![]() ![]() The Burmese language and its varieties in Burma and beyondĬompared with the other national languages of Southeast Asia, Burmese varies little regionally. On the other hand, as Kojima (in this Focus) discusses the Palaung, who speak widely divergent varieties (perhaps even languages), nevertheless consider themselves to form one community. For example, at the level of every day speech, Hindi and Urdu are the same language sharing a common origin, yet politics have divided them into separate languages. Political and historical processes have created ethnic communities, not language alone. It can provide insights into how languages and their varieties are connected, how long ago they separated, and how languages function in society. Linguistic scholarship, however, validate or falsify claims of ethnic unity or separation. In the pre-colonial period, not everyone who spoke the same language considered themselves to be part of the same community or to have the same identity.įollowing the logic of ethnicity, language is central to identifying and recognizing difference. Identifications can vary depending on the context. Family and kinship connections, networks of patronage and loyalty, religious and cultural practices have all shaped how people understood themselves and wider communities. Over time, ethnicity has encroached on the earlier practices of identification from the pre-colonial Burmese empires, but which compete with ethnicity. In Burma, practices and ideologies of race began evolving during the colonial period (1824-1948). The practices of organizing and understanding difference through ethnicity-solid, singular, non-porous, identities, which are projected into the past-is a recent development stemming from European romantic nationalism. ![]() I argue that difference among human populations has always existed, and people have always been aware of it. Others choose to downplay the role of ethnicity, treating it as a sort of political neurosis, a mania for a particular way of organizing the world, of the English-speaking world. Some take such arguments as a claim that the British somehow created difference. Scholars also disagree about ‘ethnicity’ many resist a historicization of ethnicity, that is, a discussion of how ethnicity as a way of understanding and categorizing difference has arisen in a particular context. These identities have been both a cause and consequence of long-standing conflict. Two profound consequences of this first racial (later ethnic) thinking have been that groups of people in Burma have defined and redefined themselves into ethnic identities, where language plays a key, if equivocal role. Outside of Burma, this earlier concept of race has gradually evolved into the concept of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘ethnic groups’. The British created a new technology of governance that would allow them to create subjects and, for example, recruit suitable people into the army: they equated language with ‘race’ to form racial categories. The categories of caste and religion, which they had used in India, were not useful for categorizing the people. When the British arrived in the country in 1824, they tried to make sense of the diversity they found. In Burma, ethnicity is central to social organization, culture and politics. The idea of hierarchy is also useful for understanding how entire languages and their societies stand in relation to each other. Much scholarship has focused on the hierarchical interpersonal relations that are prominent features of lowland, court-based Southeast Asian societies. Looking at the larger overall picture, in whatever way Burmese dialect speakers think of themselves, their communities occupy a position near the top of local sociolinguistic hierarchies. Such identifications come out of complex, incompletely understood historical and political contingencies. Speakers of Rakhaing, which varies comparatively less from Standard Burmese than Tavoyan does, have a separate sense of identity, while many speakers of Tavoyan generally consider themselves to be ‘Burman’. I explore this intersection between language, identity, and the equation between language and ethnicity by looking at three examples of variation within the Burmese language itself: among the Rakhaing/Marma, Tavoyan and Intha dialects. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |