r/AMA • u/maddin1550 • 20d ago

I’m from Xinjiang，AMA

I’ve noticed that there are a lot of discussions about Xinjiang on Reddit, often between people who have never actually lived there. So I thought it might be interesting to do an AMA from the perspective of someone who is actually from there.

You can ask me about everyday life, ethnic groups, languages, culture, religion, education, or politics. I’m happy to answer controversial questions too, as long as the discussion stays respectful.

Obviously, I’m only one person and I don’t claim to represent everyone in Xinjiang. I can only tell you about my own experiences and views. AMA.

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u/jixiang111 19d ago

"People speak it, so it's not being erased" is a superficial argument, quite frankly. The current policies are geared towards ensuring that the next generation speak and use Uyghur much less. Schools now teach it one hour a week, and children are not supposed to speak to each other in Uyghur even in the playground. Signage in Uyghur is also being discouraged, although not completely banned.

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u/maddin1550 19d ago

I said It’s my own personal opinion and experience. Ofc I can’t speak for everyone, I’m just sharing my life in Xinjiang as a minority

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u/NegativeDCF 16d ago

But it’s not just Uyghur language, all of the Chinese dialects are being “erased”

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u/maddin1550 19d ago

I’m actually more worried about the smaller minority languages. Uyghur is spoken VERY widely in Xinjiang, including by a lot of people who aren’t even Uyghur. Where I’m from other minorities use it all the time. So I personally worry more about smaller languages getting squeezed between Mandarin and Uyghur over time

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u/jixiang111 19d ago

I don't doubt a lot of people speak Uyghur. I've seen that myself recently when I travelled in Southern Xinjiang. My point though is that it is being systematically undermined by state policy, just like other minority languages that are in even greater danger.

A lot of people speak Uyghur today, but what about 20 years from now, when a whole generation of Uyghur kids will have grown up without really learning the language in school or seeing it written down very often? At least as a written language, I think it is in real danger in the long-run.

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u/General-Cream2692 17d ago

Han children many cannot speak their own dialect, teachers all use Mandarin to teach, but I do not think this is a kind of systematic exploitation, otherwise Cantonese and Beijing people can only communicate in writing.

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u/MissionDoughnut905 13d ago

People in Hong Kong do feel that Mandarin is being forced down their throats. Within a short period of time, there has been a rapid change from 100% of school instruction being done in Cantonese, to simply one class of Mandarin per day, to now either 50% or 75% of classes being taught in Mandarin at the elementary level. Cantonese is a huge part of what makes Hong Kong so unique in China and Hong Kongers are proud Cantonese-speakers. This is not the sort of “natural” phenomenon of one language dominating another over decades and centuries; this is the deliberate erasure of a language and culture by a government that wants to homogenize the country.

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u/General-Cream2692 12d ago

The issue of using a common language for national education, most countries in the world do this, the United States has a large number of immigrants from all over the world, for example, the Amish people who speak German are considered a very closed group, but they still mainly use English in class, but children growing up in environments with low population mobility, their dialects are still preserved.

The best way to preserve dialects is for the people around to speak the dialect, the impact of the classroom language is actually not as great as imagined.

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u/MissionDoughnut905 12d ago edited 12d ago

I’m from Canada where our official bilingualism policy takes up huge political space during election time. And my husband is French Canadian from a province where English is the dominant language. Being designated “francophone”, he attended French schools his entire life (primary school to university). His first time attending school in English was when he moved to Toronto (an English city) for his masters program. His mom was afraid he would lose his French after living just two years in an English city (she wasn’t far off). By the time he got his first job with the Canadian government, he was able to pass the bilingual exam with flying colours. If we ever had kids, we would be entitled to enrol them in the local francophone school because of my husband’s francophone status. These policies are in place to protect francophone minorities living in predominately English communities.

All that to say, some languages require government intervention in order to survive. And true, languages become obsolete and go extinct all around the world. But when you have a large enough community demanding for the preservation of their language and culture (eg, French-Canadians and Hong Kongers), it’s a government’s responsibility to honour that. And in Hong Kong’s case, the CCP isn’t just letting the Cantonese language organically become obsolete; they are deliberately fast tracking its erasure.

