 I'm Nathan Hill. I'm director of the Center for Asian Studies and I'm happy you're all here. And it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Gerald Roche. Lived in China for a long time, 10 years, something like that. Originally worked among the Monguers who are called the Tuzu in Chinese. And then moved from descriptive anthropology into issues around language and language policy. He's been around. He was in Sweden for a while at Uppsala and then went back home to Australia where he's been now also a few years at La Trope where he's a senior research fellow. And he's published in a lot of good places like China Quarterly and American Anthropologist and was one of the editors of the Rutledge handbook of Language Revitalization. This afternoon, the talk is Language Oppression in China. What does it look like? Greetings, everyone. It's nice to be there virtually. I'll just begin with a short acknowledgement of country which is that I'm speaking to you from Melbourne which is the unceded lands of the Weirung and Boonurung people of the Kulin nation. And since I'm going to be talking about language, I'll also acknowledge their languages, the Weirung and Boonurung languages and ongoing struggle that those people are engaged in to revitalize those languages after long periods of severe repression. And it's also important to acknowledge as someone who works at La Trope University that one of the main agents of the oppression that those people historically faced was Charles La Trope who the university is named after, who was a colonial governor and established some of the first schools in Melbourne. So yes, I'm going to be talking about this question, language oppression in China, what does it look like? I will be presenting some empirical data based on field work in China with Tibetan communities, ethnographic field work, interview surveys and so on. But in order to answer this question, what does it look like? And I'm going to be really concentrating on that sense of look. What does it look like? I'm going to be engaging a bit more with theory broadly from what I call the new genocide studies. And that's all kind of new stuff for me. So it's a bit of a mixture of old results and new ideas. Hopefully it's interesting. So I'll just start off by talking about the motivation for this topic in particular about what does language oppression look like? And the impetus was unfortunately social media which you can see some of the examples here. What you can see in these pictures is three separate people, non-PRC citizens living in or visiting China, posting content on Twitter to combat what they see as false reports of ethnic repression in the PRC, specifically in relation to the so-called minority languages of China. And these posts exemplify a broader genre of social media witnessing that typically includes some form of visual evidence. And that's either videos or still images or references to the visible or seeing more broadly. And these social media witnessing practices aim to support the argument that minority languages in China and more broadly minority peoples and cultures and identities are being respected and supported. I'm not really interested in the arguments advanced in these posts by these people since I think that they're patently false, intellectually facile and morally bankrupt as arguments. However, what I am interested in is understanding why people seem to find these posts convincing and what role aesthetics play. And I wanna think about how investigating these issues of aesthetics and believability opens up new theoretical avenues for understanding language oppression and new possibilities for thinking about how language oppression can be resisted and overcome. So my talk this evening is going to be divided into three main parts. I'll start off talking about patterns of language oppression in China. And in this section of the talk, I'll provide the empirical evidence that enables us to know that language oppression is a reality in China, looking broadly at the national level and more specifically at the Tibetan context. Then I'll start moving towards answering my key question, what does language oppression look like? This question seeks to explore the visual presentation of the processes underlying the patterns described in part one. And this section is mostly a theoretical intervention to supplement the initial and empirical part. I'll argue that recent developments in what I call new genocide studies can help us think through this issue. In the third section of the talk, I'll discuss what I call the aesthetics of language oppression to not only answer the question, what does language oppression look like, but also to ask why it is so easy to visually misrepresent. Let's start by looking at patterns of language oppression in China. It's probably useful for me to begin by explaining what I mean by language oppression. So language oppression, when I use that time, I'm referring to coerced language shift that leads eventually, if left unchecked, to the elimination of a language. So this typically occurs when speakers of indigenous and minority languages stop transmitting their mother tongue across generations, and instead transmit dominant languages, usually the language of the state. We know that language shift is occurring through an analysis of patterns of intergenerational language transmission. And we can understand if this shift is coerced through a historically grounded analysis of relations of power that come to bear on decisions around language transmission from the standpoint of the affected population. So what do we know about language oppression in China? It's difficult to directly study or find information about language oppression defined in the terms that I've laid out in China for what should hopefully be pretty obvious reasons. However, we do have a proxy indicator in the form of language