The Language Beneath the Land

📖 Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

There is a maxim that Amerindian communities of Guyana have long carried with them, passed from elder to younger across generations without the aid of any written curriculum or government program: the four elements of true life are fresh air, pure water, sunlight, and common sense — without which nothing survives. Three years ago, writing with former Minister of Indigenous Affairs Sydney Allicock and Dr. Carolyn Walcott, I chose to close with that maxim. Today, on the occasion of International Mother Language Day 2026, I return to it with a question that is not rhetorical but urgently practical: in what language was that wisdom first spoken? And what happens to the wisdom when the language that carries it disappears?

This Saturday, the world observes International Mother Language Day under UNESCO’s theme “Youth voices on multilingual education.” In Guyana — a nation of six peoples, nine Amerindian languages, and an oil economy that has promised to transform everything — this observance demands more than ceremony. It demands a reckoning with a contradiction at the heart of our national development story.

The Contradiction of Wealth

Guyana’s economic transformation since the first major oil discovery in 2015 is staggering. Before oil, the nation’s GDP stood at approximately US$3.6 billion; by 2024, it had swelled to US$24.7 billion, with the IMF projecting it to reach nearly US$30 billion in 2025. [1][7] This growth, the fastest in the world, is fueled by an exponential rise in oil production, which surged from a nominal start in late 2019 to 900,000 barrels per day by the end of 2025. [4] As of November 2025, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Natural Resource Fund (NRF), held a balance of US$3.64 billion. [3]

This rapid escalation in production has fundamentally altered Guyana’s fiscal capacity, making previously impossible investments now feasible.

Yet, as this new wealth flows in, a foundational form of national capital is flowing out. In 2023, I joined my co-authors in examining the structural challenges facing Amerindian communities as this fossil fuel economy accelerated around them. We noted that Guyana’s carbon credit transaction with Hess Corporation—at the time the most visible intersection of oil wealth and indigenous life—had directed fifteen percent of proceeds to indigenous communities. We noted, too, the honest skepticism of indigenous stakeholders about whether those resources would translate into genuine capacity. Florence Alexi La Rose, a consultant on indigenous development, put it plainly: members of indigenous communities risk exclusion from opportunities due to a lack of awareness, and linguistic barriers only compound the situation.

We treated language, in that essay, primarily as a barrier—something to be bridged so that Amerindian communities could more fully access the oil economy’s opportunities. I want to revise that framing today. Not abandon it—the access problem is real—but deepen it. Because what Guyana is allowing to erode in its nine Amerindian languages is not merely a cultural amenity or a historical artifact. It is operational knowledge. It is, in the most precise economic sense, capital.

The Forest’s Instruction Manual

Macushi, Wapichan, Akawaio, Patamona, Wai-Wai, Lokono, Carib, Warao, and Arekuna—these nine languages are the accumulated product of centuries of co-evolution between human communities and the interior rainforest and savannah of Guyana. They are also all under threat. While comprehensive data is lacking—a policy failure in itself—available estimates paint a grim picture. The Lokono (Arawak) and Carib (Kari’nja) languages each have fewer than 2,000 speakers, most of them elderly. [9][11] Others, like Mawayana and Taruma, are on the verge of extinction with only a handful of speakers remaining. [10]

These languages encode what no satellite, no algorithm, and no consultant report can reconstruct: precise taxonomic knowledge of plant species, animal behavior, water cycles, soil variation, and ecological interdependence that has no equivalent in English. The words themselves are not simply labels. They are compressed theories about how the living world works.

Guyana is currently selling—at increasing volume and price—the environmental services of the forests that Amerindian communities have tended, named, and sustained across those same centuries. Our carbon credit market, our REDD+ participation, our green economy brand: all of these rest on the ecological integrity of landscapes that indigenous stewardship has maintained. The landmark US$750 million deal with Hess Corporation for 37.5 million carbon credits is a prime example. [14]

We are, in effect, monetizing knowledge systems while allowing the languages through which those knowledge systems are transmitted to atrophy. This is not a metaphor. It is a structural problem with direct economic consequences. A landmark 2021 study in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* found that in the Northwest Amazonian region, which includes Guyana, a staggering 91% of all medicinal plant knowledge is unique to a single language. Globally, the study found that where languages are threatened, so is the knowledge they hold; in the Americas, between 86% and 100% of unique medicinal knowledge is stewarded by threatened languages. [26]

When the last fluent speaker of a language dies, what is lost is not a sentimental artifact but an irreplaceable body of ecological intelligence. A development model that sells the forest while it allows the forest’s instruction manual to disappear is not a sustainable model. It is a liquidation.

