Dead Language
Words and Art by Carmen Vidal
One language dies every 40 days.
I learned this grim fact in the most unexpected of places, a movie about the explosive beginnings of Irish hip-hop band Kneecap, proper titled Kneecap. I highly recommend watching it, it’s funny, exciting, and more importantly, inspiring.
Kneecap tells the story of these young Irish men from the “ceasefire” generation, who instead of bending to conformity choose to keep their language and culture alive through their art, their music, and overall “fuck you” attitude towards the imperial British state.
The Irish are a contemporary example of what has happened to a lot of our communities that have been colonized, genocided, and whose cultures languages have been forgotten. Watching this movie helps put in context the evolution of colonization, and how society forces us to move along once conflict is over in an attempt to downplay and forget the atrocities of colonial occupation. When young generations like the members of Kneecap refuse to forget or let their languages and cultures die we can feel hope.
It is estimated that 90% of the world languages will disappear in the next 100 years, this is cultural genocide and erasure of many people. It’s with acts of defiance, big and small, that we can keep our languages and stories alive, and art plays a great role in it.
Just like Kneecap, Peruvian artist Renata Flores Rivera uses her music to keep the Quechua language alive. She uses her voice to tell stories of her people and to encourage and inspire younger generations to learn and respect indigenous languages. “When I was 8 years old I would ask myself why people rejected my grandmother, and when I grew up I understood it was because of her mother tongue” she tells in an interview for Latino Book Review, “This is where my social responsibility to protect, value, respect, and love Quechua as well as our ancestors was born.”
Renata was moved to fight, with her talent, with her voice and now she has gained recognition and most importantly, it has made it clear for all of us that the Quechuan language, just like many indigenous languages, has place the 21st century and beyond.
With the movie Kneecap, and the viral success of Renata’s music, we can see that younger generations are hungry to express themselves in a language that speaks to their soul, their roots, and to find a voice beyond their colonized realities.
This is where many young minds have found their calling, like Danielle Boyer, the Ojibwe robot inventor who is using her creations to help keep indigenous languages alive through technology that is by and for indigenous populations.
She criticizes major revitalization initiatives that use Ai for doing more damage than helping keep indigenous languages alive. “Companies like OpenAi are creating language learning models that actually teach and use indigenous languages.” she tells her followers via TikTok, “But the problem is the way we are training this data.” These learning systems are not getting their information from indigenous speakers but rather get their data from the internet, compromising the authenticity of the data and further erasing the voices and autonomy of indigenous populations.
This is what prompted her to build her own language learning robot, to combat the big corporations that don’t put indigenous voices at the forefront of their initiatives. Her creation, SkoBot, a robot that learns by listening to the voices of children of the endangered Indigenous language Anishinaabemowin, seeks to be a more ethical and sustainable learning system.
Keeping our languages alive is crucial for the preservation of our cultures that imperial states seek to erase us by any means necessary. The movie Kneecap ends with a lesson, every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom. This phrase is the powerful reminder that every action to keep our cultures and languages alive is important, and refusing to let our languages and voices die is the most important act for liberation.