I am deeply thankful for English. It has opened doors for me, carried me across borders, given me access to education, books, work, friendships, and ideas I might never have encountered otherwise. English has been a bridge, and I do not take that lightly. Many of us from indigenous and vernacular-language communities know this truth intimately: English can be a tool of survival, opportunity, and connection.

But gratitude for English should not require silence in our own languages.

Too often, we are made to feel that language is a choice between progress and preservation, between global participation and local identity, between being understood by the world and being understood by our elders. This is a false choice. We can speak English and still protect the languages that first named our rivers, our ceremonies, our kinship systems, our humor, our grief, our land, and our ways of knowing.

The urgent need now is not only to speak our vernacular languages at home or during cultural events. We need more written text. More stories. More essays. More children’s books. More dictionaries. More captions. More songs written down. More oral histories transcribed. More community newspapers, digital archives, school materials, poems, prayers, recipes, and everyday conversations preserved in the languages that belong to us.

In this age, language survival is increasingly tied to data. The languages that appear online, in books, in keyboards, in search engines, and in digital tools are the languages that become easier to learn, teach, translate, and transmit. The languages that are absent from written and digital spaces risk being treated as if they are absent from the future.

For many indigenous communities around the world, this is not an abstract concern. Language loss is a real and continuing threat. It often comes from histories of colonization, forced schooling, migration, shame, economic pressure, and the belief that children must abandon their mother tongue in order to succeed. But when a language weakens, we do not only lose words. We lose memory. We lose ecological knowledge. We lose jokes that cannot be translated. We lose names for plants, seasons, winds, relationships, and responsibilities. We lose a way of seeing.

This is why creating more written material in our vernacular languages is not a small cultural project. It is an act of protection. It says that our language is not only for the past. It belongs in classrooms, libraries, phones, websites, government offices, courtrooms, novels, and love letters. It belongs wherever life is happening.

Of course, this work must be done carefully. Our languages are not raw material to be extracted. Communities must decide what should be shared publicly, what should remain sacred, and who has the right to record, translate, publish, or digitize certain knowledge. Language preservation must be rooted in respect, consent, and community leadership.

Still, we cannot afford to wait. Every fluent speaker is a living library. Every elder carries archives that may never be recovered once lost. Every young person who writes a text message, a poem, a post, or a story in their vernacular language is helping build a future where that language remains alive.

English has given many of us much, and it will continue to be useful. But our own languages give us something English cannot replace: belonging. They carry the sound of home. They remind us who we are, who came before us, and what we owe to those who will come after.

We do not have to reject English to love our own languages. We only have to make room — on the page, on the screen, in the classroom, and in daily life — for our languages to breathe, grow, and endure.