“Langscapes” and Language Borders:
Linguistic Boundary-Making in Northern South Asia
Maya Daurio and Mark TurinAbstract
Drawing on examples from the linguistically-diverse Himalayan region, in this contribution
we explore three main questions. First, we ask how language boundaries both contribute to and defy
the imagination of the nation-state. Second, we investigate how such boundaries are transcended andbecome redefined through increased mobility and technological innovation. And third, we examine
what it means for languages to become detached from the landscapes in which they were traditionallysituated and historically spoken. Unfixed and unfixable, languages resist the limitations and constraintsof nation-states—both colonial and contemporary—that strive to delineate their boundaries along“clear” and often monolingual lines. In the Himalayan region in particular, plural linguistic identities
challenge reductive national logics that seek to bind or appropriate languages for hegemonic andideological goals. Not only are national borders decreasingly relevant for the maintenance andtransmission of languages, but the global dispersal of people and the languages they speak, sign andwrite are combining with accessible digital media to transform internally-maintained language borders
as well.
Introduction
National borders and language boundaries are often represented as coextensive and are
regularly perceived to be coterminous. While nation-states are necessarily demarcated to distinguishthemselves from each other, languages are able transcend national borders that often seek to divide andseparate speech communities, and these linguistic geographies are carefully managed and rigorously
maintained by language communities. Such political boundary crossing by language communities isnothing new, but the rapid growth of digital media has created additional pathways for language
mobility and new opportunities for speech communities to carve out a sense of place.1
To explore the shifting historical, political, and social dynamics which affect how language
communities and borders interact, we build on Arjun Appadurai’s use of the suffix -scape to indicate

 Maya Daurio is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia focusing on language

mapping in the Himalaya; Mark Turin is an associate professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies andthe Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
1 Marco Jacquemet, “Language and Transnational Spaces,” in Mapping Language and Space: An International
Handbook of Linguistic Variation, ed. Peter Auer and Jürgen Schmidt, Volume 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH& Co. KG, 2010), 50–69.
DOI: 10.14943/ebr.10.1.21

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >the fluidity, irregularity, and contingent nature of “global cultural flows” 2 and apply this to our
discussion of the dynamic and constructed relationship that exists between language and borders.
Chiara Brambilla uses the concept of “borderscapes” to move from discussions of borders to bordering
processes and their “shifting and undetermined nature in space and time.”3 The idea of borderscapes
invites a criticality in border studies “to grasp new forms of belonging and becoming that are worth
being investigated in a time of globalisation and transnational flows.”4 We find this proposition highly
relevant for examining how such flows impact the changing landscapes of increasingly globalized
language communities. Following in the footsteps of Appadurai and Brambilla, we propose a different-scape suffix to critically examine a relatively undertheorized aspect of border studies, that of linguistic
boundary-making, particularly in the context of territorial languages linked to particular landscapes.
The intriguing and enticing term “langscape,” while not explicitly defined anywhere in the available
literature, seems to point to the coalescing of language and landscape in ways that are relevant andresonant for our discussion.
Linguist and public scholar Luisa Maffi founded Terralingua in 1996, a non-profit promoting
understanding and support for biocultural diversity and explicitly linking terra, the earth, with lingua,
language. 5 Since 1996, Terralingua has produced a biennial publication entitled Langscape, whichstarted out as a quarterly newsletter but which has, over the last decade, transformed into a full-colour,
community-centered, scholarly magazine that supports Terralingua’s mission to educate minds andhearts about the vital importance of biocultural diversity on earth. The concept of “langscape” speaks
to the connection between language communities and the landscapes in which their languages arerooted, thereby facilitating an exploration of the transformation of language borders within the context
of migration, technologisation, and globalisation.
Drawing on examples from the linguistically-diverse Himalayan region,6 home to over 1,000
languages 7 from various language families, 8 we explore three main questions. First, we ask how
language boundaries both contribute to and defy the imagination of the ethnolinguistic nation-state andwe examine the role of censuses, surveys, and cartography in this context. Second, we investigate what
2 Arjun Appadurai,

Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996).
3 Chiara Brambilla, “Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept,” Geopolitics 20:1 (2015): 14–34.
4 Brambilla, “Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept,” 30.
5 “Terralingua - Unity in Biocultural Diversity” website. Accessed December 29, 2019: https://terralingua.org/
6 Mark Turin, “Linguistic Diversity and the Preservation of Endangered Languages: A Case Study from Nepal,” inTalking Points (Kathmandu: International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), 2007), 1–39.
7 As Tomasz Kamusella has argued, to write unproblematically about language and the distinction between
languages and dialects is to ignore the historically fraught and political nature of defining and enumerating
languages. We acknowledge the need to present the number of languages spoken in the Himalayas within thiscontext. See Tomasz Kamusella, “The Global Regime of Language Recognition,” International Journal of theSociology of Language 218 (2012): 59–86; Tomasz Kamusella, “The History of the Normative Opposition of‘Language versus Dialect’: From Its Graeco-Latin Origin to Central Europe’s Ethnolinguistic Nation-States,”
Colloquia Humanistica 5 (2016): 164–188.
8 David Eberhard, Gary Simons, and Charles Fennig, ed., Ethnologue: Languages of the World (Dallas, Texas: SIL
International, 2019). Accessed December 29, 2019: http://www.ethnologue.com

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Maya Daurio and Mark Turinit means for languages to become detached from the landscapes in which they were traditionallysituated and historically spoken, and sometimes de-ethnicized through the process. We discuss theterritoriality of Himalayan languages and consider the linguistic identities of those who remain situatedin their traditional landscapes as well as those who reside in urban environments. And third, we explore
how language boundaries are transcended and become redefined through increased mobility andtechnological innovation. We underscore how access to different technological media provide greater
opportunities for sustaining language communities across space and time while simultaneously,
dominant language speakers continue to control the digital discourse promoting normative language
ideologies.
Language Borders and Linguistic Boundary-Making
Nation-states are “imagined” political entities9 that are fundamentally—and one might argue,necessarily—constrained and defined by their geographical and cartographical borders.10 The ideologyof ethnolinguistic nationalism also assumes a geographical continuity, from the pre-modern to themodern, appropriating an imprecise past and superimposing it onto the conceptual imagination of thepresent.11 As other contributors to the Eurasia Border Review (EBR) have demonstrated, nation-stateborders simultaneously facilitate the flow of materials and peoples while working to restrict
unsanctioned cross-border movement. 12 As a field, border studies has established that borders arethemselves highly marked liminal spaces, and complex sites of porosity and of identity making.13
In this article, our goal is to focus greater analytical attention on language borders andlinguistic boundary-making to the extent that these intersect with nationalist and colonialist endeavors.
In so doing, we build on previous and notable efforts to make sense of the complexity of this subject
matter. George Grierson, who conducted the Linguistic Survey of India over a period of three decades
beginning in the late 1800s, wrote extensively about the challenges of delineating language

9 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,2006).
10 Susan Gal, “Language and Political Spaces,” in Mapping Language and Space: An International Handbook of

