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the languages of solarpunk
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this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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It's kinda sad to me that the common languages of the Americas are all European.
I really felt like that at first, but also I think that using the language of the oppressor to join native forces and maintain and spread traditional knowledge is pretty cool. There is something positive growing out of the horrors of the past, I hope, some new understanding.
that’s one area you have to be VERY careful with – co-opting the language of the oppressor is one thing, but in most cases, the oppressor’s language was the one used to erase indigenous languages (cultural genocide) – this was so prevalent across the US and Canada, that many indigenous American societies have to turn to ethnographic records compiled by those same colonizers in an effort to rebuild or recreate their native languages
I'm aware of that. I'm not trying to say that having been oppressed had advantages for indigenous people, maybe rather that using the language of the oppressor to preserve knowledge means making the best out of a bad situation, and opens the knowledge for the world, which is an important and valuable contribution to common human knowledge.
At same time I immensely appreciate the diversity of thoughts that can arise out of a diversity of languages. By no means do I think we should impose a world language and make all other languages disappear. More of everybody being bilingual or multilingual by default, and an artificial language being one language used to communicate among larger groups of people, like English is now, but involving a larger group of people (and yeah, not being colonialiser-based would be great, maybe a completely new language would truly be better).
Being able to share a common language gives people power - we can share and relate to experiences from people all over the world, we can organize as human species.