Capitalism and colonialism go hand in hand, and their devastating impact on language extinction is unimaginable. They drive global language loss by imposing dominant administrative tongues, enforcing cultural enslavement, and creating economic pressures that force speakers to abandon native dialects in favour of a global lingua franca. From school level onward, native languages are banned, and the colonisation of the mind is perpetuated across generations. Colonial powers force native populations off their ancestral lands, severing the ecological and cultural contexts specific to their vocabularies. Capitalist frameworks assign worth based solely on economic utility, devaluing Indigenous and regional languages that lack global trading power. Meanwhile, media, technology, and digital platforms favour major Eurocentric languages, marginalising smaller linguistic groups.
As reported by Reuters on 29 July 2026, Professor Claira Bowera of Yale University has proven how languages die. One of the ways, he cites, is to kill the people who speak their Indigenous languages, or to forcibly shift them to another language. Across the world today, roughly 7,500 languages remain in use. Major global tongues like English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, and French account for the largest share of speakers, both native and non-native. Despite that variety, today’s linguistic landscape is only a whisper of what it was at its historical height.
Languages are profoundly meaningful to their communities. They carry knowledge, worldviews, and memories. Using mathematical modelling alongside insights from anthropology, linguistics, and demography, researchers have estimated the number of languages used globally dating back about 12,000 years to around the end of the last Ice Age—a chapter in time known as the Holocene epoch. They identified a period spanning the first millennium BC and the first millennium AD when humankind may have spoken tens of thousands of different languages. The major decline of this linguistic golden age was due primarily to the expansion of empires and European colonialism over several centuries.
A review in The New Yorker titled “Sometimes It’s OK to Let a Language Die” reveals a profound misunderstanding of language revitalisation and perpetuates the very narratives designed to eradicate languages and their speakers. For centuries, narratives about Indigenous people and their languages have been shaped by those who try to eliminate them—to eradicate their ways of knowing, being, living, and speaking. Dominant hegemonic narratives have been crafted to support concrete efforts to make them disappear: their cultures dismissed as “savage” or “primitive” to justify taking their children, and their languages denigrated as “gibberish,” incapable of holding higher, rational thoughts, and thus forbidden in courtrooms and classrooms. Non-Western epistemologies and cultural values are dismissed as distasteful—a lazy repackaging of “gibberish” and “savagery.” This constitutes a form of colonial genocide, evident elsewhere in the world, as in Gaza under Israeli imperialism. Throwing the tenets of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to the wind, for Israel it is acceptable to violate people’s rights to food, housing, healthcare, freedom of thought, and freedom from torture.
Languages are not biological creatures. They do not die natural deaths; there is no time limit on how long a language can be used. Languages are murdered. The argument of the “naturalness” of cultural and linguistic extinction is a hallmark of Western capitalist constructs and carries within it ugly histories. It has been used time and again to rationalise the creation of hierarchies.
In the words of Dr. Maung Nyeu, an Indigenous scholar from Bangladesh,
“Languages don’t simply die away. They are driven to extinction by identifiable forces.”
People do not speak the coloniser’s language purely in response to the demands of the labour market; in all documented cases of language loss, something has been linked to the ongoing impact of colonisation, globalisation, and empire: brutality, violence, dispossession, marginalisation, dehumanisation, and so on. The argument that languages must have utilitarian value within capitalist society in order to deserve existence is also far from the truth. One might ask, who gets to decide who deserves to exist?
Colonial narratives have flattened the multitudes of ways Indigenous people understand themselves as human beings, imposing a single way of seeing the world. These narratives continue the work of dismissing, dehumanising, and erasing them and their languages. Language reclamation must be done by Indigenous people themselves; it cannot be imposed on a community from outside. Globally, even during the ongoing UN International Decade of Indigenous Languages, there is little tangible support for language reclamation. It is chronically underfunded, rarely supported by concrete policy, and in many cases overtly opposed or outlawed by techno-capitalist states.
Languages are an investment in people’s physical, mental, and economic well-being—and vice versa. When investment is made in languages, the community flourishes. Viewing the utilitarian benefits of investing in languages purely through a capitalist lens is both careless and harmful. A study has demonstrated a clear correlation between Indigenous language retention and health, most notably regarding youth suicide rates. Suicide among Indigenous youth in North America is three to nine times higher than among their non-Indigenous counterparts—the highest rates of any group in the United States or Canada. Publicly undercutting one of the most demonstrably effective prevention measures, namely language revitalisation, is deeply irresponsible.
The profound misunderstanding of language revitalisation aims at perpetuating capitalist narratives designed to eradicate languages and their speakers, thereby silencing the voices of the marginalised. Cultural homogenisation driven by global capitalism accelerates the extinction of Indigenous languages by prioritising dominant commercial languages, displacing traditional lands, and forcing economic assimilation. This systematic, ruthless pressure transforms diverse linguistic landscapes into a uniform global monoculture. Indigenous communities experience social fragmentation and the loss of ancestral heritage. With the death of Indigenous languages, ecological wisdom dies with them.
Oral traditions such as folklore, myths, proverbs, and songs are often untranslatable into dominant commercial and administrative languages. The erosion of Indigenous languages disrupts intergenerational transmission, as younger generations shift to dominant languages in pursuit of social mobility—which creates identity gaps and alienation within their communities.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect (North London News) editorial policy.
