Empowering or endangering minorities? Facebook, language, and identity in Myanmar

ABSTRACT

Language policies play a major role in ethnic conflict because they affect the right of speakers to choose and use their preferred language(s), and help determine courses of action to maintain, assert or defend such rights. There has been insufficient analysis on the role of social media, particularly Facebook, in strengthening or undermining the survival of minority languages and collective identity in multi-ethnic countries. This paper uses Myanmar as a case study to demonstrate the extent to which Facebook language policies influence language use practices of minorities in Myanmar. While Facebook’s selection of Burmese as a ‘Facebook language’ has privileged the use of Myanmar’s majority language at the expense of its minority languages, it has simultaneously provided opportunities for ethnic minorities to preserve and promote their languages and cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• Facebook
• minority languages
• nation building
• Myanmar

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Professor Ardeth M. Thawnghmung, who provided all necessary guidance and support for this paper, Prof. Jenifer Whitten-Woodring, Prof. Mona S. Kleinberg,, Hilary Faxon, Elizabeth Rhoads, Markus Kostner, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions, and all key informants and the Facebook Myanmar team, who shared their experience, knowledge, and perception in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Brown and Ganguly, Fighting Words.

2. Ibid.

3. The government recognizes only 135 ethnic groups, and these categories remain contested because of the arbitrary nature in which the categories were drawn. The Myanmar government has not released ethnicity data from its most recent census in 2014, which was carried out with support from the UNFPA and UK Department of International Development (DFID); Simons and Fennig, Ethnologue.

4. See World Population Review at https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/myanmar-population/.

5. Callahan, “Language Policy in Modern Burma.”

6. Thawnghmung, The ‘Other’ Karens, 148.

7. Callahan, “Junta Dreams or Nightmares?” 54.

8. Smith, Ethnic Groups in Burma; and Gravers, Nationalism as Political Paranoia in Burma.

9. Callahan, “Junta Dreams or Nightmares?”

10. Smith, State of Fear; and Lintner, “Burma, Laos, and Cambodia, Status of Media.”

11. Thawnghmung and Yadana, “Citizenship and Minority Rights.”

12. See “Myanmar: End Largest World’s Largest Internet Shutdown.”

13. See UNHRC Report.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Badenoch, “Translating the State.”

17. Dolan and Gray, “Media and Conflict in Myanmar”; McLaughlin, “How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion”; and UNHRC Report.

18. Dolan and Gray, “Media and Conflict in Myanmar.”

19. See “Daily Briefing in Relation to the Military Coup.”

20. See “Myanmar Junta Limits Internet”; and Giella, “Myanmar Military Restricting Internet Access.”

21. Williams, More than Tongue Can Tell.

22. Ibid., 3.

23. Kymlicka, “Culturally Responsive Policies”; Bear Nicholas, Linguistic Decline and the Educational Gap; and Voulgarakis and Dawei, “Confronting Linguistic Genocide.”

24. Abdelal, Measuring Identity; Kuzio, “History, Memory and Nation Building in Post-Soviet Space”; and Kolstø, “Nation-building and Language Standardization.”

25. Brown and Ganguly, Fighting Words; Kymlicka, “Nation-building and Minority Rights”; and Davies and Dubinsky, Language Conflict and Language Rights.

26. Diarmait, Language, Identity and Conflict, 150.

27. Simons and Fennig, Ethnologue: Languages of Asia.

28. Davies and Dubinsky, Language Conflict and Language Rights.

29. Kratz, “Indonesia: Language Situation.”

30. Giles, Language, Ethnicity and Intergroup Relations.

31. Ibid.

32. Diarmait, Language, Identity and Conflict, 14; and Ferguson, “Diglossia.”

33. Giles, Language, Ethnicity and Intergroup Relations; Smolicz, “Core Values and Cultural Identity”; and Bradley, “Language Attitudes.”

34. Ibid.

35. Allen, “The Effect of Majority Language Exposure”; and Gabanamotse-Mogara and Batibo, “Ambivalence Regarding Linguistic and Cultural Choices.”

36. Risager, “Language Hierarchies”; and Smalley, “Thailand’s Hierarchy of Multilingualism.”

37. Silverstine, “The Uses and Utility of Ideology.”

38. Irvine and Gal, “Language Ideology”; and Woodlard, “Language Ideology.”

39. Diarmait, Language, Identity and Conflict, 130.

40. Webber, “Order in Diversity.”

41. Aitchison and Carter, A Geography of the Welsh Language; and Aitchison and Carter, Language, Economy and Society.

42. Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” 218.

43. Cunliffe, “The Welsh Language on the Internet”; and Cunliffe, “Minority Languages and Social Media,” 451.

44. Crystal, Language and the Internet.

45. Karuss, “The World’s Languages in Crisis.”

46. Facebook languages were counted in March 2020 on an official Facebook page of some users, and all users identified 111 ‘Facebook languages’ on the Facebook mobile app and the web version.

