Sublime

We need to challenge the idea that English is the sole marker of intelligence or modernity. This belief traces back to Rizal’s time and persists even in media, like in the Maria Clara at Ibarra Netflix series. The shock when a woman speaks fluent English reflects a deeper social bias, that English equals higher status.

This bias runs deep. English... See more

When I have given oral presentations, I reach my people more directly than if I’d written everything down for them to read. When people can see your face and hear the melody of your voice, your point gets across more vividly. Language evolved, after all, for face-to-face contact, not rendered as glyphs on paper.Imagine a square divided into four... 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

Gordon surmised that the Pirahã provided support for a controversial hypothesis advanced early in the last century by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s. Whorf argued that the words in our vocabulary determine how we think. Since the Pirahã do not have words for numbers above two, Gordon wrote, they have a limited ability to work with... See more

"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."

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist

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