endangerment, which is basically just a depoliticized rendering of the idea of language oppression. Like language oppression, language endangerment is evident when rates of intergenerational transmission of a language decline, but this model stops short of looking at the political drivers of this process. Whereas language oppression centers that the political drivers of declining intergenerational language transition. So although we lack any broad understanding of language oppression in China, we have some good estimates of language endangerment. And in a variety of sources from people working in China and outside China, what we see repeatedly is that it's estimated that about half of China's languages defined as endangered. That means that half of China's languages are today being spoken by fewer and fewer people, a process which if allowed to continue will lead to half of China's languages disappearing. My assertion is that this pattern is driven fundamentally by political factors, by implicit and explicit policy and could be arrested tomorrow if there was sufficient political will. These endangered languages are therefore oppressed languages. So half of the languages in China are oppressed. So a cornerstone of the work that I've been doing in this area is the suggestion that a key driver of this language oppression is erasure. What I'm referring to here is the refusal of the state to recognize the existence of most of China's languages which manifests as the insistence that what are in fact independent languages are actually from the view of the state, only mere dialects. And through this definitional slide of hand, the state is able to justify denying the material and institutional support that languages need to produce and reproduce themselves. So out of a total of perhaps 300 languages in China, the state only recognizes some 56 languages that deserve the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of use development and so on. Meanwhile, all other languages in China are abandoned to the destructive forces of state building, economic development, modernization and assimilation. In the Tibetan context, this gives rise to the hegemonic position that Tibetans speak only a single language and that only a single language can receive any state support for its use development production and reproduction. The reality, however, documented by linguists and recognized also by the Tibetans themselves in their practices and in their language ideologies is that Tibetans are a multilingual population. So with the linguist Hiryuki Suzuki, I conducted a survey of available literature on languages that are spoken by Tibetans but are raised by the state. We found that in addition to Tibetan, around 30 distinct languages are spoken and I'll be referring to these as Tibet's minoritized languages. Okay, so what do we know about language oppression amongst Tibet's minoritized languages? I'm gonna zoom in to talk about these languages now. Several years ago, I undertook a survey of linguists and community members who work with or speak these languages. I had to rely on the language of language endangerment in this survey, but as I explained earlier, I think this acts as a proxy indicator for language oppression. I was only able to collect information on about 20 of the approximately 30 languages spoken by Tibetans in China and the results from this survey suggest that all of these languages are endangered to some degree, varying degrees of endangerment, some more so than others, but all of them can be described as endangered. That means that all of them appear to have declining rates of intergenerational language transmission. In the survey, I also asked the experts and community members if they thought the language in question that I was asking them about would still be spoken a hundred years from now. And it was only in one case for one language that the answer to that question was yes. So not only are the languages endangered, the outlook for them is also bad in terms of their continued survival. In terms of the direction of language shift, what those languages are being replaced by out of the 20 languages that I could get information for, 14 of them are shifting towards some variety of Chinese. Three of them are shifting towards some variety of Tibetan. And in a final case for three of them, the population is split geographically. So in one valley, the community is shifting towards Tibetan and in the other valley towards Chinese. So to give a little bit more detail and specificity about how these patterns manifest, I'll give you an example of one language that I've conducted fieldwork with, Manikacha. So Manikacha is spoken on the Northeast Tibetan Plateau. You can see it up there in the top right of the screen. It's number seven, a little pink dot on the map right up at the top there. And Manikacha is spoken by 8,000 people who live in four villages in what is today Ching Hai province in part of the province, which is associated with the Tibetan cultural region of Ando. So I undertook household surveys in the four villages where Manikacha is spoken and found that somewhere between one quarter and one third of households in those four villages is shifting away from speaking Manikacha to speaking Tibetan. And that is they're not speaking Manikacha to their children anymore, they speak Tibetan and the children are not learning Manikacha, they're learning Tibetan instead. And importantly, an underlying pattern contributing to this trend is what I've here called village defection where an entire community, one out of the four shifted en masse based on a collectively enforced decision to stop transmitting Manikacha to their children. And there are other cases in other minoritized languages of Tibet where this village defection has occurred. So anyway, the overall picture we have is clear, language oppression is rife in China, at least