A Private Conversation About The Recent Language Protests In Tibet

Students in Chabcha, Qinghai,  2010

My partner came home from his latest trip to Tibet a few days ago. He was aware of the Tsongön language protests although he is stationed in another region. He said the governor of his area summoned all educators and warned them not to get involved and spread information about the recent protest especially via SMS. He called for extreme caution because the language protest had become political and he didn’t want people in his area to become associated with it and get (him?) into trouble.

When I listened to my partner, that governor came across as so negative: Instead of displaying solidarity with the demand to keep Tibetan as medium of instruction in classrooms, which is in the interest of all Tibetan-speaking people all over the highlands, this guy specifically instructs people to restrain themselves and keep quiet. What an irresponsible leader! What a miserable coward! No wonder his area figures among the poorest in terms of Tibetan language proficiency. It’s probably not exaggerated if I say the proficiency level among Tibetan officials there doesn’t rise above the vocab of a 5-year old.

I had to think back.

I worked in a middle school there in the mid-1990s. Tibetan wasn’t considered important enough to figure on the curriculum. On my first day in the classroom I was taken aback by the Chinese name cards in front of the students: The children all looked “rugged-faced” but had these names that wouldn’t suit their faces.

“I didn’t come all the way here to teach Chinese kids”, was my first thought, “they tricked me”, was my second thought.

Later when I became friendly with some of the other teachers they assured me my students were all kosher Tibetan kids. They were just not from the surrounding countryside but town kids. By then I had become suspicious myself. During breaks I would occasionally hear snatches of Tibetan when the children were at play.

Gradually I realised that many of those Chinese-sounding names were not properly Chinese after all. For example, there was a boy sitting in the front row with funny glasses. He was a good student.  The name on his card said “QI LU RONG”. I figured out “Qi” was his Xing or Chinese family name. It was customary for townspeople in this part of Tibet to have a Chinese family name parallel to their Tibetan family name, that much I knew. Depending on which culture they were operating in, they would use either their Chinese or Tibetan name. Since school is a public affair, the kid naturally used his Xing.

So far so good - but then what was “Lu Rong” supposed to represent? It turned out that was a clumsy Chinese rendering of the local Tibetan, a malapropism of the Tibetan “Lobsang” which in this region is pronounced something like “Luzon”; and since we are dealing with people who are all illiterate in their mother tongue - and since we can hardly expect the Chinese to know the correct rendering of Tibetan names into Hanzi - the bona fide Tibetan name “Lobsang” became the dreadfully sinicised “Lu Rong” - out of sheer ignorance and incompetence.

During that time, I occasionally visited Anye Rinchen, an old Tibetan who had returned from an Indian settlement in the late 1980-ies. When he was a bit drunk he used to tease the local officials: “When you folks go to a conference up in Lhasa, you have to keep your mouths shut because you don’t know Ükè, only the local Tibetan dialect; and when you go to a conference down in Beijing, you folks also have to keep your mouths shut because you don’t know Putonghua, only your local Chinese dialect.”  There wasn’t anything the officials could say because it was true. Even Anye Rinchen, himself illiterate in any language, clearly saw their limits.

These are stories over ten years old, Anye Rinchen passed away in the meantime and things have gradually been changing.

My partner said: “The same governor who called for restraint with regard to the Amdo language protests has been taking private Tibetan lessons himself to make up for his deficit.“

“His learning curve must be steep,” I exclaimed, “because a year ago I heard him deliver a formal speech at a new-year event in surprisingly decent Tibetan!”

“Some other intellectually more sophisticated officials must have also recognised their lack in substance”, my partner continued, “Many are taking private Tibetan lessons these days. There is a small presence of Tibetan language teachers from outside the region who cater to those needs.”

Yes, and I also remembered at least one official had a child studying at the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala although the official version was that the kid was studying in Lhasa.

So when the governor summoned everyone to tell them not to get involved in the Tsongön language protests, was this perhaps intentionally phrased ambiguously so his Chinese superiors would not become suspicious? Was this perhaps not to be interpreted as cowardly after all but as skillful?

Mirig dranyam - keyig rangwang - "All nationalities are equal - freedom of language"

I asked: “Since the official allegation is that the language protests are politically motivated, what other method than taking to the streets could the students possibly have used? Do you think there would have been a more skillful way for the students to make themselves heard without getting into trouble?”

