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Krista Tippett's Journal

To think deeply about the inner workings of language is to become aware of how unconsciously most of us reckon minute by minute, hour by hour, with the ways we inhabit and are shaped by our mother tongues. This is especially true, I suspect, for those of us who grow up speaking English, the closest thing in the contemporary world to a global lingua franca. Even David Treuer, who spent his childhood on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, was not motivated to become fluent in Ojibwe while he was growing up.