Indigenous Language Revitalization

Why Are Indigenous Languages Endangered?

The world's 370 million Indigenous peoples represent 4% of the world's population, but they speak 60% of the world's languages. The settings in which Indigenous languages are spoken are highly diverse, spanning situations such as that of Quechua, spoken by 10 million to 12 million people in six South American countries; to Māori, which shares co-official status with English and New Zealand Sign Language in New Zealand; to the diasporic Garifuna Nation dispersed across Central America, the Caribbean, and the United States; to the 175 Native American speech communities in the United States, some with only a handful of speakers and one—Navajo—with more speakers than all other American Indian languages combined. The viability of all of these languages is threatened, for unlike power-linked languages such as English, Indigenous languages have no exogenous pool of speakers. When an Indigenous language falls silent, the loss is almost always permanent.

The fate of a language is intimately tied to that of its speakers and therefore to power relations among groups. Language shift reflects the transformation of group identities through the domination of politically weaker peoples by those with [Page 1172]greater power. The educational linguist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas refers to this as linguistic genocide, or linguicide. Colonial schooling has been a key agent of linguicide. In the United States, the forced removal of Native people from their homelands was accompanied by compulsory education in English-only boarding schools. In Australia, the British colonial government implemented an infamous “White Australia” policy, forcibly removing Indigenous children from their families and placing them in distant residential schools where they were forbidden to speak their mother tongue and often suffered physical and emotional abuse. In the Nordic countries, Indigenous Sámi children were punished for using their language in school, and their teachers were paid by the government to monitor Sámi parents' language use at home. Throughout Latin America, segregated colonial schooling had the clear mandate of eradicating Indigenous linguistic and cultural difference. Thus, language recovery is not merely or even primarily a linguistic issue, but is part of a larger fight for Indigenous cultural survival, human rights, and self-determination.

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