Doing Work in the Dark

Against this backdrop, a small team at the University of Guyana has been doing work of extraordinary importance with resources that are, by any honest measure, grossly inadequate to the scale of the challenge. Charlene Wilkinson, Coordinator of the Guyanese Languages Unit (GLU), has spent decades as a language activist, a creative writer, and an institution builder. The GLU she has helped build is not a passive archive. It is a working unit that has sent students on field trips to conduct revitalization surveys, convened workshops bringing together native speakers, and produced bilingual translators—a human resource of incalculable value that the state has largely failed to properly employ.

When nineteen children died in the Mahdia dormitory fire in May 2023, the GLU’s response was telling. The victims were predominantly from Patamona-speaking communities in Region 8, and the English-speaking intervention teams faced an immediate communication barrier. [19] Wilkinson and her colleagues immediately initiated an Emergency Language Facilitation workshop, training bilingual Patamuna-English speakers so that communities could receive culturally sensitive support. [20] The fact that such a capacity had to be assembled in crisis—that Guyana had no standing emergency language infrastructure for its indigenous communities despite years of oil revenues—is a policy failure of the first order. That this failure occurred while the Auditor General was citing the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs for mismanaging the Amerindian Purposes Fund only underscores that the problem is one of priority, not capacity. [27]

The Feasibility of Revival

There is nothing exotic about proposing a robust, state-funded language revitalization program. Countries far less wealthy than the Guyana of 2026 have accomplished it. New Zealand’s Māori language immersion schools (*kura kaupapa Māori*), established in the 1980s when fewer than 20% of Māori were native speakers, have produced a generation of fluent young speakers. By 2023, the number of speakers had grown to 213,849, a 15% increase since 2018. [21][22] Wales, facing a decline in Welsh speakers to just 19% of the population by 2011, implemented a national strategy, *Cymraeg 2050*, backed by a dedicated annual budget of over £53 million (approx. US$68 million). The decline has been arrested, with 538,000 speakers recorded in 2021 and a national goal of reaching one million. [23][24][25]

The Investment Case

The difference is political will, and political will, in Guyana’s case, has a new enabler: money. The investment required is a rounding error in the national accounts. An annual investment benchmarked to the Welsh program would represent less than 3% of Guyana’s projected 2025 oil revenues. The failure to make this investment is a choice, not a necessity.

Benchmarked against the successful Welsh program, a comprehensive national language revitalization initiative in Guyana would cost a fraction of annual oil and carbon revenues.

A Call for Institutional Reform

The specific asks are these. First, the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs, the Ministry of Education, and the University of Guyana should establish a formal Center for Indigenous Languages and Ecological Knowledge—giving institutional permanence and a dedicated budget to the work that the GLU has been doing on goodwill alone. Second, Guyana should fully leverage the international partnerships available to it through UNESCO, the UN, and development banks. Third, the allocation of carbon credit proceeds to indigenous communities must include a dedicated stream for language documentation and transmission programs.

None of this requires new legislation. It requires prioritization. And it requires Guyana’s leadership to understand that a green economy is not simply a marketing label. It is a compact with the communities and ecosystems that make the label credible.

I return, as I must, to where I began. Fresh air. Pure water. Sunlight. Common sense. The Amerindian maxim is a theory of life that is also, in its way, a theory of development: the things that matter most are not purchased or extracted but held in common and maintained together. Common sense, in its deepest meaning, is common *language*—the sense that is shared, passed down through words that name the world in ways that other words cannot replicate.

Guyana stands at a genuinely historic crossroads today. The oil wealth is real. The transformation is underway. But the country that emerges from this transformation will be defined not only by what it builds but by what it chooses to preserve. Oil is a resource that depletes. A language—tended, taught, celebrated, and carried forward by young voices—is a resource that compounds. Guyana cannot afford, in any sense of that word, to let its oldest knowledge systems disappear while it chases the newest ones.

International Mother Language Day is observed. What remains to be seen is whether it is also heeded.

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