He said: “It is not clear to me how the government delivered the message and what it exactly entailed. Did they say they want to stop using Tibetan as the medium of instruction? Did they say they want to stop all Tibetan in classrooms? If the message was too harsh, then students and teachers naturally felt threatened.”

He continued: “I am also not sure about the penetration of spoken Tibetan in Amdo. I can only infer it must be a bilingual set-up in the classrooms because the Amdowas speak great Chinese too. I can’t imagine there are exclusively Tibetan-medium schools since education is government job. Still the Tsongön area is way ahead with regard to penetration of the Tibetan language. They teach all the subjects - including the sciences - in Tibetan. Isn’t that wonderful? They continuously develop and enrich our language adding new vocabulary so anything and everything going on in our world and our minds can be expressed in our mother tongue. The work they have done is so encouraging and so important. They have made significant contributions to the continued relevance of Tibetan culture today.”

And then he said something striking:

“When you see how skillful the Tsongön people have been in getting this far within the system – not only preserving but enriching and expanding Tibetan – and when you think of the experience they must possess in dealing with authoritarian government, it’s a bit baffling that they chose to take to the streets rather than looking for a more subtle method. Because they are aware the official reaction to the protests can cause an enormous setback to the advancement of the Tibetan language for a long time to come.”

It’s true. They are risking a lot. We are already hearing of principals, deputies, being fired or transferred and even students being interrogated. And we are learning about more protests. But then should they just have restrained themselves just like this governor suggested?

I said: “It must have been an emotional short circuit. There is no other rational explanation. After all, this piece of news comes just as one more arbitrary policy aimed at pressing the irritatingly non-conform Tibetan identity into the Chinese mainstream. Maybe it was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Maybe people were just fed up and couldn’t help but to air their anger without thinking about the long-term consequences.”

My partner asked: “Do you really think they have a plan to wipe out Tibetan because it makes us so different?”

I reflected for a moment: “I think it’s not about us and what makes us special. It’s about them and what makes life easier for them. The motivation to press us into the Chinese mainstream is so administering becomes easier for them. It’s all about what is easier and practical for them. They want to lump everyone together so it’s easier for them to manage “the masses”.

My partner reminded me: “But don’t forget, officially they embrace bilingualism. Maybe in practice, it risks to foster separate identities that they want to prevent. So their position on bilingualism in practice becomes ambiguous.”

I said: “Practicing bilingualism correctly also means having to acknowledge people’s diversity, which is contrary to their ill-conceived idea of man. All their policies are rooted in their linear, flat and mistaken idea of man that material well-being is all that people need to be happy. That’s very communist but at the same time it is also very feudal.  It’s not like they have problem only with Tibetan, but it goes on to Cantonese and Uighur as we know. “

“I also believe they don’t do a grand analysis of how the Tibetan language – secular or religious – fosters a separate identity,” my partner said slowly, “it’s shallow mind most of the time, I think you’re right. You know they have this word xitonghua, which means to systematize, norm or standardize everything like a commodity. That’s the expression they also use in raising sports figures, athletes. I met one at the airport who said in the West, they focus on the individual’s strength and develop these, whereas in China, they have one single approach for all athletes – “xitonghua”. Since there are so many athletes, chances are out of a hundred, one makes it to the top with this type of grooming.”

“Right, and who cares about the other ninety-nine who failed and whom they’ve messed up in the process? They have more than enough candidates, so who cares about the fall-off?” I replied.

The implications are very clear: There is little space for individuality as far as the government’s dealing with the average Chinese citizen is concerned because that means complicating their work as administrators and organisors. And on this basis we can deduct that there is no space for groups of people either who stick out like the Tibetans or Uighurs or Cantonese speakers because that also means complicating their grand scheme. It’s as linear as that. People face a government in whose mindset they are just a number to be “xitonghua-ed”.

The conversation was helpful because I began to recognize a pattern.

“But now that we’ve figured them out, isn’t it up to us to find ways to work around that pattern,” I asked, “because the way things are at the moment, we do not have power to break it or even challenge it?”

