I think a very real question everyone on langblr needs to get better at asking themselves is: why do I want to study this language? Is it for vanity? Am I commodifying it? Would it be more respectful to study it without speaking it? And if you’re uncomfortable with posing these questions, then you need to take a massive, massive step back.
this guy is blocked now but anyway. asking for respect for ethnic languages is not overthinking things, it’s just asking that we don’t repeat mistakes of the past wrt linguistic colonization. and the fact that people genuinely get butthurt over being told “don’t fetishize other people’s languages that they’ve often been marginalized for speaking just so you can win some points online”… incredible
furthermore, to me, there are a few reasons to study a language, all of which are defeated if you force your way into a closed speech community:
communication (unless you are going to move to Ethiopia to speak Hareri, or whatever else you’ve been flaunting in your tumblr bio for vanity, what in the g-ddamn was the point? Oh, right, commodifying someone else’s language, which again, they have been marginalized for speaking.)
raising your socioeconomic status by speaking a particular language
love & curiosity of other cultures (again moot if you’re forcing your way into a closed speech community, because the first thing about love is respect, dumbass)
frankly the most enraging part of this is the “respect is not a variable that needs consulted.” if minorities & speakers of minority languages are telling you you need to be respectful about something, then refusing to do so is just!!!!! SO blatantly disgusting how do you not see this (except of course that you’re clearly a westerner lol)
Can I just add one thing here? Almost nobody in Ethiopia speaks Harari besides people who literally live in Harar and even then it’s primarily the ethnic population who actually use the language—many of the speakers I’ve met show a bit of anxiety towards the trend the language is going on now considering that Eastern Oromo and Amharic have much more social mobility prestige and Harari itself has always historically been restricted to the ethnic Harari population and some of the Argobba whom live in Harar—but the Argobba are unique in the sense that many of them come to no longer associate their ethnicity with their language as of recent. I’ve never actually seen someone say they’re trying to learn Harari, besides diaspora who can’t speak the language their parents know natively; but I wouldn’t be shocked if people tried to somehow find resources for it for brownie points on Langblr. The speakers literally call it ‘Gey Sinan’ which means “city language” (well you could translate ‘sinan’ as ‘discourse’ as well; the same root means arguing, in my language). They specifically associate it with the city that their ethnic identity is tied to.
But in all regards, a huge part of this issue is that people living primarily in western societies don’t comprehend languages as part of cultural property and identity in the same way I would as an ethnic Tigray from Ethiopia, or a multitude of other peoples globally. Because most languages in Europe, with some exceptions of course, are spoken by people of all different backgrounds since they’re the regional Lingua Franca if not the national language. So there isn’t that tie to identity in the same sense—so the idea of a language being the discreet property of a specific speech and ethnic population is indeed foreign and seems to them, somehow, to be selfish. Which it isn’t—polyglotism as a hobby is a Western thing. Being multilingual in much of the globe is a thing of circumstances but not a pastime. There’s people back home who speak 5-6 languages on a daily basis but it’s only because that’s circumstantial—but there’ll be neighboring speech communities who are on average monolingual because they need not speak more than just their own language.






