half of the country's languages are oppressed. My work with minoritized languages of Tibet suggests that erased languages are particularly impacted but even larger formally recognized languages like Tibetan, Uyghur and Mongolian are endangered. And if you are already aware of the plight of these languages, it is because the people who use them have the affordances, the organizational capacity, the transnational reach and the international attention to make their protests meaningful. Whereas these conditions do not exist for the vast majority of oppressed languages in China. So to return to my original impetus for this talk, it's worth repeating that it is patently counterfactual to claim that minority languages in China are adequately supported, which brings me to the next part of my talk where I'm going to use new genocide studies to help us think about this issue of why those counterfactual claims seem to have so much traction and what its relationship is with aesthetics. So why should we consider language oppression in relation to genocide? I think that there are at least three good reasons for doing this. The first is historical. And I'll be referring to various some works throughout the talk, but the work of Tova Skvino-Kangas on this next part is relevant. So we know that genocide, when originally formulated by the concepts creator, Raphael Lemkin, linked language oppression to genocide, seeing efforts to ban, suppress and distort languages as belonging to part of an overall coordinated plan to destroy human groups. That was how Lemkin originally defined genocide. And we also know that language oppression was removed from the legal definition of genocide in the course of the debates that took place in the United States, in the United Nations, mostly due to advocacy from the United States and America and Canada. So historically, language oppression was considered an integral element of genocide. And that's one reason why I think we should consider them together. Secondly, as hopefully I'm going to show in this talk, I think that there are also developments within genocide studies that provide theoretical tools which enable us to meaningfully reestablish that historical connection between language oppression and genocide in ways that help us understand language oppression better. And I'll talk more about that in the next section. But finally here, I'll just note that I may or may not have time to come back to this at the end, but I think that there are also material connections between genocide and language oppression, by which I mean that the two are often connected to each other and occur together in the real world. And let's see if I have time to talk about that more. But for now, let's go on to talk about what I'm going to call the new genocide studies. So the label new genocide studies is my own. Different authors call this scholarship different things. So for example, Benjamin Mikes refers to this scholarship on this concept as a social genocide approach. Whereas Dirk Moses refers to a post-liberal approach to genocide. I'm going to be casting a wide net here in bringing together diverse scholarship and schools under the label new genocide studies. But I think that the following list of attributes justifies bringing this work together as a body. So what brings this literature together? The first feature is that these studies of genocide attempt to move beyond the focus on the Holocaust as the paradigm of genocide. And in doing so, also aim to refute the idea that genocide is reducible to mass murder. An important aspect of such studies is a retelling of the history of the drafting of the genocide convention. And the role that the Holocaust paradigm played in helping various actors reduce Raphael Lemkin's rich complex concept of an integrated plan of group destruction to a focus on mass killing. Importantly, new genocide studies scholars have examined how a focus on the Holocaust and an emphasis on mass killing renders other forms of genocide invisible. So for example, David Stannard, author of the book, American Holocaust has claimed that the idea of Holocaust uniqueness functions as a form of genocide denialism, denying the ontological status of genocide to other atrocities. So the second feature here is the goal of interrogating and revealing the links between genocide and colonialism. We see this not only in David Stannard's work that I've just mentioned, but also in a book by Ward Churchill called A Little Matter of Genocide and a recent book by Damien Short called redefining genocide amongst others. Instead of thinking about the Holocaust and mass killing as paradigms of genocide, from this perspective, we're encouraged to look at how differing techniques of eliminating human collectives have been associated with different sites, types and moments of colonialism. For example, in the classical settler colonial context of Australia, Canada, the US and so on, as well as in the exploitation colonies throughout Africa and Asia. So in these efforts to move beyond the Holocaust paradigm, to shift away from a focus on mass killing and to center the relationship between genocide and colonialism, new genocide studies has involved efforts to completely rethink the concept of genocide itself. This has included efforts to redefine what it is that lies at the heart of genocide, such as work by Claudia Card to redefine genocide in relation to the concept of social death. This scholarship has led to new explorations of who can be victims of genocide, beyond the genocide convention's narrow focus on national, ethnic, racial or religious groups to ask for example, whether political groups or specific genders can be targeted. Originally in the UN convention drafts, linguistic groups were included as potential and legitimate targets of genocide, but then no longer considered as such. Anyway, there is also an exploration of the