བོད་རྒྱལ་ལོ།

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Actually, looking at history, no language will survive. Modern English is only 400 years old. >In a few hundred years, all languages will be very different from what they are now. Different enough to be considered a different language. It is normal.

    This is a completely different process than what’s outlined in the article. The article is about outright language death, like if Old English had died so that it never became Modern English.

    Language change is normal. Language death is, in our world, largely a result of colonialism, racism, and anti-Indigenous policies.


  • I don’t get why people are up in arms over lost languages or lost cultures, unless of course if it’s due to genocide.

    Which it often is, as I’m sure you know. We are in an awful situation for Indigenous languages.

    Regarding culture, people don’t lose their culture in general, they adopt other cultures over time.

    These are the same thing. People don’t just lose their culture and become cultureless. They lose their culture as they adopt another culture, but this process is largely driven by colonialism.

    Just like people have evolved biologically over time, so do we also evolve culturally, but the cultural evolution is much much faster.

    “Evolve”? Do you think European culture is superior to Indigenous cultures? We are destroying the planet in record time, and you are talking about “cultural evolution”? This is the language of 19th century racists who were blind to the nuances of culture. Different cultures are different ways of being in the world, each with its own pros and cons.

    And it’s fucking great that cultures evolve, because that’s the way to get rid of religion and other traits of our cultures that are detrimental to in general.

    Unfortunately, the cultures that have replaced Indigenous cultures around the world have largely been bigoted Christian cultures. Language loss is not caused by cultures becoming healthier – it is caused by unhealthy cultures killing other cultures.


  • there’s likely a good reason most of them are disappearing.

    This belief is called the “just world fallacy”. Sadly, the world is not just.

    Most of these languages are disappearing due to colonialism. People’s traditional ways of living have been forcibly upended by capitalists and state governments, who have seized the commons around the world, and by colonialist policies such as residential schools. No longer able to support themselves using their traditional ways of living, people have been mde into wage slaves who must compete on the market to survive. That means using English or another widely-spoken language. Indigenous languages are much less useful to capitalists, and so gradually they wither and die.

    We are at risk of killing 95% of the world’s languages, on top of the incalculable cultural damage that goes along with all of this, just to prop up a single way of being: liberal nation states. It is reprehensible beyond words.


  • Gurl the world’s population has been growing for hundreds of years and is still growing 🤦‍♂️ It is expected to peak at around 10 billion people.

    The loss of human languages is a direct result of colonialism + nationalism, which go hand in hand. People that want to unite a region under one government push for only a single language to be used in that region. Italy and China are prominent examples of this. The natural linguistic diversity of the region is decimated to grow a monoculture.

    Language loss is largely unrelated to people dying. Indigenous people live on, just without their languages, as they adopt the languages of their colonizers. This is very common across the world.

    When a language dies in a community, the transmission of that community’s culture is heavily impacted. Monolingual elders can no longer communicate (or communicate well) with younger generations, and the words in other languages do not capture the same nuances and connections as the words in their native language. The death of a language quickens the death of a culture, and that in turn quickens the death of indigenous knowledge systems.

    The different languages of humanity – our different ways of speaking, thinking, and being human – are treasures. They show us other ways of treating each other, other ways of organizing society, other ways of experiencing beauty and fear and anger. They show us that the world is broader than our narrow lens. We can never really escape the lens of our native language and culture, but we can step out of it for a while. And in doing so, we gain a greater perspective on what it means to be human.