Language
…believing in the naturalness of your mother tongue shows a lack of serious engagement with language and belies the entire premise of modern literature. This is why I believe that existing outside of one's mother tongue is not exceptional, but simply an extreme version of the normal state of things.
Yoko Tawada • Exophony
When the Spanish colonizers arrived, their Christianization project began by destroying the very foundation of our indigenous faith. They broke the Anitos. They silenced the chants. They erased every ritual that didn’t serve the cross. What was once sacred became feared. What was once power became persecution.
Colonizers didn’t understand that. In... See more
Colonizers didn’t understand that. In... See more
Babaylan, Bye Bye Lang : The National Colonial Amnesia
a writer’s habits with regard to metaphor (and figurative language generally) were key to their entire worldview. Heavy users of figurative language, she said, see the world as interconnected, full of unseen ties and parallels. Whereas those who abstain from figurative language think that the world is made up of discrete things: every situation is... See more
The Hatred of Metaphor
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
Mary Elizabeth Williams • Lily Gladstone's Acceptance Speech Shows Why We Need to Save Endangered Languages
In the Bible’s book of Genesis, monolingual humans aspired to build a "city and tower with its top in the heavens". God punished humans by creating a multitude of languages to sow chaos: "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be... See more
Ruby Justice Thelot • The Balkanization and Babelification of the Internet
Language fluency is activism. This is not about reclaiming purity, but embracing pluralism and contradiction. We reject colonial amnesia through language learning, even informally.
Babaylan, Bye Bye Lang : The National Colonial Amnesia
Babelification is the process by which, after splintering, insular digital groups develop unique languages which makes reintegration in shared digital spaces difficult, if not impossible. When someone believes their insular language in online echo chambers is commonplace reality, clashes ensue when that same individual is placed in a context where... See more
Ruby Justice Thelot • The Balkanization and Babelification of the Internet
"There's some neuroscientific evidence that being multilingual is really, really good for your brain. And it's good for one of them to be your cultural language, because that's good for your self esteem and emotional health."
Mary Elizabeth Williams • Lily Gladstone's Acceptance Speech Shows Why We Need to Save Endangered Languages
The German polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), brother of the famous explorer Alexander von Humboldt, likewise tried to develop a universalist and philosophical approach to the study of languages. The central fact of language is that speakers can make infinite use of the finite resources provided by their language. Though the capacity for
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