Last year, I posted a long essay in Tibetan about the experience of Losar in Dharamsala. It took me almost twice as long to write as an equivalent piece in English would have. My Tibetan keyboard setup still sometimes misbehaves. The fonts do not always render the way I intend on every device. The audience for Tibetan-language writing on the internet is, by any objective measure, a small fraction of the audience for English-language writing.
A friend who works in communications — Tibetan, based in Brussels — told me, in a kind way, that I was making things difficult for myself unnecessarily. “Write in English,” she said. “More people will read it. You can still say everything you want to say.”
She is not wrong about the arithmetic. But I think she is wrong about the rest of it.
What Gets Lost in Translation
There is a version of the argument for writing in Tibetan that rests purely on cultural preservation — the language must be used or it will diminish; every text in Tibetan is a small act of maintenance; writers have a responsibility to the language. This is all true, and I believe it. But it is not the reason I write in Tibetan.
I write in Tibetan because some things think differently in Tibetan.
This sounds mystical, but it is actually quite concrete. Tibetan has a relationship to time, to causality, to the inner life, that English encodes differently. The grammatical structure of a Tibetan sentence places the verb at the end, which means that a sentence builds toward its action — everything accumulates, and then the act arrives. In English, the verb comes early; the sentence moves outward from its action. These are not equivalent structures. They produce different rhythms of thinking.
When I try to translate a Tibetan essay I have written into English, I do not produce a translation. I produce a different essay — one that covers the same territory but moves through it differently. Some of what was in the Tibetan version is genuinely absent from the English one. Not the facts. The texture. The specific way that certain ideas settle.
The Technical Difficulties Are Real
I want to be honest about this: writing in Tibetan on a computer is harder than it should be.
The Unicode standard for Tibetan script has existed since 1991, but the ecosystem of tools for Tibetan writers remains uneven. My keyboard layout, which I set up years ago and have since reconfigured twice after operating system updates broke something, works reliably on my laptop and unreliably on my phone. The fonts I prefer — Noto Serif Tibetan, which I find cleaner than most alternatives — are not pre-installed on most devices and require a moment to load.
Spellchecking does not exist in the way it does for English. Grammar assistance does not exist. When I make an error — a wrong vowel mark, a missing tsheg, a syllable inadvertently run together — I have to catch it myself. Sometimes I do not catch it, and a reader sends me a polite correction.
All of this is manageable. It is also, quietly, a form of the larger condition: Tibetan writers have to work a little harder, in a technological environment built for other languages, to do what writers in those languages do automatically.
I have made my peace with this. It is not so different from other forms of working against a current.
The Audience Is Small, and It Matters Enormously
When I post something in Tibetan, I hear from perhaps thirty or forty people. When I post the equivalent in English, the numbers are larger — not dramatically, because I am not a large website by any measure, but larger.
But the thirty or forty people who respond to the Tibetan posts respond differently. They write longer messages. They quote particular phrases back to me and say that this was the thing that mattered. They share the post with a parent or a grandparent who does not read English. Several times I have been contacted by elderly Tibetans — people in their seventies or eighties who left Tibet as adults and who, for reasons of education or circumstance, are not comfortable with English or Hindi — who found something I had written and wanted to say that it was the first time in years they had read something in Tibetan on the internet that felt like it was talking to them.
That is not a small thing. That is the entire point.
What Language Preservation Actually Means
People who are not speakers of a minority language sometimes have a romantic conception of language preservation — as if it were a matter of archives and dictionaries, of locking things in boxes for future generations to open.
It is not that. A language is preserved by being used: thought in, argued in, joked in, loved in, written in. It is not a museum object. It is a practice, and like all practices it requires practitioners. Every person who chooses to do their serious thinking in Tibetan — to write their real thoughts in Tibetan rather than switching to the more convenient language — is making a small, daily, unglamorous contribution to the fact of the language’s existence.
This is not a heroic act. It is an ordinary one. But ordinary acts, repeated by enough people over enough time, are what keep things alive.
A Note on This Blog
Some posts here are in Tibetan, some are in English, and occasionally one is a mixture of both. I do not translate between the two — each post exists in the language in which it was written. If you read both, you will notice that the posts are not the same even when they cover similar subjects. This is intentional.
If you are a Tibetan reader, I hope the Tibetan posts feel like something genuinely written for you — not a translation, not a concession, but a real address.
If you are not a Tibetan reader and you find yourself curious about the Tibetan posts, that curiosity seems like a good thing. There are tools for reading Tibetan text that are improving every year.
The Harder Question
My friend in Brussels is not wrong that I am making things harder for myself. She is also not wrong that everything I want to say can be said in English.
But I think she has the question slightly wrong. The question is not whether Tibetan can say what I need it to say. The question is whether I am the kind of person for whom Tibetan is the right language for saying it — whether this is the language I think in, the language my inner life happens in, the language I dream in.
The answer to that question is yes. And as long as it is yes, writing in Tibetan is not a political act or a cultural-preservation act, though it may also be those things. It is simply the most accurate thing I can do.
The Tibetan post I mentioned earlier — about Losar in Dharamsala — is available on this blog. And the previous post (this one written in Tibetan entirely) is also archived here. I welcome responses in any language.