Strategic engagement with colonial languages while recovering and elevating indigenous languages, recognizing language as site of both domination and creative resistance.
Sor Juana mastered Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, and indigenous Mexican forms, navigating linguistic hierarchies while refusing pure purification. Linguistic decolonization isn't simply abandoning colonial languages but rather recognizing language as contested terrain. Colonized peoples must often work in imposed languages for survival and reach, yet this doesn't require abandoning native tongues or accepting colonial meaning-making. This concept embraces strategic multilingualism: using dominant languages while actively preserving, teaching, and elevating indigenous languages; recognizing that concepts and worldviews embedded in native languages encode decolonial knowledge; and refusing linguistic shame or inferiority. It also addresses how colonization embedded hierarchical meaning in language itself—terms that disparage the colonized, erase indigenous concepts, impose foreign categories. Decolonial work requires reclaiming linguistic autonomy: the right to speak on one's own terms, in one's own languages, with one's own meanings.
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