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Who should care about a refugee’s language? Recent world migration reports note that, by the end of 2022, the total number of refugees was the highest ever recorded with modern statistical techniques. In a global setting of increasing forced migration, languages are moving along with their speakers, in ways that intersect with humanitarianism as well as family- and community-based efforts for care. States like Canada show care for refugees by providing training in official standard languages, in order to enhance social belonging in the host society. However, a focus on belonging through an official standard language can contribute to language shift, or the abandonment of diverse mother tongues in favour of more dominant languages. A host society’s focus on integration through linguistic assimilation makes refugee communities directly responsible for ensuring the vitality of their mother tongues. 

In May 2024, questions about who should care for refugees’ languages, and about what constituted a language worthy of care, emerged at a community-based workshop, “Social, Emotional, and Ethical Learning (SEE Learning) for Multilingual Children,” in Vancouver, British Columbia. As requested by the local Tibetan community, a linguistic anthropologist (Ward) and graduate student (Moli) adapted the Buddhist-inspired framework of SEE Learning to facilitate reflections on best practices in Tibetan heritage language education. SEE Learning is a K-12 curriculum developed through a collaboration between Emory University and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. It represents a key example of how Tibetan refugees have established institutionalized, international education that preserves, advances, and shares Buddhist culture and philosophy. However, among community members, the relevance of linguistic diversity to the continuity of Tibetan Buddhist culture is a topic of considerable debate. 

The Tibetan community in Vancouver includes approximately 700 people, more than 200 of whom migrated from four settlements in Arunachal Pradesh, India, to Canada through a federal refugee resettlement program between 2013 and 2017. These refugees entered Canada with complex linguistic repertoires. Individuals spoke standard languages including central Tibetan, English, Hindi, and Nepali, with additional knowledge of smaller Himalayan languages such as Kongpo, Pemakopa (Tshangla) and Tawang Monpa. Within Tibetan families, these language repertoires are woven into intergenerational forms of care. Nearly every person who remains in the settlements in Arunachal Pradesh has family members living outside of India. These Tibetan transnational families continuously enact their kinship bonds through video calls, social media chats, and email communications in multiple languages. Children born in Canada enter into these family relationships, conversing with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents a world away. Knowledge of Himalayan languages other than central Tibetan is particularly important in communicating with grandparents and other elders. Given the adoption of standard central Tibetan, as well as English, in the Tibetan-Canadian community, some children rely on their parents to translate their conversations with older generations.

Credit: Shannon Ward
a child holds a smart phone to face towards an infant
A child and an infant are sitting next to each other on the ground. The child reaches out with one hand to touch the infant’s face. With the other hand, she holds up a smart phone to face towards the infant. The image of an elderly woman is visible on the smart phone.

The translocal nature of Tibetan diasporic kinship bonds has a history that extends beyond current transnational migrations. Beginning in the 1960s, with extensive foreign aid, the Tibetan exile government in India built an infrastructure of Tibetan medium schools specifically for Tibetan refugee children. Given the remote location of many Tibetan refugee settlements, most children attend as boarding students, some leaving their families as young as three years old. It was in these schools in India that Tibetan was explicitly constructed as a heritage language, and that responsibility for children’s language acquisition moved outside of the immediate family. In 1995, following extensive language planning, schools created a curriculum in central Tibetan, a variety based on the dialect spoken in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. The central goal of the Tibetan exile government’s schools is to instruct children in Tibetan language, history, and Buddhist culture, given that, within Tibet, the Chinese government limits access to traditional Tibetan monastic educationand criminalizes advocacy for secular Tibetan medium education. As vehicles for cultural survival and the articulation of sovereignty, these institutions enact care for the Tibetan language through formal instruction in standard central Tibetan.

Changes to migration patterns are, however, reshaping the landscape of Tibetan heritage language education. With out-migration from Tibet largely stalled and Tibetans in South Asia seeking to migrate to countries like Canada where they can gain citizenship, enrollments in Tibetan boarding schools in India are dropping. The rapid expansion of the Tibetan diaspora in North America has moved responsibility for formal heritage language education from the exile government’s schools to families and local community groups.

In 2017, Tibetan parents in Vancouver decided to organize efforts to care for their heritage language. What began as weekly meetings in a local park developed into the Lodoe Kunphel Tibetan Language School, with classes in Tibetan reading, writing, singing, and dancing offered on Saturdays. By the spring of 2024, however, the Lodoe Kunphel School faced a problem. Preschool-aged children were starting to speak more English, and less Tibetan, after attending the Saturday classes. Young children were forming friendships with their classmates, and they simply preferred to speak in English.

