US flags (Image credit: Wikipedia)

To help our readers make sense of it all, we bring you a new occasional series devoted to the politics of language and migration.

Following on from Rosemary Salomone’s essay providing the historical and legal background, political anthropologist Gerald Roche today shows how the axing of language access service provision is an exercise in necropolitics – a use of power that leads to the suffering and death of certain groups of people.

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On March 1st, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States of America. As a result, people are going to be harmed, and some will die.

There are direct and indirect reasons why this order will get people killed. Most directly, people will die as a result of this order because it will deny language access services to the more than 25 million people in the USA who need them. Apart from declaring English the USA’s official language, this order revokes Executive Order 13166 (August 11, 2000), which obliged US government agencies to provide language access services to people who need them.

Government agencies didn’t necessarily always fulfill their obligations under this order. But now, any motive they had to respect people’s language rights has been removed. Access to critical services will have life-threatening consequences in at least three arenas.

First, during natural disasters, such as fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, people require timely access to accurate information to have the best chance of survival. However, linguistic exclusion and discrimination are reproduced in how this information is provided to the public, resulting in what Shinya Uekusa calls ‘disaster linguicism’. Research during the recent LA wildfires by Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, showed that thousands of Asian Americans were denied access to disaster alerts and other information in their preferred language

Secondly, healthcare is another setting where language access is vital. When people’s language rights are respected in healthcare, they are more likely to use healthcare services, which are also more likely to be effective. When people’s language rights are violated, they are more likely to die in mass health incidents, such as pandemics. The individual consequences of linguistic exclusion can be seen in the case of Arquimedes Diaz, who called 911 after being shot, but was denied interpretation services for 10 minutes. Those crucial minutes were enough to leave him paralyzed. Any longer and he could have died.

A third area where people will be exposed to increased risk of death due to this executive order is the justice system. Sociolinguists such as Diana Eades, John Baugh, and many others have demonstrated that failures to account for linguistic differences lead to miscarriages of justice in police encounters, courtrooms, and elsewhere. This has life and death consequences particularly in the 27 states of the USA that still have the death penalty. However, we also need to take into account the fact that incarceration reduces life expectancy by 4 to 5 years, and that after incarceration, people experience twice the risk of death by suicide. Any miscarriage of justice on linguistic grounds that leads to imprisonment therefore has life and death consequences.

So, in disaster management, healthcare, and the justice system, the reduction or removal of language access services will directly expose people to harm and increased risk of death. There are also two additional, less direct ways that this order could lead to death.

First, we can look at the complex link between Trump’s official English order and death that particularly threatens Indigenous people. Trump’s order is almost certainly inspired by a law previously drafted by his vice-president, JD Vance: the English Language Unit Act of 2023. That proposed law included a clause stating that it could not limit Native Alaskan or Native American peoples’ use or preservation of their languages. The new order contains no such clause.

To understand why this is a problem and how it relates to death, we need to look more broadly at Trump’s record on Indigenous policy. During his first term, Trump carried out ‘continuous attacks’ on Indigenous communities, starting with a memo that reinstated construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Starting his second term, Trump signalled his hostility to Indigenous languages by using one of his first executive orders to wipe an Indigenous place name (Mount Denali) from the map. This prior hostility towards Indigenous communities, and Trump’s general austerity agenda, mean that Indigenous languages are likely to be underfunded during his second term. This will have life and death consequences, because decades of research has shown that language revitalization has health benefits, improves wellbeing, and reduces suicide rates.

Finally, Trump’s promotion of English and his hostility towards Indigenous peoples and languages should be viewed as part of a broader white supremacist agenda that has life and death implications for people of color. The push to make English the official language of the USA has always involved opposition to bilingualism, and often to specific languages: Jane Hill has noted how English-only movements often go hand-in-hand with efforts to limit the use and legitimacy of Spanish. These movements have gathered steam since the 1980s, and have consistently been associated with the right, and its more xenophobic, white-supremacist fringes: the linguistic fascists, as Geoffrey Pullum once memorably dubbed them.

Trump’s executive order effectively mainstreams the far-right linking of whiteness, English, and belonging in the USA. Asao Inoue has argued that the life-and-death consequences of this linkage start with the discursive circuits and communicative practices that shape judgments about whose language and life are considered valuable. But more directly, this order will legitimize the white supremacist practice of using perceived proficiency in English to target people for violence. We saw this in December 2024 in New York City when one person was killed, and another injured, after their attacker asked them if they spoke English. In another incident in July 2024, a man shot seven members of a family after telling them to “speak English” and “go back where they came from.” Trump’s official English order risks inciting similar acts of violence.

Taking all of this together, we can see that Trump’s executive order making English the official language of the USA will almost certainly harm people, and is also likely to lead to deaths. That’s why I think we need to take what I call a necropolitical approach to language – one that examines how language, death, and power intersect. A necropolitical approach demonstrates that designating English as the USA’s official language is not just a symbolic declaration, it is also, for some people, a death sentence.

Related content

In this episode of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast, Gerald Roche talks with Tazin Abdullah about his new book The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet. Gerald is also a regular contributor to Language on the Move and you can read more of his work here.

For more content related to multilingualism in crisis communication, head over to the Language-on-the-Move Covid-19 Archives.

Flag for autism rights (Image credit: Deviantart)

In this post written for autism acceptance month, autistic anthropologist Gerald Roche discusses connections between the communication styles and life expectancy of autistic people, and encourages sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and applied linguists to help work towards a better life for autistic people. 

