#linguicide

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

[deep-down-in-drowsy-town]

the really nebulous thing about linguicide is how it's both a self-perpetuating problem and a problem that encourages its own complacency.

let's say you have group A (the colonizer) who come into contact with group B (the colonized). group A will start extracting group B's resources, expanding territory, imposing various forms of slavery... the classic colonial bullshit. they create an aura of power and authority around them, and use this to reward members of group B who assimilate- including, of course, by learning group A's language.

a hundred years later. group A is now a dominant colonial force, and there's a substantial population of ethnically-group-B people entrenched in group A's system, who speak group-A's language and might have even lost their own. the majority of group B people, however, still speak their ancestral language. group A sees this as a "problem" that must be solved, and so they take more active measures: establish mandatory public education in the colonial language (and actively punish students who speak the ancestral language), ban publications and other media, and generally destroy all sociolinguistic infrastructure for the ancestral language, making adaptation of the colonial language a (seemingly) obvious choice.

you're heard all this; what i find interesting is what happens after. say the colonial power leaves, the colonized region gains independence or autonomy and the language comes back into the mainstream. even then, the process of linguicide isn't over. the social and psychological damage already done finishes the process. calls for language revitalization are met with "no it's too expensive, it's too complicated, the ancestral language isn't useful think of these kid's future!" or alternatively, young people who attempt to pick of the ancestral language are called "fake" "inauthentic" "poor speakers" and told to give up and just speak the colonial language.

some examples of the first:

breton in schools is i think bullshit (obligatory i mean) already most students don't give a shit about classes, there's a huge lack of teachers, a new language would be too much and not useful compared to english or german or spanish

i speak english spanish and german; i can talk to millions of speakers, breton? uhhh....

in both cases the revitalization of Breton is dismissed because of its apparent inutility. the colonized are complacent in an issue fundamentally caused by the colonizers.

and some examples of the second, even more frightening case (from this video):

here, as in many other cases, a genuine effort to speak the ancestral language is met with scorn and mockery because the speaker does fit the exact model of a "true authentic rural" native language speaker. this leads to a negative feedback loop, discouraging others from learning the language and making true revitalization impossible.

there's a third language ideology at play here; one admittedly mostly professed by speakers of majority languages, but that's important nonetheless. this is the idea that, since language is nothing more than a tool for communication, revitalizing any language is a fundamental waste of time. if everyone speaks English anyway, why bother? in fact, why not do more linguicide so that everyone speaks the same language?

(see also this post by @useless-catalanfacts)

so you can see how these three ideologies would lead to a slippery slope of inevitable language death. once the colonizer language entrenches itself into a society, even well-meaning colonized people can become highly complicit in its dominance.

of course, it doesn't have to be this way. language revitalization IS possible, and happening everywhere. the classic success story is Modern Hebrew, but there are many many others. the number of Welsh speakers has risen by 25% since 2010. you can now watch Star Wars in Navajo and Terminator in Occitan. every little thing helps- but only if we take a deep, critical look at our language ideologies, and the true value of multilingualism in our shared future.

[dontforgetukraine]

Ukrainian language and literature have been a target for Russia for many years. Today, they are the target for its missiles, drones, and bombs. In past centuries, they were the targets of imperialist persecutors who hunted down Ukrainian writers. —MFA of Ukraine

Russia targets printing houses like Faktor-Druk in Kharkiv, which only recently restored some of its printing capacity and began printing textbooks for the new school year.

The Ukrainian language is also suppressed in the occupied territories. You can be tortured and killed just for speaking it. Libraries are targeted and destroyed and there has been an immense loss in the number of Ukrainian books.

In Soviet times, the Ukrainian letter "ґ'" (sounds like the letter g in English) was banned by the Soviet government. Ukrainian spellings were changed to make it more similar to Russian. If Ukrainian words differed from their Russian counterparts, those words were banned and replaced with more phonetically similar words to Russian. Any separation of the Ukrainian language from Russian was seen as nationalistic.

Russian propagandists and useful idiots love to promote the narrative that Russian speakers are oppressed in Ukraine to justify their invasion, but Russia has a lengthy history of committing linguicide of Ukrainian that continues into the current war today.

[tomorrowusa]

This episode of Ukraine's True History from the Kyiv Independent deals with Russian attempts to suppress the Ukrainian language, and culture in general, for over 300 years.

Russia has been trying to wipe out Ukrainian identity for over 300 years. There is little difference between the tsars, the communists, and Putin. All have been imperialists with the aim of Russian domination.

There are some people, mostly Putinistas and ignoramuses, who claim that Russian and Ukrainian are the same language. For now I will hold off on a linguistic explanation of how they aren't. But if they weren't really different, why would Russia spend three centuries trying to wipe out Ukrainian?

