Language Oppression
Xabi [Xabi Odriozola, the International Commonality Reference Person for Languages and Interpreting] has written that language oppression is, in a big part, the result of capitalism and the dominant languages that are ruled over by capitalism.
Language oppression makes people who speak non-dominant languages feel worthless, stupid, inferior, inadequate, a burden to the system, and an annoyance—simply because they are present with a non-dominant language.
Those of us who do not belong to the dominant group are made to feel ashamed of who we are. We are made fun of [teased], ignored, and criticized if we don’t speak the dominant language, or don’t speak it perfectly—that is, if we don’t speak it “whitely.” It becomes preferable to speak the language offered by the oppressive system and to forget and bury our own language.
This is serious. We have almost half the world trying not to be or look like their real selves. And this makes everything more difficult.
The antidote is to recover, remember, resume, dust off, investigate, speak, read, and write the languages of our mothers and fathers and their ancestors, and encourage others to do the same. It is to get closer to our origins, which probably did not collaborate as much or as directly with capitalism. Therein lies our true selves, the ultimate threat to capitalism.
Lagos, Nigeria
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC Community members
(Present Time 209, October 2022)