In the context of this dilemma, we organized SEE Learning for Multilingual Children to collaboratively think about how to actively engage pre-literate children in their heritage language education. Ward discussed key anthropological findings regarding the effectiveness of translanguaging, or the intuitive mixing of multiple languages, in teaching and learning. While experts agree that translanguaging supports children’s uses of a target language, community members often worry that mixing languages hinders children’s language development. To support recognition of translanguaging, Ward and Moli discussed their own language backgrounds and modeled language mixing. Moli also took careful notes on participants’ contributions, which were later developed into a manual that blended community perspectives with recent research on translanguaging pedagogy.

Credit: Mhamoda Akter Moli
a woman stands and speaks in front of an audience
A woman in a green jacket stands in front of an audience, made up of four rows of seated adults and children.

During the workshop, community members shared their personal experiences of adapting to a new linguistic environment in Canada, and demonstrated a keen interest in the topic of translanguaging. One parent mentioned, 

“The emphasis on allowing children the freedom to mix languages and express their individual agency was a key takeaway. It’s important to create a flexible learning environment where children feel comfortable using both Tibetan and English, which can enhance their overall linguistic abilities and personal growth.”

For the researchers, adults’ interest in incorporating elements of the SEE Learning framework, including Awareness, Compassion, and Engagement, into heritage language education provided insight into the everyday significance of Buddhist philosophy. Parents’ discussions of relationship building and language acquisition highlighted these elements of SEE Learning. As one parent explained,

“One of the most insightful aspects of the workshop was understanding how crucial relationships are in language acquisition. From family to peers, the social dynamics play a significant role in how children learn and maintain their heritage language.”

In addition to communicating anthropological research to a relevant public, the workshop thus presented a forum for the community and researchers to collaboratively think together. A significant discussion centered on the need for shared efforts among parents, teachers, and community leaders to create nurturing learning environments, and to incorporate cultural activities into language learning. However, this discussion also brought to light questions about the division of responsibility in caring for the heritage language. Teachers emphasized that, in only several hours on Saturdays, many could only focus on reading and writing. Speaking, then, should be the responsibility of parents. While some parents agreed with this assessment, they are juggling transnational care responsibilities with extremely limited resources. Tibetan-Canadians often find paid employment in essential care occupations, especially elder care. These occupations involve shift work, where parents seize the opportunity to work longer hours so that they can not only support their children in Canada, but also send remittances to their family members in Arunachal Pradesh. As a result of their working lives, some parents only see their children for several hours per day. Community members identified parental financial pressures as one cause of language shift among children, explaining that many children lacked opportunities to speak Tibetan with their parents given long working hours. In this local understanding of language shift, care for children is centrally involved in care for the Tibetan language. 

Based on the workshop discussions, we found that it is in these forms of family-based care that children use Himalayan mother tongues other than central Tibetan. Configurations of care directed at kin relationships, and not at language itself, seemed to sustain internal linguistic diversity because planning for heritage language education has sought to develop a single standard language. In fact, amid the continued transnational migrations of Tibetan refugees throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the possibility of the repatriation of Tibet has motivated official goals for heritage language education. As a Tibetan-Canadian young adult said of the children in her community, 

“It’s very important for them to study everything they can…[because] I know we’ll definitely go back [to Tibet] one day. We are hoping for that still.”

With insights from SEE Learning, the Tibetan community in Vancouver is rethinking existing curricula, and considering the value of linguistic diversity to heritage language education at home as well as in their community-based school. Ultimately, their children will bear responsibility for the future of Tibetan language vitality in diaspora.

Sarah Muir and Michael Wroblewski are the section contributing editors for the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.

Authors

Shannon Ward

Shannon Ward is a linguistic anthropologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Her research examines language socialization, multilingualism, and migration among Tibetan communities. She is the author of Amdo Lullaby: an Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau (University of Toronto Press, 2024).

Mhamoda Akter Moli

Mhamoda Akter Moli is a graduate student in Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of British Columbia. Originally from Bangladesh, she brings an extensive research background from working in global non-profits. She is currently composing a thesis on the international operations of a Bangladeshi NGO.

Cite as

Ward, Shannon and Mhamoda Akter Moli. 2024. “Caring for and through Language: Tibetan Refugees and Heritage Language Education in Canada.” Anthropology News website, October 7, 2024.