Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

by James Griffiths

It benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerless, reassuring the colonizer that they are not to blame. Languages are not lost, they are taken. They are uprooted by malice or neglect, their speakers assimilated into a new tongue, or left to struggle in the space between the fading old and the out of reach new.

in Wales, Hawai‘i and Hong Kong, places that are simultaneously parts of the empires that consumed them, and separate and resentful of them; both proud of the greater nations and their achievements, and yearning for independence or autonomy.

Welsh is a Celtic language, descended from a common Brythonic tongue that was once spoken throughout Britain. It is closely related to Cornish and Breton, and more loosely to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, though Goidelic and Brythonic languages sound very distinct, and the two language families are not mutually intelligible.

Kamehameha, which had once banned the speaking of Hawaiian and sought to Americanize its students, would now be among the language’s foremost defenders, inculcating a new generation of speakers.

In 1984, the first Hawaiian immersion kindergarten had opened on Kaua’i, and more began popping up throughout the islands.19 Two years later, a bill allowing Hawaiian to be used as a medium of instruction in public schools passed,

In 1999, for the first time in over a century, a class of students educated entirely in Hawaiian from the age of four to eighteen graduated,

It cannot be overstated how close Hawaiian came to extinction. Many of the immersion preschools had to bring in elderly people to act as teachers, as so few in the intervening generation spoke the language. Had the Hawaiian renaissance come a decade later, many of these people would have been dead, and the process might have been closer to reviving an extinct language than revitalizing one under threat, a far, far harder task.