 So again, hello, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. My name is Joey Love-Strand, and I'm a British Academy post-doctor fellow at SOAS University of London, coming to you from a rare sunny morning in the UK. Glad to be able to host this webinar. Today's speaker is Gerald Roach. He is a senior research fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Gerald works as an anthropologist studying the politics of language endangerment and revitalization with a regional focus on Tibet. His talk today is titled, Rethinking the Language of Language Endangerment. This is a topic that unites two ideas strongly associated with us at SOAS. So this has been a hub of the language endangerment movement for decades. And for example, the university hosts the well-known Endangered Languages Documentation Program. In addition, anyone who has heard anything about SOAS, at least in the UK, has also heard of its reputation as a progressive university. It's not uncommon to hear discussions about equality and justice among students, for example, or to see topics like decolonization and social justice in course curricula. So today's topic provides us the occasion to reflect on how well we've actually synthesized these two themes that are strong at SOAS in our actual practice. During the presentation, we'll keep our cameras and microphone off while Gerald shares with us. There will be a time for questions after the presentation, which will last for about 40 or 45 minutes. If you wish to ask a question, you may either write the question in the chat and I'll read it out. Or you can indicate you would like to ask the question yourself by raising your hand or by noting so in the chat. Again, be aware that this session is being recorded and will be shared online. Gerald has also prepared a written document for those who would like to follow along with this presentation and writing. And I'll post that link in the chat for those who would like to have access to that. That being said, let me hand it over to Gerald. Thank you for joining us and for all of your work in preparing this talk and helping us reflect on these issues. OK, thanks very much for the welcome, Joey. And thanks, everyone, for coming along to the talk. I've prepared a written script that I'm going to read off just to try and keep to time. But I look forward to having a chat with you later on. So there we go. OK, so I'd like to begin my talk by acknowledging that I'm speaking from the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I'd like to acknowledge that their sovereignty was never seeded over this land, which was invaded and forcibly taken from them. In the same way that the land was taken away without being given up, so were the languages. So I'd also like to acknowledge the two languages of the Kulin nation that was spoken on this land before the city of Melbourne was put here. The Woiwurrung and the Boonurung languages. I'd like to acknowledge the work that's being done to reclaim both of these languages. I'd like to celebrate the achievements that have been made in this and to recognize how complex and taxing this work is. I'd also like to recognize that this work is part of what Ngarugu woman and linguist Jacqueline Troy and linguist Michael Walsh have called a linguistic renaissance in southeastern Australia, which is a massive effort currently being carried out by people in dozens of communities to reawaken their languages here. And I'd like to acknowledge that this renaissance is part of a global movement to reawaken, reclaim, strengthen, and maintain languages around the world. Finally, I'd like to acknowledge and to condemn the violence and injustice that have made this global movement necessary. For example, here in Melbourne, over 90% of the indigenous population was killed or made to die in the first 50 years following the founding of this city. At the same time, the city's settler population rose by 25,000 people in just the first 15 years and added another 100,000 in the next decade. During this time, every form of direct and indirect violence, juridical, physical, and otherwise, was used in settler's efforts to eliminate the people and their languages. And yet, these efforts failed. And so the Waiwerung and Boonarung languages are still here. OK, so before I move on, some words of caution. First is that, as we've already seen, I'll be talking about violence, death, and genocide. And I'll also be showing some images of violence in the talk. If this might be difficult for you, please make whatever precautions you need to or log off. The second note of caution is that I'll occasionally be attempting to use humor, not to diminish or trivialize the violence that I'm talking about, but more as a coping mechanism and rhetorical, released valve that I hope will allow us to confront some difficult issues. And so with those words of warning in mind, here we go. OK, so I still want to make some other preliminary remarks before I get stuck into the main content of the talk. But in order to give you some sense of what I'm going to be saying, I'd like to share this image as a kind of visual summation of the main point I'm going to make today. What I'm hoping to do is encourage you and the entire discipline of linguistics to devour your child, language endangerment discourses. But as I said, I'd like to make a few preliminary comments before we get to that point. First preliminary point I'd like to make is that I'm not a linguist. I'm an anthropologist and not even a linguistic anthropologist really. Instead, I think of myself as a political anthropologist interested in languages and the way that they are entangled with race, colonialism, domination, violence, suffering, flourishing, and death. I came to be interested in these issues through hands-on experience. I was working as a development technocrat with Tibetan communities in China, helping to facilitate their interactions with international aid and development organizations. Some of the work I helped facilitate dealt with communities' desires to record and preserve their languages. And it was in facilitating this work that I first encountered about 15 years ago, endangered languages discourses. And I began thinking about the issues that I'm going to discuss today. It was later, as a postdoc at Uppsala University, and then at the University of Melbourne, that I began thinking seriously about the problems with these discourses, particularly in the course of editing these two books, which made me think seriously about the ways in which political resistance underlies language revitalization and the ways in which conditions for that resistance are unevenly distributed throughout the world. So as I started thinking about these issues, of course, I found that others had already been doing so. And I'm going to be drawing on their work here. The work I'm drawing on includes the writing of indigenous scholars on language and decolonization, such as Jenny Davis, Wesley Leonard, and Bernard Perley. It also includes the work of critical scholars in linguistics and sociolinguistics, such as Amir Hasampur and Fergal Makhionrakti. I'm also learning on Twitter and Facebook about deaf linguistics from people such as John Henner and Rodney Adams, and also from the work of Rezi Hoffa in Tibet. I've also learned a lot in conversations with indigenous language experts like Jacqueline Troy and Ulse Verde-Croake and many friends and colleagues in Tibet whose names I won't share. I'll also be referring to other works as I go on, but I