Outsiders are not not saving a language by learning it.

linguist-breakaribecca:

amer-ainu:

While I’m personally grateful services like Tribalingual exist, creating some academic access to Indigenous languages, particularly for Indigenous diaspora (if they can afford it), I’m extremely dubious of the notion that a outsiders learning an Indigenous language is somehow “saving” it.

There was a testimonial from some white American girl learning Ainu itak, and she spoke of it as if she were collecting some rare Pokemon card before it went out of print or something, framing it in typical dying Native rhetoric. What is she going to do with Ainu itak, except as some obscure lingual trophy?

If you want to save a language, save the people.

Language means nothing without history and culture breathing life into it, and in turn we are disconnected from our history and ancestors without it. Support Indigenous quality of life, ACCESS to quality education, quality health services (mental and physical), land and subsistence rights, CLEAN DRINKING WATER, advocate against police brutality and state violence, DEMAND ACTION FOR MISSING AND MURDERED INDIGENOUS WOMEN.

Damn, if you really want to “save the language” pay for an Indigenous person’s classes for them to reconnect to their mother tongues. I’m not saying outsiders shouldn’t learn languages they’re invited to learn, but don’t pretend like you learning conversational Ainu itak is saving it from extinction.

I was lucky enough to take Linguistic Anthropology under Dr. Bernard Perley, a Maliseet Native who brought a very real sense of judgement and urgency to his lessons. One that stuck with me was his framing of Zombie Linguistics. Languages that are “saved” from “death” by people who aren’t of the culture can become ambling, empty shadows of their “living” selves.

Outsiders who record native speakers as disembodied audio spirits frozen in time, or (usually white) linguists who copy down the bones and organs of a language without respecting its body, are guilty of resurrecting something that is not the original language. Language is so much more than files and corpora, and this idea that we who have degrees are the most qualified to “save” a language is colonialist and foolhardy. Every linguist who takes National Geographic money to go to a remote village to analyze an endangered language is just a vulture circling to feed — to truly save a language would be to give the community resources to teach and learn it as they see fit.

But that doesn’t get us published.

Read more on Zombie Linguistics in Dr. Perley’s paper here.