But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely?
Ocean Vuong • On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel
She could feel the whispers in her chest, could hear them in her mind. When she was a child, before the war, before the river, her parents spoke to each other in Yiddish, a language they didn’t share with her. This was how the river felt to her—a language that soothed her, a constant presence, but one she barely understood.
Katherine Locke • This Rebel Heart
Of course forces of colonization want me to think my time is something to sell . But I think when we can start to see these languages that have been systematically killed off as doors to a different way of seeing the world (versus just a group of vocabulary words), we can start to understand why they might want to silence a differing perspective.
How Language Shapes the Way We Think
