Journal of Education and Research

JER

2020, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 119-124

KUSOEDhttps://doi.org/10.3126/jer.v10i2.32724
Article History: Received: 1 March 2020; Revised: 18 May 2020; Accepted: 6 June 2020

Book Review
Book Review: The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya
The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya
Selma K. Sonntag & Mark Turin (Eds.), 2019
Cambridge, England: Open Book Publishers
200 pp., ISBN 9781783747047, £17.95 (Paperback)https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0169
Reviewed byTikaram Poudel*
Kathmandu University School of Education, Lalitpur, Nepal
The arguments of The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya are groundedin the multidisciplinary nature of area studies i.e., linguistics, political science,anthropology and geography. Focusing on the area study of the trans-border region of
the Himalaya, the contributors enrich their arguments through specific case studies of
their respective areas. For all the contributors, the issues of language contact are central
and all of them provide contextual analyses of this issue. The contributors raise placing
their issues in the emerging discourse of language contact making the collectionaccessible not only to linguists but also to scholars interested in anthropology,sociolinguistics, political science and Asian studies.
This is a collection of five contributions from a wide range of expertise and theeditors, Selma K. Sonntag and Mark Turin, of the volume supplement with an
introduction and a section on concluding thoughts respectively. Introducing the main
* Reviewer Email: tikaram.poudel@kusoed.edu.np
ISSN: 2091-0118 (Print) / 2091-2560 (Online)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6963-7013© 2020 The Reviewer(s).
Journal homepages: 1http://www.kusoed.edu.np/journal/index.php/je2
https://www.nepjol.info/index.php/JER/index
Published by Kathmandu University School of Education, Lalitpur, Nepal.
This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.

120 | T. Poudel
thrust of the volume, Sonntag, one of the editors of the collection, disambiguates theterm ‘language politics’. For her the term ‘language politics’ refers to ‘language ofpolitics’ and ‘politics of language’ and she claims the ‘politics of language’ is theunderlying theme of the contributions here. The discourse of ‘politics of language’ got
dominance in the Post World War II decolonization period through the ideology ofmonolingualism, however, this ideology was challenged under post-structural
approaches replacing this ideology with the ideology of multilingualism informed by
the political theories.
The contribution of Tunzhi (Sonam Lhundrop), Hiroyuki Suzuki, and Gerald Rocheon ‘Language Contact and the Politics of Recognition amongst Tibetans in the People’s
Republic of China: The rTa’u-Speaking ‘Horpa’ of Khams’ discuss the language
contact situation of the rTa’u-speaking ‘Horpa’ of Khams within the theoreticalframework of ‘recognition’. The linguistic hierarchy between the rTa’u language anddominating Tibetan, the authors argue, leads to social exclusion, economicmarginalization, personal discrimination and other forms of oppression to the speakersof the rTa’u language. Since language hierarchy represents ‘collective recognition’ not‘personal recognition’ of the rTa’u speakers, they construct the collective identity of theinferiority of the entire community. In the context of the speakers of the rTa’ulanguage, the written Tibetan constructs regional linguistic hierarchies in relation to theTibetans because of the misconception of the idea that Tibet is a linguisticallyhomogenous entity. They also suffer another linguistic hierarchy at the national level
because of the language of mainland China, i.e., Standard Chinese, leading to furthersocial exclusion and economic marginalization at the national level.
Taking the case of the rTa’u language, these authors argue that the state
misrecognised the speakers of the rTa’u language as the state has categorised them as
Tibetans. However, the rTa’u language is different from Tibetan though it has borroweda large number of lexicons from Tibetan in its long historical contact with Tibetan. Sucha misrecognition, not only led to the social exclusion and economic marginalization but
also the younger generation of the rTa’u community shifted to dominating Tibetan
leading the severe endangerment of the rTa’u language.
The social exclusion and economic marginalization of the rTa’u speakers, as theauthors argue, is the manifestation of the monolingual and standard language ideology
Journal of Education and Research, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2020