different mechanisms used to pursue genocide other than killing. Seen for example, in Helen Fine's concept of a genocide by attrition and related concepts, increasingly expressed with reference to Rob Nixon's idea of slow violence and Lauren Ballant's work on slow death. And we also see scholars looking at different ways that genocide causes harm. For example, this is evident in recent work by Benjamin Meichs on genocide and the brain. Finally, we see explorations of how the perpetrators of genocide are identified, attempting to move beyond a narrow focus on evil individuals such as, which is an approach advocated in Alexander Laban Hinton's recent book, It Could Happen Here, White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US. Instead, efforts are typically made to identify, to provide structural explanations for genocide. And these approaches include historian Tony Barton's concept of relations of genocide and the genocidal society. Mark Levine's assertion that genocide is inherent to the modern nation state and the contemporary world system or Leo Cooper's assertion that the United Nations and the genocide convention itself imply a right of all states to commit genocide. So that's very briefly the new genocide studies. So I think very broadly that this new genocide studies literature raises a host of important and challenging questions that we should be thinking about in relation to how we understand language oppression. However, right now I just want to focus on one very small moment in this vast literature from a fantastic book by Benjamin Meichs called The Politics of Annihilation. Here he talks about how the Holocaust paradigm imposes particular aesthetic expectations on how we think about, perceive and even act against genocide. He suggests that the fact that the Holocaust takes up so much of our shared mental imagery and public representations of genocide has actually made it difficult for us to perceive other genocides on primarily aesthetic grounds. I think we see something similar going on with language in regards to language oppression and aesthetics and those tweets that I started out with. There seems to be an unacknowledged aesthetic profile that we think language oppression should conform to. And when cases of actually existing language oppression fail to live up to that template, we fail to perceive it as language oppression. So what is the aesthetic template of language oppression? What is the paradigm that forms the reference point that people go to when deciding if something is or is not language oppression? Well, I don't think that there is a single case that dominates the horizon of our thinking in the same way as the Holocaust has come to define genocide. However, I do think that there are certain aesthetic features that I think people expect language oppression to have and certain visual templates that they're expected to follow. I think the aesthetic expectations lead people to think it should look something like these images. So here on the left is a person wearing the Welsh knot, which as I'm sure you would know, was a device used to punish people for speaking Welsh in school and to enforce an English-only environment and which was part of a broader program to oppress and eliminate Welsh. We see in the top right here, a picture of an African slave muzzled in a cruel and shocking manner. This image was used to accompany a recent article on the topic of necro-linguistics by Professor John Muganey from Harvard to represent the figurative muzzling that accompanies language oppression. And although this kind of muzzling did indeed happen, it played no actual role in language oppression. This image is therefore a potent aesthetic model of language oppression without having any actual connection to practices of language oppression. In the final image there in the bottom right, of course, we see a Nazi book burning. And I think that this is also aesthetically how language oppression often appears in our collective representations. That is, it appears as explicit, violent, hateful, destruction. So what all these images have in common is an assumption that language oppression should be visually striking. It should be spectacular, violent and unambiguous. Pauline Wakeham in her article called the slow violence of settler colonialism, genocide, attrition and the long emergency of invasion gives us a striking metaphor that captures these sort of aesthetic expectations. To borrow her words, I think we want language oppression presented visually in such a way that it comes to us as a smoking gun on a silver platter. If this is what people are looking for aesthetically when they look for language oppression, what does language oppression actually look like? This brings us back to the question in the title of my talk, which I'll now attempt to answer. What does language oppression in China look like? So to begin with, language oppression is sometimes, often invisible. It doesn't look like anything. There's nothing aesthetically at all to appreciate. This is particularly true in relation to what I described earlier as the erasure of languages in China. Languages that are erased like the Manikacha language aren't visible anywhere. Although speakers have developed a writing system for this language, you will not see it on signs or printed in books or on the internet or on Chinese banknotes and so on because the state actively opposes its presence in public. And this is the case for not just all of Tibet's minoritized languages, but actually in fact, for the vast majority of languages in China. Not only will you not see these erased languages, but you will also most certainly not hear them anywhere. You won't hear them on TV. You won't hear them on the radio. You won't hear them spoken and taught in schools or overhear them in government offices. This is because their erasure also excludes them from all of