Why do people fight for threatened languages?
Not just defend them, or remember them fondly, but devote years of their lives to learning, teaching, and institutionalising languages that may have no native speakers left — languages whose disappearance, by any rational calculation, should be a matter of indifference?
This is the question at the heart of Languages, Affects, Institutions, a research project funded by the Institut Universitaire de France and based at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. I am James Costa, a linguistic anthropologist, and this site is where I develop, test, and share the ideas that emerge from this work.
The project’s starting point is a simple observation: the existing frameworks in linguistics and anthropology (identity, ideology, heritage, rights) cannot fully explain why people do what they do for endangered languages. They can describe the political conditions, but not the force that moves people to act. To get at that force, I draw on a tradition of political philosophy rooted in Spinoza and developed by Alexandre Matheron, Frédéric Lordon, and others: a theory of how affects — the ways we are moved, compelled, obligated by encounters with the world — are captured and redirected by institutions.
The case I work from is the Cornish language revival: a language declared dead in the late eighteenth century, mourned, commemorated, and ultimately brought back to life by the accumulated weight of feeling and obligation built up over generations. Cornwall, with no autonomous political institutions, no continuous community of speakers, and no territorial sovereignty, reveals in stark form a mechanism that operates wherever people fight for threatened languages: language itself becomes the institution, the site where collective affects are deposited and transformed into action.
This site brings together archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and theoretical reflection. It is also a space of collaboration, connected to a wider team working across European and African minority language contexts. The blog posts are written to be accessible to anyone with a serious interest in language, politics, and what makes people care — you do not need to have read Spinoza to follow the argument.