Linguistic Variation, ed. Peter Auer and Jürgen Schmidt, Volume 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG,
2010), 33–50.
11 Sheldon Pollock, “Introduction,” in The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, andPower in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 1–36.
12 Victor Konrad, “Borders and Culture: Zones of Transition, Interaction and Identity in the Canada-United States
Borderlands,” Eurasia Border Review 5:1 (2014): 41–58; Hari Bansh Jha, “Nepal’s Border Relations with India
and China,” Eurasia Border Review 4:1 (2013): 63–75.
13 Michael Schack, “Regional Identity in Border Regions: The Difference Borders Make,” Journal of Borderlands
Studies 16:2 (2001): 99–114; Brigitta Busch and Helena Kelly-Holmes, “Language Boundaries as Social, Political,
and Discursive Constructs,” in Language, Discourse, and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States, ed. Brigitta
Busch and Helena Kelly-Holmes (Buffalo: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2004), 1–12; Bonnie Urciuoli, “Language
and Borders,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 525–546.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >boundaries.14 In 1917, and focusing on Europe, Leon Dominian sought to equate a linear, progressive
notion of civilization with the sentiment of nationalism as outwardly expressed in language. Rather
than challenge the linguistic identity-making of the nation-state, Dominian’s work advanced its cause
by attempting to illustrate how fundamentally language has influenced nationality. 15 Henry Robert
Wilkinson published a rigorous analysis of two hundred ethnographic maps of Macedonia, most ofthem produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that reflected the ethnolinguistic nationalist
inclinations of that period using language as the primary, and sometimes only, criterion for ethnic
affinity.16
More recently, Susan Gal and Judith Irvine have argued that language ideologies produce
boundaries which presume a linguistic and social correlative relationship.17 In a recently publishedarticle, Mario Saraceni and Camille Jacob discuss the political nature of linguistic borders and propose
the concept of “translanguaging” to understand language behavior as a social practice in which speakers’
multilingualism expresses itself dynamically.18 In situating our work within scholarship that examines
how languages and borders are demarcated both by language communities and by the nation-states
which contain them, we assert that linguistic identities become more pronounced at borders “if only
because the communicative practices of the citizens on each side are more fluid and overlapping than
the nation-states to which they belong would like to imagine.”19
As much in popular conceptualization as in public policy, languages are often presumed tocorrelate with national political borders and have been (and continue to be) strategically deployed andexpediently used to amplify nationalist sentiment, particularly in Eurasia. In the case of Croatia
following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, “the demarcation of ‘language boundaries’ and the affirmationof ‘language communities’ were central concepts in political and media discourses on language” as the
Yugoslav state disintegrated.20 In some instances of nation-building, particular languages areappropriated to serve as symbols of national identity and even as proxies for the demarcation of nation-

14 Javed Majeed, “Mapping Languages,” in Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (London:

Routledge India, 2018).
15 Leon Dominian, The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe, The Art World, Volume 3 (New York: H.
Holt and Company, 1918).
16 Henry Robert Wilkinson, Maps and Politics: A Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1951).
17 Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine, “The Boundaries of Languages and Disciplines: How Ideologies Construct
Difference,” Social Research 62:4 (1995): 967–1001; Judith T. Irvine, “Subjected Words: African Linguistics andthe Colonial Encounter,” Language and Communication 28:4 (2008): 323–343.
18 Mario Saraceni and Camille Jacob, “Revisiting Borders: Named Languages and de-Colonization,” Language
Sciences 76 (2019): 1–10.
19 Mark Turin, “On Linguistic Borders: Official Language Policy in Settler-Colonial Nations,” Border Bites 8(2018): 1–10.
20 Brigitta Busch and Helena Kelly-Holmes, “Language Boundaries as Social, Political, and Discursive Constructs,”
in Language, Discourse, and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States, ed. Brigitta Busch and Helena KellyHolmes (Buffalo: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2004), 1–12.

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Maya Daurio and Mark Turinstate borders, whether or not a difference in spoken language actually existed.21 Along the DutchGerman border, for example, while the languages spoken on either side are mutually intelligible, they
are politically distinguished from one another as Dutch or German, depending on which side of theborder they are spoken.22 In other instances, actual differences in spoken language are overwritten andrendered invisible to serve a nationalist goal, as in the case of numerous varieties of spoken Arabic
documented within various nation-states committed to a vision of Arab nationalism, for example.23 In
such cases, languages can become nationalist metonyms, standing in for the nation-state itself.
In other contexts, nation-state borders work to erase linguistic identities. At the United States’
southern border, a failure of imagination and understanding by the American state overwrites theethnolinguistic identities of Indigenous Latin American migrants, reclassifying them as Spanishspeaking, regardless of their comfort and fluency in the language. Indicative of this deficiency inunderstanding is the lack of any process for a language assessment of immigrant speakers of Indigenous
languages and the absence of any policy which affirms the right of these speakers to communicate intheir primary language. 24 Only 7% of translated materials that exist as part of the United States
Department of Homeland Security Limited English Proficiency (LEP) policy represent languages from
Meso-America, while immigrants from Meso-America constitute 94% of the undocumented immigrant
population. Only four Mayan languages are included in translation materials, while 25 other Mayan
languages spoken in multiple countries are excluded, and not a single Indigenous language from
Mexico is represented.25 Once across the border, these historically marginalized, vulnerable individuals
continue to be sidelined, becoming merged into an undifferentiated “Hispanics” mass, even thoughmasking Indigenous language speakers as Spanish speakers is a clear violation of LEP policy.26 The
marginalisation at the border of those who lack proficiency in Spanish can aggravate an alreadychallenging asylum-seeking process, ultimately resulting in children being unlawfully separated fromtheir parents, the unwarranted deportation of adults, and in some cases even death.27 Five of the six
children who have died in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security since Donald Trump
took office are Indigenous. In two of the cases, intake waivers signed by the fathers stating that theirchild did not require medical care were in English, and only verbal translation in Spanish was provided,a language in which the fathers lack proficiency.28 In the United States and beyond, ethnic identity,
basic human rights, and linguistic ancestry are eroded as migrants become coercively associated with
21 Máiréad Nic Craith, Europe and the Politics of Language: Citizens, Migrants and Outsiders (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
22 Turin, “On Linguistic Borders: Official Language Policy in Settler-Colonial Nations,” 2.
23 Tomasz Kamusella, “The Arabic Language: A Latin of Modernity?,” Journal of Nationalism, Memory, andLanguage Politics 111:2 (2017): 117–145.
24 Blake Gentry, “Exclusion of Indigenous Language Speaking Immigrants in the US Immigration System, aTechnical Review” (Ama Institution, 2015), 1–64.
25 Gentry, “Exclusion of Indigenous Language Speaking Immigrants,” 13.
26 Ibid, 37.
27 Rachel Nolan, “A Translation Crisis at the Border,” The New Yorker, December 30, 2019. Accessed December
10, 2019: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/06/a-translation-crisis-at-the-border28 Nolan, “A Translation Crisis at the Border.”25Eurasia Border Review < Article >a newly-imagined community, and individual histories are often lost or forced to be abandoned throughmigration.
The U.S.-Mexico political border creates a seemingly arbitrary divide between what lies oneither side, exemplified by the case of Tijuana and San Diego, where two cities share the same weather,geography, history, and even the same language. 29 Legal border crossings are a daily reality forinhabitants of the cities on either side of this border—a regular movement that reflects the linguistic,
cultural, and familial ties that endure between borderland communities—while at the same time there
exists a “heightened linguistic anxiety and identity-making”30 that is intentionally produced by the state.
In the context of the Himalayan region, although Nepali has a significant speech community
outside of Nepal, and Nepal is a highly multilingual country, the Nepali language continues to be
associated with Nepali national identity. Yet, being Nepali does not require that one only speaks Nepali:
Nepal’s constitution provides for all Nepalis to receive at least primary education in their mothertongue.31 While this is highly prized and symbolically important, an implementation gap exists between
constitutional aspiration and educational reality, with access to mother tongue education remaining
very limited in Nepal. Similarly, while the constitution of Nepal recognizes all languages spoken in thenation as national languages, it provides legal status to Khas Nepali as the language of official
business,32 reasserting a long-standing and entrenched linguistic hierarchy that situates Nepali above
all other languages spoken and used in the nation.33
For the drafters of the constitution, and for Nepali-speaking Hindu elites, the role and functionof Nepali as the (not a) linguistic embodiment of Nepali national identity remains unassailable. This
contrasts with the multi- or pluri-lingual identities of most Nepalis, many of whom are advocating forand seeking official recognition of their ethnolinguistic community. At the same time that local
ethnolinguistic identities are receiving greater recognition within the nation-state of Nepal, the Nepali
language is becoming more visible beyond Nepal’s boundaries. Nepali is widely used and much valued
in Darjeeling, Sikkim and other parts of the Indian northeast, and over time has become an importantelement in cultural and political movements for recognition and representation.34
There are also large numbers of Nepali speakers in Bhutan, but there they threaten the
Bhutanese state’s aspirations of a national identity associated with Dzongkha. Following the
introduction of a new citizenship law in 1985 requiring all citizens to adopt a national code of etiquette
29 Kristin C. Moran, “Border Tales: A Comparison of Spanish-language and English-language News,” Journal of

