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Abstract
‘Language death’ is an undeniable phenomenon of our modern times as languages have started to disappear at an alarming rate. This has led linguists, anthropologists, philosophers and educationists to engage with this issue at various levels in an attempt to try to understand the decline in this rich area of human communication and culture. In this article I refer to some interesting and innovative educational projects in the Amazon region of Brazil, which are revitalizing local languages, cultures and communities. I analyse these projects in the light of some of Paulo Freire’s ideas, particularly his views on conscientization, praxis and contextualization, and will argue that these educational ventures might be viewed as useful templates for other countries and peoples seeking to reverse or avoid ‘language-culture’ death.
Notes
1. It is true that Freire focused his discussion of oppressor and oppressed within a context of social class and seems to suggest that only the poor are oppressed; however, this is not to say that he was not aware of, as well as that his theory does apply to, other spheres of human relations, such as ones based in gender and race, which is something he discussed, even if superficially, in his later works (Schugurensky, Citation2011, pp. 137–138).