Language extinction is driven by power’s consensus between profits and controls
Evidence
We agree that the extinction of any language at aIl impoverishes everyone. And even more so, if that is possible, when a composite language like Creole is in question, for this would be an instant setback for the processes of bringinginto-relation. But how many languages, dialects, or idioms will have vanished, eroded by the irnplacable consensus among powers between profits and controls, before human communities learn to preserve together their diversities. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 501
Categorization
- XREF: Loss of Creole as ‘instant setback for bringing-into-relation’ connects to Glissant’s broader creolization mechanism that this reader is tracing via Spivak and Foucault — the survival of concrete creole languages is the empirical test of whether relation-identity can persist without collapse. — connects to: Language’s defining power enforces social structures by silencing alternatives — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 609; The seclusion-or-universality dichotomy legitimizes linguistic domination — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 533; A single dominant voice interface erases the boundary between self and market — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 831 (+2 more)
- SEED: The claim that Creole extinction is worse than other language loss — losing a composite language is losing the mechanism of relation itself — could anchor an essay on what creole languages uniquely encode about identity-as-process.
Broader Connections
- Language’s defining power enforces social structures by silencing alternatives
#corroborates(0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 609 - The seclusion-or-universality dichotomy legitimizes linguistic domination
#expands(0.80) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 533 - Dominant world languages rise and fall with the power of their imperial states
#corroborates(0.80) - A single dominant voice interface erases the boundary between self and market
#exemplifies(0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 831 - Dismantling progress extends to language itself, not just physical structures
#contradicts(0.75) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 656