[a-really-big-cat]

When at the mid-19th century, primary school is made compulsory all across the State, it is also made clear that only French will be taught, and the teachers will severely punish any pupil speaking in patois. The aim of the French educational system will consequently not be to dignify the pupils' natural humanity, developing their culture and teaching them to write their language, but rather to humiliate them and morally degrade them for the simple fact of being what tradition and their nature made them. The self-proclaimed country of the "human rights" will then ignore one of man's most fundamental rights, the right to be himself and speak the language of his nation. And with that attitude France, the "grande France" that calls itself the champion of liberty, will pass the 20th century, indifferent to the timid protest movements of the various linguistic communities it submitted and the literary prestige they may have given birth to.    [...]    France, that under Franco's reign was seen here [in Catalonia] as the safe haven of freedom, has the miserable honour of being the [only] State of Europe—and probably the world — that succeeded best in the diabolical task of destroying its own ethnic and linguistic patrimony and moreover, of destroying human family bonds: many parents and children, or grandparents and grandchildren, have different languages, and the latter feel ashamed of the first because they speak a despicable patois, and no element of the grandparents' culture has been transmitted to the younger generation, as if they were born out of a completely new world. This is the French State that has just entered the 21st century, a country where stone monuments and natural landscapes are preserved and respected, but where many centuries of popular creation expressed in different tongues are on the brink of extinction. The "gloire" and the "grandeur" built on a genocide. No liberty, no equality, no fraternity: just cultural extermination, this is the real motto of the French Republic.

Jaume Corbera Pou, doctor in Catalan philology and professor at the University of the Balearic Islands

[useless-catalanfacts]

Experiences of Northern Catalans during “La Vergonha” (France’s policies of cultural and linguistic extermination)

The Great Linguistic Genocide of France is often referred to as “La Vergonha”, an Occitan word that means “The Shame”, because France’s objective was to make speakers so ashamed of themselves (or their parents) that they would completely distance themselves from their language and culture, and would put all their efforts in becoming French instead.

The French State used official exclusion, humiliation at school, rejection from the media, and sanctions in order to eliminate the local languages (Occitan, Breton, Basque, Catalan, Corsican, Alsatian, and the different langues d’oïl) and succeeded in making most of these languages be on the brink of extinction nowadays. The Vergonha is still a taboo topic and many French people deny it ever existed, while some people still call their non-French language patois (a despective word that means a mix of languages spoken by uneducated people) encouraged by the fact they were never taught how to write it and made to think only French exists in the written form.

In the school of Camélas in Northern Catalonia, a former pupil reports:

“Everyone but the teacher's children spoke Catalan among themselves. We'd even get punished for that, because at the time, we all had to speak French. Be Clean, Speak French could be found written on the school's walls. And if you refused to speak French, they'd give you some sort of wooden sign to wear until death came, as we said, which meant the last offender, in the evening, had twenty lines to copy. We'd speak French in the schoolyard, and for the first ten metres of the way back home, for as long as we thought the teacher would overhear us, and then we'd switch back to our own mother tongue, Catalan.

In those times, Catalan speakers were rather despised. My generation associated speaking Catalan with a disadvantage, with being less than the others, with running the risk of being left behind on the social ladder, in short with bringing trouble.”

Professor Jaume Corbera Pou adds the following about the French policies in the second half of the 20th century:

“When at the mid-19th century, primary school is made compulsory all across the State, it is also made clear that only French will be taught, and the teachers will severely punish any pupil speaking in patois. The aim of the French educational system will consequently not be to dignify the pupils' natural humanity, developing their culture and teaching them to write their language, but rather to humiliate them and morally degrade them for the simple fact of being what tradition and their nature made them. The self-proclaimed country of the "Human rights" will then ignore one of man's most fundamental rights, the right to be himself and speak the language of his nation. And with that attitude France, the "grande France" that calls itself the champion of liberty, will pass the 20th century, indifferent to the timid protest movements of the various linguistic communities it submitted and the literary prestige they may have given birth to.

[...]

France, that under [fascist dictator of Spain] Franco's reign was seen here [in Spanish-occupied Catalonia] as the safe haven of freedom, has the miserable honour of being the [only] State of Europe—and probably the world — that succeeded best in the diabolical task of destroying its own ethnic and linguistic heritage and moreover, of destroying human family bonds: many parents and children, or grandparents and grandchildren, have different languages, and the latter feel ashamed of the first because they speak a despicable patois, and no element of the grandparents' culture has been transmitted to the younger generation, as if they were born out of a completely new world. This is the French State that has just entered the 21st century, a country where stone monuments and natural landscapes are preserved and respected, but where many centuries of the people's creation expressed in different tongues are on the brink of extinction. The "gloire" and the "grandeur" built on a genocide. No liberty, no equality, no fraternity: just cultural extermination, this is the real motto of the French Republic.”

Source

[prairieewolf]

“MY PERSONAL LINGUICIDE?¿”

A transmission of silenced language transferring to the current generation. Really loved doing this one.

[deep-down-in-drowsy-town]

Anyone else currently thinking about the deliberate eradication of regional languages in France through government and educational policy in the 19th and 20th centuries- a linguistic genocide known as the Vergonha that has far reaching ramifications up to this day, from government officials denying it ever happened to ever-growing secessionist movements with linguistic revival at their core- and the fact that outsiders never seem to learn this long, brutal, shameful part of recent French history?