Content warning: This post discusses suicide, sexual and physical violence, discrimination, and negative attitudes about autistic people. If you are in Australia and find this post distressing, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or chat online. Lifeline offers language support services. For non-urgent information about autism, call the Australian national autism helpline on 1300 308 699.

***

Hi I’m simply dying to speak to you! I have so much I want to tell you about being autistic because I’ve learned so much since I found out that I’m autistic. I’d love to tell you everything I know but that would probably take too long, so let me just tell you one thing about being autistic. Let me tell you why I went online and searched up “autism life expectancy” soon after I was diagnosed.    

Around that time, I’d just published an article examining how linguistic minoritization reduces life expectancy. To write that article, I’d been reading across literatures in the anthropology of violence, genocide studies, and critical public health for several years, learning about how different minoritized populations are subject to structural violence that produces a ‘slow death’ and reduces their chances of living a long, healthy life. This creates ‘death gaps’ in the social fabric, where the ultimate benefits of privilege are additional years of existence. So when I found out that I was autistic, I had a sense that I might be living in a death gap. And I was right. 

Autistic people in Australia, where I live, have a life expectancy 20 years below the national average. Similar findings have been produced elsewhere. Studies from the UK, USA, and Sweden all show that autistic people die alarmingly early. A recent study in The Lancet has suggested that the ‘death gap’ might be closer to 7 years, showing that the figures are still being debated. But, the pattern of severely reduced life expectancy seems clear. Why is this, and what does it have to do with language?      

First, it’s important to understand that differences in communication styles and preferences are central to how autistic people experience the world. Whilst autistic people don’t speak a different language from allistic (non-autistic) people, our communicative practices are vastly different from those of allistic people. The differences are found across multiple areas of language, including acquisition, gesture, pragmatics, lexicon, and preferred modalities. Failure to acknowledge, accept, and accommodate these communicative differences plays a crucial role in reducing autistic life expectancy. 

The most direct connection between autistic communication and premature death relates to health communication. Autistic people experience increased rates of multiple chronic health conditions, including physical health problems across all organ systems, as well as increased rates of multiple mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression. The impacts of all these health conditions is multiplied by failures to accommodate autistic communicative styles and preferences in healthcare settings. For example, one study from 2022 found that many autistic people struggle to make doctors’ appointments by phone (we generally have a strong preference against using phones), and then experience difficulties communicating with doctors, often feeling misunderstood. A 2023 study from Australia found that autistic people frequently felt that healthcare providers did not take their concerns seriously. These communication issues potentially result in delayed treatment, undiagnosed conditions, misdiagnosis, healthcare avoidance, and other problems that lead to poor health.  

Beyond issues of health communication, there are also more diffuse links between communication and the premature death of autistic people. To understand these, we need to think about autistic people as a minority group who experience “exclusion due to discrimination, stigma, and their perceived inferiority.” Since communication is part of what makes us different, it is also part of what makes autistic people vulnerable as a minority. 

Like other minoritized groups, autistic people experience personal and systemic discrimination from the dominant population. The press typically reports negatively on autistic people. Derogatory views of autistic people circulate openly online. Allistic people find us to be deceptive and lacking credibility, in part because of our ‘low quality and inaccurate’ facial expressions. They judge us as less likable, trustworthy, and attractive than allistic peers, and have reduced interest in pursuing social interactions with us. Even when allistic people express explicit positive views of autistic people, psychological testing shows that their behavior is guided more by their implicit negative views. Exposure to such bias and stigma is ‘constant’ for autistic people.

Rather than simply experiencing bias and stigma in the abstract, they manifest in our lives as violence. This begins in childhood, with autistic children experiencing much higher rates of multiple forms of violence than their allistic peers. This continues into adulthood, with autistic people experiencing higher rates of several forms of violence, including sexual harassment, stalking and harassment, sexual violence and physical violence, producing a condition known as poly-victimization. One recent study found that 99.6% of autistic adults had experienced at least one form of violence. Autistic women suffer disproportionately: in one study, nine out of ten autistic women reported being victims of sexual violence. Surrounded and overwhelmed by this violence, many autistic people normalize it as an inevitable part of our life, and even blame ourselves for it. 

Allistic people are able to target us for discrimination and violence in part because our communicative difference makes us visible to them. Perhaps not surprisingly then, many autistic people engage in ‘masking’ or ‘camouflaging’ – suppressing visible signs of autism, such as stimming, and changing our communicative practices to be more acceptable to allistics. However, this only defers the direct and immediate harm of allistic discrimination and violence. In the long term, masking is bad for our mental health, leading to higher levels of depression and anxiety, as well as lower self-esteem. It also contributes to autistic burnout, a debilitating condition characterized by “exhaustion, withdrawal, executive function problems and generally reduced functioning.” 

Masking, discrimination, and violence accumulate in a form of ‘minority stress’ in autistic people that results in “diminished well-being and heightened psychological distress.” In research carried out with other minoritized populations, the impact of such chronic stress on the body has been described as a ‘weathering’ that reduces overall immune function and leads to higher incidence and severity of disease. Chronic discrimination and violence thus harm autistic people both physiologically and psychologically. 

