In a sunlit classroom in Tunis, a philosophy professor once told me, with a mix of pride and something close to exhaustion, that he thought in French, dreamed in Arabic, and wrote in a hybrid neither the Sorbonne nor the University of Ez-Zitouna would fully claim. He wasn’t describing a personal quirk. He was tracing the internal borders that colonial language policies carved into the minds of millions—borders that still decide who gets to speak, who gets heard, and who gets to be called an intellectual.

This isn’t a story about bilingualism as a charming asset. It’s about the hierarchies that bilingualism hides. In the Maghreb, the Mashreq, and across much of the postcolonial world, the languages we use in academic and cultural spaces aren’t neutral tools. They’re the residue of deliberate, often violent, policies designed to produce a class of intermediaries—local bodies speaking the master’s tongue, a buffer between the colonizer and the colonized. What we’re still untangling is how those policies hardened into a seemingly natural order, one where intellectual legitimacy is still measured by proximity to a European language.

The Colonial Classroom as a Sorting Machine

To understand the present, we have to go back to the classroom—the colonial classroom, specifically. In French North Africa, the écoles indigènes weren’t designed to educate the masses. They were designed to produce a small, loyal elite. The curriculum was deliberately limited: enough French to serve as clerks, interpreters, and low-level administrators, but not enough to challenge the intellectual foundations of the colonial project. Arabic, when taught at all, was treated as a foreign language, often taught by French orientalists rather than native speakers. The message was clear: your own language is an object of study, not a vehicle for thought.

This wasn’t unique to the French empire. The British in India and Egypt, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese in Angola—all deployed variations of the same strategy. Local languages were relegated to the private sphere, to folklore and family, while the language of the colonizer became the language of law, science, and serious discourse. To be educated was to be linguistically displaced. To be an intellectual was to perform that displacement convincingly.

The consequences weren’t just practical but psychological. Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher who worked in Algeria, described the colonized subject’s relationship with French as one of profound alienation. To speak French well was to gain entry into a world of privilege, but it also meant a constant measuring of oneself against a standard that was, by definition, unattainable. The évolué—the “evolved” native—was always an approximation, never the real thing. This created a permanent anxiety around language, an anxiety that still shapes intellectual life in postcolonial societies.

The Postcolonial Paradox: Independence Without Linguistic Liberation

When independence came, the new nations faced a dilemma. The colonial language was the language of administration, higher education, and international diplomacy. It was also the language that divided the elite from the masses. Arabic, Tamazight, Wolof, and other local languages were symbols of authenticity and resistance, but they lacked the institutional infrastructure to immediately replace French or English in all domains. The result was a series of compromises that, in many cases, preserved the colonial linguistic hierarchy under a new flag.

In the Maghreb, the policy of Arabization aimed to restore Arabic to its rightful place. But the implementation was often rushed, underfunded, and entangled with political Islam, which alienated secular intellectuals and Berber-speaking populations. French remained the language of business, science, and elite education. Private schools, often run by French religious orders or secular missions, continued to produce a bilingual elite that had a clear advantage in accessing higher education and professional opportunities. The public school system, meanwhile, struggled with overcrowded classrooms, undertrained teachers, and a curriculum that never quite decided whether it was preparing students for a globalized world or a reimagined Arab-Islamic past.

This linguistic schizophrenia isn’t just a matter of policy. It lives in the bodies and biographies of individuals. I think of a friend, a brilliant sociologist from Casablanca, who writes her academic papers in French because that’s the language of her discipline, but who conducts her fieldwork in Darija, the Moroccan Arabic dialect. When she presents her research at international conferences, she must translate not just her words but her entire analytical framework. The concepts that emerge naturally from her interviews—hshuma (shame), baraka (blessing), qada’ wa qadar (fate and destiny)—have no easy equivalents in French sociological jargon. She’s forced to flatten her findings to fit the language of the academy, or risk being seen as less rigorous, less theoretical, less “universal.”

The Intellectual as Translator, Not Thinker

This is the trap of the postcolonial intellectual: to be taken seriously, you must translate not just your words but your entire mode of thought into a European idiom. The result is a kind of intellectual bilingualism that’s not enriching but draining. You’re always explaining, always contextualizing, always apologizing for the specificity of your experience. The European intellectual, by contrast, can speak from a position of unmarked universality. When a French philosopher writes about “the human condition,” he’s writing about France. When an Algerian novelist writes about Algeria, she’s writing about a “case study.”

This asymmetry isn’t accidental. It’s the direct legacy of a colonial education system that taught generations of students that real knowledge comes from Paris or London, and that local realities are merely raw material to be processed through European theories. The intellectual from the Global South is expected to be a native informant, providing data for theories developed elsewhere. To be a theorist in one’s own right is to risk being dismissed as parochial, ideological, or simply incomprehensible.

The Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri attempted to break this cycle by developing a critique of Arab reason that drew on both Islamic philosophy and European critical theory. His work was groundbreaking, but it also revealed the difficulty of the task. To be legible to a Western audience, he had to frame his arguments in terms that Western academics would recognize. To be legible to an Arab audience, he had to engage with a tradition that many of his Western readers didn’t understand. He was, in effect, writing two books at once, and the translation between them was never smooth.

The Linguistic Economy of Global Academia

The problem extends beyond individual intellectuals to the entire structure of global knowledge production. Academic journals, conferences, and funding bodies are overwhelmingly dominated by English and, to a lesser extent, French. A study published in Research Trends found that over 90% of articles in the humanities and social sciences indexed in Scopus are written in English. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: to be read, you must publish in English; to publish in English, you must adopt the conventions and concerns of Anglophone academia; and as more scholars do this, the dominance of English becomes even more entrenched.