Borderlands Studies 20:1 (2005): 115–127.
30 Turin, “On Linguistic Borders: Official Language Policy in Settler-Colonial Nations,” 1.
31 Nepal Law Commission, “Constitution of Nepal,” 2015. Accessed December 29, 2019:http://www.
lawcommission.gov.np/en/archives/981
32 Om Gurung, “Social Inclusion/Exclusion: Policy Discourse in Nepal,” in Including the Excluded in South Asia,
ed. M. Sekher and R. Carciumaru (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2019), 39–55.
33 For a discussion on the ethnolinguistic nationalism of Russian neo-imperialism in a multilingual and multiethnic
context, see Tomasz Kamusella, “Russian: A Monocentric or Pluricentric Language?,” Colloquia Humanistica 7(2018): 153–196.
34 Sara Shneiderman and Townsend Middleton, Darjeeling Reconsidered: Histories, Politics, Environments (NewDelhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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Maya Daurio and Mark Turinand national dress, Nepali was banned as a subject in schools and up to 90,000 ethnic Nepalis were
expelled.35 The history of the Nepali language in Bhutan is complex, and disagreement over whether
Nepali was simply a subject in Bhutanese schools or a medium of instruction persists. In spite of statesponsored efforts to assert Dzonghka as the national language and the exclusion of some ethnic Nepalis
from citizenship, the Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS) continues to broadcast in Nepali, and thenational newspaper, Kuensel, continues to print a Nepali-language edition. 36 The spread of Nepali
across the eastern Himalayas underscores the reality that languages move when people move, and whennation-states expand and later contract—as Nepal has done—communities and the languages they
speak are left behind in the wake, reconfiguring themselves over time in response to new nationalboundary-making around them.
Census Taking and Language Mapping
The beginnings of linguistic cartography—the creation of maps displaying features andlocations of languages—coincided with the emergence of the concept of the nation-state in thenineteenth century.37 Fundamental to both was the underlying notion that a nation corresponds to asingle language,38 with the concomitant belief that monolingualism was a desired, geographical norm
and multilingualism the historical exception.39 The International Statistical Congress, meeting in St.
Petersburg in 1872, explicitly decided to use spoken language as the central component for classifying
ethnographic groups,40 and it was during this period of nation-state formation in the 19th century that
regional languages became increasingly marginalized.41 Most nation-states envision social and cultural
cohesion around a national language to be an effective way of facilitating affinity among their citizens,and subscribe to (in lesser or greater degree) an ideology of linguistic purity: the idea that a language
must be preserved in its “correct” form and protected from contamination by other languages.42 Yet as
35 Michael Hutt, Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2003); Rhoderick Chalmers, “Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas,” in Language andNational Identity in Asia., ed. Andrew Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 84–99.
36 Mark Turin, “Concluding Thoughts on Language Shift and Linguistic Diversity in the Himalaya: The Case of
Nepal,” in The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya, ed. Selma K. Sonntag and Mark Turin (Cambridge:
Open Book Publishers, 2019), 163–176.
37 Catherine Gibson, “Shading, Lines, Colors: Mapping Ethnographic Taxonomies of European Russia,”
Nationalities Papers 46:4 (2018): 592–611.
38 The German poet Ernst Moritz Arndt articulated a formula for ethnolinguistic nationalism in his song Was ist
des Deutschen Vaterland, wherein a greater German state could be achieved through the unification of all Germanspeaking areas. See Wikipedia Contributors, “Des Deutschen Vaterland - Wikipedia,” Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia. Accessed December 10, 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Des_Deutschen_Vaterland
39 Busch and Kelly-Holmes, “Language Boundaries as Social, Political, and Discursive Constructs.”
40 United States Delegation to the International Statistical Congress, “Report of the Delegates to the International
Statistical Congress Held At St. Petersburg In August, 1872” (Washington D. C., 1875). Accessed December 29,
2019: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011407923/Home
41 Máiréad Nic Craith, Europe and the Politics of Language, 81.
42 Olivia Walsh, Linguistic Purism: Language Attitudes in France and Quebec, IMPACT: Studies in Language andSociety 41 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016).

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >anthropologists know, and political scientists are learning,43 lived, plurilingual linguistic identities arevery often distinct from—and even built in opposition to—imagined or sanctioned ones.
Colonial powers undertook the enumeration and classification of languages—both written andspoken—to map the imperial geographies that they claimed, categorizing the social world in order tocommand it.44 Such methodologies continue to be used by states to construct the ways in which groups
are imagined to, or ideally should, align with one another. Turin describes how the differences between
the Nepali spoken in Nepal and “the variant spoken in Bhutan were deemed to be significant enoughthat they served as the basis for a linguistic test to ascertain whether individuals claiming politicalasylum in Europe were indeed credible Lhotshampa from Bhutan (people of Nepalese ancestry whogrew up in Bhutan) or citizens of Nepal dissembling as Bhutanese refugees in order to game the systemand find safe passage to the European Union.”45 By means of enumeration and classification, then,states work to mediate citizenship through an individual’s perceived ability to speak a certain language.
While surveys and censuses often function as tools of imperial control and administrative
regulation, they can also be transgressive in the information that they reveal. Following the Burma
Census Report of 1911, the Linguistic Survey of Burma (LSB) was initiated in 1917 but soon stymied
on account of the way it threatened the ideological aspirations of colonial scholars to define theBurmese state within a “Burmano-Buddhist narrative.”46 Leslie Fernandes Taylor, the superintendentof the LSB, tried to walk the line between his aspirations to provide a scientific and philological studyof languages and the desire of the colonial state for the LSB to have practical applications foradministrators on the ground. Taylor’s emerging linguistic narrative challenged that of the Burmese
colonial government, ultimately marginalizing him, and the LSB was never completed.47
The successfully completed Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) offers an instance of how
surveying and language mapping can in fact disrupt statist endeavors, despite appearances to thecontrary. Benedict Anderson describes the colonial fascination with census-taking as motivated by adesire to “count the objects of its feverish imaginings,”48 the objective being to build and organize acolonial state around the systematic classification of ethno-racial hierarchies.49 The British colonialstate imagined—or at least hoped—that India could be thought of as a cohesive whole, and the LSI,
initiated in 1894, earned the backing of the administration precisely because it was believed that theresults would dovetail agreeably with the census and reaffirm the imperial conception of India as a
43 Rémi Léger, “Why the Politics of Language Needs Examples from beyond the Global North,” Open Book

Publishers Blog, September 27, 2019. Accessed December 29, 2019: https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/whythe-politics-of-language-needs-examples-from-beyond-the-global-north/
44 Bernard Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of
Knowledge : The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16–56.
45 Turin, “Concluding Thoughts on Language Shift and Linguistic Diversity in the Himalaya: The Case of Nepal,”
168.
46 Javed Majeed, “The Colonial State and the Survey,” in Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic
Survey of India (London: Routledge India, 2018).
47 Majeed, “The Colonial State and the Survey,” 70.
48 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 169.
49 Ibid, 168.

