How Languages can Oppress a Group of People

  Languages, in general, are the tools to expressing the world around us from the plants, used as medicine by the hundred or so Kallawaya language speakers, to the stories of our history, some of which are told by the forty or so Chulym speakers. Every language is powerful in its own right, but many of our languages are indigenous languages that, in our modern world, have not as much use in the business and economic worlds as languages like English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Because of their invisibility in the business and economic world, indigenous languages, as stated by linguists, are dying every two or so weeks. These languages, when they are lost, can cause an area or a community to lose their history and, they continue to disappear because languages are “actively oppressed or discouraged” to where, by the time children grow up, those languages have already disappeared. These languages are sometimes a blessing or a curse to lose, a blessing due to them oppressing a people but, on the other side of the coin, a curse as they empower a people. This is usually the case with indigenous languages in this constantly evolving world where the priorities are changing with every decade to a point where these languages, sadly, are unable to survive as the new generations find these languages unneeded. In the documentary, “The Linguists” they travel to Russia to find one of these oppressed and dying languages. In the country of Russia, a strong example of how indigenous languages can oppress a people, due to the heavily governed ‘Russification’ of any Russian citizen, many children were separated from their indigenous roots and lost their indigenous languages, such as Chulym, and were punished if they tried to reconnect with them. The Russian speakers and Russia-speaking government oppressed the Chulym speakers to conform to the Russian standards and, in fear of the government and of punishment, the Chulym parents began to separate themselves and their children from the language. They feared that the language would make them seem less and would cast them out from communities, leaving them isolated. In this fear, their language was oppressed and feared to be spoken to a point where only 40 or so people now speak Chulym. It is from this language’s history or fear that we can see how the knowledge of an indigenous language can oppress a people to a point where the language can be associated with fear.

The Value of Indigenous Languages

  Indigenous languages throughout the globe are disappearing due to their lack of practice with the younger generations. With some of the top languages in the world being Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi and Arabic, younger generations are more attracted to these languages, which, rather than their less commonly used indigenous languages of their local communities, allow these people to be able to get, and keep, stable jobs in the cities near them. In 'Speaking in Tongues' by James Geary, he states that linguists have determined that a language dies every two weeks at least. And it is due to their lack of ‘use’ in the business and economic world that they are losing their hold in their communities. But, these languages have much more importance than what meets the eye. These languages are the backbone of worldwide cultures and, as said by Geary, “the death of a language such as Tlingit means more than simply the loss of another obscure, incomprehensible tongue. It marks the loss of an entire culture.” These languages include these cultures’ beliefs through the words that they use and, according to botanists, they found that certain words or phrases in indigenous languages described certain plants almost identically to the plants these botanists found and studied that they named differently. Through this, these botanists were able to conclude that indigenous languages not only make up a culture’s beliefs, values and traditions, but it can also have the potential to show the migration patterns of an entire culture. This alone could show how integrated certain cultures truly are and allows us to hypothesize what the world could’ve looked like in the times of old for the ancestors of certain cultures to have been able to travel by foot or caravan across the world to, now seemingly impossible-to-reach, destinations. As Aryon Dall’Igna Rodrigues said, “The world is a mosaic of visions [and] with each language that disappears, a piece of that mosaic is lost.” This can relate to our world’s history as, without these languages, we are not able to fully piece together the history of our world from how our current cultures, languages, ideas and knowledge exists to how our countries and current cultures have come to existence. It is because of this that I find that indigenous languages are important to preserve as they carry a culture, beliefs and carry a history of a great many people.