Articulating language oppression: colonialism, coloniality and the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages

Roche, Gerald

doi:10.1080/0031322x.2019.1662074

Cited by 68 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Which are considered correct, prestigious, or appropriate for public use, and which are considered incorrect, uneducated, or offensive (e.g., Campbell-Kibler, 2009;Preston, 2009;Loudermilk, 2015;Lanehart and Malik, 2018)? Which are rendered invisible (Roche, 2019)? 3 Language ideologies play a vital role in reinforcing and justifying social hierarchies because beliefs about language varieties or practices often translate into beliefs about their speakers (e.g.…”

Section: Language and Social Hierarchiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of “Bias” in NLP

Blodgett¹,

Barocas²,

Daumé³

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

449

223

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We survey 146 papers analyzing "bias" in NLP systems, fnding that their motivations are often vague, inconsistent, and lacking in normative reasoning, despite the fact that analyzing "bias" is an inherently normative process. We further fnd that these papers' proposed quantitative techniques for measuring or mitigating "bias" are poorly matched to their motivations and do not engage with the relevant literature outside of NLP. Based on these fndings, we describe the beginnings of a path forward by proposing three recommendations that should guide work analyzing "bias" in NLP systems. These recommendations rest on a greater recognition of the relationships between language and social hierarchies, encouraging researchers and practitioners to articulate their conceptualizations of "bias"-i.e., what kinds of system behaviors are harmful, in what ways, to whom, and why, as well as the normative reasoning underlying these statements-and to center work around the lived experiences of members of communities affected by NLP systems, while interrogating and reimagining the power relations between technologists and such communities.

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Section: Language and Social Hierarchiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of “Bias” in NLP

Blodgett¹,

Barocas²,

Daumé³

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

449

223

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An important aspect of these challenges is the state's refusal to recognize the existence of most language communities amongst Tibetans. Rather than acknowledging the multilingual reality (Roche, 2014;Roche & Suzuki, 2018), the state instead represents and treats the Tibetan community as monolingual, possessing only a single Tibetan language with three major dialects (Roche, 2017(Roche, , 2019. Tibetans have long recognized the diversity of their spoken languages (Roche 2021c), and linguists have identified at least 30 mutually unintelligible spoken varieties among Tibetans in the PRC (Roche and Suzuki 2018), in addition to 'the Tibetan language' and the variety it contains (Tournadre 2014).…”

Section: Linguistic Human Rights In Tibetmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This involves refuting the significance of certain events, practices, or structures. For example, my research has focused on the central role that erasure plays in structuring the political predicament of unrecognized languages in Tibet (Roche, 2019). I have also drawn attention to how this erasure is reproduced by institutions of the Tibetan exile government (Central Tibetan Administration), and the NGOs affiliated with it, who thus fail to provide meaningful resistance to the PRC's program of elimination.…”

Section: Denying Oppression: Tibet's Unrecognized Languages Aren't Oppressedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic Human Rights in Tibet: Advocacy and Denial

Roche¹

2021

Preprint

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In this article, I describe and analyse how my efforts to advocate for linguistic human rights (LHRs) as an engaged scholar have met with resistance in the form of denial from a variety of sources. By denial, I follow scholars such as Cohen (2001) in referring to not only the refusal to acknowledge certain facts, but also to follow through with appropriate interpretations and implications of those facts. This case study of denial and advocacy is important because it demonstrates a significant and unacknowledged challenge that exists in working for linguistic human rights. My discussion builds on and extends prior work on the challenges faced by advocating for linguistic human rights within academia (May, 2005, 2011; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas & May, 2016). My exploration of denial aims to open up a space for discussing how this challenge may be addressed, and therefore how to more effective advocate for LHRs.

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“…More broadly, all of Tibet's minoritized languages are faced by a hostile policy environment that discursively and materially erases them, and prevents their reproduction through major social institutions (Roche, 2019). In the case of the spoken minoritized languages, all of them are currently undergoing a breakdown in intergenerational transmission, with children acquiring either Tibetan or Chinese rather than their heritage language (Roche, 2018).…”

Section: Which Languages? Whose Rights?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As with the spread of rights discourse to Tibetans in the PRC, I think we need to look further afield and acknowledge the influence of global conversations on local discourses. In this case, I refer to the ways in which discourses of human and language rights circulate within international forums and do so in ways that also erase the existence of Tibet's minoritized languages (Roche 2019), abandoning them to a zone in which their rights are not acknowledged, let alone contested-in which they are essentially denied the right to have rights.…”

Section: Which Languages? Whose Rights?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Tibetan Language Rights and Civil Society in the People’s Republic of China: Challenges of and for Rights

Roche

2020

Asian Studies Review

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One of the hallmarks of the Xi Jinping era in the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been a sustained attack on civil society, coupled with discursive shifts that attempt to undermine the universality of human rights. This article examines Tibetan language activism in this context, looking at challenges both for and of rights. I argue that the challenges for rights, namely the state's increasing hostility, are offset somewhat by the slow growth, transnational nature, and ample resourcing of the emerging discourse of language rights amongst Tibetans. On the other hand, I argue that challenges of rights, namely, the differential distribution of the "right to have rights," presents a more intractable problem. I demonstrate this by showing how current discourses amongst Tibetans in the PRC claim rights for some languages but not others, effectively erasing the "right to have rights" of certain Tibetan populations.

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Articulating language oppression: colonialism, coloniality and the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages

Cited by 68 publications

References 9 publications

Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of “Bias” in NLP

Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of “Bias” in NLP

Linguistic Human Rights in Tibet: Advocacy and Denial

Tibetan Language Rights and Civil Society in the People’s Republic of China: Challenges of and for Rights

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