Abstract
Unesco will launch its decade of indigenous languages in 2022, with the Los Pinos Declaration – signed in Mexico City – emphasising indigenous people’s rights to freedom of expression, to an education in their mother tongues and to participation in public life using their own languages.
But while some are seeking to preserve languages, others are trying to wipe them out. In China’s internment camps, Uighur Muslims are required to speak Mandarin rather than their native Turkic language. In a document published last year – The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in Xinjiang – the Chinese government outlined its expectations of “trainees” in such camps.
Learning Mandarin is about “acquiring modern knowledge and information” and “adapting to contemporary society”. Even Uighur families who are not in the camps are monitored to make sure they speak Mandarin – even in their own homes.
China is by no means the first nation to repress minority languages in a bid to crush a movement or a people. The practice is as old as language itself.
And as the world becomes more global and people travel more, dominant languages such as English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic are pushing other, lesser-spoken, languages out.
Aurélie Joubert is a linguist who specialises in Occitan, the ancient lyrical language used by troubadours in medieval times. Although it is still spoken – mostly in southern France, but also in parts of Italy and Spain – it has been under threat for a long time.
Joubert believes that language loss is almost always down to politics when “one dominant culture takes over”.
“Why? Well, politically, one group – the elite – speaks one language and dominates all the regions, so the languages spoken in those regions become less important.”
The French language was used after the revolution to unite the country and get rid of the feudal system.
“It applies to a lot of countries. To unify a country politically, you try to impose a language on a national level,” Joubert said.
Making everyone speak formal French was to “enlighten people” and give them, she added ironically, the “brilliance that is the French language”. It became about expressing French national identity.
Regional languages were spoken only in private. And as communication increased and people became more mobile, leaving their villages to work in towns and cities, those languages died.
The introduction of the radio, said Joubert, meant that families began to listen to French and speak it at home, so languages such as Occitan were downgraded. Instead of being considered a proper language, it was referred to as a patois (a non-standard, provincial dialect) and became regarded as a sub-language, or barely a language at all.
And the more people tried to blend in, the more languages disappeared.
“That affects people on a very personal level,” said Joubert, who has interviewed many Occitan speakers for her research, “because you start losing your identity”.
Until the 1950s, schools in France were forbidden to teach regional languages. They then became an “option”, but were rarely taken up because of a lack of resources.
Corsican was missing from the list, ostensibly because it was too like Italian but in reality because of rising Corsican separatism.
In 2008, when regional languages were barely spoken at all, the government added Clause 75.1 to the French constitution, which said that “regional languages are part of the national heritage”. But Article 2 of the constitution is clear. The language of the republic is French. And language guardian Académie Française polices the French language and decides usage, grammar and vocabulary.
The people responsible for wiping out many languages have been English speakers. Native languages on the American continent disappeared as native Americans were massacred by colonialists. Aboriginal languages have all but vanished in Australia due to colonisation – of the 250 in use in 1788 only 13 are still spoken by Australian children – and despite it’s professed desire to support indigenous languages, there is pressure for indigenous people to speak English.
It is the only language taught in schools, and government documents are produced in English.
Some of the imposition of English has come about in the way Joubert describes the French experience: if you want to get on in the world, you have to speak English.
As a result, English is now spoken in more countries (101) than any other language, and there are more people learning English (1.5 billion) than are learning any other language.
But many developed countries have justified getting rid of indigenous languages and culture as being a religious “civilising” mission.
In Canada between 1863 and 1998, more than 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools run by religious authorities and the government. Children were not allowed to speak their own languages or practise their cultures. Many were abused and died. A Truth and Reconciliation report published in 2005 called it “cultural genocide”. In 2019, the 2,800 children who had died in the homes were recognised for the first time and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, in partnership with the Aboriginal People’s Television Network, unveiled a national memorial.
Canada is now one of the countries working with Unesco on preserving the languages of Nisga’a and others trying to bring them back.
Mexico is doing something similar. It has the greatest linguistic diversity of anywhere in the world but – according to the National Institute of Indigenous Languages – hundreds of dialects are in danger of disappearing.
In the rest of Latin America, indigenous rights are closely linked to languages which are dying out. Even though there have been efforts to save them, and native languages are recognised, it is almost impossible to have a career or to fill in legal documents using those languages.
Jaco Du Toit, a Unesco chief of section, helped build the Unesco Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, which has been renamed the World Atlas of Languages. It maps which languages are spoken around the world.
“Our strategy is to advocate for multilingualism and its importance in the development process,” he said.
Unesco is also looking at novel ways to help keep languages alive, for example through digital empowerment. And the First Peoples’ Cultural Council in Canada has already developed dictionary apps to revitalise indigenous languages across several countries.
A parade in the city of Bilbao in the Basque Country in 2011, part of the annual Semana Grande festival. The Basque Country straddles the border between Spain and France, and is home to people who traditionally speak the Basque language
CREDIT: Jarnogz/iStock
Du Toit says losing languages means losing whole ways of understanding the world. Some languages, he says, have different words for different clouds, and those symbolic words, with their nuanced description of how the clouds behave, might help us save crops.
For Joubert, the disappearance of languages is like climate change and, in the same way, what is happening is intrinsically political.
“The link between the two is the respect of natural habitat. It’s maybe more obvious for climate change – for instance, lakes – but for language it happens when you purposefully, or not, destroy communities. That means a language does not have its natural habitat.”