these contexts. So aesthetically, these languages, these erased languages, present as invisibility and silence. And that is what language oppression in China looks like for the most part. However, at the same time, language oppression in China is also sometimes messy. I don't know if this is the right word here, but by that, what I mean is that language oppression is shot through visually, aesthetically, with contradictions that make it difficult to form a clear definitive picture of what is going on. So for example, in the case of written Tibetan, there are indeed Tibetan street signs. There is a Tibetan internet. There are Tibetan bank telling machines. There is a Tibetan publishing industry and there is Tibetan indeed on the national currency. There are Tibetan TV stations and DVDs and radio stations. You can even hear the language being used and taught in schools. None of this tells us that intergenerational transmission of the language is secure. None of this tells us that the language is not oppressed. That's what I mean by messiness. A language can still be visible and oppressed at the same time. And indeed in the case of Tibetan, that's exactly what is happening. So just to give, I guess, a visual representation of those two different categories and how they interact, you can see this picture here of this neon-lit Tibetan building here. This is a museum which is built in the town of Rungo, Rangong. And on the museum, you can see the Tibetan script at the top in bright neon lights, the Chinese script underneath it, larger, more visible, the lights on the Tibetan script you can see in the middle there have broken. No one cares, doesn't matter. There's an obvious iniquity in the way that those two languages are presented, which is indicative of the oppression that Tibetan faces. There's messiness there though in that the language is visible but oppressed at the same time. What we can't see, what you don't see in this picture is the Manikacha language. This building, this museum, the square in front of it, the place where the children are playing is built on land that was compulsorily acquired by the local state from a village where Manikacha is spoken. That sovereignty, if you like, has been obliterated, visually erased and the language has also been visually excluded along with it. And that's the way in which Eurasia manifests as invisibility. Finally, language oppression then sometimes looks invisible and sometimes messy but it always, always looks slow and unspectacular. It is diffuse in time and space and intensity. It takes place across the span of generations. It is rarely, if ever visible, in acute, intense, spectacular, violent incidents though these do erupt sometimes as with street protests or the self-immolations in Tibet. More often, however, language oppression looks like everyday life. It is utterly mundane and unspectacular. And because of this, language oppression is notoriously difficult to see. It is difficult to see for the people who study it and also for the people who experience it. In its invisibility, it's messiness and slowness, language oppression in China and in fact, language oppression everywhere in the world today rarely, if ever presents itself aesthetically in the terms we expect it to. We never get our smoking gun served up on a silver platter. So language oppression is difficult to see. It's hard to perceive and requires intense analytical work to render it perceivable and visible. Why is that analytical work important? And the reason why I think it's important is because of this link between language oppression and death essentially. So just very quickly, I'll run through a short list of the ways in which language oppression and death is linked. The point that I'm making is that we need to give attention to the aesthetics of language oppression and its invisibility, not because it helps us win arguments on Twitter, but because ultimately it's a matter of life and death. Avoiding language oppression, resisting language oppression, helps avoid state-sponsored killing to some level. So intense language oppression is sometimes a prelude to killing. We see this in a number of cases where a language is banned and then the people are killed soon afterwards. The two are often entwined, but there are more diffuse ways in which language and killing are involved with one another. So we know increasingly we see this in the literature that language maintenance is linked to health and well-being. A range of measures of physical, emotional and mental health are improved by language maintenance. And by extension, this suggests that language oppression is also bad for people's health. It makes their lives poorer and shorter. We also have research from translation studies and multilingualism and communication studies that shows that oppressed languages, which are typically excluded from major social institutions and planning initiatives and so on, they're typically excluded from critical services like health and disaster response. And this leads to increased race of sickness and death amongst people who use those languages. So taken together those three factors, they produce what I refer to as a necropolitics of language oppression, which links language oppression, physical death and the destruction of human groups. And that's why we need to do the analytical work to make language oppression perceivable. