Language Log

China to restrict Tibetan language in region’s college entrance exam
Exclusion of core subject exam stokes fears Beijing is furthering campaign to ‘Sinicise’ region
John Reed, Financial Times (8/6/25)

Cantonese, Uyghur, Mongolian — they're all threatened.  And you can be sure that if China invades and occupies Taiwan, Taiwanese (and all of the aboriginal languages of the island) will be under duress.  What is being done to Cantonese, Uyghur, and Mongolian is the way the CCP deals with the majority languages of its various cultural regions, which together constitute approximately half of China's total land area.  Tibet alone occupies roughly 13% of the total land area of the PRC (Xinjiang is 1/6th [16.6% of the whole of China].  Since seven of Asia's major rivers (the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, and Indus) originate in Bod, and "The Roof of the World" possesses many other valuable natural and strategic resources, what happens to the native tongue of its inhabitants is no mean matter.

"China changed village names 'to erase Uyghur culture'", Anna Lamche, BBC (6/20/24)

I thought about this phenomenon again today, a year after that BBC article was published, because this morning Robert Thurman, the Columbia Tibetologist, told me about his concept of "ethnicide".  This, forced name changes, is one way to do it.

China has changed the names of hundreds of villages in Xinjiang region in a move aimed at erasing Uyghur Muslim culture, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says.

According to a report by the group, hundreds of villages in Xinjiang with names related to the religion, history or culture of Uyghurs were replaced between 2009 and 2023.

Words such as "sultan" and "shrine" are disappearing from place names – to be replaced with terms such as "harmony" and "happiness", according to the research, which is based on China's own published data.

AntC reports:

Earlier this month, I travelled the length of Taiwan's East Coast by train. Every station is decked out with Indigenous art, with the location's name given in both Mandarin and the applicable Indigenous language (Roman script).