“It’s a subject that has long been debated in conservation circles and was brought to the fore once again at the recent COP26 climate conference. Some Indigenous people have pointed to the fact that the hurried creation of new protected areas could lead to displacement of Indigenous groups, removing the people with the deepest understanding of the landscape. Many would like to see legal ownership of such territories given to Indigenous peoples. Gorenflo believes that this would serve the dual purpose of preserving the cultural integrity and linguistic diversity of such groups, while ceding control to communities who better understand the land and its inhabitants.”*
I could not agree more nor help recalling a personal observation from depleting multilingual settings of Africa.
There is a strong correlation between endogenous language loss/shift and loss/shift of the full range of related cultural development resources…, both material and immaterial… In the process, there tends to be an unfortunate and servile shift towards exogenous-language-rooted development resources with little or no bearing on local reality in most cases…
#metaglossia; #saveendogenouslanguagesofAfrica
Across the globe, the diversity of language overlaps with that of the natural world – Geographical Magazine
