In a Parisian seminar room, a Moroccan sociologist presents her research in flawless French. Her accent is imperceptible, her syntax more elegant than that of many native speakers. Yet when she mentions the Arabic term ‘asabiyya—Ibn Khaldun’s rich concept of social cohesion—a well-meaning professor interrupts. “Could you translate that into a language we all understand?” The room is already speaking French. The term has already been explained. What he really means is: strip it of its Arabic skin. Make it sound like it belongs to us.
This small, polite moment carries the weight of centuries. It is a direct descendant of policies drafted in colonial ministries, where language was never just about communication. It was a sorting mechanism. Rational minds spoke the language of the colonizer. Emotional, traditional, local minds spoke everything else. Those categories didn’t disappear with independence. They seeped into our universities, our publishing houses, our unspoken assumptions about where ideas come from and who gets to have them.
The Colonial Architecture of “Rational” Language
When France seized Algeria in 1830, it didn’t just occupy territory. It went after the intellectual infrastructure. Qur’anic schools were shuttered. The habous lands that funded education were confiscated. Teaching classical Arabic became, in effect, a crime. Governor-General Bugeaud was blunt: “We must destroy the influence of the Muslim scholars. It is through them that the spirit of resistance is maintained.” The target wasn’t just political dissent. It was the very possibility of thinking in Arabic.
This pattern repeated across empires. In India, Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education didn’t mince words. The goal was to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Not to educate Indians in their own traditions—Sanskrit, Persian, the vernaculars—but to produce intermediaries. English became the language of law, of higher thought, of power. Everything else was demoted to the private sphere: the home, the bazaar, the temple.
Across the French empire—from Senegal to Indochina—the hierarchy was just as rigid. French was reason, law, modernity. Indigenous languages were tradition, emotion, the local. To become educated was to become French-speaking. To become an intellectual was to master the colonizer’s tongue so thoroughly that you might be admitted to its academies. Always as a guest, mind you. Never as an equal.
Independence Without Intellectual Decolonization
You’d think independence would have sparked a renaissance of indigenous languages in intellectual life. The opposite happened. New nation-states, fragile and hungry for modernization, often doubled down on the colonial language. It was a tool of national unity, a ticket to international legitimacy. Arabic, Tamazight, Wolof, Vietnamese—these were for the home, the market, the mosque. The university, the courtroom, the scientific journal? That remained French or English.
Take Algeria. After a war of independence that killed over a million people, the new government launched an aggressive Arabization campaign. On paper, a decolonizing project. In practice, a mess. Berber activists saw it as an erasure of Tamazight. Francophone elites—educated in French schools, embedded in the state bureaucracy—resisted what they saw as a retreat from modernity. The debate was framed as a choice: backward-looking authenticity or forward-looking cosmopolitanism. Nobody pointed out that the terms of the debate were themselves colonial constructs.
Today, an Algerian researcher who publishes in Arabic faces a different set of obstacles than one who publishes in French. Arabic-language journals have smaller circulations, less prestige, fewer indexing services. Research in Arabic is often invisible to global databases. A study in French, by contrast, can travel—but it travels as a French study, not an Algerian one. The language of the text decides its audience, its legitimacy, and often whether it counts as “knowledge” or just “local opinion.”
The Native Informant and the Translated Intellectual
There’s a figure who haunts the global marketplace of ideas: the intellectual from the Global South who writes in a colonial language. Celebrated for “bringing local perspectives to global audiences.” Look closer, and the dynamic gets uncomfortable. This intellectual is expected to perform a kind of translation—not just of words, but of entire frameworks of thought—to make them legible to Western academic norms.
The Moroccan philosopher Taha Abdurrahman has a sharp critique of this. The dominance of Western languages in philosophy, he argues, forces non-Western thinkers into a bind: either “translate” their traditions into Western conceptual frameworks or remain unheard. This isn’t a neutral process. It forces thinkers to adopt the epistemological assumptions baked into the target language. When an Arab philosopher writes in French or English, they’re not just switching vocabularies. They’re reshaping their thought to fit the categories those languages make available.
So you get a paradox. Write in a colonial language, and you gain a global audience but risk losing the conceptual resources of your own tradition. Write in an indigenous language, and you preserve those resources but get confined to a local audience, denied the status of “universal” thinker. The system is rigged so that the universal always speaks with a European accent.