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Maya Daurio and Mark Turinconsistent geographical entity.50 The imperial Indian census was, after all, a means of fixing people ingroups in time and space to impose a specific kind of social order,51 one very much based on equating
language with race.52 Yet, as Majeed writes:
The LSI’s geographical imagining of India conflicted with these colonial and nationalist
mappings. It complicated the notion of India as a single, coherent, self-referential geography,
and in doing so centralised India in a global linguistic geography. Its cartographical exercises
were at odds with the colonial state’s investment in a specific geographical image of India,
and ultimately with the re-mapping of India after 1947 in terms of linguistic states.53
In other words, the Linguistic Survey of India laid bare some of the challenges inherent in
attempting to fix and locate languages in place and space.54 Cartography was a powerful expression ofcolonial power in imperial India, and the maps accompanying the LSI diluted the narrative authorityof the British Empire by depicting the elasticity of language boundaries. Sheldon Pollock writes that“at its borders, every language may appear to merge into something else.”55 George Grierson, who
administered the LSI over a period of 33 years56 and was careful to clarify the LSI’s value for theadministrative interests of the colonial state, 57 wrote candidly about the complexity of situating
languages on a map, 58 using innovative techniques and rich, descriptive language to illustrate theindefiniteness of overlapping language spaces, including “shading” to indicate how “boundaries bleed,”“waves and tides” to describe the interaction between languages when they encountered one another,and “overflowing” to depict languages spilling over mountain ranges.59 Language boundaries blur theedges and persist as inimitably undefinable.60
The categories enumerated in a census, and processes for collecting and collating data, arevaried and elicit noticeably different responses. For example, while both Nepal and India conduct

50 Majeed, “The Colonial State and the Survey,” 50.
51 Norman Gerald Barrier, The Census in British India: New Perspectives (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981).
52 Patrick McCormick, “Hierarchy and Contact: Re-Evaluating the Burmese Dialects,” The IIAS Newsletter, no.

75 (2016): 42–43.
53 Majeed, “Mapping Languages,” 56.
54 Ibid, 56.
55 Sheldon Pollock, “The Language of the Gods Enters the World,” in The Language of the Gods in the World ofMen: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 39–74.
56 Javed Majeed, “Introduction: The Survey’s Inception,” in Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic

Survey of India (London: Routledge India, 2018).
57 Majeed, “The Colonial State and the Survey,” 65.
58 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Volume 1, Part 1 (Calcutta: Government of India Central
Publications Branch, 1927).
59 Majeed, “Mapping Languages,” 60.
60 Pollock, “Introduction,” 22.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >decadal censuses, only Nepal seeks responses for both mother tongue and ethnicity.61 India’s decadal
census does little to enumerate monolingualism, bilingualism, and multilingualism, nor does it attempt
to determine how minority languages are being retained.62 The 2005–2006 Linguistic Survey of Sikkim(LSS) was a joint effort by the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Gangtok, the Department of Human
Resource Development (formerly Education) of the State Government of Sikkim, and one of the coauthors, Mark Turin. The survey sought to uncover the complexities around language use andilluminate understandings of identity and belonging.
One of the more unexpected findings of the LSS is that there were more young people who
identified Bhutia, Lepcha, and Limbu—the autochthonous languages of Sikkim—as their mothertongue than there are those who self-identified as speaking them. Co-author Turin explains this anomaly
as the expression of an emotional connection to an ancestral heritage, ethnic identity and sense of
linguistic attachment.63 The Sikkim survey is noteworthy for both the pattern of language shift that it
uncovered, with more Nepali and fewer Indigenous mother tongues being spoken, and for identifying
the way that an individual’s language heritage can serve as a proxy for ethnicity, thus helping tocultivate a sense of belonging.64 The LSI and the LSS illustrate that language mapping and linguistic
surveys can produce results that challenge hegemonic narratives about how and where language
communities situate themselves in and across nation-states.
Fluidity and Flux: Language Mobility in Nepal
While we have demonstrated that linguistic boundaries are clearly not coterminous withnational boundaries—both geographically and temporally—they are nevertheless actively maintainedin their own right. Language borders do serve as demarcated sites of belonging65 and contribute to theformation and maintenance of ethnolinguistic identities. While nation-state borders are conceived ofand depicted as firm and unmoving, language borders are necessarily fluid. As such, language borders
remain cartographically challenging to represent because linguistic boundaries are maintained at
symbolic and emotional as well as at spatial and geographic levels.66
In the Eastern Himalaya, ethnic identity forms in partial response to a political climate which
affords certain groups access to capital controlled by the government.67 In India, the central and state
61 Mark Turin, “Mother Tongues and Language Competence: The Shifting Politics of Linguistic Belonging in the

Himalayas,” in Facing Globalization in the Himalayas: Belonging and the Politics of the Self, ed. Gerard Toffin
and Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka (SAGE Publications, 2014).
62 Turin, “Mother Tongues and Language Competence,” 381.
63 Ibid, 386.
64 Ibid, 373.
65 Urciuoli, “Language and Borders,” 539.
66 Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, “Language and Identity,” in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed.
Alessandro Duranti (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004), 369–394; Sarah Samuelson and Beth Freedman,“Language Policy, Multilingual Education, and Power in Rwanda,” Language Policy 9 (2010): 191–215.
67 Mona Chettri, Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2017).

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Maya Daurio and Mark Turin

CHINA

Dolpa

N E PA L
Kathmandu

Solukhumbu

SikkimThimphuB H U TA N

Darjeeling

KachinBANGLADESH
Dhaka

INDIA

M YA N M A R

Bay of Bengal

Figure 1: Map of the Himalayan Region
Areas shaded in grey represent locationsdiscussed in this paper. Map by Maya Daurio.

bureaucracies engage in neo-colonial categorizations to afford certain marginalized communities
greater rights and benefits. Groups who are able to distinguish themselves ethnically, linguistically, andin their customs and performative culture may qualify for status as a Scheduled Tribe, increasing accessto reserved posts in government agencies, seats in universities, low interest loans, and reduced
thresholds required to pass educational board exams.68 Efforts by Limbu, Lepcha, and Bhutia
communities in Sikkim to lobby for inclusion as Scheduled Tribes are a manifestation of this process.
In neighbouring Nepal, adivāsi janajāti (indigenous nationality) organizations and activists
propose a one-to-one relationship between language and ethnicity, through which they advocate forthemselves as distinct groups in order to receive official recognition and other perceived andforthcoming entitlements.69 Nepal has experienced significant political transformation and upheaval
over the last three decades, including the introduction of a multi-party democratic system in 1990, acivil war that lasted from 1996 to 2006, the abolishment of the Hindu monarchy in 2006, and its firstever constituent assembly which was charged with drafting a constitution from 2008 to 2012, 70

68 Sara Shneiderman and Mark Turin, “Seeking the Tribe: Ethno-Politics in Darjeeling and Sikkim,” Himal

Southasian, March-April (2006): 1–4.
69 Turin, “Mother Tongues and Language Competence,” 373.
70 Gurung, “Social Inclusion/Exclusion: Policy Discourse in Nepal.”

