In five mainland Southeast Asian nations—Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam—there are national languages and language policies. There is a distinction between language policy (decisions about language by governments and official bodies) and language planning (the implementation of this policy), which emerged from their history and development.
Each modern nation has a dominant standard-majority language with a long literary tradition and various regional sub-varieties. Each nation also has various ethnic-minority groups, including some who live in several of these nations and also in China. Official recognition of and policy for minority languages differs, but in general there is little provision for them in education or elsewhere. Two of these minority languages, Mon and Cham, were the languages of former kingdoms in the area.
Four countries give explicit constitutional recognition to the national language; in Thailand this is simply assumed. In each country, there have been centralized efforts to standardize and develop the national language and to expand its use. In three, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, these efforts are now under the guidance of a separate official-language-policy body; Laos had such a body up to 1975. In Vietnam, language policy is among the responsibilities of the Ministry of Education. In each country, the ministry of education and other parts of government play a key role in language planning.
Article
Language Policy and Planning in Mainland Southeast Asia
David Bradley
Article
Wa Communities in the China-Myanmar Borderlands
Magnus Fiskesjö
The Wa is an ethnicity in the borderlands of China and Myanmar (Burma). In the 1950s and 1960s, their ancient land was divided for the first time by these two modern states. Before this watershed moment in Wa history, the Wa were famous as independent, practically invincible warrior-farmers, much feared in their region despite having no kings and no regular army. These Wa farmer-warriors were deeply engaged in their regional economy through trade in mining products, as well as in opium, and, as a result, the British colonial officers who tried but failed to incorporate them into their empire could not but marvel at the wealth of the Wa. Since the division, the formerly independent Wa communities have been transformed on both sides of the border: on the Chinese side, into drastically impoverished regular peasants under Chinese rule; and, on Burmese territory, since 1989, into peasants under a new type of Wa elite in the Wa state—a semi-state governed by the United Wa State Army (UWSA). Both in China and in Myanmar, the Wa are officially listed as an indigenous ethnic minority. In China, there is local autonomy in name only. In Myanmar, the UWSA is an ethnonationalistic Wa elite with an army of considerable power and occupies a fraught position in the geopolitics of the fragmented state of Myanmar, which the UWSA recognizes even as it seeks even greater autonomy. Both contemporary Wa societies are dramatically different from the past, although many cultural traditions continue.