just wanted to provide this list of references some of the sources that I draw on. So the final preliminary remark that I'd like to make before starting the main part of my talk is about the subject of audience. I want to make clear some assumptions about who I think I'm speaking to. So first of all, is that I'm assuming that my main audience here is linguists. But secondly, I also want to recognize that I'm speaking to some linguists more than others. So if you're a fan of John McWhorter's sub-stack newsletter on neo-racism, or if you think that things like language revitalization are a form of social work, by which you mean pointless or bad because you also think that social work is somehow bad and pointless, or if you agree with the person who compared me to an anti-vaxa for speaking about decolonization at a linguistics conference, or if you use the word woke to describe things you don't like, then you are not the sort of linguist I'm talking to and you may find my presentation more frustrating than useful. Instead, my talk tonight is really addressed to linguists who welcomed the recent language forum on racial justice in linguistics and who see their work as being tied up with anti-racism, feminism, anti-Abelism, decolonization and other aspects of social justice. I know there are many linguists who aim to empower rather than study people and who want to make the discipline more inclusive. My talk is aimed to you, hopefully in a way that doesn't preach to the converted but expands instead on what you know and offers new doorways and to new ways of thinking through these issues. However, my talk is also addressed to you as an invitation. So to return to the leitmotif of my talk and to help us transition to the substantive section tonight, let's clarify further what I'm suggesting here. I'm not only going to suggest that linguists should devour one of its children but more specifically or additionally, I also want to suggest that this will involve a struggle between the two types of linguists that I have just described. I think now is a crucial time for this struggle. Next year, 2022 represents both an anniversary and a new beginning. As an anniversary, 2022 marks 30 years since the publication in the journal Language of a collection of essays on the topic of language endangerment. These were not the first publications on the topic or even the first publications to describe the topic in those terms. I've written a little bit about the history of this but they do represent a watershed. After this moment, 30 years ago, endangerment discourses became entrenched in linguistics and entered popular usage. And despite persistent critique of these discourses, often most powerfully by indigenous people and other speakers of so-called endangered languages, these discourses have remained hegemonic until today. Now is a good time to bring an end to that hegemony. I'm going to explain later why we should do that but first let me explain why now. Starting now is important because the international decade of indigenous languages starts in 2022. We have already seen during the year of indigenous languages in 2019, how people in search of a way to talk about indigenous languages reached out and found endangerment discourses. This gave those discourses a new lease on life, greater visibility and broader reach than they've had in years. My concern is that the decade of indigenous languages will have a similar effect multiplied by 10 and that this will ultimately, as I argue later, work against the interests of indigenous people and languages. To prevent this from happening, we need a timely intervention to dismantle and replace endangerment discourses. However, before I explain why we need to do this, first we need to look at what discourse is and how it works. So to begin with, my focus on discourse is intended to highlight that I'm not talking about practices. I'm not here talking about what linguists do. I'm not talking about field work or research, not because I don't have anything to say or because linguistics are doing just fine in those departments but just simply because I'm not talking about them right now. But beyond that, what do I mean by discourse? Well, I'm happy to go with whatever definition people have in their heads of discourse rather than defining discourse. Instead, I'd like to point out two important features of discourse that I think are relevant for what I'm trying to say here. And I'd like to point that out these two features with reference to two useful books that demonstrate for me how discourse works. So the first book is Racism Without Racist by Eduardo Benila Silva. In this book, Benila Silva analyzes the way that racism in the USA works, emphasizing what he calls a materialist perspective. Racism is essentially a system that distributes material benefits through society by maintaining privilege for some and defending the deprivation of others. Ideology, meanwhile, serves to maintain this system and obfuscate its workings and discourse serves to reproduce ideology. When Benila Silva talks about racism without racists, he is describing how people reproduce this system by reproducing discourses and ideologies that maintain it. They do this even when they claim to not be racist. He looks at several frames that people use to disavow their participation in the racist system, including abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism. For Benila Silva to produce these frames in discourse is to be racist. Being racist is not attached to the usual sense of identity as a racist or to the effect of disposition that we associate with racism, i.e. hatred towards other people. And that's the first point I'd like to emphasize regarding discourse. Discourse works regardless of our intentions and our identity. And it works in relation to fields of material relations and the ideologies that support them. We might say that one can do racism without being racist or being a racist. Without referring to discourse directly, Amy says there in his discourse on colonialism makes a similar point about the issue of intentions in relation to colonial functionaries when he said, quote, do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social impacts of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism. So this is the first thing that I want to highlight that discourse works, it functions regardless of intent. The second point I'd like to make about discourse comes from the book, The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer. Klemperer was a philologist in Dresden, Germany during Hitler's reign, including the war and the Holocaust. He was born into a Jewish family but later converted to Christianity. He escaped the worst horrors of the Holocaust but was not spared. He survived but suffered. From 1933 onwards, he kept a diary in which he tracked the changes in language that were being wrought by the Nazis. He traced not just the appearance of new words and metaphors but also of whole ways of speaking, in short discourse. He wrote about the power of discourse in directing human thought and action, describing how ideology, quote, permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. Language does not simply write and think for me. It also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being. The more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandoned myself to it, end quote. Throughout the book, while describing the ways in which Nazis manipulated discourse and showing the harms of such discourses through