ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how language can be erased and destroyed in the process of music-mediated identity formation, and how contemporary Tibetan music asserts what the author calls an ‘alphabetical order’ – a discourse that conflates place, language, and identity by valorizing the Tibetan language as the soul of Tibet and the Tibetan people. It argues that by celebrating a monolingual identity, songs stigmatize and marginalize linguistic minorities without expressing aggressive or discriminatory attitudes towards them. Tibetans who spoke the Gochang language sang almost their entire repertoire in Tibetan, except when reciting epics (which had spoken sections in Gochang, and sung segments in Tibetan). The worldview expressed in contemporary Tibetan songs, the alphabetical order that links land and people through a single language, is clearly a problematic ideology in a multilingual region; it is, at least in theory, inimical to linguistic diversity.
