Why we do what we do

Language death and script death are often written about–most recently in The Economist–as if languages and alphabets die of natural causes, or misadventure.

Not true. And if we discuss them in those terms, they are more likely to perish.

I’d like to quote just three of the points made by Gerald Roche in this recent article.

He writes: “Oppression, not endangerment, lies at the heart of the global language crisis. Languages, and the people who use and identify with them, are dominated, deprived, marginalized, stigmatized, excluded, and subordinated. These languages are not endangered. The distinction between oppression and endangerment is the distinction between an approach that is explicitly political, and one which consistently works to depoliticize the problem. Furthermore, while endangerment is a feature of languages and populations, oppression is a feature of systems, structures, and relationships. Talking about language oppression centers the political and the relational; endangerment blames the victim. While endangerment highlights symptoms, oppression focuses on the causes of the underlying problems that need to be solved.

“Languages don’t oppress themselves. A failure to identify unjust political relations, and a tendency to blame victims, are entrenched in the language of endangerment discourses. These problems are often seen in the use of passive language. Languages are said to decline, vanish, die, and disappear. Populations dwindle, recede or get depleted. When active language is used, it often blames the community: languages are forgotten, lost or abandoned. Or, blame is deferred by referring to false protagonists that are described as causing endangerment, such as modernization, urbanization, migration, or globalization (none of these processes ever seems to endanger dominant languages). In order to center relations of inequality and injustice, we need use active language that places the onus on the perpetrators and aims to identify the institutions and individuals that create and maintain structures of injustice.

“People, not languages. Endangerment discourses focus on languages: how languages are lost, how many are endangered, how we can record or revitalize them, what it means when a language dies, what the value of language maintenance is, and so on. A social justice approach focuses on people. Speakers and signers of a language are oppressed. Communities are excluded. People are stigmatized and suffer. To constantly remind ourselves that language oppression is a human tragedy, and not an abstract decline in knowledge or diversity, we must constantly work to center people. The global language crisis is, in truth, a global crisis of human suffering.”

I would add that the academic tradition of remaining dispassionate and distanced, of studying rather than engaging, is also partly to blame for the current situation in which, as he writes, “endangerment linguistics has failed as a discourse: as a way of thinking and talking about a problem, and a way of perceiving and acting on the world.”

The Endangered Alphabets Project changed direction significantly in 2012 when, after actually meeting people from oppressed cultures rather than just carving their scripts, I realized it wasn’t enough just to study and be interested. You have to get involved.

This causes a whole new set of challenges and opportunities to get things wrong–but it’s still the right thing to do, the necessary thing to do. And it’s why in the end, as he says, it’s not about languages or alphabets. It’s about people, and their right to be treated with equality, dignity, and respect.