But perhaps the most distressing and tragic impact of this violence and discrimination is autistic people’s increased risk of suicide. Numerous studies show that autistic people are more likely to think about, attempt, and commit suicide; a 2023 meta-review of this literature concluded that “suicidality is highly prevalent” in the autistic population.

When I look at all this information as an autistic person, even though I’ve only learnt the statistics recently, none of it is particularly surprising. It more or less accords with my own lived experience. However, when I look at this information as a researcher, I am surprised: not so much by the information itself, but by who produced it and how. 

We are looking here at a population that is minoritized, in part, because of communicative differences. They are then subjected to discrimination and violence, with tragic outcomes. Despite the centrality of language to this situation, research in this area is led primarily by psychologists, with some speech therapists, a few sociologists, and the occasional anthropologist. The cluster of allied disciplines that look at language and communication in relation to social justice, including applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics, have so far had very little to say about this issue. 

It’s clear to me that our disciplines have a significant contribution to make here. We collectively know so much about the harms of language: slurs, labels, insults, jokes, and insidious discourses. We pay attention to the maldistribution of respect and resources to different language communities. We study how minoritization is produced and reproduced in everyday institutions, like schools, and how it enters into the most banal and intimate spaces and relations. We think carefully about how policy and practice stratify, exclude, and harm through and on the basis of language. And we also have plenty of ideas about what justice looks like, and the languages it uses. It therefore seems to me that we have an important part to play in conversations about what it really means to accept autistic people, and how to go about doing it. As a researcher, I know that we can, and as an autistic person, I hope that we will. Because right now, I’m dying to speak to you, and I wish that I wasn’t.    

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (1940-2023)

The Global Coalition for Language Rights is pleased to announce the first annual Language Rights Defenders Award. This award aims to recognize and honor individuals who demonstrate outstanding commitment to language rights. 

This year, the award is dedicated to the memory of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, a world-renowned language rights advocate and scholar who passed away in 2023. Tove’s life demonstrates the sort of attributes, efforts, and passion we are hoping to inspire and recognize through this award. You can read more about Tove’s life and work here.  

We have assembled a panel of experts to judge the inaugural Language Rights Defenders Award. Each of them is an outstanding defender of language rights: Robert Phillipson (Denmark), Jakelin Troy (Australia), Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (Nigeria), and Miryam Yataco (Peru). You can read here for background about the judges and their distinct expertise and experience in defending language rights.  

Any individual who has demonstrated outstanding commitment to language rights can be nominated for the award, including community activists, translators, advocates, scholars, or anyone else who defends language rights.

Submissions can be made in English, Swahili, Mandarin, Spanish or French, and people may nominate themselves or others. Nominations for the Language Rights Defenders Award close on April 22nd. 

Nominations should respond to the following prompt.  

In 500 words or less, describe this person’s major contributions to defending language rights. 

When answering this question, please keep in mind the criteria that judges will use (see below). In addition to answering the question above, submissions can also include up to five links or attachments as supporting evidence. Please email your submission to: global.language.advocacy@gmail.com 

Once all the nominations have been collated after April 22nd, our panel of expert judges, together with the co-chairs of the Global Coalition for Language Rights, will assess each nomination using the criteria below. Each judge will give a score between 1 and 10 for each criteria, and the co-chairs will also collectively score each nomination. 

• Commitment to defending language rights
• Impact of their work 
• Broader commitment to principles of peace, inclusion, and social justice 

If a clear winner emerges from this process, then the award will be given to that person. If not, the judges will meet to discuss a winner, choosing from among the five highest-ranked candidates. 

The winner of the first ever Language Rights Defenders Award will be announced on May 22nd, 2024.

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Adéṣínà Ayẹni [@yobamoodua] to Gerald Roche [@GJosephRoche] (2 Feb 2022): I will surely love to be a part of the global day. But one question, can I contribute in my language in place of English?

Gerald: My heart sank as I read this message on Twitter. I’d been messaging people all day, promoting Global Language Advocacy Day (GLAD22), the first ever global event dedicated to raising awareness about language rights. I was really proud to be part of this event, but reading this message suddenly filled me with doubt. Although I had assumed and hoped that people would use whatever language they wanted in participating in the day, I hadn’t really made that clear in how I communicated.

Claire: I responded to Gerald’s plea for personal stories of multilingualism for GLAD22, and in so doing, drew from my English resources to concretise the dialogue with Gerald, as a mediator to his (and my) followers. I wrote about my experiences as a multilingual that began with learning German. But, I wrote it in English to attend to the monolingual question-answer framework implicit in the Twitter reply function. This framework mimics social interactions, particularly in institutional settings, to see a dominant speaker lead a discussion towards certain personal, political and institutional aims. Interactants (like me) know that they are cut-off from doing this if we deviate from the lingua franca, limiting our combined reach. Thus, the replying function alone is structured by a monolingual bias.

***

In this piece, we interrogate the exchange that followed the question above to explore how I (Gerald) endeavored to uphold the language rights that are at the centre of our combined work with GLAD22 and the Global Coalition for Language Rights (GCLR). We interrogate the options made available by social platforms like Twitter and make suggestions for multilingual frameworks for communication that might be upheld in our future language rights work.

GCLR is a relatively young organization. It emerged in the early days of the pandemic when a group of organizations, based mostly in Europe and North America, came together to discuss the promotion of language rights. Founding members and co-chairs of the coalition were mostly representatives of non-governmental organizations and professional translation services. Membership in the coalition grew substantially throughout 2021, as GCLR expanded to include individual academics, activists, and advocates. The changing composition of the coalition, and its increasing size, began to see us nurture our definition of ‘global’ and its articulation through GLAD22.

