you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]MarkTwainiac 11 insightful - 1 fun11 insightful - 0 fun12 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I always thought the language was a less major issue, but it’s the key to dismantling all of our rights. It scares me. Kill women’s language, and you kill any way in which we can fight the patriarchy.

All over the world throughout history, rulers, invaders, imperialists, colonizers, authoritarians, dictators, tyrannical states and missionaries have long been in the habit of prohibiting invaded, conquered, enslaved, subjugated and "inferior" peoples from speaking their own native languages and dialects - and from framing/discussing their own experiences, naming themselves, practicing their own customs, holding on to their traditions and so on. It's a pro forma part of the playbook of despotism.

Arabs, Europeans and Americans who participated in the practice of taking black Africans into captivity and enslaving them all forbade the black Africans from using their own names in their own language, from using their language to converse with other Africans who'd been enslaved, and from keeping their religious and cultural traditions. Europeans did the same to the native peoples in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. And various Asian imperialists such as the Japanese in the mid-20th century and the Chinese today have done the exact same thing to all the peoples they've tried to conquer (including the Tibetans and Uigyhur Muslims who are being oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party at this very moment).

I personally know people from various North American native tribes/nations who attended religious and government schools in the US, Canada and Australia in the 1950s and 60s who were beaten or otherwise punished for using their native tongues.

Language has been used as a means of controlling the masses within cultures of the same race, ethnicity and heritage as well. Over the course of history in many different cultures the ruling-class elites have decreed that worship, prayers, understanding of religious texts and creeds and all "higher learning" in such fields as mathematics, astronomy and the other sciences also could not be conducted in the vernacular languages that "ordinary" people spoke - but only in the rarefied languages known and used by the small, select group at the top.

Hence, historically Roman Catholic services and sacraments, particularly the Mass, were conducted in Latin all around the world, with rare exceptions. This only changed due to radical reform by the Vatican in the 1960s, something that had a profound impact on my own life as a child who at the time was being raised Catholic and forced to go to convent school.

To get a better understanding of how key the control of people's language is to despotism, I suggest looking into the role of Latin vs vernacular European languages during the Holy Roman Empire. And to the way admission into many areas of "higher learning" in the West traditionally required literacy in Latin or Greek until relatively recently.

Also, look into why it is that when 80% of the world's Muslims today do not speak or understand Arabic, Muslims worldwide are nonetheless forced to recite all their daily prayers in Arabic - and Islam teaches that Arabic is the only legitimate language in which the Koran and Hadiths can be properly read, understood, appreciated and discussed. Millions of Muslim-raised persons around the world past and present were forced as children to show their piety by memorizing and reciting the Koran (or parts of it) in Arabic, a language they couldn't/can't understand beyond stock sayings like insh'allah.