Native Studies 20

Unit 1: Indigenous Worldviews and Ways of Knowing

When a Language Dies, a World Dies With It

Learning goal: I can explain why Indigenous language loss is a human rights issue and describe what the UN International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032) is trying to accomplish.

The Scale of the Problem

Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, approximately 40 percent are considered endangered. Most of those endangered languages are Indigenous languages. Indigenous peoples make up less than 6 percent of the global population, yet they speak more than 4,000 of the world's languages. That means the majority of human linguistic diversity sits in the hands of a small fraction of the world's population, and that diversity is disappearing fast.

On average, a language disappears every two weeks. When it goes, it takes with it everything that language carried: its stories, its legal traditions, its knowledge of local ecosystems, its ways of describing relationships between people and the land, its ceremonies, and its way of understanding the world.

The UN estimates that between 50 and 95 percent of the world's languages could be extinct or seriously endangered by the end of this century. Humanity may be left with as few as 300 to 600 languages that are not under threat. Most of the languages that survive will be dominant national and global languages. Most of what is lost will be Indigenous.

Why Indigenous Languages Are Disappearing

Language loss does not happen by accident. In the case of Indigenous languages, it has specific, identifiable causes that connect directly to the history of colonization covered in earlier handouts.

Why Language Loss Is a Human Rights Issue

Language loss is not simply a cultural loss, like losing a recipe or a folk song. It is a human rights violation. Here is why that distinction matters.

A language is not just a communication tool. It is a vehicle for identity, knowledge, law, spiritual practice, and relationship. In Goal 2 of this unit you examined how concepts like wahkohtowin, Mitakuye Oyasin, and kaitiakitanga are inseparable from the languages that hold them. You cannot fully translate those concepts into English because English was built on different assumptions about the world. When the language that carries a concept disappears, the concept itself is at risk.

This is precisely why colonial governments targeted languages. They understood that language was the transmission system for the worldview they wanted to destroy. Suppressing the language was a method of suppressing everything the language carried.

UNITED NATIONS DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES Articles 14 and 16 extend this further: Indigenous peoples have the right to establish their own educational systems in their own languages and to access media in their own languages. ILO Convention 169 also protects Indigenous language rights. These frameworks establish language not as a cultural nicety but as a legal right.

Language loss is also connected to other human rights. Research consistently shows that Indigenous children who learn in their own language have better educational outcomes, stronger mental health, and stronger connections to their communities. When a language disappears, those connections weaken. The intergenerational effects of language loss, including grief, disconnection from identity, and loss of access to traditional knowledge, are forms of harm.

What Is Lost When a Language Dies

The title of this handout comes from a phrase often attributed to linguists and Indigenous leaders: when a language dies, a world dies with it. This section makes that concrete.

Language Revitalization: What Works

Language loss is not inevitable. Communities around the world have pulled their languages back from the edge of extinction. These examples show what revitalization looks like when communities lead the process.

The UN International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032)

In 2022, the United Nations launched the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, a ten-year coordinated global effort to address the crisis. UNESCO leads the implementation, in partnership with the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and Indigenous peoples' organizations worldwide.

The Decade grew out of the 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages, which demonstrated that one year was not enough to produce lasting change. The Decade provides a longer timeframe for governments, communities, and international organizations to take coordinated action.

The Decade operates through a Global Action Plan structured around ten thematic areas. It calls on governments to establish national mechanisms with adequate funding, and on Indigenous peoples to lead their own revitalization processes rather than having revitalization done to them by outside institutions.

One of the Decade's central principles is that language revitalization must be led by Indigenous communities themselves. Outside funding and policy support can help, but communities must control the process. A language that is preserved as a museum artifact without living speakers in a living community is not a revitalized language. The goal is languages that are spoken, sung, dreamed in, and passed to children.

What the Decade Cannot Do Alone

It is important to be honest about the limits of international declarations and decades. The Decade raises awareness and mobilizes resources, but it cannot by itself reverse the conditions that have driven language loss.

• A ten-year UN initiative does not undo a century of residential schools.

• Governments that endorse the Decade may still underfund language programs.

• A language cannot be revitalized through policy alone. It requires living communities with access to fluent speakers, time, and resources.

• Not all languages can be saved. For some, there are no fluent speakers left. Documentation can preserve a record, but revival may not be possible.

These limits do not make the Decade pointless. They make it necessary to understand what it can and cannot accomplish, and what else is required alongside it.

Think About It

Answer the following in your notes or journal.

• The handout says language suppression was a deliberate colonial strategy, not an accident. Looking at what you now know about Goals 1 through 4 in this unit, why would destroying a language be an effective way to suppress a worldview?

• Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that Potawatomi has a grammar of animacy that makes plants and animals grammatically alive rather than inert objects. What would change about how you relate to the natural world if your language required you to treat a river as a living being rather than a thing?

• The Kohanga Reo model started with young children learning from elders. Why do you think this approach, rather than teaching language to adults, was the key to revitalization? What does this tell you about how languages survive?

• Canada's Indigenous Languages Act was partly a response to TRC Calls to Action. The same government that funded residential schools now has a legal obligation to restore the languages those schools destroyed. How do you think about that? Is that reconciliation, or is something more needed?

Key terms: Language revitalization: efforts to restore a language to active use in a community. | Intergenerational transmission: the passing of a language from one generation to the next within a family or community. | Language nest (Kohanga Reo): an early childhood immersion program where young children learn an endangered language from fluent elders as their primary language of instruction. | Grammar of animacy: a grammatical feature of some Indigenous languages that treats plants, animals, and other non-human beings as grammatically alive rather than as objects.

References

Sources Used

The following sources informed the content of this handout.

Canada. (2019). Indigenous Languages Act (S.C. 2019, c. 23). https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/I-7.75/

Ducharme, M., et al. (2025). Revitalizing Indigenous languages, fostering self-governance, overcoming the Indian Act: A case study of Lil'wat Nation. Canadian Public Administration. https://doi.org/10.1111/capa.70035

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.

UNESCO. (n.d.). International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032. https://www.unesco.org/en/decades/indigenous-languages

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2023). UN DESA Policy Brief No. 151: Why Indigenous languages matter. https://desapublications.un.org/policy-briefs/un-desa-policy-brief-no-151-why-indigenous-languages-matter-international-decade-0

United Nations. (2007). United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. UN General Assembly.