a retelling of his own suffering, he also repeatedly reproduces elements of Nazi discourse. Clemper catches himself doing this over and over and reflects on how discourse has taken on the life of its own. Discourse makes itself available to us and even when we try to resist it, it speaks through us, using us as a medium to reproduce ideologies and structures of domination. The feminist philosopher Sarah Ahmed in her book, Living a Feminist Life made a similar point about discourse when she said, patriarchal reasoning goes all the way down to the letter to the bone. I had to find ways not to reproduce its grammar in what I said, in what I wrote, in what I did and in who I was, end quote. And so that's the second point about discourse I want to make, which is that discourse works through us and on us. It produces us as much as we produce it. Now, just to be clear, I'm not drawing on these sources because I'm about to tell you that linguists who use endangerment discourses are racists or Nazis. I'm sure that many of them aren't. Instead, I'm just using these particular powerful examples to establish two points about discourse, that it works and that it works on us. So with these features of discourse in mind, let's look more closely at endangerment discourses like we see here in these UNESCO materials for International Mother Language Day, which was on Sunday. So what do these discourses assert? What do they make us assert when they speak through us? How do they work? To begin with, language endangerment discourses focus on language, which might seem reasonable for a linguistic discourse to do. But the problem that I have with this as an anthropologist is the way that it erases the people who sign and speak and use languages. We see in endangerment discourses this persistent asking of the question, what happens when a language is lost? And the answer very often focuses on knowledge or culture or information or heritage or some other way of thinking about language as content. And what these discourses never tell us is how people suffer, how they are oppressed, how they struggle, how their hopes are crushed, how parents turn to their children and decide to speak to them in a language that they had been forced to learn because they long for their children to live better and more freely than they did. And it is precisely by focusing primarily on language that these tragedies, which are both deeply human and profoundly political are hidden away. Endangerment discourses also draw our attention from these tragedies by focusing on language as things. They are things that live and die, they disappear or are lost, they have vitality and are saved and so on. There are a host of reasons why these ways of looking at the problem aren't helpful. The point has been made that when we say a language dies, it is actually often going to sleep and might be reawakened. It's also been pointed out how predictions of language death are often self-fulfilling prophecies and even expressions of hostility. But to me, again, the problem is that these aspects of endangerment discourses separate languages from people and from their experiences of life as something to be enjoyed or endured and the political predicament that produces that experience. This sense is intensified by the pervasiveness of passive language and endangerment discourses. These discourses present us with the world of spontaneous processes where some languages are lost, decline, vanish and disappear while others spread become dominant and so on. It is a world full of false protagonists that include actors such as technology, modernization, globalization, urbanization, development or just change, often rapid change. These processes seemingly unfold by themselves. Sometimes there is a strong sense that this unfolding is not just spontaneous but also unstoppable or inevitable that the languages are doomed. In this way, the world of fake protagonists and unstoppable processes resembles the 19th century world of vanishing savages that actually concealed a violent dictate to exterminate all the brutes. When an agent is identified in endangerment discourses, it is often the wrong one. We often read that people forget or abandon their languages. This often billows out into assertions about what the community must do. For example, they must improve their attitudes towards their language or they must engage in ideological clarification to figure out what they really think about their language. Although often well-intentioned and aiming to guide center and empower communities in their efforts to revitalize language, such aspects of endangered language discourses often end up blaming the victim for their own oppression. This especially happens when the broader discourse fails to identify the relations of domination and agents of oppression that are actually driving the process. So in sum, these endangered language discourses present us with a world inhabited by languages, not people. Language is a thing or stuff. This world of object stuff is enlivened by spontaneous processes and false protagonists. And if people or communities appear, it is usually in order to blame them. All of this is captured perfectly by the phrase endangered languages itself. Here we have a language object at center stage vaguely threatened by an anonymous distant menacing process and not a single person in sight. No oppression, no politics, no suffering, no body. The basic problem with this picture presented by Endangerment Discourses is that it isn't true. Languages don't just disappear or vanish or get lost. They are eliminated. They are eradicated. They are opposed, oppressed, banned, excluded, subordinated, marginalized. People are hunted, murdered, incarcerated, exiled, resettled, robbed, abused, diminished, humiliated, belittled and duped. There is nothing spontaneous about these processes. They involve immense coercion and violence and deliberate sustained and organized cruelty. And humans, real people suffer in the long drawn out process required to wrench a language away from a community. Any statement about endangered languages that does not acknowledge all of this is false. But these discourses are not simply false. They are harmful. They're harmful because all systems of oppression, including the systems of oppression that eliminate languages, are sustained by indifference and impunity. And language endangerment discourses create indifference and provide impunity to systems and perpetrators of oppression by concealing them. Toni Morrison in her description of oppressive language captures how some of this works. So I will read the quote out. Oppressive language does more than represent violence. It is violence. It does more than represent the limits of knowledge. It limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux language of mindless media, whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science, whether it is the maligned language of law without ethics or language designed for the estrangement of minorities hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek. It must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly towards the bottom line and the bottomed out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language, all are typical of the policing languages of mastery and cannot do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. So as we start now moving towards the end of the talk, I want to look very briefly at three of the ways in which endangered language discourses operate as