Language fluency is activism. This is not about reclaiming purity, but embracing pluralism and contradiction. We reject colonial amnesia through language learning, even informally.

Virtually every endangered language is endangered because its community was systematically targeted by genocide, forced cultural assimilation, some kind of political marginalization. On a practical level, language diversity encodes the sum of human cultural, historical and ecological knowledge. As a species, we lose knowledge when we lose

... See more

In a world in which any skill that can't be leveraged for the maximum benefit of capitalism is seen as a dubious enterprise, it can be difficult to make the case for languages that are not widely spoken. Yet their continued existence matters, for a variety of compelling reasons. "First of all, it's just the right thing to do," says Daniel Bögre... See more