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The other day, I was talking to a teacher in my department about his research topic. He mentioned something that I hadn't paid much attention to before. He said that for indigenous people living all over the world, language is medicine.
We all know that hundreds of indigenous languages disappear every year. This has a significant impact on their communication and cultural loss, but more importantly, it has a real impact on their health.
I later learned that the phrase "language is medicine" came from the 2018 Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages. Many linguists have already become aware of this situation. They have gradually discovered and claimed that the decline of community language diversity is not only closely related to the community's disease rate, but in many cases, it is even the root cause of the disease rate.
We have all experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. We rely on the most popular mainstream languages to obtain reliable medical information, get vaccinated, and buy medicine. But what about indigenous people who only speak their native languages? Can these important medical information be translated into their languages? If they don't even understand the disease, how can they prevent and treat it?
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