Linguistic Racism

BBC Worklife had a fascinating article on the general topic of Linguistic Racism -- https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210528-the-pervasive-problem-of-linguistic-racism.  While the main thrust was how we mistreat people who speak differently than ourselves, it has a bearing on the issue of what I might call "scientific binomial snobbism."  Similar in some ways to ethnic accent bullying, it's the conscious or unconscious implication that knowing a scientific name is somehow more correct, more important than knowing a common name.  

In the case of indigenous languages, past discrimination to eliminate entire native cultures has included  forcible removal of children to boarding schools where mother tongues were forbidden to be spoken.  That not only caused the loss of indigenous names of things, but also the loss of their cultural uses.  

When I put a label on a plant at the botanic garden, I'm reinforcing the message that there is more value in a scientific binomial than any other term to identify a species.  While true that a scientific name is associated with a rigorous method of unambiguously assigning identity to a population in nature, it is not the only means to identify groups of useful items.  

To our credit, the largest text on our labels is the common name in a vernacular language.  Sometimes it's English, other times Spanish, but rarely a native language.  In that sense we are perpetuating the linguistic colonization that has been happening since 1492.  Native tongues are assumed to be less important than European languages and native names are assumed to be less precise and carry less information than European names, either common or scientific.  

My university training has obviously given me the framework to identify plants with their Linnaean classification.  That method has great value in capturing relationships and highlighting evolutionary trends.  But it leaves me blind to the stories that are captured in common names.  And it misses the fact that common names that point to multiple different populations are preserving a different type of information.  It may be taste or shape or medicinal use that holds things in common, but that too has value.  Overall, everyone can become more aware of language-related biases.