For GCLR, being global means not just getting the message out as widely as possible, but also being as inclusive as possible, and working in a way that responds to the diverse challenges facing language rights advocates around the world. This global inclusion creates solidarity so we can act together, lending our support to those who face greater risks in their own advocacy.

The first GLAD22 used the phrase ‘language rights are human rights’ to nurture such solidarity. Modeled on Language Advocacy Day, GLAD22 aimed to raise awareness of the need to defend language rights, and to expand our network of solidarity, thus strengthening our capacity to work together in defense of language rights.

There were several approaches via social media to facilitate multilingual discussions but the majority of the engagement came through English language dialogue, which is where the question via Twitter was located.

A Twitter Exchange 

I (Gerald) responded to the request to participate in languages other than English with an enthusiastic ‘yes’. What followed was a post in Yorùbá, featuring a banner image with the phrase ‘Ẹ̀TỌ́ ỌMỌNÌYÀN NI Ẹ̀TỌ́ SÍ ÈDÈ’,—‘language rights are human rights’—alongside the GLAD22 hashtag.

Òní tí í ṣ'ọjọ́ kejìlélógún, oṣù Èrèlé ọdún; 22-02-2022 ni Àyájọ́ Ọjọ́ Àgbàwí fún Èdè Àgbáyé, àkọ́kọ́ irú ẹ̀ lágbàáyé. A ya ọjọ́ òní sọ́tọ̀ fún ìgbàsọ̀ láárí ẹ̀tọ́ èdè ẹni.
Àkórí tí 2022 ni Ẹ̀TỌ́ ỌMỌNÌYÀN NI Ẹ̀TỌ́ SÍ ÈDÈ.#GLAD22 #YORUBA #ETOSIEDE pic.twitter.com/wJbX3bSJtE

— ỌMỌ YOÒBÁ (@yobamoodua) February 22, 2022

The post featured a long thread covering existing language challenges in Nigeria and suggestions for improvement. Priorities included refocusing policy concerns for Indigenous languages as well as prioritizing Indigenous languages in the home and in education.

It received several likes and retweets, including by Gerald to his followers. This is important because Gerald’s actions demonstrated not only that he supported participation in Yorùbá, but also his institutional alignment. Other members of GCLR also engaged with the post, and in doing so, advocated for multilingual participation.

Later in the day, one of Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s mutuals, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (커라 투버순) [@kolatubosun], called out for a language rights group in Nigeria. Several of the key points of the first post were highlighted, especially those that pressure the government for language policy changes. This post was liked by several more users, who commented with their support for the group.

We need a language rights group in Nigeria. An organisation dedicated solely to advancing the rights of its languages. That supports language revitalisation and commits funds to supporting efforts in that direction; pressures government and policymakers on relevant issues, etc

— Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (커라 투버순) (@kolatubosun) February 23, 2022

This Twitter exchange provides some opportunities to ascertain the impact of Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s  multilingual interaction on the language rights values of GCLR and GLAD22. With the GLAD22 affiliation, users communicated their local barriers to language rights. They assembled to develop solidarity and organizing potential.

Importantly, these interactions were in contexts that GCLR has not yet managed to reach. As one observer pointed out on the day, GCLR had organized ‘no activities in or relating to Africa’ as part of the day. Thus, Gerald’s response helped catalyze meaningful discussion for Indigenous languages with strategies for implementation and, possibly, movement towards local organizing in Nigeria.

What if GCLR has real fit and capacity to do more? What if multilingual frameworks for communication were modeled by GCLR for use within platforms like Twitter, and beyond?

Initiating Multiple Moderators 

GCLR might mobilize the Twitter responses shown in this post, and others, to recruit them as moderators for future Global Language Advocacy Days. A series of starting points, methods for moderating in and to multiple languages might be developed amongst members.

These could include reaching out to key educational and government institutions listed in Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s post, to nominate individuals from their institution to speak on their behalf on the day within a nominated social media platform. GCLR members could act as moderators of these discussions in their languages, accumulating new communication hubs across several languages for GLAD23. These hubs could be observed to grow insight around multilingual designs for communication that may eventually be adopted by global north-based moderators such as us.

GCLR has the culture and capacity to do this. Throughout 2021, the coalition participated in a number of larger events, such as International Translation Day and RightsCon. Members’ presentations discussed the importance of language rights as a means of realizing linguistic justice, particularly in the digital realm. GCLR made this information available in as many languages as possible. We feel that it is a natural next step for GCLR to grow its member base meaningfully and initiate multiple moderators across several languages in GLAD23.

Redesigning Multilingual Frameworks for Communication

GCLR is also well-placed to improve decolonizing and multilingual frameworks for communication. Let’s say that Gerald offered to co-author a post with Adéṣínà Ayẹni that would be a thread between English and Yorùbá, linking with Australian and African institutions with power and reach. Such a post may invite comments in both languages (and varieties) that either moderator could respond to.

Such a post may invite language practices such as codeswitching to enter the dialogue because of an ease of intelligibility by the moderators. Users may draw from English resources creatively and as a tool for reaching wide audiences, defined by personal choices rather than monolingual biases. Such frameworks for communication may invite new language practices that emerge in digital spaces but rarely in English-dominated zones.

