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<h1 class="gmail-headline__title">Can Language Save Communities Under Threat From A Globalised World?</h1>
<h2 class="gmail-headline__subtitle">There are 2,460 languages currently spoken around the world — but only 118 of them are considered “safe.”</h2>
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<a class="gmail-author-card__details__name" href="https://www.huffingtonpost.in/author/padmaparna-ghosh">
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Padmaparna Ghosh
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Journalist.
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DARREN GARETT
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<p><strong>As a child, Kanako Uzawa
treasured her school vacations, when she traveled from Tokyo to her
family farm in Nibutani, a remote village in northern Japan.</strong>
"There were rice fields extending into the distance," she says. "It was
all very green with fresh air... It was paradise for kids."</p>
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<p>Uzawa,
who was born in Tomakomai, Hokkaido, is a member of the Ainu, an
indigenous group from northern Japan. The story of this small community
is one of erasure instigated by the state. In the late nineteenth
century, the Meiji government sought a unified, cohesive vision of
Japan; the very existence of the Ainu and other indigenous groups
threatened Japan's national myth of homogeneity. In 1899, the government
passed the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, which stripped
the Ainu of their identity: names were changed, language was curbed, and
they were forced to give up hunting and gathering and begin farming on
poor land.</p>
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The Casas-Rodríguez Postcard Collection // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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<p>As long as humans have
formed shared identities around ethnicity, religion, race, language, and
culture, those identities have been subject to erasure, from
colonialism to war to economic globalisation to linguistic
homogenisation to environmental change. Just look to the island nations
of Tuvalu and Kiribati, <a href="http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/20112/" rel="nofollow">preparing to sink beneath the sea</a>, or to Greenland, <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/30-arctic-ferris-paper.pdf" rel="nofollow">preparing for its ice to melt away</a>.</p>
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<p>In the <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.in/padmaparna-ghosh/refugees-are-asked-to-integrate-but-do-those-asking-know-what-that-means_a_23396078/" target="_blank">previous episode</a>,
we explored how asylum seekers struggle to define their identities,
caught in limbo between their home countries and their adopted ones.
Governments define official, legitimised forms of national identities :
the structures into which new arrivals should be integrated. But these
same structures are applied to groups who have long resided within
countries' borders—or, in the case of many colonized nations, predated
the groups that currently hold power. How can a given group retain a
sovereign identity within those national constructs?</p></div></div></article>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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