Roche's article discusses 'language oppression' as a form of domination that is coherent with other forms of oppression along the lines of 'race', nation, colour and ethnicity. Scholars have defined language oppression as the 'enforcement of language loss by physical, mental, social and spiritual coercion'. It is part of an evolving suite of concepts from linguistics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology that examines issues of language discrimination, or 'linguicism'. Roche explores one aspect of linguicism-language erasure-and how it relates to language oppression, focusing on Tibetans in the People's Republic of China (PRC). He examines how language oppression is produced through practices of erasure: the ways in which certain populations and their languages are systematically rendered discursively invisible. He argues that the erasure of certain languages in the Tibetan context is systematically reproduced by two otherwise opposed political projects: the colonial project of the PRC state; and the international Tibet movement that seeks to resist it. He refers to the contingent cooperation between these two opposed projects as 'articulated oppression'. In concluding the article he examines how the disarticulation of this oppression is a necessary condition for the emancipation of Tibet's minority languages, and discusses the broader significance of this study for understanding language oppression, and its relation to other forms of oppression.

This article examines international relations (IR)'s approach to the Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over contested international borders is not the region's primary international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by statebuilding and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical tensions, threaten the region's ecologies, cultures and languages. The Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a mosaic of ethnic groups, many of whom speak threatened languages. Its ice-deposits feed most of Asia's large rivers. In recent years, India and China have pursued large-scale infrastructure development in the region, enabling greater militarisation and extraction, and a tourist rush. These threats are amplified by climate change, which is occurring in the Himalaya at twice global averages, contributing to landslides, flooding, and droughts. However, the region's complexity is not matched by IR's theorisations, which overwhelmingly focus on the possibility of violent conflict between state actors. We argue that IR's analysis of the region must go beyond a states-and-security, Delhi-Beijing-Islamabad centred approach, to look at the numerous interconnections between its geopolitics, cultures and ecologies. We suggest this can be accomplished through incorporating more interdisciplinary analysis, and through focusing on the interaction between the organisation of political authority and the region's environment.

Efforts to revitalize languages are situated within the wider context of efforts to maintain and revitalize intangible expressions of culture more broadly, from music to dance to ritual and ceremonial traditions. In some ways, language revitalization efforts are considerably further advanced in both theory and practice than those relating to other cultural expressions. Taking music as a example, this chapter draws together the scholarly field of language revitalization with the growing investigations into music sustainability, making the case for close collaboration between sociolinguists and applied ethnomusicologists on these issues. It argues three main reasons: first, that collaboration will help consolidate a common language to describe and discuss the issues; second, that it will advance theoretical frameworks and tools to support our combined efforts; and third, it will strengthen advocacy around the need for revitalisation efforts, in the community, scholarly, and public spheres. From its beginnings in the late 19 th century until the mid-20 th century, the discipline of ethnomusicology (or, as it was then called, 'comparative musicology') placed key importance on capturing the sounds of 'dying' cultures before they disappeared. In this pursuit, it was informed and influenced by research activity and interest in other disciplines, including sociolinguistics and anthropology. But from around mid-century, the attitudes of music researchers toward issues of musical loss and change began to shift considerably. By the early 1990s, music preservation interests had fallen out of favor, with many ethnomusicologists holding view that 'salvage' or 'white knight' efforts to 'save' dying music genres were overly romanticized, neo-colonial and paternalistic. By comparison, this was around the time when, in an extended article in the journal Language, Ken Hale and his colleagues "attempt to represent as forcefully as we can. .. the reality of language loss and decline as a condition of the modern world" (Hale et al, 1992, p. 2), and to argue for the relevance of linguistics and linguists in responding and This is an author-produced PDF of an invited contribution to the Handbook of Language Revitalization, copyright Routledge. The citation information is: Grant, C. (2017). A case for greater interdisciplinary collaboration in language and music revitalization. In L. Huss & G. Roche (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization (pp. 236-244). Routledge.

No abstract

Asia is the world's most linguistically diverse continent and its diversity largely conforms to established global patterns that correlate linguistic diversity with biodiversity, latitude, and topography. However, one Asian region stands out as an anomaly in these patterns—Tibet, which is often portrayed as linguistically homogenous. A growing body of research now suggests that Tibet is linguistically diverse. In this article, we examine this literature in an attempt to quantify Tibet's linguistic diversity. We focus on the minority languages of Tibet—languages that are neither Chinese nor Tibetan. We provide five different estimates of how many minority languages are spoken in Tibet. We also interrogate these sources for clues about language endangerment among Tibet's minority languages and propose a sociolinguistic categorization of Tibet's minority languages that enables broad patterns of language endangerment to be perceived. Appendices include lists of the languages identified in each of our five estimates, along with references to key sources on each language. Our survey found that as many as 60 minority languages may be spoken in Tibet and that the majority of these languages are endangered to some degree. We hope our contribution inspires further research into the predicament of Tibet's minority languages and helps support community efforts to maintain and revitalize these languages.