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >followed by another constitution in 2015.71 Many of these political vicissitudes coalesce around theaspiration for a multicultural and multilingual Nepal with accompanying rights and representation forhistorically marginalized groups that make up a third of the country’s population and much of its
ethnolinguistic diversity.72
The federal definition of what constitutes an adivāsi janajāti in Nepal includes having one’s
own language and oral history, among other requirements,73 and encourages groups to cultivate the ideaof a singularity between ethnicity and language, whether or not the communities themselves arefunctionally multilingual. David Gellner understands multilingualism in Nepal as existing within ahierarchy in which the language people choose to use in a given situation is mediated by the power andstatus among the language groups in contact with one another.74 Patrick McCormick describes a similar
hierarchical, preferential system of language choice in Burma among multilingual communities.75
The multilingual traders of the Tichurong Valley in Dolpa, Nepal, offer one way ofunderstanding how multilingual communities demarcate the language they use according toperceptions of power through the political, social, and economic domains that they navigate. Because
they speak Kaike, Nepali, and Pöke, interactions that Tarali (inhabitants of the Tichurong Valley) havewith other speech communities involve complex choices about which language to use, choices
mitigated by relative positions of prestige and status.76 Those Tarali who live in Tichurong do not havea sense of the impending loss of the Kaike language or diminishment of their culture because they are
immersed in Tarali customs and surrounded by Kaike as a living and vibrant language. Kathmanduresiding Tarali, however, are taking steps to explicitly cultivate an identity around speaking Kaike,including actively creating a sense of affinity with the Magar community, one of Nepal’s mostnumerous Indigenous groups, now that the Kaike language has been officially recognized as one ofthree distinct languages spoken by Magar community members.77
James Fisher understands the development of Magar identity among Tarali as an alliance of
convenience.78 In the current political climate, self-identifying as Magar provides Tarali access to thesocial, economic and political capital associated with membership in Nepal’s largest Indigenous

71 Bal Krishna Sharma and Prem Phyak, “Neoliberalism, Linguistic Commodification, and Ethnolinguistic Identity

in Multilingual Nepal,” Language in Society 46 (2017): 231–256.
72 Gurung, “Social Inclusion/Exclusion: Policy Discourse in Nepal.”73 “The Indigenous Nationalities of Nepal,” in National Foundation for Development of Indigenous Nationalities(NFDIN): An Introduction (Kathmandu: Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities, 2003). Accessed December
29, 2019: https://www.nefin.org.np/en/books/
74 David N. Gellner, “The Idea of Nepal, The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture 2016,” in Himal Books for Social
Science Baha (Kathmandu, 2016). Accessed December 29, 2019: http://soscbaha.org/mcrl-2016/75 McCormick, “Hierarchy and Contact: Re-Evaluating the Burmese Dialects,” 43.
76 Maya Daurio, “The Significance of Place in Ethnolinguistic Vitality,” in The Politics of Language Contact inthe Himalaya, ed. Selma K. Sonntag and Mark Turin (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019), 109–136.
77 John Whelpton, The History of Nepal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
78 James F. Fisher, Trans-Himalayan Traders (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

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Maya Daurio and Mark Turingroup, 79 including opportunities for greater political representation. 80 The (self-)enforcement of acorrelative relationship between language and ethnicity in a largely multilingual country such as Nepal
is indicative of the way in which linguistic geographies are cultivated to situate individuals andcommunities within particular social, economic, and political contexts, 81 and then delineated tofacilitate affinities between groups of people to support them in accessing power and resources.
Living “Langscapes”: Linking Language with the Land
Most if not all speakers of Indigenous languages are rooted in a particular place, codifying
diachronic and site-specific knowledge about landscapes and livelihood systems in their grammar,
lexicon and syntax. 82 In addition, Indigenous language communities demarcate boundaries by
categorizing the territory in which they live and with which they are associated, assigning names toculturally, politically and historically significant sites in the landscape. The transfer of linguistic,
cultural, and environmental knowledge from one generation to the next is processual, performative,
and situated in this named and embodied landscape.83 It is through the medium of language, then, that
cultural knowledge and experience is organized, classified and transmitted across generations.84 This
continuous “place-making”85 generates and sustains a sense of belonging and an emotional attachment
to a land that is re-lived in the sharing of origin stories and delineated in sacred geographies.86
Among the Kaike-speaking Tarali in Dolpa, Nepal, for example, villages are ringed by sacredtrees inhabited by named deities, and the most powerful deity resides in a glacier overlooking the
Tichurong Valley.87 This is but one public example of the way that the Kaike language serves to locateand situate the Tarali community in time and space. The Kaike-speaking Tarali have long been
multilingual traders, traditionally working in the salt trade between India and Tibet while continuing toreside in Dolpa.88 Yet community members are now moving out of the Tichurong Valley in increasing
numbers to access better educational and economic opportunities, resulting in a generation born and
79 B.K. Rana, “Recent Change in Language Communities of Nepal,” OGMIOS Newsletter 26 (2005). Accessed

December 29, 2019: https://www.ogmios.org/ogmios_files/265.htm
80 Gurung, “Social Inclusion/Exclusion: Policy Discourse in Nepal.”81 Chettri, Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland, 22.
82 David Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2000).
83 K. David Harrison, When Languages Die: The Extinctions of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human

Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Margaret Pearce and Renee Louis, “Mapping Indigenous
Depths of Place,” American Indian Culture and Research 32:3 (2008): 107–126.
84 Cristina Muru, “At Home Between Science and Humanities: Biocultural Diversity as Source and Object ofInterdisciplinary Dialogue,” Langscape 4:2 (2015): 20–23.
85 Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
86 Christopher Evans et al., Grounding Knowledge/Walking Land: Archaeological Research and Ethno-Historical
Identity in Central Nepal (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2009).
87 Maya Daurio, “The Fairy Language: Language Maintenance and Social-Ecological Resilience Among the Tarali
of Tichurong,” Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 31 (2012): 7-21.
88 Fisher, Trans-Himalayan Traders.

33Eurasia Border Review < Article >raised outside the landscape in which the Kaike language was historically situated and used.89 What
does it mean for a language to move beyond the landscape in which it was spoken and about which it
contains a wealth of codified traditional cultural and ecological knowledge when speech communities
relocate?
Many of the first generation of Kaike speakers who relocated to Kathmandu continue tomaintain socio-economic ties to Tichurong and to the district of Dolpa. Those who are physically able
to do so return to their home villages on a regular basis to participate in and attend important religious
functions, to visit family and friends, or to conduct business. These Tarali continue to speak Kaike witheach other in Kathmandu and almost all live within the vicinity of Boudhanath, an important Buddhist
site in the northeast of Nepal’s capital city. As urban Tarali participate in social organizations promoting
Kaike culture that are centred around Indigenous and religious festivals,90 their identities continue tobe entwined with their language and customs and remain, notwithstanding the geographical distance,
rooted in Tichurong. It is different for their children, however, most of whom were born and raised in
Kathmandu, who answer their parents in the Nepali language, who are educated in English-medium
schools, and rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to travel to Tichurong. Whether these youth
predominantly identify as Tarali, as Magar, or as simply Nepali is complex and contingent. And it
remains to be seen what role the Kaike language will have in their lives.
Around the world, part of the “success” of colonizing languages is that they become detachedfrom the landscapes of their origin and enter new domains of use through militarization, imperial
adventure, technologized networks of global trade, and ethnolinguistic nation-building. Many
languages develop a strong link to a specific territory, unless they become adopted by a diasporiccommunity, as in the case of Yiddish for Ashkenazic Jews and Romani in the case of the Roma. While
the territorial origins of Sanskrit remain murky, for much of its history, its extra-territoriality is whatallowed Sanskrit to transcend space. As Pollock notes, for Sanskrit, “the very capacity to escape thelimitations of the local place and the temporal moment of the individual life memory was considered adefining virtue.” 91 The written form of the Tibetan language is also arguably translocal, lacking asituatedness in place, and dispersed geographically across the Tibetan Plateau as well as throughout the
Tibetan Buddhist diaspora.92 In this vein, the rapid spread of the English language through military andcolonial networks of trade and settlement was facilitated by the fact that English was no longer
understood to be a territorial language singularly tied to England. Indeed, English has now been
appropriated as a symbol of national identity by a vocal minority in the United States who strive to
make it the official language as the country’s constitution identifies no national language in its founding
documents. 93 Such political advocacy instrumentalizes language as a way of drawing boundaries
around who belongs and who does not.
89 Daurio, “The Significance of Place in Ethnolinguistic Vitality,” 129.
90 James F. Fisher, Trans-Himalayan Traders Transformed: Return to Tarang (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2017).
91 Pollock, “The Language of the Gods Enters the World,” 49.
92 Birgit Kellner, “Vernacular Literacy in Tibet: Present Debates and Historical Beginnings,” in Anfangsgeschichten/

