Language Standardization, Cultural Appropriation, Respect, Onkwehonwehneha

[monigarr]

Kanien’kéha spelling, pronunciation, etc does NOT follow english, french nor any mainstream language rules. If you are a googler, you can find a new ’Mohawk Language Standardization Guidelines’ that was created in the mid 1990s to help english speakers figure out how to pronounce & spell Kanien’keha dialects.

Never ever expect fluent speakers to follow the new standardization guidelines mentioned above because that is seriously disrespectful to them. Many fluent speakers have been speaking much longer than that guide was created. The guide was created to help those that speak mainstream languages first , as a mother tongue (english, french...). If you want more details about how or why it’s disrespectful, do your research about ’Indian Residential Schools’, ’Art of War’ and how foreign colonizers violently murdered & attempted to genocide Indigenous people - how it’s still going on today.

Indigenous Languages are not the property of colonial non-Indigenous corps & individuals to take ownership & control of.

Indigenous people are still alive, well and not conquered - we are fully capable of managing our own languages, dialects without giving them to colonial corps & individuals to colonize, appropriate, define, manage or anything else.

It’s awesome when non-Indigenous want to communicate with our Indigenous Languages - sometimes we need to remind non-Indigenous remember to practice the mutual respect that Onkwehonwehneha provides for the Respect of All of Creation.

Looking forward to the days when more and more individuals, families and communities can Revive the endangered & Indigenous Languages of their own dna ancestors to the point that anyone & everyone can communicate without using the past art of war & violent colonization tactics. <3