we do live in a swamp world whatever engineers say

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In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off. 

For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished - usually with a beating. 

Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.

And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.

People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents. 

Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can. 

I also remember a guy whose tiktok was dedicated to showing indian recipes that were slowly being lost because of english and other dominant languages drowning out the language of the culture that made them.

And I remember in my breton class learning about AAVE through US rap, and about how shaming the use of a language or dialect as wrong and/or stupider is also about shaming a culture out of existence; and then I learned about how killing breton was as much about closing schools and forcing administration to be done in french as it was about shaming people who spoke it. There is a well known 1900s school poster with a rule on it that goes “no spitting on the floor and no speaking breton”, and the punishment for either was a whack on the tips of the fingers with a wooden ruler. Breton was called the language of pigs and geese. There’s still insulting words existing in french language that were about bretons, like plouc (a rural and stupid person) or baragouiner (to speak unintelligibly). And then I remember learning about the colonisation of Africa by France and the methods that were used to smother the languages there too.

A language dying is a normal part of life: it usually evolves into something else, like latin giving us a bunch of languages, and historians can reverse engineer it through those languages. A language being killed means nothing of the sort gets left behind. It means meeting an 80yo grandma with alzheimer who cries to a 14yo me because she’s ashamed of remembering a word in her “dirty” mother tongue but not in french. It means learning about the almost century where a language that still has alive native speakers has stagnated so badly that in the early 2010s it still didn’t have a word for computer. It’s learning about how historians were touring retirements homes in hopes that someone there could help them translate documents dating WWI, because the main form of language conservation for breton in the 20th century was oral transmission.

The out of context channel contains me being quoted with “Ugh I’m getting really depressed.. I need to do a lot of opium”

And when I’m trying to organise my lore, “Right.. this goes here here because.. death brings silence and new life springs after winter and blood comes from the heart..”

you know

this

- I'll hear it no matter where my phone was buried

- it's not going to be confused for anyone else's phone

- it's just silly enough to blunt some of the anxiety around phone calls