47. Interviews with Facebook, 17 December 2020.

48. Ibid.

49. Dowling, “Shooting the (Facebook) Messenger.”

50. Lall and South, “Comparing Models.”

51. Ranzato, “Recent Advances.”

52. Smalley, “Thailand’s Hierarchy of Multilingualism.”

53. Jingphaw is the main language used by the eponymous dominant non-Bamar ethnic group residing in Kachin state. Some other ethnic groups with smaller populations, such as Zaikwa, Law-waw, Lacheik, and Lisu, have their own written languages, but sometimes use Jingphaw for inter-tribal communication.

54. Facebook Messenger is a messaging app and platform developed by Facebook.

55. Simons and Fenning, Ethnologue.

56. Respondents from the Ta'ang Literature and Culture Association remarked that Palaung is the name associated with and familiar among majority Bamar, but the name Ta'ang more appropriately represents the group and its sub-groups.

57. The Ta'ang Literature and Culture Association is working to promote standardization of the Ta'ang language to create a common Ta'ang identity. In late 2018, the association obtained a consensus among different Ta'ang cultural sub-groups to identify the Ruchin language as a formal Ta'ang common language. However, local Ta'ang media continues to use Burmese on their platforms to reach out to a wider audience. Interviews with a female Ta'ang local leader from Ta'ang Literature and Culture Association, and one female Ta-6 ang political leader were conducted on 2^nd and 3 March 2021.

58. Before the invention of Zawgyi and Unicode, most Myanmar users in internet chat rooms used the available Roman letters to write Myanmar sounds, known as Myanglish or Burglish. Zawgyi was introduced as an ad-hoc font encoding in 2006 for digital communication on the computers and smart phones in Myanmar. Zawgyi applies the visual typing and encoding method as one would write on paper, rather than using logical linguistics and computer encoding conventions. Some minority groups, particularly Shan, Mon, and Pa-O, also invented Zawgyi keyboards for their own languages. Unicode, on the other hand, offers consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. The Myanmar (Burmese) script was added to the Unicode Standard in Version 3.0 in September 1999. Unicode was officially launched by Myanmar’s State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi only in October 2019. The Unicode system helps the internationalization of Myanmar scripts and language. Initially only the Burmese keyboard was widely available on cellphones. Gradually, input keyboards were designed for several other non-Burmese languages.

59. See “Respect Myanmar’s Ethnic Diversity.”

60. A male Shan respondent, aged 28.

61. This statement also reveals a rapid shift from orality to literacy and a more literate generation among the Pa-O population, which is unrelated to the adoption of new digital communications technology in Myanmar.

62. Ranzato, Recent advances in low-resource machine translation.

63. The term ‘language resource’ refers to a set of speech or language data and descriptions in machine readable form, used for building, improving or evaluating natural language and speech algorithms or systems, or, as core resources for the software localization and language services industries, for language studies, electronic publishing, international transactions, subject-area specialists and end users. Only about 20 popular languages out of nearly 7,000 languages being used across the world are rich-resource languages. All others have limited resources and are considered to be low-resource languages.

64. See note 51 above.

65. Public groups on Facebook are those that are open to all Facebook users to join and share posts.

66. Joining private Facebook groups requires permission from group administrators and only invited members can share posts on the group page.

67. A male Naga respondent, aged 32.

68. An attempt by the Kayah State government to place the General Aung San statue was interpreted by Kayah youth and civil society groups as a symbol of unfulfilled promise by the National League for Democracy (NLD) to grant meaningful rights and self-determination to ethnic minority groups.

69. Three respondents who identified socially respectful persons as their leaders are a Mon, a Naga and a Danu.

70. One Kayah, two Karens, one Pa-O, one Naga and two Bamars said they didn’t have any person they considered to be a leader.

71. The RCSS (Restoration Council of Shan State) is an ethnic armed group based in southern and eastern Shan State.

72. The SNLD (Shan Nationalities League for Democracy), is an ethnic political party which won 46 seats in 2015 General Elections, and held about 19% of seats in the Shan State Parliament.

73. The Facebook pages of four armed groups, including Arakan Army (AA), were banned by Facebook in the first week of February 2019. See “Facebook Targets ‘Dangerous’ Armed Groups.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Myat The-Thitsar

Myat The-Thitsar is a co-founder of Enlightened Myanmar Research Foundation (EMReF; www.emref.org). Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate of the Global Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She holds a master’s degree in International Relations from California State University- Fresno and a Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) degree in International Relations from Yadanabon University, Mandalay. She was a research fellow of the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) at the University of Oxford from September 2016 to January 2017.