Who Counts? Who Defines a Language and its Speakers?

Who gets to speak their language?

In Native North America, and other colonized regions of the world, Native nations have been forcibly, violently displaced by settler colonialism.

Part of the colonial genocide project was the cultural uprooting of Native language practices.

Community-led preservation of Native Languages is a reclamation of power in a colonial context.

Who counts as a speaker?

Linguists describe languages uprooted by colonialism as “having few speakers” and “approaching extinction.” 

When linguists say a language has “few speakers”, they impose a set of criteria. In these approaches, speakers who "count" are:

• Monolinguals

• Elders

• People who learned the language "naturally"

• People who "seem" Native North American

These criteria reflect colonialist stereotypes about Nativeness being something antiquated, isolated, and monolithic.

Linguists’ definition of language extinction is based on problematic criteria.

Who is left out?

Language reclamation is a redefinition of problematic criteria, by the community.

"It’s strange that we would leave it up to linguists to define who’s a fluent speaker. … there’s nobody that can determine the fluency of people, other than the people themselves." 

- Myra Johnson, former Director of the Northern Paiute Tribe’s Culture and Heritage Department

"If they, they felt they were a speaker, if they had knowledge to share about that language, then they were a speaker of that language."

- Daryl Baldwin, Executive Director of the Myaamia Center

Culturally-rooted language reclamation may not “count” in the eyes of linguists, and often lacks funding.

Saying a language is “extinct”often ignores community-defined language use.

Changing the narrative

Outsiders defining the authenticity of language speakers perpetuates settler colonialism. Also, phrases like “language extinction” are built on settler colonial stereotypes.

Instead, communities themselves ought to define their own terms to describe culturally rooted language practices.

Source

• Leonard, Wesley Y. (2024). Toward an Indigenous relational approach to reframing “native speaker”. Keynote presented at the 1st ROLE Symposium.