In the past two days I have attended the confernce, and it's really a long one (8am-6pm daily). Today I have just presented my paper on the Zhuang character, but I felt it was not that good (as what I expected) because I failed to handle the time limit well.
Anyway, there are still lots of good things in Bangkok. Yesterday I met a Ahom professor. Ahom is a group of Tai people in Assam State of India, the most western Tai people. This professor told me that there are 6 branches among the Ahom people, and 5 of them still use their language to a certain extend. The bad thing is that most Ahom people can't speak their language anymore, however the good thing is that some Ahom activitists have already done a lot of work to protect their culture and langauge.
She was also very glad when I told her about the Zhuang people, their relatives in China. She said she would like to visit Guangxi someday to learn more about the Zhuang people.
I've also met a group of student from a Thai university. They work on a very small ethnic group in Southern Thailand, which is called Chong, to develope a writing system for them and teach the people to read and write, and it was really SUCCESSFUL! I asked a lot on their work, and will share with you all after I come back, I think their experience will be very useful if we want to promote Zhuang writing in Guangxi.
One of the key message in the conference is that, in order to promote a writing system, there must have COMMUNITY INVOLVMENT, which means the public must involve in the process of writing system development, and in the promotion of it. I think the failure of the Zhuang writing system, to a large degree, is because the "top-down" model is used, while all the successful cases I saw here in the conference are "bottom-up".
Another thing. The first group of people they targeted to teach the new writing system is the CHILDERN, but not the adults. It's really inspiring, as childern is the future of the society. Also it's far more easier for a child to learn a new writing system.
The conference has also tallked a lot on the bilingual or multilingual education. I will share more on it after I come back.
Overall speaking the conference is simply GREAT.
Cheers from Bangkok!