Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Abdulwaliyaju, winner of the first language Rights Defenders Award interview by Gerald Roche this year, the Global Coalition for Language Rights launched the Language Rights Defenders Award to recognize and honor the important people who work for language rights.
GCLR received nominations from 14 countries celebrating language rights defenders from many walks of life, including teachers, translators, community activists, healthcare professionals, lawmakers, and policy advocates. The nominations were judged by a panel of experts in the field, together with the co chairs of the GCLR. Although there were many deserving applicants, the judges unanimously chose Abdouwali Aju as the winner. Abdouwali Ajup is a scholar and activist. He was arrested and imprisoned in China for his work promoting the language rights of Uyghur people and other ethnic groups. He now lives in Norway. In this interview, he discusses his background and motivations and offers some words of encouragement for language rights defenders everywhere. What kind of language rights violations do Uyghur people in China face?
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Everyone in China has the right to use their language. It's guaranteed in article four of the chinese constitution. But what is happening now in many places in China is violating that constitutional right. In education, we have the freedom to use our language from primary school to university.
However, since 2016, the Uyghura language has been completely shut out of the education system and only Mandarin Chinese is used. Even very young kids in kindergarten cannot use their language at school, and many of them board at their kindergarten six days a week. Our language rights are also violated in healthcare situations. Interpreters are not provided at the hospital or doctor offices. Even if someone only knows Uyghur, the only language on offer is Mandarin. There used to be some private hospitals where people could use the Uyghur language, but those have been closed and many of the staff have been imprisoned. We also have the right to publish in our language and express our ideas, but it doesnt exist in practice. We should also have the right to privacy, but this doesnt exist for us either. These days, the chinese government sends people into Uyghur homes maybe once or twice a week to monitor our language practices with family members. Finally, according to the chinese constitution, everyone in the country has the right to protect their language. This is our right, our constitutional right. But when I stood up to protect my language, they persecuted me.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: What work did you do in China to defend Uyghur people's language rights? And how did the government respond to this work?
[00:03:03] Speaker B: The main thing I did was set up a private kindergarten. It was totally legal. I really looked into it carefully before I started because I didnt want any trouble? I examined the chinese constitution and looked at the relevant laws. According to the law, Mandarin is compulsory at all levels from primary school onwards.
But in kindergarten its legal to just use the Uyghur language without Mandarin. So thats what I did and I was arrested and sent to prison on false charges. My imprisonment was also punishment for my other activities.
I wrote essays about the importance of protecting the Uighur language. I also wrote about the relevant laws to show people that it's legal. I translated documents from the United nations into Uyghur, like the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which China signed. It guarantees children the right to use their language, and I wanted Uyghur people to know that they have this right. I also spoke to lots of community leaders, academics and government leaders about language rights. I was always careful when I did this. Uyghur people who struggle for their rights are often accused of being separatists or terrorists. So I also went to other communities, not just Uyghur people, and spoke to them about their language rights. In Xinjiang, where I'm from, there are many ethnic groups such as Mongols, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Sibet, and I made efforts to promote language rights for all of them.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Beyond the Uyghur context, what challenges do language rights defenders throughout China face?
[00:04:40] Speaker B: I am a scholar and a linguist, so before I fled China, I had lots of connections to other academics in other parts of the country, like tibetan, korean, kazakh and mongolian scholars. I also had the chance to do fieldwork in some places, like with salar communities in Qinghai province. Before I was arrested, it was possible for me to build personal connections and talk to people about language rights. However, even at that time, you could not really start a social movement to defend language rights in China. Things changed drastically after I was imprisoned, and they got worse after Xi Jinping came to power in Xinjiang. My friends all started disappearing from social media around 2016, and after that they started disappearing into prison. Now, for so many people in China and even outside the country, there is a pervasive feeling of fear when it comes to issues of human rights. I spoke to one professor who had fled the country and was granted asylum outside. Although they are living in safety now, they would not speak to me about language rights issues in China. Many people from China who live outside are not free to speak up because they fear for their friends and family in China. Outside China, we have programs like scholars at risk that could help academics and activists from China. But the real problem is how to get the information to them safely. How can we help them without putting them at risk.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: What words of encouragement and advice do you have for language rights defenders in other parts of the world?
[00:06:16] Speaker B: I hope that people everywhere will appreciate that language is not just sounds, not just meaning. Language is human dignity. It is who you are. You have a right to be yourself, and you have a right to use your language. So many people are made to feel ashamed of their language, ashamed of who they are. When I was in Uzbekistan, people thought that you were backwards and uneducated. If you came to the big city and spoke in Uzbek, they thought you had to speak Russian to be sophisticated.
Even when two Uzbek people met each other in the city, they would speak in Russian because they had been made to feel ashamed and denied the basic dignity to feel that their language is worthy. It's great to see examples where people maintain the dignity of oppressed languages in public. For example, at public events in New Zealand, they begin in the Maori language, even if the person is not themselves Maori. I think thats an important lesson. The majority population has a responsibility to defend the dignity and the rights of languages that have been oppressed. The burden should not always be on people who are having their rights violated. Anyone can be a language rights defender.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: On the global level. How do you think language rights defenders can work together to achieve language rights for everyone?
[00:07:36] Speaker B: We need to understand that the situation is different in different contexts. Often people focus their activism on places like Canada, New Zealand, or the United States. But we really need to reach out to people in places like Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Egypt. There are big challenges to language rights in those places, but there are also possibilities to talk about the issues.
We should go to those places and talk publicly about language rights. As a scholar, I also think that universities have an important role to play. For example, there are many linguistics departments at universities around the world where they study all sorts of languages. They should create programs and scholarships that support people whose language rights are under threat. They can bring people from around the world to study and teach that not only empowers those people, but also helps raise awareness in their communities back in their home countries. Finally, I would love to see something like a world summit on language rights, where many activists and scholars could come together. We could talk about the challenges people face, the different ways their language rights are violated, and the solutions that we've created. We could organize ourselves and figure out how to cooperate and support each other in our struggles to defend language rights.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: This article was written in Gerald Roche, an associate professor of politics at La Trobe University.
He lives and works on the unceded lands of the woundjerry people. His book, the Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, will be published in November 2024 by Cornell University Press.
Originally published in multilingual Magazine, issue 232, September 2024.