My partner was firm: “We have to challenge them when we believe things go wrong but we have to make sure our actions remain not only peaceful and within the constitution, but at the same time very careful and well thought out. Since their default disposition vis-à-vis the Tibetans is nervousness they are prone to overreact and we have to bear the consequences.”

Then he asked me the crunch question: “Do you think it’s worth making the effort to teach our kids? Do you think they will ever speak Tibetan and use it when they’re grown up?”

We all wonder all along whether it’s worth keeping up the Tibetan identity.

I spontaneously replied: “We have to keep on teaching them and making every effort. It’s the right thing to do. We don’t need to speculate too much about its eventual outcome. We have to do what’s right without getting obsessed.”

I added: “What our children do with their heritage is no longer in our hands and we shouldn’t be too concerned about that either. Also, as people who have faith in the Dharma, we must try to look at this as a practical exercise in the law of cause and condition that says if you create the conditions, you will get matching results. We may not live to see what comes out of this exercise but we can be confident we exhausted all methods that are in our power.”

I don’t know what made me say all that. Life would be a lot easier if we just stopped the Tibetan overtones and became thorough Westerners or Chinese, I’m sure you agree. But when my partner looked at me with what I thought was a warm and loving expression on his face, I knew I had instinctively said the right thing.

It boils down to our demand to respect our individuality versus their habit of lumping everybody together like a commodity and pushing through uniform policies that are easiest for them. It’s a matter of perseverance and individual choice for all Tibetans, whether we live in Tibet or outside. Tibetan spoken at home in the family is where it starts. Even in Tibet with official pressure in the schools, this is completely in our hands and is the absolute minimum we all can do.

Maybe my partner and I are too simple-minded. Maybe we are under-analysing the situation but that’s what we believe. We also believe the accuracy of our analysis doesn’t matter so much as long as we carry on.

Kelsang Tenzin Kamè 30

I came across a really cool alphabet rap from Tibet the other day. The name of the song is “kamè 30” by a performer called Kelsang Tenzin left in the picture.

Never heard about the guy before, but the song is powerful because it contains an ardent appeal to more self-responsibility in holding high our beautiful Tibetan language. 

The chorus says:

Children of the Land of Snows 

We Tibetans have a saying:

“No matter how many languages you know

If you forget your father’s tongue, then shame on you!  

There's a link to the video at the bottom. It’s easy to get distracted by the video because it’s so hip. Just pay attention to the message. It tells us what we need to hear: We can be multi-lingual, widely-travelled, professionally successful, socially respected, politically influential, rich, famous - we can possess all outward signs of success, but if we neglect our mother tongue in the pursuit or fail to pass it on to our children, our achievements are incomplete - because we lost touch with our roots.

There is absolutely nothing to add to that.

Mountain Phoenix

Kelsang Tenzin's "Alphabet Rap"

All written content on this blog is coyprighted. Please do not repost entire essays on your websites without seeking my prior written consent. 

Reading Tibetan? All Greek To Me!

I’ve been feeling like my own grandmother lately, attempting to read, recite and memorise prayers and Sutras. When I think of it, that’s how I’ve been spending most of my free time in the last six months. Holy Trinity, looks like Mountain Phoenix discovered Buddhism as her new hobby!

Actually, it’s crazy because I can’t even read properly. Honestly, it’s more a deciphering than reading. And once painstakingly deciphered, without a translation next to the Tibetan root text, the content wouldn’t even begin to make sense. That’s the way I “read”.

So when the functionally illiterate Mountain Phoenix had finally taught herself to recite the Heart Sutra, she so utterly mixed up the pauses between the words, it got the Lama roaring with laughter - because the text had taken on a completely different meaning.

Every kid knows the story in this context: Somebody receives a letter that was supposed to read: Nga natsha me, yak ngakar shisong ("I’m fine, the white-tailed Yak died”). But the recipient got the pauses wrong and read: Nga na, tsha me, yak nga kar shisong ("I’m ill, there’s no salt, and all five Yaks are dead”).

But how is it possible in the first place, to misread one and the same text to such a drastic extent, I ask myself? And I answer myself right away: Punctuation and spacing. Two simple things.

Thomi Sambotha and his crew did a great job when they created the Tibetan script in the 7th century and introduced lots of sophisticated new vocab translated from Indian texts. But how come they omitted punctuation and spacing? Maybe those are recent linguistic phenomena and weren't there in the Indian originals? I don’t know. But then I’d say it’s high time our modern Lotsawas do something about it.

