Tibetans keeping their mother tongue modern
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PU Tsering, a good-natured primary school teacher, is very stubborn when it comes to which language his students have to speak.
“We should speak standard Tibetan,” the 37-year-old language teacher often tells his students at a boarding school in Yushu, a Tibetan autonomous prefecture in northwest China’s Qinghai Province.
“As a Tibetan teacher, I’m responsible for preserving our mother tongue,” he said.
Pu Tsering insists on saying “maqepu chang” when his friends from childhood say “Yellow River Beer” in Mandarin at bars in town, hoping to keep his Tibetan pure and set an example for his students.
“Many new words — such as iPhone, iPad and Twitter — do not exist in Tibetan,” said Yeshi Soiba, a native of Yushu who graduated from the University of Kent in England. “It’s very easy to use the English words, so no one has bothered to make up equivalents in Tibetan.”
Yeshi Soiba is a program liaison officer with the local government in Yushu. He is fluent in Tibetan, and switches freely to Mandarin and English.
“I majored in environmental protection and community development, and it was extremely difficult for me to find Tibetan — sometimes even Mandarin — equivalents of terminologies.”
In fact, the lack of new words has led to concern among Tibetan linguists.
“All languages change with time and the same is true of Tibetan,” said Genqub Tenzin, a Tibetan-Mandarin translator in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province neighboring Tibet Autonomous Region.
“As the Tibet plateau is no longer isolated, its language is updated with a rapidly expanding vocabulary of borrowed words,” he said.
New phrases
Genqub Tenzin is one of many Tibetan linguists working to preserve the language.
He is head of a government-run Tibetan textbook compilation committee that edits written work for primary and middle schools in Tibet as well as other Tibetan areas in Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan provinces. Translation of borrowed words is an increasingly important job in the committee’s editing.
“When we cannot find a Tibetan equivalent, we try to work out new phrases, or paraphrase the idea with existing Tibetan words,” he said. “Transliteration is our last resort.”
In one of their works, a Tibetan-Chinese-English dictionary of new words and terminologies, Genqub Tenzin and his trilingual team submitted more than 13,000 entries, including new Tibetan coinage for computer, mouse, web users and even microblog.
But first published in 2006, it has lagged behind the influx of new words.
“There’s a lot more to be done,” said Genqub Tenzin. “We have to move faster in updating the Tibetan lexicon. Hopefully, we’ll also promote standard Tibetan to replace the different dialects of Tibet and other Tibetan communities in western China.”
The Chinese government encourages bilingual education at schools in Tibet and other ethnic regions. In Tibetan areas, most classes are taught in Tibetan, though Mandarin and English are also on the curriculum.
Teachers in Tibetan areas are given on-the-job training to help with their bilingual teaching.
“We’ve trained 35,000 primary and middle school teachers in the province since 2004,” said Dong Haifeng, deputy dean of the ethnic teachers’ college of Qinghai Normal University.
At least half received bilingual training, in Tibetan and Mandarin, he added.
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