Is the Tibetan language endangered?

Last year a series of protests swept across Tibet and China in reac­tion to the Chinese government’s stated inten­tion to curb or elim­i­nate the use of the Tibetan lan­guage in local Tibetan schools. These were the largest protests in Tibetan areas since the March 2008 upris­ing. And since the month of February marks International Mother Language Day, we thought we should take a look at just why such a thing mat­ters so much.

The Tibet Connection’s Christal Smith spoke with Dr. David Harrison, a lin­guist and lead­ing spe­cial­ist in the study of endan­gered lan­guages. He co-​​leads the Enduring Voices Project at the National Geographic Society and is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College.

David Harrison’s most recent book The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages (2010) depicts the human fac­tor in lan­guage extinc­tion, recount­ing the per­sonal sto­ries of lin­guis­tic sur­vivors like Maori, Welsh, and Tamil.