If I may add very quickly to what my colleague Sherap just said, in terms of doing extensive research on the ground on exactly the scope and scale of the impact, it's very difficult to do because the Chinese government does not allow any foreign researcher, scholar, independent investigator or journalist to go into Tibet. They don't allow any information from Tibet to escape out of Tibet.
In Tibet, one reason there is an information black hole is that the messengers get punished sometimes even worse than the protesters. At the same time, here are a couple of examples that I have observed in my own experience: The age of the child seems to be very important in terms of how deep the level of impact is, let's say, if we just look at the individual impact on one family. My colleague, Dr. Gyal Lo, who is here with us, observed that among children who are between the ages of three and six, three to six months is long enough for a child to switch completely from Tibetan to Mandarin. It literally takes less than six months for the language erosion to happen at a very fundamental place.
I also met a young Tibetan student around the age of 11 or 12. This was somebody who attended one of those boarding institutions recently. Her story was a little bit different because she grew up in a family that was fiercely proud of their Tibetan heritage. She grew up speaking only Tibetan in her home and that was the language of the home, but when she was enrolled into a boarding institution at age 10, within one year, Mandarin displaced Tibetan as her first language. When I met her, she was no longer comfortable speaking in Tibetan. She was speaking to me in halting Tibetan, and her first language was very clearly Mandarin.
I asked her, “What about the other students in your school? In class, of course, you speak Mandarin, but outside of class, what language do you use with each other, with your peers?” She said, “Mandarin, Chinese.”