Ifyouhadtoreadmybloglookinglikethishowwouldyoulikethathuh? Wouldn’tyouagreenglishisreally adifficultlanguage?Andwouldn’tyouagreethewrittenandspokenenglishlanguagedon’thavemuchincommonjustliketibetan?
Other countries tackled the simplification of the written language hundreds of years ago and their literacy rates today speak for themselves. Mind you, their job involved a lot more than just punctuation and spacing. The Chinese had to come up with a completely new set of simplified characters (thousands of them!) so people would have an easier time to learn them. And Luther virtually invented a new language when he wrote the bible in vernacular German, so ordinary people would be able to understand, not just a lucky few.

Well, if Luther could issue the holy bible in a whole new people’s version, then our Lotsawas certainly shouldn’t have a problem with mere punctuation and spacing added to the Buddhist texts, should they? After all, we’re not touching the message; we only make it better understandable by more people. What could possibly speak against that?

Of course, those who love to read textwiththewordsallstucktogetherinahugehodgepodge may continue to do so. I’m not proposing to replace these. All I’m saying is we should have a user-friendly, modern version with spacing and punctuation. Simplifying Tibetan is a sine qua non if we want literacy rates in the Tibetan rural areas and among young expats to go up.

Or do we really prefer to tell ourselves for our own amusement and for even more generations to come, the story of the guy who fell ill with no salt and all yaks dying on him, without ever drawing the right conclusions from this story?

Sooner or later we will have to address the demystification of the written Tibetan altogether. If we want to keep our culture alive and evolving, we must update and expand our view of Tibetan as an exclusive and holy vessel that transports the Buddhist doctrine. We must add a new layer. Modern Tibetan should serve to communicate content, with no religious nostalgia tied to it, full-stop!

The question really boils down to this: Do we want reading and writing skills to be a self-understood mass ability? Or do we want to keep it a decorative privilege of an elite? That’s been the state of Tibetan literacy since the alphabet was invented over a thousand years ago.

It goes without saying: The goal is to have every single citizen, young or old, lay or clergy, male or female, rural or urban, in Tibet or abroad, able to read and write with ease, as if they have never done anything else. To achieve this goal, we must support language reform which includes things like punctuation, spacing, but also simplified spelling.

We shouldn’t treat Tibetan like a holy cow. If Tibetan were a dead language like Latin or Sanskrit, OK, then it would have a special status, and we can’t go around proposing to change stuff. But we’re still here, speaking it, using it every day and we want it to help us express things that are relevant to our lives today. Therefore as a living language, Tibetan must evolve and adapt to the people’s needs.

If we don’t do it, people will revert to other more flexible languages and gradually do away with Tibetan. Or its only purpose will become liturgy. Look, all this is already happening, we are witnessing it. If we don’t react, Tibetan will definitely join the holy ranks of Latin and Sanskrit one day, with a big reputation - but dead.

Those who believe Tibetan is perfect as it is, and doesn’t need to change, are part of a backward-oriented, reactionary group that ends up preserving reading as the privilege of a few. The fact that we haven’t had a language reform worth the name in half a century since coming to the modern world, shows that there must be a lot of folks out there, who think this way. That’s scary, don’t you think so?

So we see, even in linguistics we touch upon our old problem: mixing the secular and the religious. And as usual, the religious overpowers the secular.

Actually, when I think of it, what keeps me from adding punctuation and spacing to Tibetan texts? I’m free to do as I please. It’s a small first step, but it’s a step. If language reform doesn’t come top-down, people can always give impulses bottom-up.

As the Americans say: “It’s not over till the fat lady sings”.

Bhod Gyallo! Victory to Tibet!
Mountain Phoenix



All written content on this blog is coyprighted. Please do not repost entire essays on your websites without seeking my prior written consent. 

It’s The Spirit, Stupid!

Had I only visited this town on the edges of the Tibetan plateau and not lived there for almost two years, I would remember Pang Didi (“fat little brother”) as one of the most sinicised biological Tibetans I had ever come across.

