Language death can narrow an entire people’s worldview to nine speakers

Evidence

When the speakers were called forward to the circle of folding chairs, they moved slowly—with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs, only a few entirely under their own power. I counted them as they filled the chairs. Nine. Nine fluent speakers. In the whole world. Our language, millennia in the making, sits in those nine chairs. The words that praised creation, told the old stories, lulled my ancestors to sleep, rests today in the tongues of nine very mortal men and women. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 180

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ch11 (boarding school bans nearly erased 350 Indigenous tongues) — the proximate count of survival, and to ch8’s Boarding schools severed whole generations claim. — connects to: Most North American Indigenous languages will be extinct by 2050 — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 679; Language preserves fossilized worldviews within its living metaphors — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1599; Unwritten oral traditions can be destroyed more totally than literate cultures — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 1479 (+3 more)
• SEED: The materiality of linguistic extinction — ‘nine chairs’ as a unit of measure for cultural loss — is a powerful image for an essay on quantification in environmental and cultural justice.

Broader Connections

• Language preserves fossilized worldviews within its living metaphors #expands (0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1599
• Speaking a language means assuming its entire culture and civilization. #corroborates (0.82)
• Unwritten oral traditions can be destroyed more totally than literate cultures #corroborates (0.80) — , The Rod and the Child, 1479
• Language loss threatens biological diversity they encode #corroborates (0.80) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 471
• Worldviews require permanent organized repetition or they decay #expands (0.80)