American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Grammarians are often harbingers of revolution. This statement (by Karl Deutsch) clearly points to the critical role of language in the definition of national consciousness which precedes revolutionary mobilization. As communities become self-conscious about their ethnic identity and preoccupied with delineating their boundaries as groups from those of others, the role of their native languages frequently assumes a hitherto unprecedented importance. What was once taken for granted as a natural fact of life-the existence of a particular linguistic idiam differing either subtly or vastly from all others-suddenly becomes a unique, identifying hallmark of the community; existence. At the moment when the use of a language becomes self-conscious, it becomes an element of ideology. When that self-consciousness is compounded by political, economic, and social overtones of "oppression "- such as occur, for example, in colonial situations - then language serves, often along with race, as a major determinant of the boundaries between groups and therefore of who gets what, where, when, and how. Language, and race, may then become interchangeable and explosively political in their implications.