Language 4R and the Placement of Roots: Introduction
One’s mother tongue is one’s language of intimacy. Perhaps it carries tender childhood lullabies. Perhaps it paints one’s dreams. Perhaps it swells with anger. Perhaps it wrings out one’s grief. A mother tongue shapes one’s perceptions of the world and of oneself. For better or for worse, it provides a means of communication and a sense of place. But what if each word of your mother tongue reminded you of the violence your ancestral mothers endured? How much of that violence would seep into the way you see the world and yourself? Can a language that holds such a legacy of violation ever be your language of intimacy?
Many African Americans, namely descendants of African slaves in the United States, experience this intrinsic tension in our relationship with the English language. In a literal sense, English functions as a mother tongue since the African American community has been speaking English and regional dialects thereof for generations. It is the language of our mothers, or at the very least, the mothers that we know or can trace through living memory. Furthermore, English can be a sufficient and arguably even privileged means of communication in globalized discourse. As English becomes an increasingly dominant language of technology, business, and international policy, there is some benefit in having it as our native language. However, as aforementioned, a true mother tongue not only provides a means of communication, but also a sense of place. Language points to one’s roots, and roots often imply the soil of a homeland.
For many other native English speakers, especially in the United States, if English is not the language of their ancestral homeland, they can follow their roots to the languages of other soils. But when African Americans look to our roots, what do we see? We cannot help but marvel at the evidence of strain, rupture, and loss. The Atlantic Slave Trade violently uprooted our ancestors from their homelands and replanted them on hostile ground just for them to be treated like weeds. Even today, with the harsh racialized realities of gentrification, mass incarceration, and police brutality, African Americans are forced to grow, as legendary rapper and poet Tupac Shakur says, like roses from concrete. The roses that grow from concrete are either hated or admired for their beauty and resilience, but they are almost unequivocally viewed as being out of place.
The African American community cannot afford to deny the significance of this ancestral language loss. This can be admittedly easy to minimize at face value, since contemplating the connections between language and identity is not necessarily a basic need for survival. Who has the time or energy to think about a mother tongue or desire a homeland when there are mouths to feed and bills to pay? Sentiments like these often sweep language considerations under the rug as superfluous.
Additionally, many prominent African American linguistic scholars, like John McWhorter of Columbia University, would conjecture that language is not one of the more defining features of cultural identity or propagation, but rather primarily a tool of access. In an article titled “The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English,” McWhorter argues that a loss of language does not directly correlate to a loss of culture, and that in fact, a cultural community may gain from the accepted internalization of English as a lingua franca. In advocating for the widespread use of English, McWhorter encourages readers to, “Note also the obvious and vibrant black culture in the United States, among people who speak not Yoruba, but English.” [1] For him, the African American utilization of English functions as a case study to demonstrate English’s power and adaptability. This type of logic supports the widespread assumption that ancestral language loss has not hindered the vitality of African American culture in a way that is conceivable or worth addressing. Yet, these arguments lack introspective evaluations of the African American community’s violently obscured roots and language’s role in shaping them. Yes, there is beauty and resilience in being roses that grow through concrete, but what if really considering language can be one of our keys to breaking the concrete apart?
It is imperative for African Americans, with support from our allies, to actively grapple with the following questions: Is it possible for us to have a true mother tongue, to repair a sense of place and intimacy from the words closest to our hearts? Can we use language to reclaim our right to an ancestral homeland? What lost legacies and identities can be restored? In essence, I recommend we launch into a concentrated mode of discourse dedicated to postulating potential solutions to be made manifest through concrete communal, educational, and political action. I propose to entitle this discussion to language reparation/reappropriation/reclamation/restoration, or language 4R for brevity’s sake. The coexistence of the four r-words not only indicates some of my unresolved questions about which frames the discourse best, but it also alludes to a diversity in pre-existing concepts in African American cultural thought that can fortify the structure and progression of language 4R discussions. In other words, reparation, reappropriation, reclamation, and restoration respectively capture distinct components and models that can be essential to potential solutions. In the following four posts, I intend to discuss each language r-word with its correlative model in the hopes of drawing attention to language and its importance to the most foundational r-word of all– our roots.
[1] McWhorter, J. “The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English,” 2009.
Blog Image Source: https://www.nordangliaeducation.com/en/our-schools/cambodia/article/2018/9/7/why-mother-tongue-matters
