We would need to define "culture" before answering this question. I certainly don't presume to be an anthropologist with a proper definition of the term, but in this context, "Tibetan culture" I'm going to define as "what distinguishes Tibetans from the external world." I don't think this is particularly controversial, but I welcome a conversation about the definition of culture.

Anyway, what seems to make Tibetan culture different from her neighbors (i.e. where Tibetans themselves have focused on their efforts at cultural preservation) is language, religion, and material culture (i.e. visual arts, religious paraphernalia, etc.).

Language

Needless to say, all of these issues regarding cultural preservation are contentious on both sides of the Himalayan border. Language is probably one of the most intense areas of debate as the PRC has, obviously, Chinese as an official language. And since Tibet is officially "a part of China" then Chinese is the official language of the Tibetan Autonomous Area. Tibetan is often found on the backburner, sometimes subordinated beneath the Chinese on signs in Lhasa, and any Tibetan who hopes to advance in this brave new sinified world would need to know Chinese. One undoubted benefit of this linguistic influence is that the Tibetan inside the PRC has a growing vocabulary as scientific and technical terms from the PRC's industrializing and westernizing influence are being infused into the language. The downside is that the traditional language begins to falter and wither. Though to what extent is... difficult to say at best.

But on the south side of the Himalayas, the Tibetan language is in a process of preservation. The Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama's main residence is, and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile holds Kashag (Parliament) is one of (if not the) largest library of Tibetan works in the world. Many of its texts are published by authors in exile, republished religious texts that were at one point at risk of extinction, or preserved texts that have made their way out of the Himalayas and the risk of deliberate or accidental destruction (not necessarily from malicious actors on the north side of the Himalayas, either. Many are sent there for preservative purposes from Tibetan temples and monasteries in Nepal or India).

The Tibetan language itself is not so much a unified language. People from different parts of the Tibetan Linguistic Sphere have trouble communicating with each other. And many polyglots who speak four or five dialects of Tibetan can find themselves stumped in distant regions. The Dalai Lama and his family come from Amdo, and so speak Amdowa. When they moved to Lhasa, now they needed to become fluent in, well, what western academia has termed "Modern Tibetan," but is more accurately the Lhasa dialect.

Tibetan exiles don't necessarily come from a single region in Tibet. Though Sam Van Schaik notes that "Tibet" of the pre-modern era referred really only to U-Tsang, south-central Tibet focused on Lhasa and Shigatse. Amdowas and Khampas sometimes take (or took) issue with the label of "Tibetan" since it has cultural and political implications that don't necessarily exist. As is normal in any diaspora, people from like communities tend to cluster. There are communities of Kyirongpas in Nepal who speak Kyirongkha (and any one who isn't aware that Kyirongkha is a different language will get made fun of by Tibetans who are mystified by their weird dialect). I've been told by Lhasaps that Ladakhis "speak the same language" as Tibetans, but any scratch on the surface of that investigation reveals that Ladakhi is basically as foreign a tongue as Scots is to the Queens'. (Sanyukta Koshal's Conversational Ladakhi looks innocent enough until you compare with any book on modern Tibetan, or just talking to a Lhasap for a few minutes.)

It's a... truism, I guess, for lack of a better word, that the Tibetan language is in "danger." As a student of Tibetan language, I think this is quite the overstatement. Classical Tibetan is still the official language of religion in Bhutan. A modified form is still used for official purposes in the Tibetan Autonomous Area when the Chinese really really need to get the message out to locals. And it's not like there aren't hundreds and thousands of Tibetans who can read and write in their local tongue for religious, or personal use in Nepal, India, and the West. Not to mention the western academics who spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to understand the language and all its varieties.

Speaking of which, the outer Tibetan cultural sphere has been instrumental in the preservation of Tibetan language. While most people on the outer sphere probably will have a lot of trouble communicating, there's a hybrid variety of the language that speakers from totally different areas and with differing mothertongues can use with each other (ask me more about it in approx. six months). Anyway, the (slow) expansion of Bhutan into the academic world, of Tibetan religious personnel into the West for religious or academic reasons, and of growing Western interest into the region has all done its fair share to try to understand and codify the Tibetan language.

Kalmykia, a small autonomous region of Russia, is one of the key players in this story. The Kalmyk people were a Mongolic tribe who settled on the Caspian Sea during the migration era. During the Russian Revolution, they were persecuted by Stalin's men, and welcomed the Wehrmacht during World War II as liberators. None too pleased to find a convenient ally, the Wehrmacht armed them and subsequently lost. Stalin sought to purge the Kalmyk people with renewed vigor for their "betrayal," and many went west as refugees. Many of them congregated in Virginia where they were instrumental in forming the University of Virginia's Tibetology department. Donald S. Lopez is one of the most famous academics to come out of the department. What's notable about it is not only that it was found and developed by those fluent in Classical Tibetan and with a Tibetan education, but that without knowledge of how western academia works, the Kalmyk teachers used what they knew, Tibetan monastic education, to train their new western students. Students at UVA, to hear Lopez tell it, learn how Gelukpa monks should learn, debate how they would debate, and learn to use the language as proficiently (ideally) as any Gelukpa monk.

Among Tibetans themselves - and I can't point to an academic source since I'm not a linguist, but I've been looking - it's difficult to say whether the language is dying. There are many local efforts among Tibetan communities to send children to "Tibetan school" as Jewish families often send their children to after school "Hebrew school." Though the language that Tibetan youth - usually born in the West or in India or Nepal - speak is usually a descended (though some might say degenerate I really hate that connotation) form of the Tibetan of their parents and grandparents. From what I understand, the Dalai Lama with his hint of Amdowa, his monastic education, and his 1940's vocabulary, is almost unintelligible to young Tibetans born in the 21st Century.

None of this means that Tibetan language is being preserved, or dying. But it does show how the varieties of the Tibetan linguistic experience are amplified in the face of new challenges outside of the Tibetan Plateau. Overall, efforts at trying to preserve the language (any language) will inevitably change it. Just as the Tibetan language changed over the centuries while Tibetans were in charge of their own political destiny.

Cont'd.