Tibetan Language at Home in the Diaspora: The Mother Tongue–Based Bilingual Schooling of Tibetans in India

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis conceptual paper reports the rare and unprecedented mother tongue based schooling of Tibetan children in exile in India as a success story that can serve as a model for displaced and indigenous peoples. A brief historical development of Tibetan language is offered to highlight the circuitous journey of Tibetan language from the indigenous to the Diaspora setting. India’s long-standing pluralistic three-language formula (TLF) is, then, described to provide the context for the mother tongue schooling of Tibetan children in the Diaspora. Finally, the unique case of mother tongue based bilingual education of Tibetan children in the Diaspora illustrates the language-as-rights policy capacity to allow an autochthonous language of Tibet to blossom on multilingual Indian soil. Creative suggestions for moving forward with active status, corpus, and pedagogy planning ensure the sustained continuity of Tibetan language in its ancestral land, irrespective of what the future may hold for the Tibetan Diaspora.