These frameworks go beyond the otherwise profit-driven knowledge generation in social media discourses as they redesign more socially and linguistically equitable interactions online.

There is great scope for testing such frameworks within Global Language Advocacy Day. On Twitter, the #GLAD22 hashtag received nearly 60,000 impressions with individuals contributing stories, ideas, and resources and language-focused organizations participating including the Linguistics Society of New Zealand, the PEN Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee, Cultural Survival, Tehlike Altındaki Diller, Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, and Hausa Language Hub.

Prefiguring Linguistic Justice

GCLR upheld language rights within several aspects of its communication in GLAD22, leading to 13 events in 6 countries in Asia, the Pacific, Europe, and North America and to the support of new debates such as those in Nigeria. We published about language rights issues in the UK and Bangladesh; New Zealand, Japan, the UK, Ireland and the USA, Australia, and Myanmar, organized a social media campaign on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and received attention in the media, such as this article in Kronos News that was published in English and Turkish. However, as advocates for language rights, we must discern ‘how’ we do this within the limited and often monolingual platforms that we are offered online.

We are currently working to create a set of multilingual principles and practices for the organization, which we aim to have in place before we begin planning Global Language Advocacy Day 2023. Doing so is part of the coalition’s prefigurative practices, i.e., those based on the idea that we should try to ‘create the sought-after forms of justice in the process of achieving structural transformation: to prefigure the world one wants to build.’

This work is also part of evolving organizational strategies in the coalition, which include the formation of working groups, modeled on processes that were used in the Occupy movement (among other contexts). These groups come together to undertake a specific task, without supervision, and then once that task is done, they dissolve. One of these working groups will develop the coalition’s multilingual principles and practices, which will undoubtedly evolve over time, while others address discrete issues raised by coalition members.

If you would like to be part of these language rights activities, and help to prefigure and work towards a world of greater linguistic justice, then we invite you to join us. Contribute your passion, ideas, and labor, your solidarity and commitment, to realizing our mission of language rights for all.

***

Source: Australian Museum

Editor’s note: This week (Nov 08-15) we are celebrating NAIDOC week. “NAIDOC” stands for “National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee.” The theme of this year’s NAIDOC week is “Always was, always will be” in recognition of the fact that First Nations people have occupied and cared for the Australian continent for over 65,000 years. Indigenous Languages have been a inextricable part of this history. Yet the value of Indigenous Languages continues to be denied, as Gerald Roche and Jakelin Troy show here.

***

A New Era for Indigenous Languages?

Despite decades of research and public outreach demonstrating the importance of Indigenous languages, negative attitudes about the maintenance and revitalization of these languages persist among the general public in Australia. Here, we argue that we need to think about the tenacity of these negative attitudes as a form of denial, like climate denial or genocide denial. We also argue that now is a crucial time to confront that denial.

2019 was nominated by the UN as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and the years 2022-2032 have been nominated as the decade of Indigenous languages. These high-profile international mega-events seemingly promise a coming era of unprecedented attention to and support for Indigenous languages.

This promise extends to Australia. We joined in the International Year of Indigenous Languages, with numerous activities organized by the Department of Communication and the Arts. The Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies recognized 2019 as an “opportunity for all Australians to engage in a national conversation about Indigenous languages.”

Source: Australian Museum

Australia is the only country in the world that has a national schools curriculum that supports the teaching of all its Indigenous languages. ‘The Australian Curriculum Languages – Framework for Teaching Aboriginal Languages and Torres Strait Islander Languages’ provides for every school in Australia to teach one or more Australian languages—the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. In spite of this historic development in our education system, most Australians seem to be oblivious or, worse, hostile to Australian languages. Plans are now afoot to take part in the coming decade of Indigenous languages, but how will Australia support Australian languages?

Ongoing trends and recent events in Australia suggest that significant challenges lie ahead. The Third National Indigenous Languages Report, published in August this year, found that most of Australia’s Indigenous languages are highly ‘endangered,’ while only a small and declining number (currently 12) are considered ‘strong.’ Meanwhile, recent efforts to bolster the role of English, seen in new regulations enforcing English requirements for partner visas, have strengthened problematic associations between the English language and Australian citizenship. And most disturbingly, we continue to see the destruction of Indigenous heritage by both commercial and state parties.

All of this suggests that Australia must still confront massive social and political barriers if Indigenous languages are going to flourish. As the analysis below demonstrates, denial of the importance of Indigenous languages and the reality of their revitalization persists, and are expressed in public forums with surprising impunity.

Indigenous Languages and the Australian Public  

Source: Australian Museum

We undertook a preliminary analysis of comments made on five articles in the Conversation, published between August 2014 and July 2020; the data we analyze is available here. These articles focused on different aspects of the maintenance and revitalization of Indigenous languages in Australia. We collated a total of 49 comments from them.

We began by classifying the comments into negative, positive or both/neither regarding their view of Indigenous languages. We found that  21 (42.8%) of the comments were unambiguously negative in their appraisal, while 14 (28.5%) were positive; the remaining were either neutral or ambiguous.

We then examined the negative comments for recurrent themes that were used to justify and rationalize these views. We found five major themes: language revitalization is impractical; it harms Indigenous people and communities; revitalized languages are inauthentic; government support for Indigenous languages is inappropriate, and; English should be promoted instead of Indigenous languages. Each theme is examined in turn below.

