This is a brilliant, informative, and deeply worrying book. It builds on many years of anthropological fieldwork in minority communities in Tibet, and is dedicated to Manegacha speakers in the Rebgong district, Roche’s primary informants. Following an Introduction on analysing language oppression, the book is divided into three parts, on Erasure, Suppression, and Elimination. It describes successive periods of Chinese policy, from initially ignoring the region to intervening violently, and the imposition of forms of structural violence. A triglossic hierarchy of languages results in the oppression and probable extinction of minority mother tongues and of all dialects of Tibetan and Chinese. The “Conclusion: Resisting Language Oppression” envisions what the alternative could have been. There is a Note on transliteration processes for Manegacha, and the variety of Tibetan used. There are some photos and maps. The entire book is informed by deep familiarity with language oppression worldwide, and a determination to write through commitment to a political anthropology of language that is “justice-oriented, decolonial, and militant”. The book is also informed by a vast amount of analysis by other researchers, presented in 40 pages of Endnotes.
The book is extremely well structured and signposted. Each chapter ends with a section of theoretical reflection, drawing mainly on Foucault, that tracks transition through various types of political and military dominance and its transformation into biopolitical power. Roche provides a summary of the conceptual themes when concluding each chapter. He traces phases in the “governing” of language oppression, the way domination is normalized, who the agents are in navigating modernization and an increasing use of Mandarin, while consolidating one form of Tibetan at the expense of other languages. In the six decades since the violent clashes of 1958, the Buddhist ancestry and language verbalization practices are on their way to extinction, like so many languages worldwide.
It is an extremely rich, dense book, that builds on real familiarity with the detail of what is happening in this part of China, how new forms of power have been enacted, through Han dominance, biopower, “state racism” and “race war”. There are terminological challenges here, since difference is essentially ethnic, and ethnicism is well-established in studies of language dominance, alongside linguicism (e.g. Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). In local understandings, “race and nation are mingled in the concept of minzu” (64). Tibetan nationalists believe that “the soul of the Tibetan nation is language” (65), with linguistic pluralism traditionally accepted and practiced. Roche clarifies issues of language purity in vigorous resistance to Han dominance, while a hegemonic form of Tibetan has “saturated all aspects of Tibetan life” (75). The downside of this form of biopolitical power is that other varieties of Tibetan are suppressed, both in China and in the diaspora, which is also explored in depth. Minority mother tongues risk extinction, for which the book provides evidence in each and every chapter.
Roche sees the efforts to maintain Tibetan in exile in India—a nation state in waiting—and the diaspora worldwide forming a Tibetophonie, by analogy with other internationally used languages, though in fact the “phonie” label otherwise refers to former imperial languages of European origin (Francophonie, Lusophonie, etc., like the Anglosphere). There are well-intentioned support groups and campaigns for Tibet, and funds from the USA, but such efforts invariably ignore all Tibetan minority languages.
Roche describes the impact of modernization, processes of language change, and the survival of some traditional practices that have a marketing value. He sees language policy as succumbing to “banal violence and biosovereign power” that entails degradation of minority languages. Prejudice vis-à-vis minority languages is widespread, leading to a perverse belief that Manechega is lifeless. Discrimination is banal “violence that is every day and the result of abandonment by the state”.
The Conclusion sums up the earlier chapters, describes efforts to influence the politics of language policy in China, and pleads for the revitalization of all minority languages (on which see Hinton, Huss, and Roche 2018). However, the erasure of linguistic human rights continues in many parts of the world (Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 2023), including in Tibet (Roche 2023). Chinese language policy has become shockingly inhumane, as is well documented in this book and in the Uighur region, Xinjiang (Ayup, Tékin, and Sidick 2023). Advanced techniques of mind control aim at linguicide, in the same spirit as Europeans dispossessing territories, cultures and languages in the Americas and Australasia. The book provides commendable and informed insight into how language oppression functions in China. It needs careful monitoring, if justice and decolonization are to be achieved.