He was working as a chauffeur for a hotel and, although he knew I was from abroad, always spoke to me in Chinese with the utmost presumption. The few times he switched the language, probably because my reactions always came in Tibetan, it would be so heavily peppered with Chinese, you would call that “Chinetan” or “Tibnese”.

Although it’s such a cliché, it wouldn’t have surprised me if Pang Didi ate dog meat. Some local Tibetans apparently found nothing wrong with that.

There was generally no air of Tibetanness around him, except perhaps his height and facial features. If he had a Tibetan name at all, he did not use it. Historically, most town folks here have had a Chinese surname.

In my eyes, Pang Didi seemed the epitome of a Tibetan “made in China”: No trace of Buddhist values in his behaviour, no awareness of Tibetan culture, no idea of Tibetan history.

Only later, I made an observation which got me thinking.

We happened to hang out with the same crowd in the “Black-Neck Crane”, a favourite Karaoke bar at the time. In came a group of tourists from Shanghai. They started singing English songs taking over the whole place. Suddenly Pang Didi said to me: “C’mon sis, pick an English song, let’s show these Chinese chickens that we Tibetans are much better at singing English songs!”

It may sound like an insignificant statement, but to me, that was the moment when I was able to catch a glimpse of his Tibetan identity. I only saw it because I had been around long enough. I don’t think he would have said that to me if we had just known each other.

That moment I realised, it’s not the language, not the religion, nor anything else that is superficially visible; it’s the spirit, stupid!

I found unexpected traces of this spirit in others too who, by expat-Tibetan standards, would be considered Chinese.

Once I went to the monastery with Teacher Wang. His father, a soldier from somewhere in China proper, had been left behind wounded, when the army marched through this town on their Long March.

Nick-named xiao gongchan (“little communist”) by the town’s people, his dad married a local Tibetan woman and settled here. Teacher Wang grew up with the local Tibetan kids and, as the head of a research institute, became one of the few learned people in this area. He also had a very kosher Tibetan name printed on the reverse of his business card.

Teacher Wang probably had more than one identity but to me he was a Tibetan. He knew our customs and habits, and whether he considered himself a Buddhist or not, seemed to respect our Lamas. Unlike some of the pure-bred local Tibetans, I never saw him smoke in their presence.

He spoke the local Tibetan well, and also understood high Tibetan spoken in the central areas. Some said he had a staccato accent and strange intonation, which when I think of it, is true. But I learned later that it was common for Tibetans from areas with strong Chinese influence to have an accent. They never really grow up with Tibetan as their mother tongue, only acquire it later, which then is noticeable in their adult speech.

In my eyes, Teacher Wang deserved respect for this effort. We all know too well what it takes.

Then we stood before the monastery gate, where visitors had to buy tickets. I told him I find it inappropriate to have to buy tickets to enter the monastery. He smiled and said, that the Tibetans only charge the Chinese, but not the others.

“For all the pressure there is from the top and the sides, the monks are very clever when it comes to circumventing instructions they disapprove of.”

According to Teacher Wang, this is what the monks say to Chinese visitors:

”Dear friends, it would be impious to ask the Tibetans to buy entry tickets because they come here to worship, it would be very inappropriate, we are sure you understand this: as for the Westerners, they have already spent so much money to come all the way to Tibet, would it not be impertinent if we asked them for even more money to visit our monastery? But you, the Han, have not come from so far like the Westerners, and you have not come to worship either like the Tibetans, so therefore, please understand that you should buy a ticket.”

He told that with a huge grin that said “that’s how we pay them back!”

I’ve learned from my encounters with people like Teacher Wang and Pang Didi that externally noticeable assimilation isn’t a reliable indicator for felt identity. Even a name isn’t.

But actually I should have known.

There are plenty of us living abroad in freedom, but still don’t bother to learn proper Tibetan, still don’t study our history. I have never thought of us as less Tibetan because of that.

A prominent example is the late Taktser Rinpoche’s family. When he passed away a few months ago, none of the sons, or the wife, Kunyang-la, seemed to feel confident enough to deliver the public statement in Tibetan. Instead, they spoke in English which was awkward because it felt like the main target of the message were the Americans.

For if members of Yabshey, Tibet’s top family, cannot speak Tibetan coherently enough, a Pang Didi in some remote border town surrounded and permeated by Chinese influence, hardly could.