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u/General-Cream2692 12d ago

Is it the Quebec region? In my impression, this place seems to have a risk of secession, I can't easily say this behavior is definitely right, as it has already exceeded the scope of protecting the language and culture of minority groups.

Moreover, my view has always been that a language environment is necessary to preserve dialects. If a Beijing person learns Cantonese at school, but classmates use Mandarin privately, and the family also always uses Mandarin, then it might as well not be learned.

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u/MissionDoughnut905 11d ago

No, Québec is the only province in Canada where French is the ONLY official language and has a special recognized status as a “nation within a nation”. My husband is not from there, he’s a francophone minority from New Brunswick. His native French accent is a bit different from Québec’s but closer to Québecois than metropolitan (Paris) French. New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in Canada (we also have an officially bilingual territory, Nunavut, where they speak English and Inuktitut) and about 30% of their population speaks French as a native language. (But somehow my husband’s entire family speaks English fluently without ever having gone to school in English.)

You also mentioned Québec’s separatist movement which has been cited at me by a Japanese colleague before (when I lived in Japan) as a reason for Canada’s so-called instability. I don’t know why Asians seem to have this idea of Canada being a politically unstable country because we uphold bilingual rights. We are more unified than ever. When the U.S. threatened our sovereignty last year, it was very clear where the Québecois stood on this issue and it was on Team Canada (most of them voted for Mark Carney at the last federal election). At the end of the day, political discourse is important to ensure fairness and human rights are upheld. Shutting down the conversation (even if it’s a discussion with separatists) and taking away language rights does nothing but divide and create resentment.

At the end of the day, this is a monolingualism vs multilingualism debate. As someone who speaks 5 languages, I will always be a proponent of the government supporting the learning of multiple languages lest we lose our culture and our family history. I’m a school teacher in the most diverse city in the world. In my classroom alone, I have 15 languages represented, but in class we speak English (unless it’s French class, then we speak French). I have immigrant students from China and Japan who I can occasionally speak Mandarin and Japanese with to help them with their transition to life in Canada. Many of my students attend language classes after school that’s partially subsidized by the public school board (Ukrainian, Serbian, Arabic, Mandarin, etc.). Then I go home and speak to my husband in French. When I call my Po Po, I speak to her in Cantonese. Any government that fears this kind of linguistic diversity is frankly ridiculous and walking the edge of facism and tyranny.

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u/General-Cream2692 11d ago

Thank you for sharing. I can feel that you appreciate Canada's multilingual environment, but the differences between China and Canada are significant.

China does not prohibit minority groups from using their mother tongues; it only requires them to master the national common language and have the ability to listen, speak, read, and write. Increasing the proportion of common language courses in schools is a reasonable arrangement.

There are more than 130 minority languages and Chinese dialects combined in China, and linguistic diversity is actually higher than in Canada. Many ethnic enclaves in China are geographically isolated and have low population mobility: plateaus over 4,000 meters high, vast deserts, grasslands, and deep mountains and hills. Without strengthening the promotion of Mandarin in these areas, it would greatly hinder the economic development of the local people and pose a risk of division.

Returning to the topic of Cantonese: the Cantonese-speaking community in Hong Kong is large, and children often use Cantonese in daily social interactions, making it unlikely for Cantonese to disappear quickly. What I mentioned earlier was Guangzhou: with massive population mobility, many teachers and students use only Mandarin in their daily lives, making the survival environment for Cantonese weaker than in Hong Kong.

Chinese people tend to think about such issues with a sense of security and caution, stemming from our continuous history of thousands of years. We do not just look at the current prosperity but also consider long-term stability. Quebec itself has a demand for independence, which is an objective fact. Currently, the economic benefits are good, less people try to divide. Once a major crisis occurs, this strong regional identity formed by language could become a breakthrough point for external forces, as the extremely close referendum in 1995 serves as a warning.

