In the language hierarchy, languages at the bottom castes are despised, oppressed, avoided. They make their speakers ashamed, awkward; they make them feel that they don’t fit in and don’t belong. People refuse to speak them so they gradually wither and die. But does this common sense of resistance really result from, as many people believe, the languages themselves, their assumed innate inferiority, vulgar sounds, and unorthodox pronunciations? Or does it peel off the thick membrane tightly covering society, exposing the ugly truth and letting it breathe veraciously in the open air?

Mongolian and Mandarin

“Can you count from one to ten in Mongolian? Uh?”

While mom was washing dishes in the kitchen, dad asked me proudly, assuming an air of patriotism.

“No.”

“Nege, ho’ile, gulu, dulu, kaba, jue’lega, gao’le, nama, ise, alebe!”

I laughed at the words’ funny pronunciations and dad just kept on reciting loudly and happily, wagging his head.
“There he goes again,” Mom said. “Twenty years of marriage and that is the only thing I’ve ever heard that he could say in Mongolian.”

I laughed harder and my stomach ached.

I have a complex family background: my hometown is Hebei where I’ve never been. I was born in Inner Mongolia indirectly due to the Chinese Land Reform in the 1991s—my grandparents, taken by their parents, fled from Hebei in fear of persecution of landlords and settled in Inner Mongolia, where later became my de facto motherland. Not long after birth I was stripped from my motherland, crossed almost the entirety of China, and was taken to Zhongshan, a Southern city one and a half hours drive from Guangzhou. I grew up there. Absorbing southern values, eating southern food, meeting southern people, I became a “southerner” with a northern accent. When entering high school, my friends were amazed by the sense of distance, mystery and cultural difference the name “Inner Mongolia” brought and often asked if I could speak Mongolian.

The thing is, I couldn’t. In fact, I made no effort in learning Mongolian, and its decline was obvious: my dad, who did not leave Inner Mongolia until he went to university, could only count from one to ten in Mongolian. His little brothers stayed in Inner Mongolia and married Mongolian wives who could not speak fluent Mongolian due to overexposure to and contact with Mandarin since childhood. Their children, my cousins, could not speak Mongolian either—the Chinese government imposed a “Popularize Mandarin” campaign and required schools to teach Mandarin and students to communicate in Mandarin. My mom was from the northeast, speaking only “northern Chinese.” Following the family tree, you just watch the language weaken little by little and at the end fall into disuse. In my family, Mongolian almost disappear in my generation. It is very likely that Mongolian would disappear more thoroughly in the next generation with my children born abroad and unheard of this language.

In retrospect, it dawned on me that this phenomenon was far from simple. Mild government policies (the ones that do not seek to ban and eradicate some languages but only to encourage and popularize the others) and geographical distance never have the power to extinguish a language as long as its people speak it, practice it, cherish it, fight for its place under the shadow of Mandarin, and pass it on to the new generation. For example, living in Zhongshan and going to school in Guangzhou, I could feel Cantonese people’s urge to protect their own language and resist the impact of Mandarin. It seemed unfair to them that Cantonese—the mother tongue that they were bathed with when still in cradles, that they uttered in the fastest speed and with the most confidence and natural intimacy—was to be replaced by Mandarin, a language brought in by a mass influx of people, a language that does not belong and evokes no shared, bygone memories. They feared that, one day, Mandarin would dominate and Cantonese vanish along with their past and cultural identity. Therefore, many Cantonese people would speak Mandarin when they had to but shift back to Cantonese with family members, friends, and strangers in the markets. I used to feel inadequate and alienated when somebody in a group unconsciously started talking in Cantonese and the rest of the group switched to Cantonese almost immediately, with me hanging there like a dry, light, autumn leaf. I never complained, since I knew their reason too well.

