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Social Science Cultural

Amdo Lullaby

An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau

by (author) Shannon Ward

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2024
Category
Cultural, Preschool & Kindergarten, Sociolinguistics
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487558697
    Publish Date
    Oct 2024
    List Price
    $26.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781487558666
    Publish Date
    Nov 2024
    List Price
    $120.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781487558673
    Publish Date
    Nov 2024
    List Price
    $26.95

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Description

In Amdo, a region of eastern Tibet incorporated into mainland China, young children are being raised in a time of social change. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, Chinese state development policies are catalysing rural to urban migration, consolidating schooling in urban centres, and leading Tibetan farmers and nomads to give up their traditional livelihoods. As a result, children face increasing pressure to adopt the state’s official language of Mandarin.

 

Amdo Lullaby charts the contrasting language socialization trajectories of rural and urban children from one extended family, who are native speakers of a Tibetan language known locally as “Farmer Talk.” By integrating a fine-grained analysis of everyday conversations and oral history interviews, linguistic anthropologist Shannon M. Ward examines the forms of migration and resulting language contact that contribute to Farmer Talk’s unique grammatical structures, and that shape Amdo Tibetan children’s language choices. This analysis reveals that young children are not passively abandoning their mother tongue for standard Mandarin, but instead are reformatting traditional Amdo Tibetan cultural associations among language, place, and kinship as they build their peer relationships in everyday play.

About the author

Shannon M. Ward is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan.

Shannon Ward's profile page