oppressive language. So I'm going to look at depoliticization, hermeneutic injustice and systemic trauma. So depoliticization. Embedded in the discourses of language endangerment is the idea that linguistics is a value free scientific objective discipline solving technical problems through technical means. I've already pointed out that this gives a false impression of how language oppression comes about. But furthermore, it also has what James Ferguson following Michelle Foucault calls instrument effects. It does something, it works. And what it does is remove a highly political aspect of life from the realm of politics, a maneuver that always enables power to operate more freely. In this sense, linguistics operates as an anti-politics machine in much the same way that development does, serving as a cover for the expansion of state power and for other forms of power that drive language oppression. I know from personal experience that some practitioners including myself use endangerment discourses precisely because they are non-political. But I also know that by representing itself as a technical enterprise, endangerment linguistics amplifies and conceals the operating of the political rather than avoiding politics. De-politicization then is really just a synonym for more but more insidious politics. Second to hermeneutic injustice. Hermeneutic injustice is a variety of what philosopher Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice. That is injustice that attaches to someone as a result of how they are socially positioned as a producer and possessor of knowledge. Hermeneutic injustice specifically refers to the ways in which concepts that allow for the recognition, analysis and confrontation of injustice are unevenly distributed and even withheld. There is a feedback loop here between materials and symbolic forms of injustice and hermeneutic injustice because to address any form of injustice you need to be able to understand it. One of the best ways to ensure that injustice is perpetuated is thus to ensure that it is misunderstood, under-analyzed, concealed, unnamed and unconfronted. In relation to the injustice of language oppression, endangered language discourses are a form of hermeneutic injustice. They conceal and withhold the necessary conceptual frameworks that aid in understanding and confronting oppression. And often they do so at the expense of the pre-existing political intuitions of people who sign and speak oppressed languages, thus gaslighting them into second guessing their lived experience and nascent analysis, replacing political understandings with technical ones. So whereas depoliticization empowers power, hermeneutic injustice disempowers the oppressed. Finally, systemic trauma. Systemic trauma takes this dynamic one step further by punishing the oppressed. Systemic trauma refers to the, quote, contextual features of environments and institutions that give rise to trauma, maintain it and impact post-traumatic responses. What I'm suggesting here is, firstly, that language oppression produces trauma. Secondly, I think that endangered language discourses contribute to the reproduction of this trauma by refusing to acknowledge that it exists and ignoring the conditions that produced it. An important aspect of this is what philosopher Jill Stalford calls ethical loneliness, which I think of as the state of moral injury that pertains when one calls for help and is heard, but help is refused. Endangered language discourses enforce a state of ethical loneliness because the call to dismantle these discourses is as old as the discourses themselves. And when as a discipline, linguistics refuses to do this, when endangered language discourses are enabled and encouraged to thrive and grow, then the entire discipline becomes a site of systemic trauma, an enormous ongoing institutional act of abandonment that rubs salt in the wound of language oppression. So, depoliticization, hermeneutic injustice and systemic trauma, empowering power, disempowering the oppressed and punishing the suffering. This is how endangered language discourses as a press of language harm. These harms are produced wherever endangerment discourses are used because that's how discourse works. And endangerment discourses are used in a surprisingly wide variety of contexts and certainly not only by linguists. Within academia, these discourses have spread into other disciplines, including sociology, applied linguistics, anthropology, economics, geography and genocide studies, amongst others. We also see endangerment discourses in the media across a wide range of platforms from massive mainstream media platforms like the BBC to fringe anti-woke free speech absolutist libertarian outlets like Spiked Online, to hundreds of local newspapers around the world, including indigenous outlets, collectively reaching thousands of people every day. Endangerment discourses are also prevalent amongst practitioners, such as the development technocrat that I was, but also amongst a variety of other community-based workers including linguists and also in the bureaucratic hinterland that supports them, government departments, philanthropic donors and research and funding agencies. Finally, these discourses are also used by people who are being subjected to language oppression themselves. So these discourses are therefore widespread and propped up by significant institutional and financial support, but ultimately their legitimacy and their authority comes from linguistics. So linguists, the sort of linguists that I said that I was addressing at the beginning of my talk. You have a much broader job to do than just working out issues about language endangerment amongst other linguists in your own discipline. You also have a responsibility to intervene wherever endangerment discourses appear. Linguists must devour their own child, but this child has split into a thousand pieces and pops up just about everywhere and anywhere that people talk about language. How can such a child be devoured? Drawing on terms used by the anthropologist, Ghassan Hajj, I want to argue that linguists need to engage in both an anti-politics and an ultra-politics. They need to engage in an anti-politics, that is to express their oppositional concerns and make efforts to overthrow existing orders. These orders include existing discourses that collectively, that linguists collectively helped bring into the world. And linguists also need to partake in an ultra-politics, meaning a search for alternatives and an effort to construct new discourses that are capable of capturing the possibilities and laying the ground for new modes of existence. Linguistics therefore need to not only devour their child, but also to give birth to a new one. Before I finish, I want to look very briefly at both anti-politics and ultra-politics of endangered languages discourses. So if we accept, as I've argued here, that these discourses harm simply by being circulated, then linguists, because of their link to the legitimacy and authority of these discourses in particular, have a special responsibility to stop these discourses from circulating. But how? Well, in part, you need to engage in what Julia Komska, Michelle Moyd and David Gramling have called linguistic disobedience. At the foundation of this practice is a tuning and a turning of our hearing away from hegemonic voices and a shift in our attention, our obedience to other voices. In linguistics, this means we turn our listening towards the people who have been saying all along