On the way home…

I was listening to the public radio station on the way home from work today and heard a show on the just released movie, The Linguists. It is about the journey that to academics take to record endangered languages. Much of the show centered around one of the causes of a language being lost: oppression.

I began to think about the conversations I had heard around the issue of our country’s borders. One of the arguments against immigrants receiving aid from our government was that there are examples of families who hold onto their native culture and tongue too ferociously; sometimes having members of an entire family who refuse to speak English. I will not go into the truth or fallacy of this argument against this family’s patriotism to America or to their native country. There are certainly instances in this country’s history where we have practiced oppression against another people’s culture to the extreme, such as boarding schools for native American children where to speak their mother language at any time was a punishable offense.