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In the early 1990s, a small subset of linguists began raising the alarm,
trying to reorient a discipline whose well-meaning focus on elusive and
trivial “universals” had led it to ignore actually existing linguistic
diversity—an unfortunate legacy left by Noam Chomsky, who was a radical
and a linguist but not a radical linguist. The new advocates of
“language documentation” convincingly demonstrated that language
death—when the last native speaker of a language dies—is accelerating
dramatically. Would-be radical linguists, this writer included, have
been joining local activists in recording, describing, and maintaining
threatened languages, though our numbers and resources are still dwarfed
by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a Christian organization of
missionary linguists, whose ultimate goal is to translate the Bible into
every human language.
Sources of Radical Possibility
There are political, educational, scientific, and cultural reasons to
support endangered languages and the communities who speak them. There
is the straightforward question of justice and minority rights, since it
is always the powerful who impose their languages on the powerless.
There are the vast reserves of history, literature, knowledge, and
wisdom embedded in these languages, the loss of which leaves all of us
impoverished. Children learn best when educated in their mother tongue,
but, too obsessed with the imperatives of indoctrination and
assimilation, few governments ensure this basic human right. Linguistic
and cultural continuity holds people together, boosting the resilience
of indigenous communities in crisis. Multilingualism is strongly linked
to cognitive development, potentially enhancing our capacity for empathy
and open-mindedness. Yet far from being a marker of advanced formal
education, multilingualism is actually the preserve of the “bottom
billion,” who have no choice but to learn their more powerful neighbors’
languages.
Leftists, liberals, and progressives have a bigger stake in the future
of language than they know. We hardly realize how deeply embedded
capitalist mentalities now are in our very language—the ways we talk
about time, space, relationships. Liberals intensely aware of privilege
based on gender, race, class, or sexuality seldom consider linguistic
privilege—English (or Spanish or Chinese or Hausa) is just the air we
breathe. The politics of language, when we practice it at all, has been
about framing, about keywords, about sloganeering in the major
languages. Meanwhile, the ground is shifting under us.
full:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/radical-linguistics-in-an-age-of-extinction
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