that endangered language discourses are problematic. But linguistic disobedience also involves correction, not just listening to certain voices, but the correction of harmful hegemonic voices including our own. We can do this by interrupting. We need to interrupt endangerment discourses wherever we encounter them, in peer review processes, in supervision and mentoring practices, in hiring practices, in editorial practices, in conducting funding reviews, in interactions at conferences with presenters and colleagues on social media, in talking to the media, the mass media, in interactions with practitioners and perhaps most importantly with ourselves, with our discipline but with ourselves individually. Interruption does not always stop the circulation of harmful discourses, but it creates moments when reflection is possible. It also sends signals to onlookers and bystanders that something needs to be reconsidered. In doing this, it can help generate new social connections and solidarities and failing to engage in correction upholds the hegemony of harmful discourses. Engaging in correction does not have to be confrontational, but it is almost always confronting because it entails interrupting communicative norms in ways that can generate embarrassment, guilt, confusion, resentment and anger. As the interrupter, it also involves becoming vulnerable and exposed. As Sarah Ahmed has explained, by pointing out a problem, you become a problem. Interruption also involves being exposed and vulnerable in another sense because to offer correction is also to invite it. So Komska, Moid and Gramling, therefore invite us to, quote, make mistakes, admit errors publicly, correct them, do better. So interrupting and correcting endangerment discourses is important, but what about ultra-politics? What is the alternative? What do we replace those discourses with? We have already started working on this when we speak about sleeping and dormant languages, for example. We can and should continue to revise our vocabulary and I think we should do so in a way that is informed by other movements for social justice that have worked through an ultra-politics of language in different contexts. For example, in conversations about gender-neutral language, editorial conventions for writing about indigenous people such as the capitalization of the I in indigenous, the campaign to drop the I word in talking about undocumented migrants in the US and so on. These kind of measures are exemplified in several style guides such as the Progressive Style Guide written by Hannah Thomas and Anna Hirsch. One example of this in relation to endangered language discourses is my use of the term language oppression as a substitute for language endangerment. I prefer this term not just a language endangerment but also to other alternatives such as linguicide or linguistic genocide because language oppression places the onus on the agent and it emphasizes processes and relations over end results. But as I've suggested in my talk, the problem of endangered language discourses are much more pervasive than a few problematic words. What we need is a whole new way of communicating a new language of language oppression that will explicitly politicize and humanize the issue which will serve the cause of hermeneutic injustice by providing communities and their allies with the conceptual tools they need to analyze the complex workings of power in through and on language and which will also give sustenance and safe haven to those who are traumatized by language oppression rather than reproducing that trauma. Building this new language of language oppression will take, is taking, sustained and good faith into disciplinary dialogue. Good faith dialogue means that we can't simply pick up concepts from one discipline and drop them into another. We don't simply need linguists to use more social theory. Instead, we need to continue forming new ligatures in the interstitial spaces between disciplines. In these spaces, concerns for language as both practice and institution as how we speak and what we speak, meld with a focus on justice, weaving together concepts from critical indigenous studies, critical race theory, critical gender side studies, the anthropology of violence, gender sexuality and diversity studies, critical disability studies, settler colonial studies and other disciplines. This engagement should be mutually transformative, not only creating new ways to communicate and think about language, but also making language a concern in these other discipline conversations as well. So the good faith that I'm imagining goes both ways. If we do this, if linguists engage in linguistic disobedience and transformative good faith dialogue with other disciplines, what might happen in the international decade of indigenous languages? It would not mean that we will suddenly solve the problem of language oppression on a global scale or that all indigenous people everywhere will have their every hope and dream for their languages fulfilled. But to hold the new language of language oppression accountable in this way would be equivalent to criticising anti-racism for not solving racism or the climate movement for not solving the climate crisis. Instead, the point is to move towards better understandings and more effective practices for resisting the massive structural forces that sustain systems of injustice and to bring clarity and insight to bear on a series of massively asymmetrical and unjust conflicts over language. And so with that, I'd like to wish you all a pleasant evening. Thank you for listening. And particularly I'd like to wish all indigenous people a very successful decade of indigenous languages. That's great, thank you so much, Gerald, for a really insightful, thought provoking talk with some great imagery as well. So feel free to add your questions into the chat or if you'd like to ask a question yourself, you can use the raise hand feature or just mention in the chat that you'd like to ask a question. As we wait for those questions to come in, let me start with maybe a bit of a provocative question myself. Some of you are talking, we think of this Peter Lagafoded article from 1993 that he wrote in response to the 1992 language special edition on language engagement where he says language engagement isn't primarily a political issue. And in a sense what he draws from that as his conclusion is that, well, I'm a phonetician so I'm not equipped to deal with political issues and so I shouldn't get involved and not equipped but also in addition to that, if I start to get involved in political issues that's going to create problems in my relationship with the government and the country where I'm actually trying to do this work in the first place so it would be counterproductive. What's your response to that line of thinking especially if I'm an individual who thinks that I have my specialty, that's nothing to do with these political issues? Yeah. So I think the problem is that linguistics has this relationship to endangered language discourses that other disciplines don't have. And as a linguist, you're a representative of the discipline as a whole whether you want to be or not and that places you in a relationship to this discourse of authorizing and legitimizing it to some extent. I appreciate the sort of the hesitancy around specific disciplinary competencies and I think that that's important but to me that doesn't mean that we shouldn't that linguists shouldn't try and think about these things