In my quest to collect reliable sources to combat common lies leveled against China and the UdSSR I require some help regarding Tibetan Language use.
I have read multiple times that ~90% of Tibetans are able to speak Tibetan alongside Chinese. I have also found reports of Tibetan and other Chinese politicians confirming numbers between 90 and 99.99% depending on the reported age bracket.
But I couldn’t find any scholarly work regarding this issue.
Most sources you can find online will either claim that China is banning Tibetan language use outright or is eradicating the language by not teaching it. These claims are either present directly through RFA/Tibetwatch or source RFA/Tibetwatch. Which means it’s 100% bullshit.
It would still be nice if someone knows any academic books or reports on the issue. I have found that providing “trustworthy” sources works better than going on and on about CIA fronts and the NED especially when talking with someone who still needs to shed a lot of western propaganda.
Edit: wording for clarification
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I’d be sort of concerned to see that high of a take rate.
Tibetian is not really a language with solid trade prospects; if you want to be more than a sustenance worker who never leaves Tibet, you’d better learn something else. Anyone with broader ambitions, and well-intended parents are likely to see the writing on the wall and seek out bilingual education or drop the language entirely.
It’s sort of like Native American languages- important as a cultural artifact more than a viable language. At best you’ll get a token “Let’s dub Star Wars in Navajo” gesture. But nobody would be surprised to see 95% of people on the reservation speaking English.
There’s also a bit of fetishism there; the role of Tibet in the West is to present a “pure, isolated, historic Buddhist culture” which lines up with the fantasies they cobbled together from martial-arts movies and ATLA. They want it as a novelty, and damn the social or economic consequences of trapping people in the past forever.
I should have worded it differently my bad. 90 to 99.99% of Tibetans speaking Tibetan doesn’t mean it’s THE ONLY language they can speak. They are still thought Chinese and English alongside it.