Colonial Language Policies and Extractive Education Accelerate Erasure of Indigenous Knowledge Systems
Original framing: “Lost in Translation: Decline of Indigenous Languages as a Threat to Knowledge Systems and Why National Education Policy 2020 Matters” — bing news
The decline of Indigenous languages is not a natural process but the result of centuries of linguistic imperialism, from the suppression of Native American languages in U.S. boarding schools to the banning of Welsh under British rule. India’s own history includes the imposition of Persian and later English as languages of power, while post-colonial policies like the 1961 Official Languages Act continued to marginalize regional languages. The NEP 2020’s '3-language formula' echoes these patterns, prioritizing Hindi and English at the expense of tribal languages, despite constitutional guarantees under Article 350A.
The decline of Indigenous languages is not a cultural tragedy but a systemic failure of education policies designed to centralize power in dominant languages while erasing alternative epistemologies.
India’s NEP 2020 exemplifies this, continuing a colonial legacy where Hindi and English are framed as 'modern' while tribal languages are relegated to folklore, despite constitutional protections. Globally, the pattern repeats: states invest in 'language preservation' programs that treat Indigenous knowledge as static artifacts rather than living sciences, while Indigenous communities—particularly women and elders—are sidelined from policy design. The solution lies in reversing this dynamic through legal recognition (e.g., UNDRIP), community governance of schools, and economic incentives that treat language as a tool for ecological and cultural sovereignty. Historical precedents like New Zealand’s Māori language laws and Mexico’s Zapatista schools prove that when Indigenous communities control education, language loss can be reversed—and with it, the collapse of biodiversity-linked knowledge systems. The absurdity of the current approach is that it claims to 'save' languages while funding the very institutions that destroy them, a trickster’s paradox that only Indigenous-led solutions can untangle.