Expensive editors of World Literature In the present day,

In her March 2025 column “Language as Refuge,” Veronica Esposito explores questions of language growth and loss, responding to the query: “What occurs when a language dies?” Sadly, the essay overlooks key components of that subject: linguicide, linguistic rights, and language preservation.

Esposito implicitly acknowledges that language loss of life may result from political causes however stops wanting explicitly naming linguicide (the purposeful destruction of a language); neither does she critically look at the perpetrators. As famend Mixe scholar and linguist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil famously stated in a 2022 deal with to the Mexican congress: “Languages don’t die. They’re murdered.” (We encourage Esposito, and all readers of this letter, to hunt out Aguilar Gil’s wonderful 2024 guide This Mouth Is Mine, translated by Ellen Jones and printed by Charco Press, which delves into this urgently vital topic.)

Esposito alludes to linguicide by mentioning that “the forces of assimilation” may be “fairly purposeful,” providing the instance of Swahili in Tanzania. She writes that Swahili was “promoted by authorities brokers as a approach of constructing the nation, with the approval of no less than a few of these whose languages have been relegated within the course of.” This uninterrogated nationalism, and the tacit suggestion that the involvement and “approval” of “no less than a few of these whose languages have been relegated” (to . . . what? loss of life?) someway makes linguicide much less insidious, are distressing. In a 2010 article on the “Swahilization” of ethnic languages in Tanzania, linguist Nobuko Yoneda concluded that “the sluggish, nearly surreptitious substitute” of Matengo and different mom tongues “is certainly happening” on account of the institutionalization of Swahili, alongside English. That’s to say, it was linguicide. 

Esposito admits that, whereas “shedding languages” “feels innately . . . like a nasty factor,” this “nebulous feeling” pales compared to her “sense of justice round different social causes.” Whether or not or not one of many world’s 3,193 endangered languages is lastly killed on any given day, she insinuates, is just not a very pressing “social trigger.” The creator’s reluctance to acknowledge the linguistic rights of audio system of minoritized languages worldwide—and the continuing violations of those rights—dismays us, particularly in a column for World Literature In the present day.

We might count on columns showing in WLT to acknowledge the huge linguistic inequities ensuing from settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and accelerating extractivism. But Esposito appears uninterested within the profoundly asymmetrical relation between a US-based author who muses on the potential impacts of “shedding languages” and other people worldwide—notably in and from the World South—who’re preventing to maintain their residence languages and their linguistic communities intact. For them, the size of loss is under no circumstances “nebulous.” It’s devastating. As Nahua author, anthologist, linguist, and critic Martín Tonalmeyotl wrote in 2019, “With the lack of the residing (oral) language, one’s personal historical past is misplaced.” 

The hegemonic dominance of English and the dearth of appreciation for minoritized languages (and the audio system who preserve them alive, towards all odds) facilitate the publishing of this essay, which appears to counsel, in a type of social Darwinism, that languages stop to exist when they’re now not helpful: they “dwindle,” they’re “misplaced,” they’re changed by others throughout processes of “purposeful assimilation.” This mindset is just not distinctive to Esposito however pervasive all through the anglosphere. A lot in order that the group co-directed by Ross Perlin, the Endangered Language Alliance, is misidentified by Esposito because the “English Language Alliance.” It’s a revealing error, all of the extra telling that it stays uncorrected one month after this essay appeared on-line. On the flip facet, it’s near-impossible for English audio system to think about a world by which English is endangered, nor to meaningfully contemplate what it might imply to lose entry to at least one’s mom tongue. When Esposito does try this sort of pondering, she solely reinstantiates the hegemony of English, writing, “It’s maybe essentially the most compelling argument I can think about for language-preservation to attempt to think about a world by which [the] three [Western] ideas [of art, love, and god] are misplaced from the universe.” Be aware that Esposito’s “most compelling argument” for language preservation right here has to do with the expressive assets of her personal mom tongue. 

