Mitra Ebadolahi Ebadolahi is a third-year
international development studies and history student who believes
that the forces of good will kiss evil on the lips. She encourages
comments at [email protected].
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Last week, while reading a brief article, I learned about a
government that had once disfranchised immigrant Chinese because
they were seen as “a threat to the purity of the ballot
box.” This same nation also recently eliminated multilingual
emergency telephone lines, cutting hundreds of thousands of people
off from relief services.
Believe it or not, I am speaking of the United States.
Throughout the world, similar acts of racism are occurring every
day. Presently, minority and indigenous languages are being
threatened by powerful elites who are imposing an unnatural
homogeneity upon people from innumerable cultural backgrounds. As a
result, the vast majority of the world’s languages are now
“endangered species,” and the issue of
“linguistic diversity” has become the subject of heated
international debate.
For many proponents of linguistic diversity, the world is being
colonized by English and other “mega-languages” at the
expense of indigenous and minority languages. Today, there are more
than 10,000 languages throughout the world. Alarmingly, as many as
90 percent of these languages may be extinct or moribund ““
that is, no longer learned by children ““ by the year
2100.
Currently, 80 percent of the world’s languages exist in
only one small region or country. Thus, some people have argued
that it would be beneficial, even logical, for all people to
communicate in just a few international super-languages.
Illustration by RACHEL REILICH/Daily Bruin Yet a closer look at
linguistic diversity indicates the profoundly negative impact the
disappearance of languages will have on the planet. First, there is
mounting evidence linking linguistic diversity to biodiversity and
a balanced global environment. According to Dr. Tove
Skutnabb-Kangas, vice-president of the international nonprofit
group Terralingua, “It has taken centuries for people to
learn about their environments and to name the complex ecological
relationships that are decisive for maintenance of biodiversity.
When indigenous peoples lose their languages, much of this
knowledge also disappears.”
Take for example Californian English. Nowhere in our vocabulary
do we have terminology for indigenous agricultural methods or names
for hundreds of thousands of tree species. Given that we do not
live in a rainforest, this is understandable. If indigenous
languages from rainforest regions disappear, however, we will lose
this information, which is central to the maintenance of
biodiversity. And all the “hellas” and
“dudes” in the world won’t bring it back.
In a recent environmental program report, U.N. officials stated,
“Threatened languages store the knowledge about how to
maintain and use sustainably some of the most vulnerable and
biologically diverse environments in the world.” In other
words, as languages diminish, so does the human capacity to care
for fragile ecosystems and biodiversity.
Secondly, it is critical to recognize that the groups most
affected by linguistic colonization are the same as those which
have been subjected to ongoing economic colonization over the past
five centuries: indigenous and minority populations.
One of the many types of violence that has been committed
against these peoples throughout the last 500 years is linguistic
genocide, in which indigenous culture is destroyed as
mega-languages such as English or Spanish become the only legal
languages of a particular region.
According to the original U.N. definition, linguistic genocide
is “prohibiting the use of the language of a group in daily
intercourse or in schools, or the printing and circulation of
publications in the language of the group.” The definition
also includes indirect prohibition, whereby native speakers of a
minority language are made to feel ashamed of their language and
are overlooked by publishers and libraries discriminating against
literature in these languages.
Indigenous peoples control or manage nearly 20 percent of the
world’s land and speak over 60 percent of the world’s
languages despite representing only 4 percent of the total human
population. Indigenous groups effectively serve as the
planet’s guardians; therefore, life on Earth is seriously
threatened when its linguistic traditions are attacked.
Thus, though the issue may seem farfetched, linguistic diversity
is actually very relevant to our future survival. Unfortunately,
linguistic genocide continues daily. According to Dr.
Skutnabb-Kangas, “The media and educational systems are the
most important direct agents in language murder today,”
prioritizing certain languages over others while portraying
indigenous and minority populations as backward and less
competent.
These patterns are present here in Los Angeles. In 1998,
Californians passed Proposition 227, which institutionalized
English as the sole official language for all state government
programs, including health and social welfare services. The
proposition paved the way for an English-based monoculture and
catalyzed a national movement against linguistic diversity within
the United States. Perhaps most significantly, however, Proposition
227 has destroyed bilingual public education in a state that is
home to more than 40 percent of the nation’s “limited
English proficient” students.
Twice a week, I work as a bilingual literacy tutor in East Los
Angeles with Spanish-speaking first graders struggling to learn
English in the post-227 LAUSD. I have witnessed first hand the way
children are led to reject their bilingualism and to see their
Spanish skills not as a gift, but rather as something to be ashamed
of, an inheritance to renounce. If this isn’t linguistic and
cultural genocide, what is?
The attack on languages is yet another way in which homogenized
culture is being thrust upon our globalized planet. Agricultural
monocultures are dangerous for crops, rendering them more
susceptible to pests and destroying soil. Similarly, a cultural and
linguistic monoculture is dangerous for people, destroying the
foundations of our complex human relationships.
In order for biodiversity and traditional/indigenous knowledge
systems to survive, linguistic and cultural diversity must be
maintained. In order for such diversity to be preserved, linguistic
genocide has to be stopped.
We can take immediate steps to slow the elimination of our
precious languages. For starters, we should strive to be bi- or
multi-lingual, and view other languages not as barriers, but rather
as wealths of knowledge available to us as long as we respect them.
We can agitate for bilingual education programs and seek to require
teachers to be bilingual themselves. These are not impractical
solutions, as the proponents of “English-only” laws
like Prop. 227 want us to believe. Rather, they are the first steps
toward creating a society which values cultural and linguistic
diversity.
As Dr. Skutnabb-Kangas wrote, “When speakers of small
languages learn other, necessary, languages in addition to their
native languages, they become multilingual, and the maintenance of
linguistic diversity is supported. When dominant languages such as
English are learned subtractively, at the cost of the mother
languages, they become killer languages.” If we want to avoid
becoming mere carbon copies of one another, and are serious about
surviving, we must stop the destruction of linguistic
diversity.