probably others but that'll do for now

Another time, standing at the reception of a private hospital, blood running down my face from a gash on my head. Receptionist explains they can't treat me me without payment so I apologize and ask to use a bathroom to wash my face.

On a night out I fell back heavily on my wrist. When I got home I could tell something was wrong so I tied a sock around it and went to sleep. Next morning I drove to the doctor, changing gears with my sock-tied wrist, which turned out to be broken.

I was using a lino cutting tool & my hand slipped. I ended up thrusting the blade right up my nostril, leaving a long gash. I had a shift coming up at work and I didn't want to miss it, so I just got in the car and drove to work (had to pull over before I got there due to dizziness from blood loss).

An optometrist told me she had never seen eyes as dry as mine. "How can you not feel that?" she said. She waved her fingers towards her eyes, "This is pain. You should think of this feeling as pain."

When I was maybe 9 or 10 I couldn't feel the heat from the clothes iron and I couldn't tell if it was on so I pressed it against my thigh. It was on and left a burn in the shape of a clothes iron on my skin, right down to the holes where the steam comes out.

At a rehearsal for a performance at school when I was 11, I fell & hurt my ankle. I told my very busy teacher, who told me to "stand over there and wait." I did and they forgot to follow up, so I just kept standing on my torn ligaments and went home with my ankle swollen up like some sort of melon.

My first job as a teenager was in a bakery. I put my hand too far into the bread slicer, and cut up my fingers. Because I wanted to 'do a good job' I just kept working until my manager noticed the blood running down my hand.

🥹

Happens every time.

If we view the world's languages in crisis through these lenses, we get a very different picture from Krauss's, and most importantly, we get a very different sense of what we should do to intervene in the world in support of those languages. /end

The world isn't just a container for languages, it is a political field, animated by structures and systems that drive the fate of languages and the people who use them. Nationalism, colonialism, racism and capitalism are four key structures in today's world system.

My revision here is to talk about the world as a world system: a political and economical system integrated through hierarchies and horizontal exchanges, which takes various forms in different historical periods.

The second revision I make to Krauss's article focuses on 'the world'. Krauss talks about the world, basically, as a container for all languages. When he says 'the world's languages' he just means all the languages.

In this sense, the 'crisis' of the world's languages is seen in the tensions between ongoing language oppression & loss, and language revitalization. The old (a world system that produces language oppression) is dying, but the new (a world of multilingualism & revitalization) cannot be born.

One way I update Krauss's article is to rethink the word 'crisis'. Krauss meant something like 'emergency', but I argue that it is helpful to think of crisis in the way that Antonio Gramsci did (he was a linguist!).