it means that they should think about them in conjunction with other people from other disciplines that we do need this sort of space between disciplines to have these conversations and to figure out a language for talking about these things in a way that is authorized by linguistics but it is not a linguistics discourse itself which endangerment discourse isn't anyway, right? When you look at it, it's endangerment discourse is primarily not about linguistics it's not about language itself. On the other issue of, well, if I politicized this stuff true, right? That happens and that has happened to me but the question is what are your priorities in this situation? Is it just harvesting data in the face of human suffering or there are also complex trade-offs to be made between can you address that suffering by harvesting more data and you can sometimes, right? But there are complex ethical questions that simply can't be avoided. You can't step away from the politics of the situation. You need a way to address it. If you're going to do the research, if you're going to work with these communities it just is profoundly and unavoidably political. Let me go to Nathan Hill and ask him to unmute and ask his question. Okay, so I'll try and keep this brief. I'm not familiar with most of the theorists who you talk about but your talk feels very grom sheet to me which I would paraphrase as a kind of trying to create the superstructure for the infrastructure that we want to have. But then I see like, and I sort of wrote this in the comments that most of your critiques are much more pervasive than linguistics. The reification of political struggle as a way of obfuscating inequalities, pervasive in the social sciences in general. And so I sort of, and maybe you spoke to this but I sort of, and I think we've even talked about before I feel like, okay, so maybe I'll follow the correct style guideline and maybe we'll have a nice sort of anti-hegemonic discourse but it still doesn't change who has the guns. And maybe what Latifogud was saying and also that Peter sort of mentions is those that political and financial hegemony is exercised to discipline academics. So like, you know, how do we keep our, you know, in a sense, how do we feed our own families? If we can start to get in the business of antagonizing people who have control over the means of production, yeah. Yeah, so look at someone without a permanent ongoing position, I'm not really qualified to answer that question in a meaningful way. I don't know how to engage in this work and retain employment at the same time. It's not necessarily always possible. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it. The same thing relates to the question of who has the guns and like using the nice words won't disarm the people with the guns, right? But it might, the point is that it might. There's a possibility that it will. It engages with the fact that people are even holding guns, right? And simply ignoring the fact that there is violence, that there are material inequalities, that there is political oppression. Just ignoring that will never make it go away, right? Engaging and confronting that reality is the only way that that's ever going to change, right? And if you don't think that that's ever going to change, I don't know, that's depressing, that's sad and maybe endangerment, linguistics is not the field for you, right? If you think that that revolutionary social change isn't possible, study something else. Thanks, Daryl. Thanks, Nathan. I'm going to read out a question from Marie Lena, Karyu Limu. She writes in the chat, thank you very much for your reflections on language endangerment. Where do you situate the extremely politicized discourse of revitalization processes undertaken by native linguists, such as Catalan's in Spain and Occidental films in France, since at least the 1960s? They have largely talked about social oppression as a corollary of language minoritization, and it worked on the way dominant discourses in literature, science, et cetera, have been promoting and sustaining ideological mechanisms of devaluation and disdain about minority and endangered languages afflicted also on speakers of themselves. But of course, they originate from the communities they can feel in their skin, what language endangerment means. Yeah, so this is an issue which I really struggle with in my work, both in the specific research that I do, but also in my discipline. So if you look in anthropology and the history of linguistic anthropology, engaging with these issues, it kind of comes from studying movements like the Basque language movement, the Catalan language movement. And Alexander Jaffa, I can't remember which languages you worked with at the moment. Of course, again, right? And it was often in, you know, these original works on, and this is where the whole approach of language ideology comes from as well, right? And it comes from the critique of these movements being essentially often extremist, repressive, reproducing the mechanisms of domination they claimed to oppose and so on and so on, right? And there is truth in these things. Like where I work in Tibet, there is absolutely an element of this discourse where the state oppresses Tibetans and Tibetans' response further oppresses and marginalizes linguistic minorities amongst Tibetans themselves and within the Tibetan community, right? And so we have to confront these complexities of that approach. But the way that I'm continually trying to think it through is that where does the responsibility lie politically and ethically, right? It lies with the oppressive agent. And so when we talk about, you know, the oxitanists are too extreme, they're making the children learn the language, et cetera. But we have to think about what are the political conditions under which those forms of resistance arise? Because resistance is always tied into and reproduces and replicates and in order to engage with forms of domination and power, right? And so the real question is not whether those ideologies are too extreme or so. And the question is what conditions have produced those discourses and techniques of resistance, right? And I think that we can acknowledge at the same time that sometimes revitalization discourses can be oppressive while saying that that oppressiveness comes from a higher and deeper form of oppressiveness. And that's where our attention should lie. I hope that that addresses the question. Yeah, and that would seem to connect those kinds of contexts more with what we traditionally think of language engagement contexts as well in thinking about the systems that are around them that are sort of creating that environment, right? Mm-hmm. There's been a few comments in the chat from Peter Austin. I want to read out one of the first ones where he talks about some of what's impacted in the native language discourse. So he said that the native language discourse in the past 20 years has been impacted by three things. One, the ideologies of funders like UNESCO, Rousing, NSF, that like this way of speaking and hold the purse strings. Two, what Gobin Austin and Nathan called the audit culture of academia where stuff and counting is the currency of existence. And three, the dominant empiricist and positivist paradigm of linguistics as compared with anthropology and sociology. I wonder what you think of those influence and I mean, what might those who are engaged in language engagement be doing further to think about what's influenced the discourse and