Niche Languages: Decolonising Language Use Through Domain Specialisation and Linguistic Harmony

Although driven primarily by the prospect of economic benefit, a central tenet underlying the Euro-Western colonial enterprise was the ideal of a notionally monolingual society, with the coloniser’s language at the top of the pecking order and Indigenous ones at the bottom. Former colonies of the Global South, in their modern avatar of independent nation-states, continue to retain latent imperialist linguistic ideologies in their political structure, wherein economically and/or politically dominant language(s) with codified written forms are perceived as having the most value and, consequently, designated the ‘national’ or ‘official’ languages. Besides undermining indigenous spoken traditions, such a capitalist, utilitarian and graphocentric approach to language use legitimises mutually competitive free-market behaviour among languages and entrenches a survival-of-thefittest attitude. Consequently, well-intentioned maintenance and revitalisation efforts often focus on increasing minority and Indigenous languages’ domains of use and creating or codifying a Roman-script orthography. Unfortunately, this inevitably sets minority languages on a collision course with socioeconomically powerful national or official languages and destabilises previously harmonious linguistic ecologies. In this chapter, we argue that apparent socioeconomic utility or availability of a standardised written form are neo-colonial and suboptimal metrics of language value. Moreover, sustaining minority and indigenous languages need not entail sociolinguistic one-upmanship. Rather, we posit that stable language use and maintenance are best achieved when languages find their respective niches in the ecology and co-exist in mutual harmony, with different languages being used in specific domains in a complementary manner. Not only does such an approach often dovetail with organic multilingualism prevalent in the precolonial Global South, but it also has the potential to liberate Indigenous communities from the implicit pressures of expanding their language’s domains of use and inventing a standardised written form as outward indicators of their language’s health.