Revaluation of indigenous languages: 7 stories in 7 sociocultural global regions
Indigenous languages afford a unique way to perceive, understand, and interact with the world. Indigenous languages are complex knowledge systems that store ancestral wisdom and allow humanity to have a diversity of knowledge and ways of thinking. Despite the importance of keeping languages alive, they can be lost very quickly.
Many factors contribute to the decline or disappearance of a language’s speakers, including processes of evangelization and the influence of religious missionaries, economically-motivated migration, little (or no) use in public institutions, prohibition of their use in formal education, social pressure to speak dominant languages, and the shame for speaking an indigenous language due to a history of discrimination, among others.
All these factors provoke traumatic and painful historical processes for Indigenous peoples. Loss of an Indigenous language not only impoverishes ways of seeing the world and the knowledge that this entails, but also fractures human beings and communities. In many contexts language loss is accompanied by discrimination and devaluation.
Faced with this situation, many peoples have sought ways to revalue their languages. This linguistic revaluation is a change in the way we think, rejecting the cultural hierarchy that has been imposed on us, exercising our customary governance, and starting or strengthening a healing process as people and communities.
