Abstract
Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to unpack the historical trajectories of different empires and their impact on languages and speakers through a comparative analysis of three cases: Brazil, Colombia, and Ukraine. The analysis will show how politics and religion not only have oppressed languages but have at times afforded opportunities for the development of Indigenous languages, opportunities that were disrupted. The analysis will also show how prejudice against languages and their speakers has been enacted or resisted in these three contexts by colonized peoples. The analysis will conclude that going forward, multilingual scholars on language, colonization, and post-colonialism need to address the role of empire as a ‘mood’ of imagination or empiring language in the language of research and scholarship, facilitating understandings of pitfalls around conceptualizing ‘rights’ and speakers.