Language revitalization and radical politics

In his 2005 article ‘Will Indigenous Languages Survive?’ Michael Walsh described language revitalization as ‘profoundly political’. And Jacqueline Urla, in discussing the Basque language movement, has said that language revitalization can “never be divorced from politics.”

But if language revitalization is political, just what sort of politics is it?

Here, I want to think about language revitalization as a form of radical politics, based on a reading of the recently published Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics.

To begin with, what is radical politics?

Radicals don’t propose a single definition of the concept. My understanding of radicalism is that it is oppositional, and seeks fundamental transformation (rather than superficial tweaks), through the abolition of various forms of domination. In this sense, language revitalization is radical, because it challenges the global status quo: a planetary system of language oppression that is presently eliminating at least half of the world’s languages.

Language revitalization seeks a different world, not a better version of this one. It seeks a world where structural power arrangements allow all languages to flourish. This requires a fundamental transformation of current social and political arrangements, which are presently geared towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples and the continuing subordination of other groups according to race, ethnicity, caste, and religion.

Radical politics seeks to achieve this transformation through direct action. Although campaigning, lobbying, consciousness-raising, and other forms of progressive politics are part of the radical toolkit, more important are acts of civil disobedience, protest, disruption, hacktivism, and so on.

Moments of direct action have always preceded language revitalization movements. Such movements can only occur in the context of greater rights, expanded freedoms, and diminished domination that are won through struggle.

A key case in point is the revitalization of Indigenous languages in settler colonies such as Australia, the USA, Canada, and New Zealand. In all these contexts, larger revitalization movements emerged out of earlier efforts to maintain languages only after civil rights had been secured through protest and other forms of direct action. States did not grant these rights willingly; rather, these rights were won as a result of coordinated, purposeful, direct action by Indigenous peoples, fighting simultaneously in their homelands whilst networked across the globe.

Language revitalization is also connected to direct action in another way. If we accept that current structural arrangements lead to the elimination of certain languages, then simply using those languages is a form of direct action. In this sense, the anthropologist and Chickasaw language activist Jenny Davis has called language revitalization an “act of breath-taking resistance, resilience, and survivance.”

In addition to direct action, language revitalization demonstrates another important feature of radical politics: prefiguration. Prefiguration refers to efforts to create the sought-after forms of justice in the process of achieving structural transformation: to prefigure the world one wants to build. Language revitalization is prefigurative in that it restores languages to a community and the world before broad-scale transformation has taken place, as a model of how the world could and should be.

In addition to direct action and prefiguration, another important feature of radicalism is critique. It aims to name, describe and expose systems of domination, and to clearly outline their harms and their perpetrators. Radical politics is thus typically ‘anti’: antifascist, antiracist, anti-capitalist, antimilitarist, anticolonial, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchy.

This sort of critique has so far played only a limited role in language revitalization. Instead, discourses of language revitalization, particularly in the popular imagination, have been dominated by tropes of what Jane Hill called ‘hyperbolic valorization’: the heaping of abundant praise on these languages. Such praise, without a critique of domination, leads to what Daniel G. Solorzano and Dolores Delgado Bernal call ‘conformist resistance,’ which works towards social justice by offering ‘Band-Aid’ solutions that do not address deeper, systemic issues.

However, a structurally-informed critique is gradually emerging in relation to language revitalization. For example, Alice Taff and her collaborators use the term ‘language oppression’ to describe the ‘enforcement of language loss by physical, mental, social and spiritual coercion,’ and I have written about how language oppression can be analyzed similarly to other forms of oppression that occur in relation to race, nation, ethnicity, and religion. Indigenous scholars such as Wesley Leonard, Jenny Davis, and Michelle M Jacob are increasingly tying language revitalization to a critique of colonialism. Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh, in discussing the radical language politics of political prisoners in what is currently Northern Ireland, ties their language revitalization work to broader struggles against colonialism and neo-colonial globalization. And in Australia, Kris Eira has stated that, “what causes the loss of languages is dominance of one group of people over another.” Together with Tonya Stebbins and Vicki Couzens, Kris Eira has therefore called for the decolonization of linguistic practice.

This focus on a critique of colonialism and a positive project of decolonization increasingly forms a central aspect of radical politics, due to efforts to ensure that radical politics are intersectional. This means that radical projects explore how varying forms of domination and oppression interact, through discussion of concepts like racial capitalism, environmental racism, and the decolonization-decarbonization nexus. They also seek to ensure that radical projects do not create injustice for some while seeking justice for others, for example, through anti-oppression policies.

Because radical politics seeks to be intersectional, solidarity is central to its practice: solidarity within, across, and between movements. The first type of solidarity is highly relevant to language revitalization, given its communal nature. Thinking about solidarity as a form of negotiated goal-setting and coordinated action seems to provide a more constructive way of dealing with the conflicts that often arise in the process of language revitalization, compared to present interests in achieving ‘ideological clarification’.

Solidarity across movements refers to how people outside a movement can act as advocates, allies, affiliates, or accomplices to those within it. For example, I see my role as that of an ally for linguistic justice, rather than a language revitalization practitioner. One thing I think we can usefully do as allies is to help create safer spaces for language revitalization. As Ruth A. Deller explains in the handbook, safer spaces are those where, “…people from different marginalized groups can gather, speak and be resourced safely”—these may be physical or virtual. Whatever practices of solidarity we engage in, it is crucial to think about how we can decolonize solidarity—how we avoid reproducing the power structures and relations that cause language oppression in the first place.

Thinking about the third form of solidarity—between movements—provides a critical insight into an important shortcoming of the Routledge handbook. In a volume containing a chapter on radical bicycle politics and another dedicated to discussing what does and does not constitute radical music, language barely rates a mention. In a book that takes intersectionality and decolonization as organizing principles, the near total absence of any discussion of language is indicative of the need for a more expansive and more inclusive vision of what counts as radical politics.

This presents an opportunity for language activists, advocates, and allies to engage with radical academics and activists. We need to demonstrate how any analysis of oppression is incomplete without understanding the ways in which language serves as a contour of domination and an objective for emancipation. In turn, we have much to gain from a deeper engagement with the practices and philosophies of radical politics.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Shannon Woodcock, Christopher Annis, Rokhl Kafrissen, and Ingrid Piller for discussions and comments that helped improve this article.