Esposito states, “There may be an argument for linguistic variety based mostly on believing that pluralism in and of itself is effective.” Given her appreciation for the hurt carried out when “culture-specific ideas” are misplaced, it’s unusual that Esposito expresses such skepticism right here. We are able to solely hope that anybody writing for World Literature In the present day helps pluralism. Furthermore, linguistic variety is about peoples’ proper to precise themselves, to be a part of a cultural neighborhood, and—fairly frankly—to exist. As Tonalmeyotl notes above, when language is exterminated, id is endangered. In This Mouth Is Mine, Yásnaya Aguilar Gil writes about Mexico: “Each time you converse in one among this nation’s Indigenous languages, each time you begin a dialog in Seri, each time a thought kinds within the grammatical constructions of Zoque, it’s an act of resistance. What are we resisting? We’re resisting orchestrated pressured Hispanicisation campaigns. . . . We’re resisting all authorities efforts, all through the historical past of Mexico as a rustic, to eradicate our languages.” Aguilar Gil insists, “To talk an Indigenous language within the current circumstances is to inhabit a cognitive territory that has not been conquered but, or no less than not utterly.” 

Close to the tip of Esposito’s essay, with out addressing ongoing world efforts to fight linguicide, she asks: “What may it appear like to reverse the lack of linguistic variety—that’s, to purposely re-Babel the world?” She writes that she hasn’t seen this query “anyplace within the literature round linguistic variety.” Nonetheless, “re-Babeling the world” is exactly what the audio system of many—if not most—of the planet’s most critically endangered languages are doing in rural and concrete communities across the globe, typically with little or no assist from native and regional governments or NGOs. Re-Babeling the world doesn’t occur with invented jargons like Boontling and Toki Pona—the examples that Esposito provides in her essay—however by the continued use of Mixe, Seri, Zoque, and the opposite 3,190 endangered languages, lots of that are referenced within the guide that Esposito’s essay is supposedly discussing: Ross Perlin’s Language Metropolis.

As Esposito herself suggests, the worth of a language is just not that it makes use of a unique set of phrases to precise the similar idea however that it captures and expresses a culturally particular set of ideas. When a language is misplaced, humanity loses these very ideas that developed as a part of centuries or eons of cultural evolution by audio system of that language. That could be a common loss.

For this reason, in a context of world linguicide, we discover it offensive that Esposito posits inventing new argots corresponding to Toki Pona as an alternative of drawing consideration to the arduous work of language preservation. Argots usually are not languages. Languages usually are not simply one other expertise. They don’t seem to be one thing {that a} group of some hundred individuals invent with the intention to exclude others or to precise inside concepts. They’re the results of cultural specificity and tons of or hundreds of years of shared expertise and mental growth of and by a neighborhood in a specific ecology. In contrast, an invented argot is only a completely different mechanical approach of expressing the identical ideas and worldviews that the inventors of the brand new lingo carry from their previous language. That’s to not say that there isn’t a worth in inventing argots, or that language video games can’t construct neighborhood, as Esposito rightly factors out. However it’s a completely different form of neighborhood, introduced collectively by shared curiosity, not centuries or millennia of cultural evolution.

Esposito, sadly, doesn’t make this distinction. Her essay is likely to be extra precisely titled “Argots of Refuge.” She writes, “Pondering again to my latest column on Toki Pona, I’m reminded of the enjoyment, mental stimulation, and emotions of neighborhood that audio system of that language skilled as they delved into its intricacies. These to me appear essentially the most human and palpable causes for supporting linguistic variety” (italics added). We have now no qualms with individuals inventing an argot. We have now little question the expertise could be a shifting, stimulating one. Nonetheless, if taking “refuge” in language video games (a type of mental escapism) provides “essentially the most human and palpable causes for supporting linguistic variety” that the creator can conceive of, we wonder if she really learn the guide (Language Metropolis) that sparked her essay. Creator Ross Perlin provides dozens of way more deeply “human and palpable causes” to assist language restoration and language justice. 

Moderately than “What occurs when a language dies?” it appears to us that Esposito’s essay is in the end pushed by a separate inquiry altogether: “What occurs when a brand new argot is ‘born’ in our up to date context of world language loss of life?” That is an fascinating query, however we discover its import relatively diaphanous, in comparison with the urgency of fostering world language justice amidst mass linguicide.

Sincerely,

Wendy Name (Seattle, WA) & Whitney DeVos (Mexico Metropolis)
[email protected] / [email protected]