Identity and Support for Political Communities Based on Language Choice Data in Tibet

National sentiment and identities are affective orientations of diffuse political support toward political communities. Language choice is suggested be a reliable indicator of community identity in Tibet for theoretical, historical, and practical reasons. Tibetan, Mandarin, and English are three language choices that are used to indicate three identities and three political communities in this paper. By using the language orientations of Tibetan high school students as the indicators of their community identities, I demonstrate the patterns of identity of Tibetan students with survey data. I also use empirical evidence to test the attitudinal and demographic sources of the students¡¯ variation in their community identities. The results reconfirm that the constructivist theory of the identity construction, which includes the primordialist and circumstantialist factors, has a fairly good explanatory power regarding the community identities of students in Tibet. And policy implications are offered from the educational perspective