In the name of assimilation, in a certain country, a policy was put in place in schools in order to uproot local languages, to eradicate them in the exclusive favor of the One Official Language of the country.
Any kid caught speaking a forbidden language had to wear a mark of shame, the Symbol, and was to keep it until another kid was caught, including through denunciation by the wearer, which was of course encouraged.
The Symbol took various forms across different regions. In some places it was a sabot, pinning the wearer as a backwards hick for speaking such a filthy, primitive language.
This strategy spanned several decades and generations, and while it hasn’t succeeded in totally eradicating its targets, and has been abandoned since, it damaged their locutor base enough that, to this day, the long-term survival of several of those languages is quite uncertain.