how to resist that pressure to come up with more helpful discourse in language engagement. Yeah, so thanks for those comments. I really like, you know, I appreciate that endangerment discourses have not developed in a vacuum, right? That they come out of and are authorized by linguistics but they appear in a dialogue with people who hold the purse strings and so on, right? And that has to be taken into consideration. But I guess what I'm arguing for is that we need a way of talking about these issues which can detach itself from those things, right? Because if our aim is to really support these languages, help these communities and so on, and if donors and institutions and political climates want us not to talk about things in particular ways, then they don't wanna solve the problem, right? We have to confront the fact that they don't wanna solve the problem. They're doing it for other reasons, right? Well, they may think that this way is more effective but it isn't. I would argue that it quite simply isn't, right? So I would argue that we need sort of, we need scholars, we need organizations that can detach themselves from these limitations on their practice. And we've seen this happen in other disciplines. We know that it's happened in other disciplines. We have an anthropology, for example, the tradition of militant anthropologists, right? Who work for communities in engaged and militant ways and they have jobs and they have organizations and they have advocacy groups and so on. There are other disciplines that work in the tradition of radical politics and manage to do so, manage to sustain themselves through collective organizing and so on. We also see now language revitalization movements that acknowledge the pressures and limits that donors place on their work and refuse to take any funding. They refuse to take money from anyone, partly to avoid audit culture and all the time that's wasted in writing reports and asking for money partly because they don't want to have to modify their language. They don't want to have to re-represent the issues in ways that they think are politically inaccurate and so on. So I think that there's lots of opportunities to sort of break away from the limitations imposed by donors and so on. And part of that has to come through that dialogue that I was talking about, which is not just interdisciplinary, but in terms of concepts, but also in terms of organizing. How do we organize, right? How do we organize without that funding? How do we organize without the legitimacy of UNESCO? How do we solve all these practical political problems? Yeah, so hopefully that. Yeah, I mean, I think that goes back to what you said about the tension among linguists around these issues too, because if one person, so as the individual says, I'm not going to take this funding because of this whatever issue, there's always going to be another person who's going to jump in and say, well, I'll take the funding and the funder needs to get rid of their funding, needs to have results, so that's going to go on. And so I don't know if individual resistance is as effective as a collective movement with together with the funders, can talk about what direction we want to move in and shift into a practice. But I mean, this is always the kind of the bind of collective organizing, right? Linguistics as a discipline has clout. It has a capacity to push back against these donors, right? If you're not going to take their funding, if no linguists are going to take their funding, no one's going to do the work for them, right? And I know that they'll find something else to do, but you can, I mean, there are methods to apply pressure through collective action that could be used to modify the behaviors and theories of these organizations, I think. Let me see how many more questions they have. I think we'll just end with one final comment here from Yair Sapir. He says, thanks for an interesting talk. I think that merely replacing endangered by oppressed might not always reflect reality. For instance, Irish Gaelic is in decline, although the state is actually trying to encourage its instruction and use. What's your response to that? Yeah, well, I guess we could start there with a conversation about what do we mean by oppressed, right? Whether it's just simply dominated or whether it has broader implications that relate to historical injustices and failures of decolonization and ongoing forms of resistance to revitalization, which is a very real and important thing as well, right? So if you look at the Irish case, there's people researching and writing the way that Irish people in Ireland resist and push back against the revitalization of the Irish language, right? And while that resistance still exists, you can call that language oppressed, right? That's what it means. While that resistance to revitalization is legitimized by hegemonic discourses of abstract liberalism and so on, Irish is still oppressed, right? Just because it's official, just because it's mandated, just because it's government support, it doesn't mean it's not oppressed. But I think that the deeper point that I'd like to make and to really emphasize is that what I'm not saying that we always have to only replace endangered with oppressed, that's not what I'm suggesting. That's not how I think that this process of interruption and correction should work. I find that term useful in most situations, but it's not always useful. And there are other terms that sometimes better and more create better insights, right? And so what I think is that we need to think about these things and we need to talk about it and we do need to get rid of words like endangerment and we need to think about an experiment with different words that help us find what a better way of talking about it is. I do see we have two more hands raised. So if you have time, I'm gonna get to those two people and end with that. So let me start with Tarab Hussein. Are you still ready to ask a question? Yeah, thank you for this fruitful session. I would like to ask question that while living in a community such as Pakistan, some languages have a very strong ideological construction. There's some languages are associated with religion, some are associated with economic goals and powers and some of the languages has been associated or I can say one language has been associated Urdu, that is Urdu, has been associated with national integrity. How we can develop awareness or how we can motivate our communities, community about the value or about the value of linguistic diversity and about the importance of our own native languages or local languages, what should be your first step while motivating people? Yeah, sure. Like I think the first step in that situation always has to be to ask what took away that immunity sense of value in their language, right? It's not how to give the language value. It's not how to convince people that it had value. It's to ask why they think that it doesn't have value. And so there's two questions, two ways that you have to address that issue. One is historically, what's the historical process that has taken place in that community that has resulted in them no longer valuing something which is foundational to their life and being, right? Historically, how did that happen? What were the steps ABC? And then secondly, it's more of a material slash political analysis of the contemporary situation of what is maintaining that? What is reinforcing that lack of value there in the broader society? What are the