Justice

Killer Languages

By Graham Cameron / 30 July 2007

In following on from my post suggesting the church is using a language of domination in its ‘mission to the poor’, I thought I would pick up on an interesting post in the Jesus Radicals forum about ‘Killer Languages’. It provided a few references as food for thought.

The concept of killer languages comes from Skuttnabb-Kangas (2002) in promulgating her theory of linguistic genocide, where she refers to English and other languages that oppress as “killer languages.” She advocates that:

Children should learn new languages, including the dominant languages that most minority children obviously want and need to learn, in addition to their own languages. Formal education that is subtractive, that is, that teaches children (something of) a dominant language at the cost of their first language, is genocidal and turns dominant languages, for instance, English, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, or Hausa, into killer languages. (p. 181)

Manu notes that “while it is no secret that discrimination in education is rife and takes many forms, it is interesting that discrimination on the basis of language has received little attention in the field of educational research.”

He also provides a link to Decolonization, Self-determination and education by Margaret Maaka which references Skuttnabb-Kangas and others, including Frantz Fanon (1963):

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.

And the famous quote that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy.” There is an on-going debate over who originated this quote—whether it as scholar Max Weinreich; his son, Uriel Weinreich; or his student, Joshua Fishman. Of the three, only Fishman is alive and he is unsure who said it first.

I personally am in the privileged position of being conversant in te reo Maori. But even given that lens, perhaps there is a call here to encourage the home languages of Christ and the church in communicating our gospel, that is Greek and Hebrew, recognising the geneocidal and ethnocidal history that backs our lazy use of English.