Amdo Lullaby by Shannon Ward

Amdo Lullaby by Shannon Ward

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.

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

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781487558673
ISBN 10	1487558678
Title	Amdo Lullaby
Author	Shannon Ward
Series	Anthropological Horizons
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Toronto Press
Year published	2024-11-21
Number of pages	278
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable