by Camille Simon

It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Shannon Ward on 9th September 2025. Her work as a linguistic anthropologist provides precious insights into multilingual socialization, at a time when the issue of language transmission is a pressing concern among Tibetan communities both in Tibet and in the diaspora.

Immediately after completing her PhD entitled “Learning Language, Transforming Knowledge: Language Socialization in Amdo, Tibet” in 2019 (published as Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau, University of Toronto Press, 2024), she took up a position of Assistant Professor in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Her paper “Style and Standardization: A Case Study of Tibetan Family Interaction in Greater New York” (2015) paved the way for the study of language transmission and language shift among the Tibetan diaspora outside South Asia. From 2020 on, she further engaged in deepening our understanding of Tibetan as a heritage language in the West, with research projects on the preservation of Tibetan language in Canada and a study of linguistic interactions during mealtimes among Tibetan-Canadian families.

I have been in intermittent contact with Shannon since the summer of 2017, when we first met in Xining, and I was particularly pleased to hear her talk about her research on language socialization and acquisition in Amdo. Language acquisition is a field dominated by research on a restricted array of dominant languages, mainly spoken in Western societies. Shannon’s careful documentation of language acquisition and socialization among minoritized families in the multilingual context of Amdo thus represents a much-needed contribution to this field. Furthermore, her analysis of the dynamics of language shift in the current political context in Amdo and the role and place of children in this process also provides an invaluable insight into the situation. Over time, I have increasingly learned to admire Shannon’s precise and thorough analyses of linguistic phenomena and everyday interactions, always based on intensive fieldwork and a deep familiarity with the people she worked with. Such scientifically impressive results were only permitted by her in-depth knowledge of Tibetic languages.

With the untimely death of Shannon Ward, we not only lose a brilliant scholar but also an enthusiastic and dedicated colleague. Her genuine interest in converting her research findings into practical tools for the Tibetan communities can be illustrated, for example, by the workshop on Tibetan Heritage Language Education she organized in May 2024 with the Tibetan community in Vancouver. I cannot claim to have known Shannon very well on a personal level, but our exchanges were always full of prospects for new ideas and projects, and I deeply regret that we did not have time to collaborate more.

Details on Shannon Ward’s research projects can be found here. An interview about her book Amdo Lullaby can be found here.