07/28/2026
If you’ve seen The New Yorker's article “Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die,” you may be sitting with anger, pain, or just exhaustion at dealing with yet another helping of colonial nonsense.
We reject these narratives about us and our languages. Their time is long over.
We feel a responsibility to speak back when these colonizing narratives show up, yet again, in such a prominent venue.
We rebuke The New Yorker's irresponsible decision to publish this piece.
Read the full response at: https://endangeredlanguages.com/story/response-sometimes-its-ok-let-language-die
Excerpts from the response:
'The New Yorker has chosen to publish a review of How to Kill a Language, “Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die,” which shows a profound misunderstanding of language revitalization, while also perpetuating narratives designed to eradicate languages and their speakers.
As a group of Indigenous language revitalization practitioners, scholars, advocates, and allies, we are intimately familiar with these narratives about Indigenous and endangered languages. They have not changed very much in centuries.
These discourses need to shift – it is long past time. We feel a responsibility to speak back when these colonizing narratives surface yet again in such prominent venues.
Discourses and narratives – the stories we tell about things, and the ways we tell them – are not harmless or abstract. They do things, and have concrete effects.
This article stokes public sentiment against our struggle to restore our languages, and perpetuates views of Indigenous and minoritized peoples which have very real impacts on our lives.
What these discourses do, what this review does, put plainly, is reproduce the logic and discourses of colonial genocide.
This piece begins and ends with the notion that there are two kinds of language death: “natural” deaths and “murder”. This framing is nonsensical within most understandings of language held within Indigenous worldviews, as well as the academic discipline of linguistics.
To quote our colleague Dr. Maung Nyeu, an Indigenous Marma scholar from Bangladesh, “Languages do not simply die away. They are driven to extinction by identifiable forces.”
The New Yorker’s analysis of these forces is shallow at best, and deliberately misleading at worst.
The author refers to “putting languages out of their misery”. He returns to the imagery of euthanasia, painting this as a benevolent and reasonable decision, “the best way to love [dying languages]."
When, within our worldviews, our languages are inseparable from us as Peoples, the genocidal logic of this argument becomes clear: it is best for those in power to simply let us die, to put us out of our misery.
“How sad should we be when a language dies?", asks this article. From Indigenous perspectives, we know this is not the question that needs to be asked.
It is instead a question of whether you agree that a few people should get to choose who lives or dies. It is a question of whether you, or anyone, wants to accept a world where a handful of powerful men can choose to “put out of their misery” entire cultures, ways of being, human existences.
When those in power decide our languages deserve to die, what’s next for our ways of living, for the lands that sustain us, for us? And then, what’s next for all of you?'
