Language Justice • noun

Language justice is the commitment to creating inclusive multilingual spaces, where each of us can bring our whole selves into the room. It is the practice of actively building a world where English is not the dominant language in our spaces and where language is not a barrier to communication and community building.

This framework has many definitions, but we’re borrowing the one above from Cenzontle, a cooperative organization we’ve partnered with and love. Language Justice is a crucial part of Reproductive Justice, and overlaps with all of RRFP’s values in some way! “Accessibility” may be the most obvious connection when considering communication differences, but as an abortion fund we know that “access” is the bare minimum — it is our “Collective Liberation” value that outlines that we need all our intersecting parts to be free and to live into our dreams. As movement worker and popular educator Catalina Nieto explains beautifully, “Language is not a barrier. To the contrary, when we have multiple languages in a space, we have multiple cosmovisions, and multiple ways of understanding the world. We have the opportunity to expand and deepen our perspective, our imaginations, and the possible strategies, tactics, and visions for what is possible.”

As we recently wrote in our zine Language Justice is Praxis (coming soon in multiple languages), “Language justice is something that needs to be put into practice in every day, in every moment of your life, it is not just an abstract and intellectual concept. We need to apply it in our communities, organizations, collectives and lives. It has many forms and aspects and is in constant evolution, and most importantly, we need to abandon the idea that we will ever reach an end point where we know everything there is to know about language justice.”