Book Review: The Politics of Language Contact | 121of the state. Such ideologies put the minority languages like rTa’u in the lowest layer ofhierarchy with labels such as ‘corrupt’, ‘non-standard’ and so on. Strategic programs ofstate informed with the ideology of monoglot contributes to the construction of adifferent identity of the rTa’u speakers undermining the perceived values of indigenous
communities like the rTa’u speakers. The contribution concludes that the hegemonic
position of monoglot language ideologies demonstrates the destiny of the rTa’ucommunity concerning contemporary visions of Tibetanness.
To understand the language politics in the Indian state of Assam, Selma K.
Sonntag’s chapter ‘What Happened to the Ahom Language?’ offers a case study oflanguage contact situation in mediaeval Ahom kingdom, British and post-colonial India.
Sonntag argues that the speakers of Ahom, a language of the Tai-Kadai family shifted toAssamese, an Indo-Aryan language. The mediaeval Ahom kingdom was a mandalastate, as opposed to the nation-state of linguistic homogeneity of ‘post-Westphalia
Europe’ that co-existed with other Assamese speaking kingdoms. However, the shift tothe Assamese started in the seventeenth century because of the rapid expansion of NeoVaishnavism eastward with its poetry and prose of the bhakti cult. In the midseventeenth century, the Ahom kingdom converted to Hinduism and neo-Vaishnavism
received royal patronage by Ahom rulers to the Assamese. Ahoms were warriors andconquerors; they married local women and their siblings adopted the language of theirmothers. By the time the British conquered Assam in the following century, they
preferred to rule Assam from Bengal giving a lower status to the Assamese as Bangla
was imposed as a language of governance and administration. After the decolonizationof India in 1947, the federal states were reorganised under the State Reorganization Actof 1956 on the linguistic basis and the Assamese language became the state language ofAssam.
In the third chapter of the book, Uma Pradhan takes a case study of a school in thesouthern plains of Nepal that implements a multi-lingual education program, agovernment initiative. She argues that, in the process of implementation, Tharu, an oral
language has been transformed into a written one in the process of preparing it for theformal education system. The concerned textbook writers and school authorities were
aware of the fact that Tharu did not have a written literary tradition. This transformationof the Tharu language to a written one brought this minority language into close contact
with Nepali, the more dominant language of the education system of Nepal. This
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122 | T. Poudel
contact upgraded this minority language to linguistic authority in the broader linguistic
landscape of Nepal. This process of transformation of the Tharu language got
reconfigured and standardised to the status of a language from its existing dialectal
status in the local context and enabled its speakers to claim the authenticity of theirlanguage.
The developers of the Tharu curriculum, especially the writers of textbooks, wereconcerned with the inclusion of the local indigenous knowledge system of Tharu
communities, not merely translating the texts from more dominating Nepali. Further,
this process not only standardised the minority language but also upgraded from its
dialectal status to the status of language suitable for the language of education.
In the chapter ‘The Significance of Place in Ethnolinguistic Vitality’, Maya Daurio
takes the case of Kaike, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language in the remote district ofDolpa, Nepal to examine the ethnolinguistic vitality through the notion of space. The
attitude of Kaike speakers towards their language has been changing over time. Unlikein the 1960s, the speakers embrace their language and cultural practices as valued andimportant. Kaike speakers, both in their homeland and their new settlements in urban
areas, campaign for the promotion of their culture and language, though they prefer tosend their children to English-medium schools in their urban settlements because they
do not see the capital in their native language like in Nepali or English. Daurio argues
that acquiring English and Nepali through formal education removes the current
generation from traditional environmental knowledge of the Kaike community as suchknowledge is acquired through direct experience and interaction with everyday cultural
practices but this English educated generation had to live away from its homeland. In
the context of Nepal, the linguistic and cultural erosion of minority communities is often
ascribed to the Nepali language. Daurio convincingly argues that the modern education
system is responsible for the linguistic and cultural erosion of the Kaike community
because a large number of people move away from their homeland for higher education.
Consequently, they are denied access to their linguistically transmitted knowledge of
their community.
In the chapter ‘Speaking Chone, Speaking ‘Shallow’’, Bendi Tso and Mark Turin
examine how the speakers of Chone variety of Tibetan, spoken in Yarru village ofChone County in Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAP) of Gansu Province, suffer dual
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Book Review: The Politics of Language Contact | 123
hegemonies of regional Amdo Tibetan and national Mandarin Chinese because of theChinese language policy. Two components of hegemony — coercion and consent — areat work in marginalizing the speakers of Chone variety from the mainstream linguistic
landscape of China. The institutional coercion implemented through language policies
enabled Amdo Tibetan and Mandarin Chinese to create a language hierarchy putting
Mandarin Chinese at the top, Amdo Tibetan next and Chone Tibetan at the lowest level.
This hierarchy creates a different perception of minority language speakers such as
Chone from dominant languages such as Amdo Tibetan and Mandarin Chinese that
dominant languages are legitimate, prestigious and authentic. The popular discourses
concerning the language policy of China are the promotion of Chinese in all domains ofpublic life and the encouragement of minority languages to preserve through the processof standardization. However, the speakers of a minority language variety like Chone donot see any economic or social capital in it and they prefer to invest their time to learn
Mandarin Chinese or Amdo Tibetan. Such a perception of speakers of these minority
languages undervalue their heritage language and accelerate the language shift to more
dominant languages such as Amdo Tibetan or Mandarin Chinese.
The book ends with Mark Turin’s ‘Concluding Thoughts…’. The Greater
Himalayan Region that stretches from Afghanistan to the west of Myanmar is the homefor over 150 million people speaking a diverse range of languages, many of them areendangered. Getting insight with the Sonntag’s discussion on Ahom in the Indian stateof Assam in the present volume, Turin argues that language shift is a historical process
located in the past, rather than a modern-day one. A large number of these languages
have been spoken for centuries but recently, with the access of technology and language
awareness, many of these have been transformed into written, a process of linguistic upgradation. Political alliance, the pressure of globalization and trade brought many
minority languages of this region in contact influencing each other. Despite thecoercive feature of modern nation-building, many minority languages preserve their
homogenous entity.
This collection establishes that the study of language contact is a multi-disciplinary
pursuit and the contributors of this volume are fully aware of this wisdom unlike
confining this issue within the discipline of linguistics. Drawing insights from thetheoretical takes of ethnicity, hegemony and, of course from linguistics, thesecontributors make an attempt to understand the politics of language in the region. Like
Journal of Education and Research, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2020124 | T. Poudel
normative scholars working on language contact, these contributors are, not onlyinterested in linguistic binaries of written and spoken forms, pure and authentic forms oflanguage, but also introduce theoretical concepts of language hierarchy and language
vitality in the context of Himalayan area studies.

To cite this article:
Poudel, T. (2020). Book review: The politics of language contact in the Himalaya. Journal ofEducation and Research, 10(2), 119-124. https://doi.org/10.3126/jer.v10i2.32724Journal of Education and Research, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2020