political institutions and policies? But political institutions is really key here. And I don't just mean organs of government. Political institutions include the state, right? The state itself is a political institution. What is the state's role? What is the role of the state's existence in this particular form in maintaining oppressive systems that have denied people of a sense of value in their language, right? How is that backed up by policy? How is that backed up by investments symbolically and materially? How are these things enforced through everyday interactions between people that are authorized and legitimated by the state and so on? Right? But I think really you have to start with the question of not how do you give people a sense of value in their language, but why do they not have it? How did it get taken away from them? Thank you. Thank you very much. For our last question, I'm afraid I won't pronounce this name correctly. If I angle it so I say it would be controversial, but that's probably not correct. Okay. I'll say it myself then if it's any easier. Joey, I'm Krohoro Gilligan. And I work for the University of Highlands and Islands. I work on the Gaelic languages. I'm not going to take up the point earlier about the level of threat to the Gaelic group. I just want to talk in general about Jared's talk. Thank you for preparing the talk, first of all. Very rich insights that we have to think about. However, I would ask, is there a level of comfortable framing in the way you're posing the argument? When we go through, and I can see the issue you have about the way we use words, the way we frame things are very important. But when we go through this literature of language endangerment, I'm not sure if these scholars are such political dullards as has been portrayed today. You're often struck by the empathy that these scholars have for the different language groups they're concerned about, concerned about intellectually and socially, I think. And we realize there is a kickback to an extent to the way these issues are discussed. We can think of David Crystal's book, Bluntly Titled Language Deaf, and he points out quite clearly that there is a dynamic of shooting the messenger that often language groups object to scholars who say that their culture is declining or under threat. But the point, the question I would ask is shifting the framework of the discussion within academia, so avoiding the use of the word endangerment and using new framing methods. How does that arrest the sociological processes which drive the erosion of these groups? Surely it's more important to empower these groups with a fairly robust scientific diagnostic of what is happening to them. That gives them the tools to engage in political action and demand resource to deal with their own context from their own situation. Yeah, thank you very much for these questions. So like just to go back to where you started about this idea of linguists being political dollars and so on. Like I think we have to separate out there two parts of that statement and the implications, right? So one is about intentions. And I'll say two things about intentions. One is that like I don't doubt the very good intentions of many linguists in engaging in this work. In fact, I'm thoroughly convinced of them because I've engaged with many deeply concerned linguists over many years and seen how deeply they care about people and communities and languages and so on, right? And that's why they do this work and that's why it exists as a field of linguistics because people care. And so that's not what I was trying to imply. The second aspect of that though is that those intentions are largely irrelevant, right? It's nice that people care but it doesn't particularly matter. And this is the point that is made very powerfully in that book, Racism Without Racists, right? That book is based on a series of interviews with like young liberal progressive American college students who don't have a racist bone in their body, have the best of intentions, et cetera. But nonetheless, engage in these discursive practices which maintain systems of oppression, right? Because their intentions don't matter. Intentions don't matter relative to material and symbolic inequalities, right? That's the argument at the core of what I'm saying, right? And that goes on to the second point which is that what I'm arguing is that in that sense linguists are political dullards if you want to use that word which is that they haven't engaged with theory to bring them to the point to understand that. Why they haven't done that is because they're linguists. It's not part of their training. It's not something that they can necessarily step into in the same way that I can't step into a linguistics paper and understand it and so on, right? It's not part of their training. It's not part of what they understand. So I'm not really saying that they're dullards. I'm just saying that they're trained to not understand these things, right? Which is why I repeatedly wanted to emphasize the importance of these things, of interdisciplinaryness, right? That linguists need to reach out across to other disciplines where we work with and think about these things and we need to work together, right? And people in other disciplines need to have good faith in trusting those good intentions of linguists. So I'll just mention briefly, there's a book on Endangerment Discourses, right? The critical book, which I haven't referenced, which I haven't referred to and the analysis of which is fine, but does not demonstrate the kind of good faith reaching across and working together that I think is really important, right? I'm having this conversation with linguists because I think that linguists, at least some of you want to know how to do this work better, right? So then to get to the second point that you made about like, well, don't you need technical knowledge and the production of information about the sociological and linguistic situation in order to improve it? Yes, you absolutely do. Which is why I addressed my comments mostly, why I addressed my comments exclusively to discourse and not to practice. Because a lot of the practices that endangered, Endangerment Linguistics engages in do actually speak to these political concerns, right? We need that data of understanding how the language is spoken in the community. We need that data understanding how people feel about that. We need that data understanding where and how they're using languages, right? But I think we need to rethink that data. We need to think about that data as a political map as well as a social and a linguistic map. And I think using that data, that sort of data and that kind of knowledge with these other discourses creates a whole other set of actions that you can and should undertake. So yeah, I hope that that addresses your questions. Thank you, Gerald. Thanks again for the presentation and you're taking the time to respond to all these interesting questions and comments. We're gonna leave it there. Of course, this could be an ongoing conversation for the next year or maybe the next decade as you propose as we think about the decade of indigenous languages. But thank you very much for taking the time to be with us. Thanks to everyone who came to join and to everyone who had a question to ask or a comment in the chat. Appreciate you all taking the time to reflect on these issues and think about how we can do our work better. Yep. Thanks very much, everyone. It's been a pleasure.