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much for this talk. There is already one question that I will slightly paraphrase. So you mentioned this Mark Levine who tied genocide or language oppression to the nation state as a social political form. Let's say conceptually speaking, we tend to distinguish, or I don't know, people's intuition is to distinguish like blue water, settler or colonialism from, I don't know, from what China is doing in Tibet, which might be more like, you know, Germany's relationship to the Swarps or England's relationship to the Cornish or France's relation to the Bretons. Should we call those kinds of relationships colonial or genocidal? What are the conceptual categories that are adequate to different instances of language oppression? Yeah, like this analytical separation between nation state building and colonialism, I enjoy observing the messiness between those two things. Like many of you would be familiar with this book, Peasants Into Frenchman, by Eugene Weber, which is a classical work on nation building from the perspective of modernization theory where he, you know, all of these French peasants didn't speak French and then they had to because of modernization, the rails, the roads, the labor markets and so on. And there's this fantastic moment towards the end of the book where he's writing and France for non has just published the wretched of the earth and he's saying, you know, this looks a lot like colonialism and people in France, these policymakers at the time, they would refer to these Breton peasants as savages and they would explicitly compare colonialism and nation building. And maybe we should do this because maybe France is just a big colony united by a single block of land. And then he decides not to do that. He just sort of steps away from it and says, like, well, actually, I think Fanon's overblowing it a bit. And whereas I think that like that analysis is correct that that nation, that state building, that nation, state building through nation building is colonialism, right? So those things are a spectrum of each other. You mentioned blue water colonialism. And this is, you know, like this idea of the salt water theory is just a fiction which enabled certain countries to retain colonial possessions that they wanted to keep a hold of, right? So if you look at the debate through the United Nations, the Belgians realized that they were going to lose their territories. And so they proposed this idea that, well, decolonization will mean also breaking up the states that colonialism created, right? Because if you're talking about the self-determination of peoples, those colonial nations were just random lines drawn around peoples. And so they needed to be liberated from them. The Belgians were very magnanimous in suddenly deciding that they loved freedom after murdering 10 million people in Central Africa. And so that led to this principle of that, well, then it's only colonialism if it goes in a boat. And that was promoted by countries like America and Australia in the United Nations because they did not want to be dismantled by the United Nations, right? Which is exactly the same reason why they opposed the inclusion of language and other aspects of cultural assimilation in the genocide conventions, right? On the one hand, there's that analytical connection between nation-state building and colonialism, which we need to not think about them separately in some ways, but at the same time, I do also think it is really important to look at the different forms of colonialism in the way that they operate. So for example, settler colonialism is absolutely and importantly a distinct form of colonialism that we have to think about differently from exploitation colonialism in India, for example. And you see the importance of this analytical distinction when people talk about China as a colonial state, right? China is a colonial state, but we can't just simply describe it as settler colonial, which is what people are increasingly doing. We see this in reference to Xinjiang, which is correct. We see this increasingly with reference to Tibet, which is not so correct. So on the one hand, I think that we need to say that nation-states and empires are the same thing, but at the same time, I think we need to separate them out. So then a very concrete question, which is when we talk about people switching to Chinese, there are lots of different kinds of Chinese. What does that mean, switching to Chinese? Yeah, so it's different in different contexts. So for example, in Sichuan, Western Sichuan, people would be primarily switching to some kind of Sichuan Chinese. In Qinghai, they would have in the past been switching to Qinghai, Qinghaihua. Increasingly, I think what you're seeing is that you're getting teachers coming through that have Putonghua as their strongest language. And so I think that you will start seeing a shift to Putonghua instead of those regional Chinese languages. And part of that, part of the reason for that is that those languages are also themselves being replaced by Putonghua, right? So there's work on the loss of synidic languages shifting towards gradually a complete eradication of languages like Qinghaihua, which is absolutely a unique language of that area due to prolonged contact with Tibetan, Mongolian and Mongolian. I wanted to ask about the understanding of, I was interested in that survey you conducted with speakers of these kind of unrecognized languages and their expectation that they're disappearing. And I realized you couldn't phrase your question in terms of oppression, but do you have a sense of their understanding of the reasons for that? Do they see that their language is being oppressed and that this is a deliberate policy or is there a, I believe that this is an inevitable accompaniment of your globalization, modernization, progress, whatever that could be taken to mean? Rather than talking about the surveys, I can talk a little bit about interviews I did with Manikacha speakers, but also like a host of informal conversations that I've had with people over many years around these topics and what you see in people's sort of interpretive models around why this is happening. So on the one hand, you see this idea of what like, what I call false protagonists, where it's like the something is eating the language, right? The globalization, the modernization