Another example is Laura, my best friend during a summer camp in Vancouver, who was almost a native Canadian except that her grandparents were Chinese migrants. She was required to communicate in Chinese at home; as her mother said, she had already had enough practice of English in school. Once I asked her in Chinese, "By the way, why can you speak Chinese so well?"

“Speak English!” A staff member roared at me and a few Turkish students talking in Turkish and laughing too loudly.

“I guess they insist because they want to preserve something that is part of the family, that runs deep in their blood; my mom used to say to me, ‘Never forget your roots.’”

“But you are legally a Canadian!”

“Yeah, it’s strange. But I feel like a Chinese person. Every time I looked into the mirror I knew I could never be a hundred percent Canadian even if I was born here and would spend my whole life here.”

I was lost in thoughts.

“Speaking Chinese actually makes me proud, by the way.” She added and her eyes shined even under the sun.

What Went Wrong

If it is neither government policies (the Cantonese retain their language against Mandarin), nor geographic distance (many Chinese families living abroad and giving birth to “native foreigners” keep speaking Chinese at home after generations) that has the power to completely extinguish a language, what can?

Later I figured out the culprits—discrimination and bias against the race and culture associated with certain languages.

At an early age, I used to be so embarrassed to tell my friends that I was from Inner Mongolia. Although I’d visited my hometown several times, in my and many other southern children’s minds, Inner Mongolia was still a place where bearded, rough men who had red cheeks and never bathed, rode horses, swallowed spirits, tore lambs with their teeth and shouted dirty words. Once, out of the blue, I got the courage to tell somebody that I was from Inner Mongolia, and he asked,

“Do you live in tents? Do you ride horses to school? Do you have KFC?”

He spilled out the questions one after another like a firing cannon, and what he asked sounded strident and ridiculing. Whether his injury to my pride was unintentional or not, was due to ignorance or not, I sensed a hidden mocking tone in his questions, enough to make me angry and humiliated. He seemed to be implying that Inner Mongolia was an outdated place, rural and peripheral, where people still lived in tents, rode horses and never knew what KFC was when they, “the modernists,” are sleeping in apartments, driving cars around the city and eating at junk food restaurants. I answered with a feigned smile,

“Yes we have modern apartments with nice heaters and we go to schools in our parents’ cars and of course we have KFC it is everywhere in Inner Mongolia.”

Similar cases happened at lot, each time building up my irritation towards their ignorance and a deep sense of self-consciousness about my hometown. People who have “normal” birthplaces like Guangdong, Sichuan, and Beijing seldom get frustrated when mentioning their backgrounds. But modern day Inner Mongolia is not “normal.” It is a place so far away, so unknown and distorted by antiquated tales and stories.

I gradually understood why Mongolian is falling into disuse in my family. Except the obstacles imposed by the government and generated through immigration, the deadly factor is its speaker’s self-consciousness driven by the majority’s prejudice, ignorance and pride against Inner Mongolian culture. Indeed, various associations with this language—classic Mongolian red faces due to thin oxygen content, dirty bowls, lambs, horses, tents—all point to the coarseness of this culture. Frustration overwhelms and tires its speakers for explaining the truth over and over again only to find this biased impression so deeply ingrained in “southerners” for centuries that it is almost impossible to change the majority’s mind.

In the end I chose to answer Hebei when asked, easy and friendly, even if it was as unfamiliar to me as China to American born Chinese. Inner Mongolia seemed like something part of me that I wanted to keep hidden, and the fear of its exposure followed by surprise, misinterpretation and despise of others became so clear whenever someone asked about my birthplace. It is just terrifying to think about how many Mongolian families out there are encountering similar situations. It is even more terrifying to think about how many families of Chinese ethnic minorities are losing their languages along with their cultures and identities.

Going back to the question raised in the introduction, I think I have an answer. The decline of languages exposes a social reality that is not very pleasant. Factors associated with these languages—native places and social statuses of their speakers, prominent and biased social values, and domination of certain cultures—are the chief culprits of their murder.