Language Loss

Causal Conditions

There are two main conditions that can lead to total language loss. The first is the total destruction of a people resulting in having no one speaking that language. In this case, the language disappears naturally. The second is uprooting and dislocation of a group of people from their linguistic community. Such a condition could eventually rob the dislocated people of their languages. The discursive formations within which language is lost are hegemonic and colonialist. In both cases, language loss is a product of cohesion or force, domination, control, and exploitation. The language of the dominant group displaces or marginalizes that of the subordinate group. Imperial domination, in all its variant forms, uses control over language and knowledge to silence the voices of the oppressed and to establish hierarchies of power that favor imperialist nations. For example, Western economic, cultural, and political dominance were underwritten through language and education. The displacement of languages of indigenous people [Page 423]with languages of imperialist nations resulted in indigenous people losing their self-image and self-confidence. Consequently, many colonized people, especially their elite, chose to share or participate in the benefits associated with the language of the dominant group and to avoid the inferiority associated with the indigenous languages of the marginalized communities.

Consequences

The colonizing forces created the social, political, and economic conditions essential for language loss. They not only dispossessed the colonized peoples of their material resources and political power but, in addition, devalued their cultures and languages. As a consequence, many colonized peoples, especially the elite, developed reverence for and faith in foreign cultures and languages while looking down upon their own. They began to believe in the colonially constructed hierarchy of cultures and languages in which cultures of colonized people and the languages through which these cultures are communicated or represented as inferior to the cultures and languages of the colonizing societies. Eventually, the colonized people believed that the cultures and languages of the dominating societies are best suited to effectively facilitate sociocultural and economic development in the colonial world. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains in the introduction to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, the European elite produced alienated indigenous elite. These elite were stuffed with a servile mentality that often manifested itself in rejecting indigenous languages as incapable of carrying complex thought. European education and training produced in them an unprecedented reverence for foreign cultures and languages and disdain, not only for their people but also for their cultures and languages. Thus, these “manufactured” elite were forced to adopt the languages of their colonizers or oppressors and to lose their own indigenous languages. According to Fanon, the African elite, by adopting European languages, assumed European culture, supported the weight of European civilization, and consequently possessed the world expressed in and implied by those languages. Extensive research reveals that colonization creates an inferiority complex in the soul of the colonized: Such an inferiority complex disconnects people from the sources of their creative potential and originality, including culture and language. Taking away the language and the culture it expresses takes away a people's initiative and thwarts their creative potential.

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