DINÉENA bizaad doo shi? Do you speak Navajo? If not, good luck running for the Navajo presidency. Chris Deschene has learned this the hard way. Mr Deschene was in second place in the polls before he was booted from the ballot two weeks ago for refusing to take a Navajo proficiency test. The presidential election, which should have taken place on November 4th, was put on hold until the issue could be resolved. In defending this policy, Ben Shelley, the current Navajo president, waxed deep: “Diné bizaad is sacred. Navajo leaders should have both language and cultural fluency in order to be qualified. Every society has an obligation to hold on to their traditions.”

Navajo is the most widely spoken indigenous language in America, but its speakers are dwindling. Just over half of enrolled tribal members—around 170,000 people—are fluent. It’s little wonder that Navajo leaders are so sensitive about this language requirement. Navajo is one of the rare languages to have survived the onslaught of the English juggernaut that laid waste to North America’s native linguistic diversity. That the nation could even consider a strict language requirement for its president underscores the vigour of the language, but the continued popularity of Mr Deschene hints that many Navajos don’t see language as an indispensable carrier of their culture anymore.

That Navajo leaders are digging in their heels is unsurprising. Many minority communities are linked in this way. After Basque gained co-official status in a small area of northern Spain, activists started drafting rigid new policies to reverse the language’s decline. Civil servants in the region have since needed fluency in Basque, much to the grumbling of their non-Basque countrymen. Quebeckers, too, are finickier than the French about promoting their language. In multilingual India, Tamil speakers, long wary of the dominance of Hindi, purged their language of non-Tamil borrowings and instituted strict language requirements in public schools in Tamil Nadu. Other states have adopted similar policies.

The Navajos’ particular bind has roots in English-only policies that marginalised and ultimately eliminated most indigenous languages in America. For a long time the American government sponsored efforts to stamp out native culture. A federal law passed in 1819 spawned a network of boarding schools aimed at "civilising" Native Americans by purging their traditions, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs carried out this and related mandates for decades. America began to reverse this course in the 1960s and 1970s, even though significant damage had already been wrought, with a national law that funded bilingual primary education and a handful of court cases favouring minority-language education. The Navajos, who run the largest reservation in America, had, quite improbably, managed to keep their culture afloat. But the overall picture is less cheery: today, speakers of native languages account for just one American in a thousand.

Languages have been dying for as long as language has been around—for all manner of reasons, not all sinister. But the rate of death rose in a very visible crescendo with the colonising missions that began in the 17th century: colonisers’ languages were indispensable parts of their “civilising” toolkits. This continued well into the 20th century. The results are clear: Spanish, English, French and Portuguese are now found far from their homelands. Less obviously, some countries even imposed language on themselves in a sort of self-colonisation. France nearly wiped out Occitan and Breton speakers with French-only policies, and protests over the short-lived imposition of Urdu on what is now Bangladesh foreshadowed its schism with Pakistan.

The shift in America’s approach to minority languages was matched by trends elsewhere. India reorganised its states on linguistic lines in 1956 and 1960. Quebec enacted the first of many laws protecting French’s status in 1969. Spain released its chokehold on Catalan and Basque in the late 1970s. In New Zealand, the resurgence of the Maori language began in the 1980s. In international treaties, too, linguistic rights began to earn a mention. Minority-language protection was first included in the United Nations’ package of civil and political rights in 1966. The momentum of linguistic rights during this period was fed in part by the frenzy of decolonisation, the American civil-rights movement, and the end of several dictatorships. But at its heart, the new recognition of minority-language rights grew out of the infectious postwar philosophy that undergirded much of the new international system: minority cultures deserve protection. Language got to come along for the ride.

This progress is heartening, even if in many cases the wounds run deep. The Navajos’ present unease will not fade as long as Navajo fluency continues to peter out. Language is a visible and persuasive marker of group identity, and maintaining the purity of that identity can be very important for a long-suffering minority. But this impulse shouldn’t be consuming. It’s easy for people to resent languages that are foisted upon them. Just ask young Irish-language learners or many anglophone Quebeckers in the 1970s. True revival—and, more importantly for minorities, healthy bilingualism—takes root as part of an entire cultural package. The suggestion by senior Navajos that Mr Deschene’s popularity is a harbinger of cultural death probably goes too far. But for Mr Deschene’s part, it could do him (and the Navajo language) good to very publicly take language lessons (perhaps with the children pictured above), whether he ends up running for president or not. Persuasion, on many counts, is stronger than force.