Origin Stories, ed. Norbert Kössinger et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 381–402.
93 Turin, “On Linguistic Borders: Official Language Policy in Settler-Colonial Nations,” 6.

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Maya Daurio and Mark Turin

In the linguistically diverse Himalayan region, 94 by contrast, language remains largely
territorial. In Nepal alone, an estimated 123 languages are identified as spoken or signed mothertongues,95 of which 109 are Indigenous.96 Most of these languages are linked to particular langscapes—
specific ancestral territories that reflect the traditional socioeconomic practices and cultural ways of
their speakers. While many speakers of these languages continue to live and work in their traditional
territories, as documented for the Kaike-speaking Tarali above, increased urbanization, educational
opportunities, literacy, and health-related migration facilitated new forms of linguistic mobility andboundary-making that become enabled through widely-available digital technologies.
Urban “Langscapes”: The Movement and Mobility of Languages
The city of Manchester in the United Kingdom is but one of an increasing number of
linguistically diverse urban areas across the globe where the resettlement patterns of language
communities are highly complex. More than 150 languages are spoken in Manchester, and nearly halfof all students enrolled at institutions of higher learning come from homes where a language other thanEnglish is spoken.97 The University of Manchester, in partnership with the city in which it is located,
are working to promote awareness of linguistic diversity and highlight its benefits for the city, including
attracting business investors, for whom competency in more than one language is important. The
partnership also helps ensure access to services in multiple languages by working with local
government and community organizations to celebrate the city’s diverse cultural heritage embodied bylinguistic diversity.98
In an effort to improve language services for the wider community, the University ofManchester is spearheading a project entitled “Multilingual Manchester”. The project has launched an
online interactive mapping application that “brings together statistical information on languages froma variety of sources covering different sectors of the city such as the languages of school pupils, libraryholdings in different languages and their uptake, interpreting requests, and census data.” 99 The
application enables users to select and display language-related census data filtered by language used.
The user may select a number of parameters for a query, such as the census category “percentage able
to speak English well” and the language category “Amharic” to show the spatial distribution of thepercentage of Amharic speakers across the city of Manchester who are also able to speak English
94 Turin, “Linguistic Diversity and the Preservation of Endangered Languages,” 1.
95 Population

Education & Health Research Center, “Nepal Population Report 2016” (Kathmandu, 2016).
Accessed December 10, 2019: https://www.mope.gov.np/downloadfile/Nepal%20Population%20Report%202016_
1514709110.pdf
96 Eberhard, Simons, and Fennig, Ethnologue: Languages of the World.
97 University of Manchester, “About Multilingual Manchester,” website. Accessed October 25, 2019: http://mlm.
humanities.manchester.ac.uk/about/
98 “About Multilingual Manchester.”
99 University of Manchester, “Mapping Multilingual Manchester,” in Multilingual Manchester (Wiltshire: Arts andHumanities Research Council, 2019). Accessed October 25, 2019: http://mlm.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2019/03/AHRC-OWRI-leaflet_MLM-Section.pdf

35Eurasia Border Review < Article >well.100 Through these sophisticated visualizations, users are able to query and interrogate the urban“langscape” of Manchester to make visible the city’s plurilingual reality.
New York City’s many diverse ethnolinguistic communities offer a compelling example ofboth historic and contemporary linguistic mobility. Thanks to the immigrant communities who have
moved to the metropolis from all corners of the world, a staggering 800 languages are spoken across
New York City, making it the most linguistically diverse urban area in the world. 101 Many of thelanguages now spoken in New York City’s five boroughs are highly endangered, and linguists from theEndangered Language Alliance (ELA) based in Manhattan have established that the last remaining
speakers of a number of languages are currently resident in New York City.102 One example are theGottscheers, a Germanic community from Slovenia, whose language is quite distinct from other
Germanic-speaking populations.103 Inspired by the goals of immigrant communities, ELA staff andtheir research partners are working to document as many languages in the city as they are able, someof which have never been recorded or documented before. To this end, staff at the Alliance haverecorded hundreds of hours of audio and video of 50 different languages,104 worked with speakers ofover 100 endangered or minority languages, and have mapped 631 languages and dialects to 970 sites
across the city.105
Through a new collaborative project funded by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies
at the University of British Columbia, the Endangered Language Alliance and its partners are now
developing a digital version of their language map to represent the mobility of language communities.
Mapping languages, whether in print or digital form, continues to be a challenge since specific points
that identify a community center or polygons drawn around a residential block are inadequate
representations of the complex and layered plurilingual realities that exist in so many urban locations.
This is particularly relevant for a site like New York, where multiple languages are spoken in the sameapartment building or subway car, let alone on one city block in Jackson Heights, the most linguisticallydiverse neighborhood in the United States, and according to Daniel Kauffman, ELA co-founder,probably in the world.106 Finding a way to visualize a stacked vertical alignment of geospatial linguistic
data—such as multiple languages in one apartment building—is cartographically complex. As Gal
notes, “the internationally conventional language map is built on the perspective of the contemporary
100 University of Manchester, “Data Tool Main Site,” Multilingual Manchester. Accessed October 25, 2019:http://datatool.mlm.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/#
101 Endangered Language Alliance, “Languages of New York City,” website. Accessed December 29, 2019:https://elalliance.org/programs/maps/
102 Mark Turin, “New York, a Graveyard for Languages,” BBC News, December 6, 2012. Accessed December 29,
2019: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20716344
103 Mark Turin, “New York, a Graveyard for Languages.”
104 Endangered Language Alliance, “Documentation,” website. Accessed December 29, 2019: https://elalliance.
org/programs/documentation/
105 Endangered Language Alliance, “Languages of New York City.”
106 Bill Parry, “Queens Is a Lab for This College Professor Working to Document the World’s Disappearing
Languages,” Queens News and Community (New York, September 2019). Accessed December 29, 2019:https://qns.com/story/2019/09/09/queens-is-a-lab-for-this-college-professor-working-to-document-the-worldsdisappearing-languages/