Commentators suggested that it was “impractical,” “absurd,” or not “feasible” to maintain and revitalize Indigenous languages, or that these languages are “doomed,” and therefore any interventions were useless. Some commentators took a modified position, suggesting that the proposed methods, rather than revitalization itself, were impractical. One commentator attempted to demonstrate the impracticality of supporting Indigenous languages with a hypothetical scenario: a factory in an “Aborigine area” where all signage would have to be in English as well as “the various Aboriginal languages/dialects,” leading to an unsafe work environment.

Another theme was that maintaining and revitalizing Indigenous languages is harmful. Some suggested that supporting Indigenous languages has adverse economic impacts, primarily because English is the language of economic advancement: “English, in Australia must be the language of the classroom as it will be the key to the factory, office and other workplaces.” Others stressed that supporting Indigenous languages would isolate Indigenous people: from the rest of society, in remote locations, and in the past. Support for Indigenous language was associated with Indigenous people living “in the desert, isolated from mainstream society,” “condemned” to becoming a “living museum,” unable to “appreciate their links to people in other regions.” A variant of this argument was that providing support for language revitalization takes funds away from communities where Indigenous languages are strong.

Source: Australian Museum

Commentators also employed a ‘bootstraps’ argument, insisting that government interventions in Indigenous languages were inappropriate because communities should take sole responsibility for their languages. One commentator stated that “The real responsibility lies within each community to promote language usage,” while another emphasized the need for “a grass roots commitment within the community.” This point was often stressed by making comparisons with successful efforts of migrant communities to maintain their languages in Australia. These comments seemingly imply that if Indigenous communities need government support, it is because they are either unwilling or unable to maintain their languages themselves.

A fourth theme in the negative comments focused on issues of authenticity. It was argued that the languages, speakers, or the use of languages were, essentially, fake. Regarding revitalized languages, it was argued that, “We don’t know what the languages were really like,” and that we can “never know” their pronunciation. Not only were the languages described as fake, but it was also asserted that, “Aboriginal people are really English speakers.” Finally, the use of such languages is also deemed inappropriate in the modern world, in places that “are now completely covered in concrete, industry, and modern life.”

A final theme was that English should be prioritized. The importance of English was sometimes suggested to derive from its official status: “English is the official language in Australia.” More often, it was suggested that English ‘simply is’ the dominant language, and that prioritizing it is mere realism: “Living in Australia means speaking English.” One commentator also suggested that English is a “very rich language,” that contains “the words needed for modern, global life.” This suggests that Indigenous languages are, by contrast, ‘poor’ and have vocabularies unsuited to ‘modern, global life.’

Source: Australian Museum

Understanding Denial

All the positions outlined above constitute denial insofar as they are counterfactual. In contrast to what these commentators suggest, language revitalization is thriving in Australia. Many languages of the south east and south west of Australia have come back into active use after more than one hundred years of dormancy. One such language is Kaurna of the Adelaide Plains, not spoken for more than one hundred years when its community began to reconstruct the language from sparse memories and some historic documents, assisted by linguist Rob Amery. It is now a thriving language with its community using the language on a daily basis for casual and formal communication. It began with the community wanting to teach the language in their schools and this continues today.

Rather than harming Indigenous people, language revitalization is linked to increased wellbeing. In talking about the renewal of Kaurna and other languages, Kaurna educator Stephen Goldsmith says, “When we’re talking about the Aboriginal culture, we’re talking about the cultural heritage of every Australian…When people go into communities they start to understand the depth and the knowledge of Aboriginal people and how we operate as part of the environment.”

Although language revitalization requires commitment from the community, it also requires government support, in both policy and funding. And languages that have undergone renewal of their use as community languages are as real and authentic as any language. Finally, English is not Australia’s official language nor is it an Australian language; it is a language of Australia, imported like the many others that are now languages of Australia.

Source: Australian Museum

These are all established facts, accessible to anyone who cares to look. There are debates about details, but not basic truths. Therefore, if the comments we analyze are expressions of ignorance, it is willful ignorance. More than merely counterfactual, however, these arguments are also denialist in the sense that they aim to obstruct a course of action that is suggested by those recognized facts. In this case, they aim to justify and rationalize an unjust status quo that Indigenous people have persistently spoken up against.

The denialist arguments described above follow a common pattern shared with denialist efforts to suppress language revitalization elsewhere. However, they also exist in a uniquely Australian context, and an important aspect of this context is anti-Indigenous racism. A recent survey found that three quarters of Australians hold ‘implicit bias’ against Indigenous people, and the Online Hate Prevention Institute has tracked rising anti-Indigenous racism in Australian online space, particularly following this year’s Black Lives Matter protests.

We need to better understand the relationships between anti-Indigenous racism and the denialist positions described here.

If the UN decade of Indigenous language is going to truly help Indigenous languages in Australia flourish, it will be essential to understand both the extent of denialist sentiments, and the complex ways they interact with the wider political context. Broad public support will be essential to promoting Indigenous languages: to create a safe space where Indigenous people can undertake the difficult and emotional work of reclaiming their languages; to protect communities and individuals from backlash; to ensure that funding is secured and its use supported; and as an essential part of any political change within our democratic political system.

To win this support, we have to stop denying the existence of denial, try and better understand how and why opposition to Indigenous language revitalization exists, and explore how it might be countered.

But if language revitalization is political, just what sort of politics is it?

Here, I want to think about language revitalization as a form of radical politics, based on a reading of the recently published Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics.

