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2022 begins the United Nations (UN) International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL), which aims to “draw attention to the critical loss of indigenous languages and the urgent need to preserve, revitalize and promote indigenous languages.” These goals align with language justice, which several civil society organizations have described as a world where everyone can communicate in the language that they are most comfortable with and where colonial norms around language are challenged. Despite the important steps the IDIL takes, it fails to address the interactions between language and migration, even though this is critical to a comprehensive approach to preserving, revitalizing, and promoting indigenous languages. In order to live up to the promise of the IDIL, the UN, state governments, indigenous language communities, and other stakeholders must consider the needs of diasporic indigenous language users and the root causes of migration away from indigenous communities.
Indigenous peoples are often defined as “those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories.” According to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, over half of the world’s languages will likely disappear by the end of this century, and most of the languages in danger are indigenous languages. Recognizing that preserving indigenous languages promotes not only linguistic diversity but also “philosophy, heritage, production of knowledge, understanding of human relations and the natural world, in building peace, good governance, sustainable development, social cohesion and peaceful coexistence within our societies,” the UN General Assembly created the International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019, which it decided to follow up with the IDIL. Indigenous communities and scholars also argue that indigenous languages are important to cultural identity and resistance to colonialism.
The vision for the IDIL is laid out in the Los Pinos Declaration [Chapoltepek] and a Global Action Plan. They present an expansive understanding of what it means to support indigenous languages and language users, addressing topics that range from language revitalization to health care, from education to climate change, from job opportunities to gender equality. This wide-ranging vision is important because it recognizes that preserving, revitalizing, and promoting indigenous languages is about more than just language.
The subject of migration is conspicuously absent from official documentation about the IDIL and its goals. The Global Action Plan mentions migration only once, to answer the question, “Why an international decade of indigenous languages?” “Over time,” it explains, “many Indigenous Peoples around the world have been marginalized; they continue to experience challenges connected with, for example, … enforced migration and forced relocation.”
Despite the silence in the Global Action Plan, migration does affect indigenous peoples and their languages. Common understandings of indigeneity emphasize an indigenous community’s connection to a particular place, but indigenous people sometimes move (whether by choice, coercion, or a combination of the two) away from the land where they and their ancestors were born. There are many historical and contemporary instances of entire indigenous communities being displaced due to settler colonialism, violent conflict, development projects, and other causes. In other cases, indigenous communities remain on their ancestral lands, but many community members move away. This is the situation of indigenous Samoans: there are more Samoans living in places like New Zealand and the mainland United States than in the Samoan Islands. Indigenous migration can take the form of internal migration, such as from traditional territories to cities. In other instances it is international migration, as exemplified by the recent rise in indigenous immigrants from other parts of the Americas, particularly indigenous Mayans from Guatemala, to the United States. These stories show that migration is a pressing issue for many indigenous communities.
The near-absence of migration in the IDIL Global Action Plan is not an anomaly. More general international frameworks for language rights, indigenous peoples’ rights, and human rights do not specifically address the impact of migration on indigenous language communities either. Most language rights protections are limited to a few categories: (1) nondiscrimination based on language, (2) the right to use one’s own language, and (3) the right to access services and judicial proceedings in a language one understands. This is the case for universal and regional human rights treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights. These rights are certainly important for one area where migration and indigenous languages intersect: the lack of qualified interpreters for migrants who use indigenous languages. But these limited rights do not compare to the IDIL’s expansive, language justice-oriented vision, let alone fill in its gaps described below. Broader conceptions of linguistic rights and indigenous peoples’ rights may also include children’s right to education in their first language and communities’ right to revitalize their language, but they still tend not to situate these rights in migration contexts. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, for example, calls on states to protect and promote minority languages but limits itself to languages that were “traditionally used within a given territory,” not immigrant languages. This leaves out minority language users who live outside of the area where their language originated but who still want to promote their language.
Any comprehensive approach to preserving, revitalizing, and promoting indigenous languages must be attentive to migration in at least two ways. First, it must grapple with the particular circumstances of diaspora communities. Second, creating and maintaining strong indigenous language communities requires addressing the push factors driving indigenous language users to migrate.
Heritage languages are often lost within a few generations of migration due to factors like isolation from other language users, limited opportunities to use the language, and lack of educational resources in the heritage language. When language users do not all live near each other, language policy makers may face unique challenges like the need to connect geographically dispersed communities, often across borders. The Global Action Plan for the IDIL does not discuss strategies for promoting indigenous languages outside of the place where they originated. It does not say that it excludes indigenous languages with user communities outside of their original territories or state(s), either, but its silence on the issue suggests that the drafters did not have diaspora communities in mind. By not addressing the impacts of migration and the needs of diaspora communities, they missed an opportunity to analyze those needs, suggest strategies to address them, and articulate the duties of states, UN entities, and other actors to do so.
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