Dr. Gerald Roche
Washington DC: Anthropologist and linguist Dr. Gerald Roche (Co-Chair, Global Coalition for Language Rights) highlighted the language rights situation for people in China and the need to defend language rights as he testified before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China here on April 5, 2022.
Urging the United States to earmark funding for Tibet’s unrecognized language using funds allocated under the Tibet Policy Act of 2020, he pointed out that Tibetan people in China use about 30 unrecognized languages, not including Tibetan. People who use these unrecognized languages face linguistic barriers everywhere: in schools, media, government, healthcare, the legal system and so on. He explained how suppression takes place through the encroachment of the national language, Mandarin, into spaces for minority languages as part of a broader plan to universalize Mandarin among the entire population.
To read the complete testimony, click here.
(Information Supplied by CECC Website)
By Team TRC