Language and Citizenship in the COVID-19 era

Aug 11, 2020 Editorial

The advent of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, in Guyana has – as it has elsewhere – served in part to map the gaps, and chasms, in our society in critical areas. Our shortcomings in healthcare facilities is one such area, one that was used as cover for the disastrous Ocean View project thinly disguised as a COVID-19 hospital. Our economic infrastructure has suffered and the necessary lockdown has highlighted just how many of our citizens live economically precarious lives. At present, the Ministry of Education is struggling with the difficult choice of opening schools or not, with the only workable solution – the use of the Internet – presenting only a partial solution because of how far behind we are in technological equity. There is also the awareness of inability to adequately police lockdown measures with citizens defying stipulations of the order and gathering for social events even as our numbers of infections keep increasing.

As this newspaper has highlighted in recent days, several of our hinterland communities, the new hotspots for COVID-19 infection, represent a concentration of all those challenges – inadequate healthcare coverage, tenuous economic circumstances, low technology coverage, and poor policing capacity. Added to all of that is one challenge that we continue to either pay inadequate attention to or try poorly to occasionally play catch up with. That is the challenge of language equity and inclusion.

While Guyana’s official language is English, our rich linguistic heritage is more complex. In addition to the nine Amerindian languages, a small number of Guyanese are also known to speak particular localized dialects of Hindi, Portuguese, French, Spanish and Dutch, while the majority of Guyanese speak various forms of a more or less standard Creole.
Adding to that complexity of the linguistic tradition is the migration-associated influence of new languages ranging from the influx of various nationalities working in the burgeoning oil industry, a significant number of refugees from the crisis in Venezuela, to increased cross-border economic activity with Brazil.
The concept of language as a critical and inalienable element of citizenship and individual identity is gaining increasing traction international, with last year, 2019, for example being named the International Year of Indigenous Languages. The programme for the Inauguration of the President received praise this past weekend for the inclusion of a Macushi prayer, a clear sign of the heightened appreciation for indigenous language.

In contrast, however, as commendable as that was, part of the reason COVID-19 continues to spread in Indigenous communities in particular is because we have not moved far beyond token gestures when it comes to Indigenous language inclusion, and towards the ultimate goal which is recognizing, institutionally and legally, that language is a fundamental and inalienable aspect of citizenship.

As the new government is being installed hundreds of miles away on the coast, the Wapichan people of the Rupununi, according to the South Rupununi Development Council, are fighting to ensure that adequate information on COVID-19 prevention is presented in a language they understand, the Wapichan language. As coastal communities are saturated with messages and programming in English, from television to the Internet to radio to the newspaper, inadequate information in general, and far less, on the pandemic is making it to our Indigenous communities.

Our failure to fully integrate indigenous languages into public service delivery is insensitive at best. Our failure to accelerate indigenous language inclusion in the public education, particularly in early childhood education continues to be shameful and terrible. However, the situation when it comes to the absence of indigenous information on the greatest pandemic the world has ever seen, particularly in Region Nine, with porous borders with Brazil, is completely unacceptable. It is in fact a violation of a basic right of citizenship.