and these kind of recourses to these sorts of arguments are just extremely common, right? The language is disappearing because the city is getting bigger. The language is disappearing because the economy is developing. The language is disappearing because the nation is becoming rich, right? This kind of inevitableism driven by false protagonists. But then at the same time, especially this came out when I was doing interviews with Manikacha speakers, you have this recourse to just complete social Darwinism, which expresses a form of politics in a way that is politically safe in China, which is that this is just the nature of things. The weak are defeated and destroyed by the strong, right? So Manikacha speakers would say, would like express this idea that, you know, the Chinese oppress the Tibetans. The Tibetans oppress us. That's how it is. What are you gonna do, right? And the same people would express the same ideas. So this like, like crystallization of language real politics with this complete deferral of agency and responsibility and inevitableization, just at the same time constantly. So there's a question kind of along similar lines that again, I'll sort of paraphrase in my own way, which is, it's unlikely that the political circumstances are concretely imaginable in which Manikacha would be a language that international diplomacy and scientific research and, you know, that sort of thing would happen in, maybe something better than what is happening on the ground. I mean, let's just say bracket what I mean by better, but is possible, but only within certain kind of material constraints. And that's people's intuition when they talk about the inevitability of progress, right? Yeah, yeah. So like in response to that, I would say that, like, you know, I perhaps gave this sense in the talk and you certainly get the sense from reading literature on language endangerment and language oppression, that languages are these inherently fragile things that will just go away in a whiff of smoke. But we actually have really good evidence from places like where I am that there is this remarkable robustness in languages where they live on in different forms that people don't expect. People have childhood these complex decay paths of languages, right? Like what used to be called language obsolescence, the way that it's kind of like whose paradox is it? Zeno's paradox? It never ends. You always have to destroy 50%. The language half-life means that it never gets destroyed. So that's true and that's important to acknowledge. But like the broader point is that what you're saying is that, okay, without substantial changes in the material conditions, something is going to happen and something bad is going to happen. And that is true, right? Without substantial change in the material conditions of people who speak these languages, the political material conditions, these languages, like that half-life process is going to happen and that half-life process is violent and destructive and it is going to happen unless something changes, right? But change does happen and we forget that that. We forget that that is true, right? The history of everything is the history of unprecedented things. The only way that those unprecedented changes are going to happen is by saying that they have to happen, right? They don't just spring out of a box somehow. Yeah, and I feel just compelled to mention, that was the story of Czech, right? Actually like very famously Marx dismissed Czech as on its way out and concerted political coordination on the part of Czech speakers. Yeah, and Joshua Fishman writes about this in relation to Yiddish as well, right? You know, I'm paraphrasing, but he says, never has a language had so many funerals as Yiddish. Like I think a very good word here is the word abandonment rather than neglect. An abandonment sort of ties what's going on into a whole bunch of political processes, right? So the idea of abandonment is to sort of cast out, to throw aside, et cetera, right? But abandonment is also linked to the idea of banishment as a political punishment to send someone beyond the community. And how it happens is by the state abandoning a language to what seems like natural processes that are caused by the state, right? Globalization, modernization, development, infrastructural expansion, electrification, et cetera, right? Commodification, urbanization, none of these things are spontaneous processes. They are all forces that are unleashed by the state. So the state unleashes all of these forces on the population at the same time. It withdraws or refuses to grant the resources that the community needs to weather that violence intact. And that has a corrosive force on those communities. And the state knows it, the state knows it because it deliberately provides those resources to other communities to enable them to survive the exact same problems, right? So we know that the state understands that this is a destructive process without sufficient protective measures. So it is, so there's this debate in genocide studies. So genocide studies addresses all of these issues. This is what I mean by the new genocide studies is that it looks at these kinds of processes where killing, where the destruction of human groups is via abandonment rather than direct violence and that distinction is important. And there's this distinction between also the ideas of culpability and intention, right? So intention is I'm mean to kill you. Culpability is that I'm responsible for your death because I have failed to protect you. And this comes particularly from the work of Claudia Card and her idea of social death. And so she says that genocide is mostly a matter of culpability rather than intention. This is exactly, this is absolutely the same with language oppression as well. It's something that the state lets happen knowing what the consequences will be.