metalanguage for describing and categorising lived ethnolinguistic
reality. As Nancy Dorian put it, we require ‘a language for talking
about language’ (1999: 33).
Lessons from the Indosphere
As a relatively young discipline, Tibetology may benefit from a critical
appraisal of the theories which have been formative for other area studies,
specifically Indology. In India, as many have noted, language has long
been intimately interwoven with the religious complexes of the subcontinent.
Schiffman suggests that the most salient feature of ancient Indic linguistic
culture may have been a ‘concern for the preservation of sacred
texts and the purity of the language in which they were composed’
(1999: 433). This, in turn, has shaped modern Indian views towards spoken
tongues, linguistic change and lexical borrowings, and has helped scholars
better understand such attitudes. Prejudice towards variant linguistic
forms is also attested in the Tibetan context, as noted by Nicholas
Tournadre and Sangda Dorje in their introduction to the Manual of Standard
Tibetan:
Many Tibetans, as well as some non-Tibetans consider that only Literary
Tibetan has a true grammar. Educated Tibetans are mildly disparaging
of their spoken language, which they consider “vulgar” or
“ordinary” (Tib. phal-skad). Only classical Literary Tibetan
is well regarded enough to be “blessed” with grammar. (2003:
26)
The sense of wonder at the elegance and sophistication of classical
or literary languages is one which is shared by many observers. Sir
William Jones, the great Orientalist, was alleged to have praised Sanskrit
for its ‘wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more
copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’
(de Bary 1958: 590), a sentiment echoed to this day by some textual
scholars of Tibetan and Sanskrit. A result of such an approach, as so
clearly noted by András Höfer, can be that scholars approach
the unwritten and endangered languages spoken by Himalayan ethnic groups
as deviant or ‘broken’ forms of a poorly-remembered classical
language, rather than as viable linguistic varieties in their own right
(2000: 234-235).
Moving on from Tibeto-Burman: the Thakali exercise in forgetting
In the remainder of this paper, I turn my focus to two ethnic communities
in Nepal, the Thakali and Thangmi, who offer compelling, contrastive
examples of the shifting nature of ethnolinguistic awareness and self-identification.
According to the contested Population Census of Nepal 2001, less than
half of the total Thakali population of 13,000 speak Thakali, a Tibeto-Burman
language, as their mother tongue (see Turin 2000 for a critique of the
census). While the Thak Khola valley of lower Mustang district, Nepal,
was their traditional homeland, new business and trading opportunities
have resulted in mass Thakali out-migrations to urban centres and the
lowlands bordering India. The declining use of the Thakali language,
however, predates the shift in residence patterns and is more closely
linked to the negative values associated with rural speakers of Tibeto-Burman
languages and their cultural habits which emanate from the Nepali nation-state
at the centre. While the Thakalis’ growing alliance with Hinduism
and their concomitant turning away from shamanism and village Buddhism
are well documented by anthropologists working in the Himalayas, their
changing speech patterns have been rather overlooked. As early as 1958,
Iijima reported that Thakalis generally did not converse in Thakali
(Hutt 1986: 16), and the trend continues to the present day. Despite
pleas by the Thakali Central Cultural Committee, few Thakali are making
an effort to learn their language and practically no children from the
community speak Thakali as a mother tongue. Nevertheless, most Thakali
adults continue to believe that the existence of the Thakali language
is central to their sense of a collective Thakali identity, even if
they themselves do not speak the language.
While the traditional portrayal of ethnic Thakali as willing converts
to the social ideology of Hinduism (Tucci 1952; Fürer-Haimendorf
1966) continues to be challenged (Fisher 1987, 2001), the fact remains
that Thakali society has undergone dramatic transformation in the space
of two generations. The concomitant decline of the Thakali language
is generally presented by members of the Thakali community as an unfortunate
by-product of the necessary urbanisation and internationalisation of
the Thakali community and its growing alliance with the norms of Hindu
Nepal. Critics from within the community suggest that the previous generation
inadvertently threw the baby out with the bath water in that the Thakali
language was jettisoned along with the cultural, dietary, religious
and marital practices which were thought to be unfashionable and undesirable
within the context of a rapidly modernising nation. In its present endangered
state, the Thakali language has become the focus of a campaign for preservation
and documentation, led in part by members of the Thakali Research Centre.
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