To begin with, what is radical politics?

Radicals don’t propose a single definition of the concept. My understanding of radicalism is that it is oppositional, and seeks fundamental transformation (rather than superficial tweaks), through the abolition of various forms of domination. In this sense, language revitalization is radical, because it challenges the global status quo: a planetary system of language oppression that is presently eliminating at least half of the world’s languages.

Language revitalization seeks a different world, not a better version of this one. It seeks a world where structural power arrangements allow all languages to flourish. This requires a fundamental transformation of current social and political arrangements, which are presently geared towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples and the continuing subordination of other groups according to race, ethnicity, caste, and religion.

Radical politics seeks to achieve this transformation through direct action. Although campaigning, lobbying, consciousness-raising, and other forms of progressive politics are part of the radical toolkit, more important are acts of civil disobedience, protest, disruption, hacktivism, and so on.

Moments of direct action have always preceded language revitalization movements. Such movements can only occur in the context of greater rights, expanded freedoms, and diminished domination that are won through struggle.

A key case in point is the revitalization of Indigenous languages in settler colonies such as Australia, the USA, Canada, and New Zealand. In all these contexts, larger revitalization movements emerged out of earlier efforts to maintain languages only after civil rights had been secured through protest and other forms of direct action. States did not grant these rights willingly; rather, these rights were won as a result of coordinated, purposeful, direct action by Indigenous peoples, fighting simultaneously in their homelands whilst networked across the globe.

Language revitalization is also connected to direct action in another way. If we accept that current structural arrangements lead to the elimination of certain languages, then simply using those languages is a form of direct action. In this sense, the anthropologist and Chickasaw language activist Jenny Davis has called language revitalization an “act of breath-taking resistance, resilience, and survivance.”

In addition to direct action, language revitalization demonstrates another important feature of radical politics: prefiguration. Prefiguration refers to efforts to create the sought-after forms of justice in the process of achieving structural transformation: to prefigure the world one wants to build. Language revitalization is prefigurative in that it restores languages to a community and the world before broad-scale transformation has taken place, as a model of how the world could and should be.

In addition to direct action and prefiguration, another important feature of radicalism is critique. It aims to name, describe and expose systems of domination, and to clearly outline their harms and their perpetrators. Radical politics is thus typically ‘anti’: antifascist, antiracist, anti-capitalist, antimilitarist, anticolonial, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchy.

This sort of critique has so far played only a limited role in language revitalization. Instead, discourses of language revitalization, particularly in the popular imagination, have been dominated by tropes of what Jane Hill called ‘hyperbolic valorization’: the heaping of abundant praise on these languages. Such praise, without a critique of domination, leads to what Daniel G. Solorzano and Dolores Delgado Bernal call ‘conformist resistance,’ which works towards social justice by offering ‘Band-Aid’ solutions that do not address deeper, systemic issues.

However, a structurally-informed critique is gradually emerging in relation to language revitalization. For example, Alice Taff and her collaborators use the term ‘language oppression’ to describe the ‘enforcement of language loss by physical, mental, social and spiritual coercion,’ and I have written about how language oppression can be analyzed similarly to other forms of oppression that occur in relation to race, nation, ethnicity, and religion. Indigenous scholars such as Wesley Leonard, Jenny Davis, and Michelle M Jacob are increasingly tying language revitalization to a critique of colonialism. Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh, in discussing the radical language politics of political prisoners in what is currently Northern Ireland, ties their language revitalization work to broader struggles against colonialism and neo-colonial globalization. And in Australia, Kris Eira has stated that, “what causes the loss of languages is dominance of one group of people over another.” Together with Tonya Stebbins and Vicki Couzens, Kris Eira has therefore called for the decolonization of linguistic practice.

This focus on a critique of colonialism and a positive project of decolonization increasingly forms a central aspect of radical politics, due to efforts to ensure that radical politics are intersectional. This means that radical projects explore how varying forms of domination and oppression interact, through discussion of concepts like racial capitalism, environmental racism, and the decolonization-decarbonization nexus. They also seek to ensure that radical projects do not create injustice for some while seeking justice for others, for example, through anti-oppression policies.

Because radical politics seeks to be intersectional, solidarity is central to its practice: solidarity within, across, and between movements. The first type of solidarity is highly relevant to language revitalization, given its communal nature. Thinking about solidarity as a form of negotiated goal-setting and coordinated action seems to provide a more constructive way of dealing with the conflicts that often arise in the process of language revitalization, compared to present interests in achieving ‘ideological clarification’.

Solidarity across movements refers to how people outside a movement can act as advocates, allies, affiliates, or accomplices to those within it. For example, I see my role as that of an ally for linguistic justice, rather than a language revitalization practitioner. One thing I think we can usefully do as allies is to help create safer spaces for language revitalization. As Ruth A. Deller explains in the handbook, safer spaces are those where, “…people from different marginalized groups can gather, speak and be resourced safely”—these may be physical or virtual. Whatever practices of solidarity we engage in, it is crucial to think about how we can decolonize solidarity—how we avoid reproducing the power structures and relations that cause language oppression in the first place.

Thinking about the third form of solidarity—between movements—provides a critical insight into an important shortcoming of the Routledge handbook. In a volume containing a chapter on radical bicycle politics and another dedicated to discussing what does and does not constitute radical music, language barely rates a mention. In a book that takes intersectionality and decolonization as organizing principles, the near total absence of any discussion of language is indicative of the need for a more expansive and more inclusive vision of what counts as radical politics.