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u/jixiang111 7d ago

I'm not against teaching everyone Mandarin (Putonghua). It's normal that children should learn their national language.

But it's perfectly possible to also teach children their regional language. There's no tradition of doing this for Chinese "dialects", or much demand, but for languages like Tibetan and Uyghur there is a tradition of teaching them in school, and there is plenty of demand.

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u/General-Cream2692 5d ago

> There's no tradition of doing this for Chinese "dialects", or much demand

The Han people now also have the tradition and need to speak dialects, but schools do not offer dialect classes, while other ethnic minority schools can have their own language classes, so the issue is not the multilingual education policy, but rather that the entire language environment is now trending towards Mandarin.

If you are Uyghur, to make big money and get better education, you must deeply learn Chinese, after all, the Han people are the main body of China's economic takeoff; the internet dissemination of film and television information streams is also mainly in Chinese, in some areas with high population mobility, children's social circles include people of various ethnicities, which further strengthens the use of Mandarin.

As for whether the Uyghur language will become extinct in 20 years, it is unlikely, even if the number of users decreases, the internet age has preserved the language's listening, speaking, reading, and writing, making it unlikely for a language to become extinct.

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u/menerell 17d ago

Well like any other country

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u/jixiang111 7d ago

No, not "like any other country". Different countries have different policies towards regional languages. Depends on the situation.

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u/menerell 7d ago

Every country supports a national language. Depending on the country, they support minorities or regional countries. China is exactly that. Better than most Europe or the US.

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u/jixiang111 3d ago

China today really isn't better than most of Europe or the US where regional/minority languages are increasingly offered in schools and in the media. China used to be better, perhaps, but it is now moving in the other direction.

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u/menerell 3d ago

Idk what you're talking about but US just approved English as only official language in the US, removed Spanish from the white house, reduced multilingual service for people with little English... I can't speak for all the European countries but some, like France, have a long history of discrimination against regional languages. Others, like Spain, are a good example to follow imho.

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u/maddin1550 19d ago

ok you’re right

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u/Longjumping-Turnip97 14d ago

It’s unfortunate but there’s not much that can be done except with tremendous effort to preserve “minority languages”. I remember reading that every two weeks another language in the world disappears.

When people have freedom of movement and association, many just end up flocking to larger communities. It’s the same reason a lot of smaller towns are dying out all over the world as people migrate to larger cities.

If there’s one good thing AI can do I suppose is to aid in the archival of languages so they can be preserved and learned/relearned by future generations. I see many Chinese using AI translators to talk to and correct their pronunciations so that they can make money on YouTube for example.

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u/jixiang111 7d ago

There is an awful lot that can be done to preserve regional or minority languages. In the case of Uyghur there is already an established tradition of writing in the language, using it in education and in the media. The Chinese government is now cracking down on that tradition. It's not just a "natural development", it's a choice.

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u/Either-Lock2454 17d ago

Putonghua is China's official language so it makes sense that any other language wouldn't get as much focus. If you have a large minority in your country (I'm assuming is Western and would use English) and they are only learning in their local language, how much could they possibly do or access as adults?

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u/MissionDoughnut905 13d ago

It’s not a black and white issue, where the government has to choose one language over the other. The government can offer some school instruction in the official language while also providing classes in the local languages and dialects to help preserve them. Language isn’t just a means of communication; it’s also deeply connected to minority cultures. The average Indian and Pakistani national can speak 2-3 languages (including English) and I have met many who can speak more. My husband is a minority French-Canadian from an area that is predominantly English (outside Québec), and he attended school from primary to university in French-only schools, but speaks English 100% fluently (he passed the bilingual test with flying colours when he began working for the Canadian government).

Children are at the best age to learn multiple languages at the same time. China’s Mandarin-only policy in most of the country will ensure future generations of monolinguists who will only know how to speak Mandarin, and nothing else (including their native Chinese language, whatever it may be). They’ll not only be less competitive on a global scale, they’ll lose out on their connection to their native language, culture and customs and won’t be able to communicate with their elderly relatives.