Yet he and many others have maintained some sort of a Tibetan identity on a deeper level. Imagine how people in the central areas feel about it!

Our cause is not lost. Our hope is not lost.

Between those ugly concrete blocks, among those Chinese-speaking Tibetans in grey suits, the spirit is alive. When the time is right, it will work wonders.

Mountain Phoenix




All written content on this blog is coyprighted. Please do not repost entire essays on your websites without seeking my prior written consent. 

Tibetan For Kids – 10 Ways To Keep The Language Alive

“How am I supposed to teach them Tibetan, if I myself don’t have a decent command of the language”? My friend Pema looked rather low-spirited. As a single mother of four, life was already quite tough on her. “You know, right now they’re toddlers and I can just about cope with that type of vocabulary, but what about later”?

“You mean like when they’re coming home from school, talking about Algebra? Global warming? The dangers of nuclear energy? HIV? Islamic fundamentalism? By then at the very latest, your ‘speak Tibetan!’ used on them since their childhood will inevitably get you nowhere, for how do you say these things in Tibetan? How? It’s just not fair”. I couldn’t agree more. Pema’s agony was also mine.

For some Tibetans living abroad, the deteriorating state of modern spoken Tibetan from one generation to the next has become a source for worry. My colleague Beatriz from work sends her 3-year old to a Spanish-language nursery. My colleague Tomoko sends her two children to a Japanese-language primary school in another town, and when I was little, all Italian kids in my school went to Italian classes every Wednesday afternoon.

For Tibetan, there just isn’t this type of a professional infrastructure. The Tibetan classes offered when I was little were boring as hell, with an overemphasis on the written language, calligraphy, and learning grammar rules by heart that made absolutely no sense to children.

Even my Dad, who had gone through the old education system in Tibet, thought that’s off and saved us from the ordeal. You know what? Some of the kids, who had to sit through these classes for years, still can’t read or write a single decent sentence in Tibetan as grown ups. Ineffective and absolutely tragic.

20 years later, Pema and I are taking our children for a trial lesson to a Tibetan class offered in a town nearby, trusting that today’s Tibetan teachers have also discovered the insights of education science and methodology of the last two decades.

Far from it! It was déjà vu all over. If there were a prize for the most child-unfit, mind-numbing teaching style, these guys would win it. What kid needs this type of negative reinforcement that Tibetan is a drag, complicated and absolutely useless?

Pema too thought the teaching style was out of sync: “It already requires a superhuman effort just to continue speaking Tibetan in a foreign environment, why make everything still more difficult by teaching children Tibetan in such an antiquated and theoretical way”?

So in sum, we’re pretty much on our own with regard to keeping the language alive. Over the years, my partner and I have developed a couple of strategies to cope with this unenviable situation. As Pema says, the way to start is with oneself. If I as a parent have nothing to give, how can I possibly pass something on?

Here are 10 ways that have helped us and our kids keeping Tibetan alive and kicking.

Action 1: CommitWe consider the Tibetan language to be at the core of our identity. We want Tibetan to come to our children naturally. It shouldn’t be an artificial effort to speak it, nor something political, or something to be particularly proud of. Speaking Tibetan should be as normal to them as speaking Spanish is to Beatriz’ son or Japanese to Tomoko’s children. As parents, our top goal is to help our kids feel at ease with Tibetan.

Action 2: Decide and focus
Our focus is on the spoken language. We aspire for our kids to possess a vocabulary decent enough to comfortably talk about topics of daily life and of general interest. Reading and writing is a nice-to-have but not on our radar screen. There’s time for this later in their lives.

Action 3: Look it up
In order for the children to develop a respectable vocabulary, we as parents should have one to begin with. Whenever we don’t know a word or expression, we do what learners of a language normally do: consult the dictionary. We use Goldstein’s English-Tibetan Dictionary of Modern Tibetan as a starting point, since most of the time, we know how we would say something in English. Meanwhile this dictionary is also a bit outdated and there may be more recent ones. The suggested translation can sound a bit funny sometimes. Test it out on an authoritative native speaker before you unleash it onto your children. – My mom is always a good test person. When I dropped the word wangpo kyönchen she knew right away I meant “handicapped people”. But when I said there’ll be tukpa kogton - hollow noodles - for dinner, she gave up. OK, it’s silly to translate Macceroni. Some things should just stay the way they are.

