Spanish and Empire

Why decolonizing language? Partially because I want this course to be about deconstructing the ideas we have about language and language learning, ideas that come out of empire. Spanish is an interesting language in this regard, as it is both a language of prestige and a subaltern language, depending on the context. (subaltern means, 'oppressed people')

Many people consider Latin American spanish to be less 'pure', and some people go to Spain to study the spanish that they consider 'correct'. This is similar to the situation of Canadian French, where we are taught parisian french in school even though it's Quebequois or Franco-Ontariene french that we might actually need in our lives. Spanish language speakers (hispanohablantes) in anglo-america are told that their spanish is 'bad' ,are continually discriminated against, and receive little support in maintaining their language from society a large. A judge in the united states threatened to remove a small child from her mother because she spoke spanish to her at home, calling it 'child abuse' not to use the majority language, english.

But at the same time, spanish is a language of oppression, brought to this hemisphere through conquest and war: a conquest that continues to this day. Throughout the Americas, native languages are denigrated , not recognized and called 'primitive'. They continue to be lost in favour of spanish, portuguese and english. The process of erasing language goes hand in hand with the oppression and erasure of people. Yet millions of people continue to resist imperialism, in part by maintaining thier languages, and Quiché-Maya, Mam-Maya, Quechua and Aymara, Yanomamo, and many others, continue to be vibrant and living languages with large populations.

The video I wanted you to watch for last week is about the n/u language in South Africa, and I'd like you to take a look at it again. This language, once widely spoken, now has only 15 speakers. It's loss was due to apartied and racisim. With it goes thousands of year of cultural adaption and knowledge. The whites said that n/u was not even a language, and made the young people feel ashamed for speaking it. They wanted the people to speak Affricans so they would be able to understand what they were saying to facilitate oppression.


n/u clip, again

If you have time, and enough internet access, it would be cool if you could watch the whole movie, which is about endangered languages worldwide, efforts at collection and language revitalization movements. Or there are also some other clips at babelgum that are cool. Anyway, check out whatever you can and comment on them.


whole movie