Translating the State: Ethnic Language Radio in the Lao PDR

ABSTRACT

The nation-building project of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic has been challenged by the task of uniting the multi-ethnic country under its political ideology. The Lao National Radio broadcasts in the Khmu and Hmong languages are the only official voice of minority languages and provide insights on how political messages are sent to the population. In their creation of programming material, the broadcasters must translate the socialist ideology of the Communist Party into language that is politically correct and culturally acceptable. In the process, they are creating a political register in the two languages that is heavily influenced by the linguistic structures of Lao. This article examines these two broadcasts to see how language use at the radio effects the message that is delivered to the listeners, enhancing the calls for mobilisation by teaching the people a new political language reflected not only in terms of lexicon, but also in the syntax and phonology of their translations. The result is a way of speaking that crosses ethno-linguistic boundaries to reinforce the control of the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Laos
• ethnic minorities
• language
• media
• translation
• radio

Notes

1. In fact, the concept of majority and minority are not used in Lao political discourse, as all people of Laos by law belong to an “ethnic group” (son phaw), of which the ethnic Lao themselves are one. The use of the term Lao (laaw) as an adjective is fraught with ambiguity, as it can be interpreted to mean the ethnic group or the state, without any overt linguistic marking.

2. The Lao name, vithanyu kacaai siang haeng saat laaw, invokes the saat “nation” in place of the previous Pathet Lao “country” element.

3. While these programmes are from a decade ago, the broadcasts continue in basically the same format today. The programmes analysed in this article are from a period in which state broadcasting was expanding the scope of its content and provided much of the substantive basis for the development of Khmu and Hmong language television broadcasts which are now aired daily on the main state channel.

4. Khmu words are presented in the Romanised orthography used in the Kmhmu’-Lao-French-English Dictionary (Suksavang, Sayavong, and Preisig 1994). Hmong words are presented in the Romanised Popular Alphabet (RPA) orthography used unofficially by Hmong in Laos and widely by the Hmong diaspora. Final consonants mark tones and are not pronounced as normal consonants.