The ‘rationality trap’ of language shift: family language policy and investment in boarding schools in Tibetan areas of China

Boarding schools dominate compulsory education in Tibetan areas of China and enrol approximately 78% of children aged 6–18; yet their consequences for intergenerational language transmission remain underexamined from a family perspective. Drawing on Norton’s investment framework and Bourdieu’s notions of field and habitus, this multi-sited qualitative study analyses semi-structured interviews with administrators, parents, teachers, and students across Sichuan Province and the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) to examine how families negotiate linguistic investment within boarding schools. Employing a focal case strategy, we document standard-language normalisation and three interrelated actor responses: parents pursue contradictory investment through a dual-track strategy, balancing institutional compliance with private ethnic-language remediation; teachers create shrinking interstitial spaces for Tibetan within monolingual boarding environments; and one focal case (Dolma) exhibits a U-shaped trajectory from adolescent self-silencing to reconstruction at university, suggesting a pattern warranting further investigation. Together, they reveal what we term the ‘rationality trap’: a structural configuration in which individually rational choices converge to produce collective language shift. Treating the examination-driven linguistic marketplace as a supra-regional field, we show how families and educators reproduce the structural conditions that constrain them.