Khroskyabs
[aka Lavrung, bósʁæi, Guanyinqiao]
·
threatened
resource
Song for Giving Toasts
There are no songs sung traditionally in Khroskyabs, probably due to historically diverse language contact reasons. Roche (2017) claims northeast Tibet was linguisti- cally “super diverse”, and that various social groups had different plurilingual reper- toires and distinct translanguaging praxis that often included singing in Tibetan. Thiscontributed to the fact that Khroskyabs was not used for singing (Roche 2017): all songs are sung in Amdo Tibetan, and some in Mandarin, in the Khroskyabs-speaking region. The first topic that came to my mind, therefore, was creating a song in Khroskyabs. Many of my Khroskyabs-speaking friends were shocked to hear this idea because they simply did not think it was possible to sing in Khroskyabs. One friend even commented, “It [Khroskyabs] is too complex9 to be used for singing songs!” That said, people agreed it was valuable to have a song in Khroskyabs despite their skepticism about the possibility. The original song is in Tibetan. I translated the lyrics into Khroskyabs and per- formed the song in Khroskyabs. This is a song about how to appropriately give toasts, by thanking the deities, parents, and guests. After seeing this video, one of my cousins said, “I loved the song. Now, I am proud that I have a Khroskyabs song to sing at social gatherings.”
Jan. 1, 2019 |