Linguistic genocide?

Children's right to education in their own languages

We are killing languages faster than ever. By 2100, between 90 and 95 percent of today's approximately 7,000 spoken languages may be extinct or no longer learned by children.

Most threatened languages are spoken by indigenous peoples; unless they are strengthened through education and other measures they will disappear.

Most countries are multiethnic and multilingual. If Education for All (EFA) becomes a reality, most children will soon attend school.

However, most indigenous and minority children (and children from majority groups like those from African countries with European official languages) are forced to accept instruction through a language that is not their own. They have no choice: there are no schools teaching in their first language.

Many parents and politicians 'choose' education through a dominant language, often English, unknowingly going against scientific evidence about learning and bilingualism, as well as against the human right of their own children to education in a language they understand.

Loss of educational opportunity

Some researchers claim that languages die 'naturally', that they cannot adapt to a post-modern technological world, and that their speakers leave them behind voluntarily to get the benefits that a more widely-spoken language gives. Parents think of the future education and jobs of their children and stop speaking their own languages at home. Nobody can be blamed and the children appear to profit.

But do they? Research with indigenous and minority children from all over the world shows negative results from using a dominant language as the main or only teaching language. Two examples: Canadian Inuit students taught in English reach only Grade 4 level after 9 years of schooling; English is the greatest barrier to successful classroom learning for Aboriginal children in Australia.

Research also shows that:

• Children learn better when they are taught through a language they know well.
• Children in mother tongue-based bilingual programmes in the USA learn English more rapidly and do better academically than those in all-English programmes.
• In the largest-ever study of minority education students who reached the highest levels of bilingualism and school achievement were those whose mother tongue was the main language of instruction for the longest period of time.

Loss of information essential for survival

Non-degraded ecosystems such as rainforests in the Amazon, Borneo or Papua New Guinea are often inhabited only by indigenous and traditional peoples. When their languages disappear, their knowledge about how to maintain diverse ecosystems sustainably also disappears, including important knowledge about human survival (for instance, about medicinal plants) that is encoded in their languages. By killing languages, we are ruining the prerequisites for human life on the planet.

The disappearance of languages may be seen as a result of linguistic genocide. The formal education of indigenous and minority children through the medium of a foreign language corresponds to what two of the five definitions in The United Nations International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (E793, 1948) define as genocide:

Article II(e): 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group'; and

Article II(b): 'causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group' (emphasis added).

Indigenous and minority children should be educated in their own languages with good teaching of a country's official languages as second languages. Children need to learn dominant languages in addition to, not instead of, their own languages.

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas
Roskilde University, Denmark
Äbo Akademi University Vasa, Finland
skutnabbkangas@gmail.com

See also

Linguistic Genocide in Education - or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000

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