This article explores how language oppression—coerced language loss—contributes to physical death. The context for this investigation is the ongoing crisis of global linguistic diversity, which sees approximately half the world's languages facing language oppression. It is also a crisis of bodies and lives. This article proposes the necropolitics of language oppression as a decolonial anthropological approach for theorizing and confronting this global problem.
This perspective enables a synthesis of literature from linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, translation studies, and public health to reveal the links between language oppression and death. The conclusion discusses how the approach developed in this article can help sustain languages and lives.
URL: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041420-102158