When Lily Gladstone accepted her historic Golden Globe award earlier this month, the "Killers of the Flower Moon" star didn't just express her thanks. She introduced herself. She said her name. She said "I love you." And she said it in Blackfeet. "One of the first things we're taught is you say your name, you say where you're from and you say hello to everyone," she explained later. "So it was one of the more natural things I could do in the moment." It was a greeting received around the globe, in a language spoken only by a few thousand people. There are roughly 7,000 languages in the world. And UNESCO has estimated that 3,000 of them — including Yiddish, Irish and Blackfoot — are endangered and could be lost by the end of the century. That's one language every two weeks. Potentially gone.
Languages don't just randomly go missing. They don't disappear because the world is becoming a smaller place, or because a common tongue is automatically a good thing. Their precarity or obliteration means something else, something we need to pay attention to. "People don't lose their languages to globalization," says Daniel Bögre Udell, the co-founder of the language preservation nonprofit Wikitongues. "Rather, economic exclusion, political oppression and violence force people to abandon their languages. Globalization didn't drive Blackfoot, known natively as Siksika, into decline. Rather, until 1978, the federal government took indigenous children from their families and forced them into so-called residential schools where they were given English names and punished for speaking their languages." He cites another, more personal example.
