#lost languages

I mourn for the languages that are lost, the ones we are losing. The children beaten for using their native tongue in school, the pull in the stomaches of the ones alive today and the ache in their throat as they hold back tears and realize they don’t remember the word for something. I grieve for the cultures faded into a memory, or a picture, maybe even nothing. The Native people of the Americas, the Gaelic of Scotland, the longing for the feeling of a language on their tongue that will never come, the knowledge that it was not time or gradual change that stole their words from them, but men.