36

Maya Daurio and Mark Turinnation-state as a political form.”107 The New York City language mapping project may help to disrupt
this conventionality and find ways to represent overlapping spatial complexity that more accuratelyreflects the distribution of different speech communities across the city.
A number of New York City-based language communities are working hard to recreate a senseof place and belonging far from the ancestral territories in which they originated. In some cases, as with
the Gottscheers, New York is the only place they have left to build and sustain their community. For
other language communities, through digital communications such as texts, voice-over-internet audio
calls, video calls, and social media, individuals connect with family and friends across space, 108
refashioning social identities and feelings of belonging through shared cultural events and digitallymediated social interactions.
The U.S.-based Sherpa community, an internationally recognized ethnolinguistic community
whose traditional homeland is the Solukhumbu district of eastern Nepal, are harnessing new digital
media in creative and innovative ways. Over multiple generations, the Sherpa diaspora has expanded
to include first neighboring districts in Nepal and northern India, then locations across South Asia andthe Middle East, and finally new continents, including North America, Australia, and Europe. In New
York City and surrounding areas alone, there are an estimated 5,000 Sherpa. The largest concentrationof Sherpa living outside of Nepal’s capital city of Kathmandu is now in the borough of Queens in New
York City.109
For transplanted Sherpa community members, the establishment of the New York kyidug—asocial and cultural organization that supports members to celebrate being together at important life
stages and ceremonies—has facilitated the maintenance of group identity, the preservation of cultural
heritage, a supportive community of practice, and Sherpa language learning.110 A participant in one of
the kyidug programmes describes hearing elements of a Sherpa ritual being explained in the Sherpa
language, noting that even in their ancestral homeland of Solukhumbu in eastern Nepal, prayers athome or in local monasteries were always recited in the more dominant liturgical Tibetan rather thanin their own Sherpa language.111
By way of the persuasive example of Sherpa, it is worth noting that through processes ofmobility and migration, ethnolinguistic identities can flourish in diaspora contexts in ways that were
unimaginable at home, precisely because they are freed from oppressive state systems in homelandcontexts that foreclose certain forms of linguistic agency and cultural visibility. In Nepal, we mayunderstand the Sherpa language to be subjected to dual linguistic hegemonies; a coercive nation-statethat prioritizes Nepali language ability combined with the dominant status of liturgical Tibetan inreligious and ritual contexts. In Nepal, then, the Sherpa language could be described as being situated107 Gal, “Language and Political Spaces,” 33.
108 Mark Turin, “Globalization Helps Preserve Endangered Languages,” YaleGlobal Online, December 3, 2013.

Accessed December 29, 2019: https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/globalization-helps-preserve-endangeredlanguages
109 Pasang Yangjee Sherpa, “Sustaining Sherpa Language and Culture in New York,” Book 2.0 9:1 (2019): 19–29.
110 Sherpa, “Sustaining Sherpa Language and Culture in New York,” 21.
111 Ibid, 25.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >beneath both Nepali and Tibetan in terms of perceived power and influence. 112 In the crowded
neighborhoods of New York City, far from the open skies and towering mountains of Solukhumbu,
Sherpa community members are able to reimagine and rebuild their relationship with the Sherpa
language, generating new forms of linguistic attachment, belonging and practice in the process.
Pushing New Borders: Language and Technology
As Sherpa community members who have relocated to New York illustrate, languages movewith people. In the maps and accompanying descriptions in the original Linguistic Survey of India,
Grierson evocatively describes the ways in which languages have always been prone to mobility,
despite how nation-states attempt to position particular speech forms as lying within or beyond theirborders. For Indigenous languages spoken in the Himalayan region, linguistic mobility should be
increasingly understood as a form of diffusion by which members of ethnolinguistic communities settle
in urban and peri-urban locations around the world, far from their ancestral homelands. While such
mobility would traditionally have resulted in fewer interactions between community members, 113
access to digital technology is transforming that expectation and providing new platforms for linguistic
connection. Not only are there more immediate, affordable and varied ways to communicate, but
increasing numbers of people now have access to and make use of sophisticated technologies before
they have access to basic services such as clean water, stable electricity, and sanitary facilities. As acase in point: cell phone towers arrived in the Tichurong Valley in Dolpa, Nepal, prior to every
household having a latrine, and there is still no running water or electricity in the Tichurong Valley,aside from a few scattered solar-powered lights in individual households.
Boundaries—language borders included—are created, maintained, constrained, changed andchallenged by communities on the basis of socio-economic factors such as the existence or speed of
the internet, paywalls, state censorship,114 and the cultural capital that individuals can leverage to secureaccess. Privilege and class help people to transcend language boundaries with greater ease, and we maypause to consider whether handheld technologies are helping to broaden access to information andcommunications or serving to reinscribe existing inequities, or perhaps a combination of both. Before
smartphones were readily available but after basic cell phones had become relatively commonplace, inthe north Indian state of Uttarakhand several days’ walk from the nearest road, co-author Daurio met a
112 Bendi Tso and Mark Turin, “Speaking Chone, Speaking ‘Shallow’: Dual Linguistic Hegemonies in China’s

Tibetan Frontier,” in The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya, ed. Selma K. Sonntag and Mark Turin(Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019), 137–162.
113 Barbara Johnstone, “Mapping Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation,” in
Mapping Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation., ed. Peter Auer and Jürgen
Schmidt, Volume 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2010), 1–18.
114 See Elizabeth C. Economy, “The Great Firewall of China: Xi Jinping’s Internet Shutdown,” The Guardian,June 29, 2018. Accessed December 29, 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/29/the-great-firewallof-china-xi-jinpings-internet-shutdown; “Russia Enacts ‘sovereign Internet’ Law, Free Speech Activists Cry Foul,”
Reuters, November 1, 2019. Accessed December 29, 2019: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-internetbill/russia-enacts-sovereign-internet-law-free-speech-activists-cry-foul-idUSKBN1XB4TF

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Maya Daurio and Mark Turingentleman whose son drove a taxi in a city on the plains. Father and son communicated with each otherby cell phone, although at the time, in 2006, it required the father to summit a local peak in order tohave stable cell reception, and the cost of the calls was high. Now, even for highly dispersed andhistorically marginalized communities, hardware and software technologies available on smartphones
facilitate oral languages and cultural traditions to be recorded, shared and disseminated to friends andfamily across space and time.
Pasang Sherpa describes how new digital media and affordable technologies have enabled her
increasingly diasporic Sherpa community to more readily interact and engage with each other acrossvastly different time zones. By way of example, dances, songs, and religious reading materials may be
produced through a programme at the New York-based kyidug, recorded on mobile devices byparticipants and audience members who are present, and then speedily distributed over social media
and video sharing platforms with community members back in Nepal and in other sites across the
Sherpa diaspora. The level of cultural engagement and commitment among the New York Sherpa
community has inspired Sherpa communities back in Nepal and India to begin language and religion
classes of their own,115 creating a feedback loop between the diaspora and the homeland that fosters
language maintenance, cultural continuity and regular communications.
At the same time, with the emergence of writing cultures and increasingly technologicallymediated forms of communication, communities are seizing opportunities to engage with theirlanguage and cultural heritage online, through sharing audio and video recordings of language lessons
and through asynchronous platforms such as internet radio and podcasting. In the 1890s, Baptist
missionaries developed a Roman orthography for the Jingphaw language, spoken by Kachin people innorthern Myanmar and neighboring areas in northeastern India and southwestern China. In a curious
twist of history, the fact that the language had been committed to writing and that the orthography thatwas chosen was the Latin alphabet instead of a neighbouring Indic script, laid the foundation among
Burmese Jingphaw speakers for the early emergence of a mobile language network that reached acrossthe border from China.116 Because their writing system required no special fonts beyond the Latincharacter set, Jingphaw-speaking Kachin were able to text with each other across nation-state borders
on basic mobile phones, jumpstarting a digital movement that has facilitated communication across the
Jingphaw-speaking diaspora. There are now digital news networks in Jingphaw, and cultural andpolitical knowledge is produced and disseminated on social media and other platforms.117 As a resultof the existence of a commonly-used writing system and the affordances of decentralized digitaltechnologies, the Jingphaw language and Jingphaw vernacular media are thriving, in spite of an
ongoing war between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar military since 2011.
Just as language mapping can helpfully disrupt hegemonic national linguistic identities, so too
digital language learning is creating new opportunities for border-making and boundary resetting.
While staff at the Endangered Language Alliance in New York City are supporting immigrant
115 Sherpa, “Sustaining Sherpa Language and Culture in New York,” 27.
116 Keita Kurabe and Masao Imamura, “Orthography and Vernacular Media,” The IIAS Newsletter 75 (2016): 36–

