294 L. Kingston, A. Seibert Hanson enhancement.” This call to arms for language policy to support language rights and thus minority populations is particularly relevant to the case of the Rohingya. The Rohingya Case The name “Rohingya” became part of public discourse in the late 1950s, when Muslim leaders and students in Myanmar’s North Rakhine State used the term to assert a distinct ethnoreligious identity, and it spread widely following reports of human rights abuses there in the 1990s and again after 2012 (Leider 2018, pp. 2). Studies of the Rohingya as a culturally distinctive Muslim community are rare and access to documentation is limited—indeed, “no research has been done on the East Bengali dialectology that would enlighten us on the regional linguistic variety” (Leider 2018, pp. 21). Primary source documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries note linguistic differences within the area’s Muslim community (see Leider 2018, pp. 5), and Muslim nationalists in the twentieth century debated the proper spelling of Rohingya for years—highlighting how the term had been transmitted orally, not in written form—until agreeing on the current rendition around 1963 (Leider 2018, pp. 9). The Union Citizenship Act of 1948 defined Myanmar’s “national races” as those groups that lived permanently in the country before the First Anglo-Burmese War (before 1824) (see Leider 2018, pp. 14). In response, the quest for “an encompassing Muslim identity called Rohingya” in the 1940s and 1950s led to the creation of a condensed historical account and an identity based on localized ethnicity rather than shared culture (Leider 2018, pp. 11). This “streamlined account of the past” that defined the Rohingya as an ethnic group that “existed since antiquity” was problematic, but it was seen as necessary for constitutional recognition and national belonging in independent Myanmar (Leider 2018, pp. 11–12). However, such recognition did not materialize—particularly as the concept of “national race,” or taingyintha, became a pre-eminent political idea in Myanmar. Nick Cheesman (2017) argues that taingyintha surpassed the importance of citizenship in Myanmar and has served to exclude the Rohingya, who are not included in the country’s 135 officially designated racial categories. “To talk of the political community ‘Myanmar’ is to talk of taingyintha, and to talk to that community is above all to address its members not as citizens but as national races,” he writes (Cheesman 2017, pp. 470). National Registration Cards (NRCs) (“green cards”) were used as de facto proof of citizenship in the 1950s and did not include taingyintha, but North Arakan Muslims were no longer issued NRCs in the 1970s and many NRCs were allegedly seized by the authorities (Leider 2018, pp. 14; Cheesman 2017, pp. 471). Discrimination against the Rohingya was formalized in 1982 when Myanmar’s Citizenship Law made membership to a national race “the gold standard for citizenship and the primary basis for determining the rights of someone claiming to be a member of the political community…” (Cheesman 2017, pp. 471). Although the law had provisions to prevent large-scale statelessness, campaigns against “illegal” migration led to discriminatory application of the law (Cheesman 2017, pp. 472). People in Myanmar were forced 13