Action 4: Be up to speed
Every Thursday, I watch VOA’s Tibetan-language news on the web. It’s integrated into my weekly routine. When the kids are in bed, I watch Kunleng TV – no Pema, not because of Dorje Tseten, one of the hosts, although he is a cutie with that grainy Amdo accent! But from a linguistic standpoint, the most useful thing is the weekly wrap-up of what’s been going on around the world. Even though I don’t understand every word that’s being said, I’m often able to deduct the meaning from what I see. It’s here where I pick up a lot of contemporary vocabulary. Climate change? - Namshi gyündo! Nuclear weapons? – Tüdrin tsünja! I got many more and I can pack them into decent sentences as well. My latest acquisition is kokso rüso – corruption!

Action 5: Take notes and review
I don’t just sit there and watch the news. I sit there with a notepad and a pencil, phonetically writing down the new words and expression I’m learning while watching the news. The notepad is so small it fits into my pocket. I always carry it with me and sometimes when I need to make the time pass - during the commute to work, in the toilet, or lining up for something - I take it out and flip through it. This way the stuff somehow gets stuck in my brain and I can retrieve it when needed.

Action 6: Use it or loose it
This requires some discipline and planning since knowledge of Tibetan is not an absolute necessity. We all would get by just fine without it. So be persistent and attentive. Your kids will fall back into the dominant language time and again. Don’t deviate from your course, stick to it. Even if they speak to you in the outside language, your answer and reaction should always come in Tibetan.

Action 7: Make it fun
Since keeping Tibetan alive is a long-term effort, show your children that speaking Tibetan is not a chore but a lot of fun. Show them Tibetan-language films, music videos, and cartoons. This requires, of course, that you take the necessary steps to get your hands on these things as they can’t be bought around the corner. And don’t be picky. “I don’t like the type of Tibetan they speak in films from China” is just something we can’t afford. People speak Tibetan with all sorts of accents and intonations. Our kids should get used to that instead of carrying over our antipathies. Also use “regular” children’s picture books to tell them a good-night story in Tibetan every evening. Little kids focus on the pictures, the text underneath could be Swahili, they couldn’t care less. A big plus of the story-telling approach is that the vocabulary, ideas and concepts gradually form a mental structure on which to build further when they start school in the outside language. It gives them stability and self-confidence.

Action 8: Be clearLatest research on bilingualism shows that kids need clear rules when to use which language. Establish a rule. Ours is “Tibetan in the family – English on the outside”. It works but you have to be consequent. Again, if you don’t work on your Tibetan vocabulary, you will gradually succumb to the dominant language. It starts harmlessly with mixing a word here and there. Watch out! And also watch out for those uncooperative relatives and friends, who always fall back into the dominant language when talking with your kids. Sensitise your Tibetan-speaking environment and get them onboard. You and your partner(s) should be in absolute agreement on this one.

Action 9: Put it into context
Kids should realise that Tibetan is not just something peculiar spoken in the home, but without real functional value. We take the kids to Tibet every summer to reconnect with the bigger picture, and let them immerse into the place and the people. It’s probably not everybody’s cup of tea to go to Tibet regularly, but you can substitute that with a Tibetan-language summer camp in your vicinity, regular visits to Dharamsala or whatever your preference is. You get the point. It’s immersion.

Action 10: Chill out!Some things just shouldn’t be changed. Don’t become so deeply absorbed with linguistic purism that you go out Tibetanising every loan word. Like me with Macceroni. Or the folks who say tsigcha when they mean coffee. - Goodness, gracious! Who wants to drink “burned tea” for that’s what tsigcha literally means? It’s not only a miserable rendering, it makes coffee sound appalling, it’s conceptually wrong. Let’s accept coffee as it is. It won’t hurt the language. Tibetan is cool enough to accommodate. Just think of oldies such as rili (railway) or motra (motor), and lean back.

It looks like a fact of life that Tibetan will be spoken less frequently and less well from generation to generation. People like Pema or me can’t reverse that, we can only try to make a difference for our families. But for all the effort and discipline it takes, let’s not forget that there’s a life, a world, so many things out there to learn and enjoy, beyond the Tibetan horizon.

Mountain Phoenix














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