This isn’t just a matter of language proficiency. It’s about the kinds of questions that get asked and the kinds of answers that are considered legitimate. A scholar writing in Arabic about the concept of adab (a term that encompasses literature, ethics, and civility) is engaging with a rich tradition of thought that has no direct equivalent in English. But if that scholar wants to participate in global debates, they must either translate adab into a pre-existing English category—literature, perhaps, or etiquette—or spend a significant portion of their work explaining the concept to an audience that may not be interested. Either way, the intellectual labor is distorted by the demands of the dominant language.

The Resistance of Vernacular Intellectualism

Yet, there’s another story, one that doesn’t fit neatly into narratives of linguistic loss. Across the Arabic-speaking world, and in other postcolonial regions, there’s a lively tradition of intellectual production in local languages and dialects. This work often circulates outside formal academic channels—in newspapers, on television, in online forums, and in public lectures. It’s the intellectual life of the café, the mosque, the literary salon, and the street. It’s not recognized by the global academy, but it shapes political and cultural debates in profound ways.

In Egypt, for example, the public intellectual is a well-established figure, and the Arabic language is the primary medium of intellectual exchange. Figures like the late Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, who wrote about the Qur’an and hermeneutics, or the novelist and essayist Ahdaf Soueif, who writes in English but engages deeply with Egyptian politics, demonstrate that serious intellectual work can and does happen in languages other than French and English. But the global recognition of such work often depends on translation, and translation is never a neutral act. It’s shaped by market forces, by the interests of Western publishers, and by the geopolitics of knowledge.

The rise of digital media has created new spaces for vernacular intellectualism. YouTube channels, podcasts, and social media platforms allow thinkers to reach large audiences in their native languages without the mediation of Western academic institutions. This has democratized access to intellectual discourse, but it’s also created new challenges. The algorithms that govern these platforms often favor sensationalism over substance, and the lack of editorial oversight can lead to the spread of misinformation. Still, the energy and creativity of these spaces can’t be denied. They represent a reclaiming of intellectual authority by people who have long been told that their languages aren’t fit for serious thought.

The Bilingual Bind: A Personal Reflection

I write this article in English, a language that’s not my first, nor my second, but my third. My mother tongue is Arabic, specifically the Levantine dialect of my family. My first language of formal education was French, in the lycée system that still operates in many parts of the Arab world. English came later, as a tool for accessing a wider world of scholarship and professional opportunity. Each of these languages carries a different weight, a different history, a different set of associations. When I write in English, I’m aware that I’m speaking to a global audience, but I’m also aware that I’m leaving something behind—the textures of Arabic, the precision of French, the intimacy of the dialect I speak with my parents.

This isn’t a complaint. It’s a condition. And it’s a condition shared by millions of people who navigate multiple linguistic worlds every day. The question isn’t whether we should abandon colonial languages—that’s neither possible nor desirable. The question is how we can create spaces where multiple languages can coexist without hierarchy, where intellectual legitimacy isn’t tied to a particular tongue, and where the knowledge produced in Arabic, Tamazight, Swahili, or Hindi is taken as seriously as that produced in English or French.

Toward a Multilingual Intellectual Commons

Building such a commons requires more than good intentions. It requires institutional change. Universities in the Arab world and beyond must invest in translation programs that work in both directions—not just translating European texts into local languages, but also translating local scholarship into global languages. Academic journals should encourage multilingual submissions and provide translation support. Funding bodies should recognize the value of research conducted and published in languages other than English. And intellectuals themselves must resist the pressure to conform to a single linguistic standard, insisting instead on the richness of their multilingual realities.

There are models for this kind of work. The Arab Council for the Social Sciences, for example, has made a point of supporting research in Arabic and promoting translation between Arabic and other languages. Independent publishing houses in Beirut, Cairo, and Casablanca continue to produce serious intellectual work in Arabic, often in translation from other languages. These efforts are small in scale, but they point toward a different future—one in which the colonial legacy is not erased but transformed, and in which the languages we speak are not prisons but possibilities.

The colonial language policies that shaped the modern Middle East were designed to create a linguistic hierarchy that would outlast empire. In many ways, they succeeded. But the story doesn’t end there. Every day, in classrooms, in cafés, in books and on screens, people are renegotiating that hierarchy, mixing languages, creating new forms of expression, and insisting that their words matter. The intellectual of the postcolonial world is not a failed copy of a European original. She is something new, something that the colonial planners never imagined—and something that, in her very hybridity, points the way toward a more just and more interesting future.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did colonial powers impose their languages on colonized peoples?

Colonial language policies weren’t simply about communication. They were instruments of control designed to create a local elite that could serve as intermediaries between the colonizers and the colonized. By making the colonizer’s language the language of administration, law, and education, colonial powers ensured that access to power and prestige required linguistic assimilation. This also had the effect of devaluing local languages and cultures, reinforcing the idea that European ways of thinking were superior and universal.

How do colonial language policies still affect education in the Arab world today?

In many Arab countries, the legacy of colonial language policies is visible in the continued dominance of French or English in higher education, particularly in scientific and technical fields. This creates a two-tiered system where students from elite, often private, schools are fluent in the colonial language and have better access to opportunities, while students from public schools, where instruction is primarily in Arabic, are disadvantaged. This linguistic divide reinforces social and economic inequalities that have their roots in the colonial era.

Is it possible to decolonize language without abandoning European languages entirely?

Decolonizing language doesn’t mean rejecting European languages outright. It means challenging the hierarchies that place them above local languages and recognizing that intellectual work can and does happen in all languages. This involves creating institutional support for multilingualism, investing in translation, and valuing the knowledge produced in Arabic, Tamazight, and other languages on its own terms. The goal isn’t linguistic purity but linguistic justice—a world where the language you speak doesn’t determine whether you are heard.