37.
117 Kurabe and Imamura, “Orthography and Vernacular Media,” 37.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >communities to record and document their own endangered languages, sometimes for the first time, aproject in Canada is providing culturally relevant, online learning opportunities for a Northern
Athabaskan language. Through a partnership with the Department of Anthropology and the First
Nations and Endangered Languages Program at the University of British Columbia, the Kaska
Language Website serves Kaska community members in the Yukon and Northern British Columbia bydesigning and recording Kaska language courses which are then uploaded to a public site, along withphotos, audio and video recordings. 118 Both the Endangered Language Alliance and the Kaska
Language Website are community-led documentation and revitalization projects that leverage
multimedia platforms to engage participants wherever in the world they are. In such ways, communities
are harnessing digital technologies to create extraterritorial opportunities for learning and engaging
with historically territorial languages, creatively transcending time and space.
A recent example of increased global support and institutional visibility for facilitating accessto language technologies is the UNESCO-hosted international conference Language Technologies for
All (LT4All): Enabling Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism Worldwide held in December 2019
in Paris. Convened during the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages, theconference focused on multilingual technologies, including presentations on innovative applications to
support citizen linguistics, speech-to-text technologies, and tools for digital language revitalization. An
example would be the Mozilla Foundation which is partnering with the German Ministry for Economic
Cooperation and Development (BMZ) to foster the ethical collection of open speech data in local
languages in Rwanda through machine learning.119 Meetings and symposia such as LT4All demonstrate
how open-source technologies can help bridge political borders and build capacity within language
communities to realize their own goals in ways that project into the future.
At the same time, the digital ecosystem often reflects and mirrors the same power asymmetries
that exist in the material world. Kamusella points out that Wikipedia entries for Arabic vernacular are
virtually non-existent—with the exception of the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia—which reflects thenormative assumption that there is only one Arabic language.120
It is clear, then, that new technologies and digital media can support language communities totranscend physical borders in novel ways and even subvert established linguistic hegemonies that are
created and sustained within national and territorial boundaries. However, “technoscapes”,121 to use
Appadurai’s word, are not neutral spaces mediated by indifferent actors. Access to language
technologies and the production and distribution of knowledge about digital language mobilization aredisproportionately controlled by speakers of ideologically dominant and majority languages. Just as
nation-state borders and ethnolinguistic territories are socially constructed and politically maintained,
118 University of British Columbia, “Kaska Language Website,” Kaska Language Website. Accessed December 29,

2019: https://kaska.arts.ubc.ca/
119 Mozilla, “Mozilla and BMZ Announce Cooperation to Open Up Voice Technology for African Languages,”
The Mozilla Blog, November 25, 2019. Accessed December 29, 2019: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/11/25/
mozilla-and-bmz-announce-cooperation-to-open-up-voice-technology-for-african-languages/
120 Kamusella, “The Arabic Language: A Latin of Modernity?”
121 Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 33.

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Maya Daurio and Mark Turinso too are technoscapes shaped by normative linguistic geographies, even though opportunities exist
for language communities to disrupt these norms.
Conclusion: Translocal “Langscapes”
In this paper, we have situated language borders and linguistic boundary-making within thelarger field of border studies and borderscaping, 122 critically examining how language borders aresocially and politically constituted and how they change in response to the language ideologies ofnation-states and language communities themselves. Expanding on the concept of borderscapes, we
adopt the term “langscape” from the Terralingua publication to explore the connection between
territorial speech communities and the landscapes in which their languages originate. What are theimplications for communities—particularly Indigenous communities—when their languages become
decoupled and untethered from their original territories? We know, for instance, that technologies in
the form of online dictionaries123 and language lessons and language apps124 can help to generate accessto language resources for community members wherever they are and thus help to facilitate new formsof linguistic mobility.
In addition, we have noted how some historically place-based language communities who are
now dispersed across the world, such as the Sherpa, have succeeded in transcending national andterritorial borders to recreate community and language-based traditions through social media andinteractions on online platforms. Nevertheless, the role of newer digital technologies in creating
mechanisms for language communities to reshape linguistic boundaries remains underexplored. It is
critical to make sense of the socio-economic factors that determine levels of access to digitaltechnologies and better understand regimes of state censorship that constrain access to such tools in
research programs that explore changing language borders. In addition, studies that explore thedeterritorialization of language communities and the socio-spatial affordances of language technologies
would benefit from applying Appadurai’s concept translocality to examine the “power relations that
affect the production of locality.”125
There is growing interest in our research community in the reshaping of ethnolinguistic nationstates, linguistic cartography, language ideologies, and language and technology. In the process of
finalizing this contribution, for example, we learned of the publication of the Handbook of the

122 Brambilla, “Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept.”
123 Inge Genee and Marie-Odile Junker, “The Blackfoot Language Resources and Digital Dictionary Project:

Creating Integrated Web Resources for Language Documentation and Revitalization,” Language Documentation& Conservation 12 (2018): 274–314. Accessed December 29, 2019: https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/
bitstream/10125/24770/1/genee_junker.pdf; Heiltsuk Cultural Education Centre, “Heiltsuk Language & Culture
Mobilization Partnership,” website. Accessed December 29, 2019: https://heiltsuk.arts.ubc.ca/dictionary/
124 Chickasaw Nation, “Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program,” website. Accessed December 29, 2019:https://www.chickasaw.net/Services/Chickasaw-Language-Revitalization-Program.aspx
125 Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 188.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >Changing World Language Map,126 an enormous reference volume of over 4,000 pages dedicated to ageographical approach to the study of language, broadly construed. We refer the interested reader tothis megabook, although acknowledge that the prohibitive cost of the publication (Euro 1,247) will
likely deter all but the independently wealthy or those who have digital or print access throughinstitutions of higher learning. In our modest contribution, in this open-access journal, our primary
regional focus has been the Himalaya, although we offer examples from across the globe to illustrateand underscore our theoretical positions.
Unfixed and unfixable, languages resist the limitations and constraints of nation-states—bothcolonial and contemporary—that strive to delineate their boundaries along unambiguous and oftenmonolingual lines. In the Himalayan region in particular, plural linguistic identities challenge reductive
national logics that seek to bind or appropriate languages for hegemonic and ideological goals. In ourincreasingly mobile and technologically-enabled world, it is ever harder to conceive of languages aslinked primarily or solely to nation-states. Not only are national borders decreasingly relevant for the
maintenance and transmission of languages, but the global dispersal of people and the languages they
speak, sign and write are combining with ever more accessible digital media to transform internallymaintained language borders as well. Technology and mobility have exposed spatially and temporally
innovative ways for linguistic belonging and cultural heritage to be imagined, shared, re-enacted andrefashioned.

126 Stanley D. Brunn and Ronald Kehrein, ed., Handbook of the Changing World Language Map (Cham: Springer

Nature Switzerland AG, 2020).

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