This presents an opportunity for language activists, advocates, and allies to engage with radical academics and activists. We need to demonstrate how any analysis of oppression is incomplete without understanding the ways in which language serves as a contour of domination and an objective for emancipation. In turn, we have much to gain from a deeper engagement with the practices and philosophies of radical politics.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Shannon Woodcock, Christopher Annis, Rokhl Kafrissen, and Ingrid Piller for discussions and comments that helped improve this article.

A restaurant sign featuring both Tibetan and Chinese, in a village where the Tibetan residents speak Ngandehua, one of Tibet’s minority languages (Image: Gerald Roche)

As elsewhere in High Asia, minority languages in Tibet are the first victims of international tensions.

During the recent UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) periodic review of China, a total of twelve countries raised the issue of Tibet. In their response, the Chinese delegation devoted two minutes to discussing Tibet (begins 2:33:39), and half that time was spent talking about the Tibetan language.

Interestingly, none of the countries that raised the issue of Tibet explicitly referred to language. Why, then, did the Chinese delegation draw attention to this issue?

In part it is because they consider addressing language issues a key success in China’s program for Tibet. In white papers on Tibet in 2015 (April and September), 2011, and 1992, China has repeatedly boasted of its successful provision of language rights for Tibetans.

But, language has also been a significant aspect of Tibetan grievances and international scrutiny, particularly in the last decade. Students have protested against changes to bilingual education several times since 2010. Many of the 154 self-immolators in Tibet expressed fears regarding the fate of the Tibetan language. And most recently, the imprisonment of language advocate Tashi Wangchuk brought condemnation from the international community, including from within the UN.

China therefore had good reason to focus on language issues in its response during the UNHRC periodic review.

China’s discussion of language issues focused on the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR)—despite the fact that most Tibetans in China live outside it. They described efforts to translate official documents and media into Tibetan, the successful digital encoding of the Tibetan script, and the implementation of a bilingual education system in Mandarin and Tibetan.

It is unclear if these measures actually constitute an effective offset to the aggressive promotion of Mandarin. For example, Tibetans are currently deeply concerned about the increasing presence of Chinese loanwords in Tibetan, considering it evidence of more systematic imbalances between the two languages. However, even if these measures are effective in protecting Tibetan, they completely fail to protect other languages of the region.

For example, the non-Tibetan Monpa and Lhoba peoples of the TAR speak several languages. Although China is keen to draw attention to their Tibetan bilingual education program in the TAR, the languages of the Monpa and Lhoba people are completely excluded from schools. They instead receive education in Tibetan and Chinese, bringing with it all the well-known detriments of being denied mother tongue education.

Furthermore, not all Tibetans in the TAR use Tibetan as their first language. Linguists are still recognizing previously un-described languages in the region. There is also a growing community of Tibetan Sign Language users. Neither group is catered for by bilingual education policies that focus only on Tibetan and Chinese.

If we widen the scope to include Tibetans outside the TAR, the significance of this exclusion grows. Tibetans within China speak at least 26 distinct non-Tibetan languages, none of which are recognized by the state. A total lack of state protections for these languages is leading to language loss—all these languages are now being replaced by Tibetan or Chinese.

It is also worth pointing out that whether or not Tibetan itself is a single language is not a trivial question. Although sharing a common written language, the spoken forms of Tibetan are highly divergent. Some linguists classify ‘the Tibetan language’ in China into up to 16 languages. Comprehension between these spoken languages is low. Bilingual education policies that ignore this diversity also ignore the important role that comprehension plays in the classroom.

The response of the Chinese delegate at the UN periodic review, therefore, was missing the point. Promoting a single language is an inadequate measure to protect the rights of a multilingual population. In fact, promoting the Tibetan language in many cases impinges upon linguistic rights. This is the case not only of non-Tibetan populations such as the Monpa and Lhoba, but also for Tibetans who do not speak Tibetan, or primarily use a signed language.

Unfortunately, Chinese policy-makers are not alone in missing this point. Although international organizations that advocate for Tibet frequently focus on language issues, they consistently refer to Tibetans as an homogenous population with a single language. Like the Chinese state, they tend to ignore languages when talking about language rights.

The International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), for example, expends significant effort on their website explaining that the Tibetan language is not Chinese. And despite the fact that ICT has campaigned for Tibetan’s language rights, including within the UN, this has always overlooked the region’s linguistic diversity. The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, meanwhile, has published two reports focusing on language in education. Both these reports, in 2003 and 2007, focus only on a single Tibetan language.

Representatives of the Chinese state, and the international community of Tibet advocates, therefore, find themselves curiously united on this issue. Despite their obvious open disagreements, both agree that Tibetans speak only a single language. They therefore continue to debate linguistic rights in ways that erase and exclude Tibet’s minority languages.

This erasure and exclusion matters. It perpetuates the impression that some languages, like Tibetan, deserve rights, whilst others do not. And yet a commitment to the idea of rights involves a commitment to the equality of all people regardless of their language.

If China really wants to fulfill its constitutional promise to respect the rights of ethnic minorities, it needs to support all their languages, not just a few carefully chosen ones. And if the international community wants to hold China accountable for their failures to respect minority rights, we need to stop replicating their erasure of linguistic diversity, and focus attention on Tibet’s most vulnerable populations.

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