The Economics of Intellectual Production
Language hierarchies aren’t just cultural. They’re material. The global publishing industry is concentrated in a handful of cities: New York, London, Paris, Berlin. These cities decide what gets published, translated, distributed, reviewed. A brilliant work of sociology written in Bahasa Indonesia will likely never reach a global audience unless it’s translated into English. And translation is expensive, selective, and shaped by market calculations that have little to do with intellectual merit.
The numbers are stark. According to UNESCO’s Index Translationum, over 50% of all books translated worldwide are translated from English. About 3% are translated from Arabic—a language spoken by over 400 million people. French and German dominate the rest. The flow of ideas follows the flow of capital. Knowledge produced in dominant languages circulates globally. Knowledge produced in marginalized languages stays home.
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Publishers in the Global South, knowing their local-language books have limited markets, invest less in them. Scholars, knowing that publishing in a colonial language brings greater prestige and career advancement, choose French or English. Local-language academic publishing withers. The next generation has even less incentive to develop sophisticated intellectual vocabularies in their mother tongues. Over time, the language itself becomes impoverished as a medium of higher thought—not because it lacks the capacity, but because it’s been systematically denied the chance to grow.
The Lebanese Exception and Its Discontents
Lebanon is a particularly tangled case. Arabic, French, and English jostle for dominance in different spheres. It’s often held up as a model of cosmopolitan multilingualism. Walk through Beirut, and you’ll hear all three languages woven into a single conversation. But this linguistic fluidity masks deep hierarchies.
French and English are the languages of elite education—the prestigious Université Saint-Joseph, the American University of Beirut. Arabic is the language of the public university, the Lebanese University, which suffers from chronic underfunding and is perceived, fairly or not, as producing second-rate scholarship. A Lebanese academic who publishes in Arabic is rarely invited to international conferences. One who publishes in French or English may be invited, but often as a “native informant” expected to explain the region to Western audiences.
This creates a painful double bind. Writing in Arabic means addressing one’s own society but being ignored by the global academy. Writing in French or English means gaining global recognition but often at the cost of being read as a translator of local realities rather than a producer of original theory. The Lebanese intellectual is perpetually caught between audiences, never fully at home in either.
The Gendered Dimensions of Linguistic Authority
Colonial language policies also had gendered effects that persist. In many colonized societies, Western-style education was first offered to boys, creating a gender gap in access to the languages of power. Women were often confined to domestic spaces where indigenous languages dominated. So when women did enter intellectual life, they faced a double marginalization: their gender made their authority suspect, and their linguistic repertoire—often richer in indigenous languages than in colonial ones—was devalued.
Yet this very marginalization has sometimes produced radical intellectual traditions. The Algerian novelist Assia Djebar wrote in French but filled her prose with the rhythms and oral traditions of Algerian women’s Arabic. Her work refuses the choice between languages, creating a literary space where multiple tongues coexist. This isn’t a comfortable bilingualism. It’s a writing practice born of fracture—of the violence of colonial language policy and the resilience of those it tried to silence.
Resistance and Reclamation
Across the formerly colonized world, movements are pushing back. In Morocco, the Hirak Rif movement has demanded official recognition of Tamazight alongside Arabic and French. In India, Dalit writers have reclaimed English as a tool of anti-caste resistance, using it to bypass the Sanskritized hierarchies of Hindi and other regional languages. In Algeria, a new generation of writers is experimenting with darja—Algerian colloquial Arabic—in literature and online, challenging the dominance of both classical Arabic and French.
These movements aren’t about rejecting colonial languages outright. That would be both impossible and counterproductive. French and English have become part of the linguistic landscape of former colonies, woven into daily life and intellectual practice. The goal isn’t purity. It’s parity: a world where an intellectual can think and write in Wolof, Arabic, or Tamazight without being dismissed as parochial, and where writing in French or English doesn’t require abandoning one’s own conceptual traditions.
This requires more than individual choices. It requires institutional transformation. Universities in the Global South must invest in publishing in indigenous languages. International academic associations must recognize scholarship in multiple languages. Funding agencies must support translation not just from dominant languages to marginalized ones, but in both directions. The infrastructure of intellectual life must be rebuilt on a multilingual foundation.
FAQ
Why do so many postcolonial intellectuals still write in colonial languages?
Many postcolonial intellectuals write in colonial languages because these languages dominate global academic publishing, confer prestige, and provide access to international audiences. Publishing in French or English increases the likelihood of being cited, invited to conferences, and recognized by funding bodies. This is not simply a matter of personal preference but a structural condition: the institutions that validate intellectual work—journals, universities, grant committees—are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Global North and operate in colonial languages.
Is it possible to decolonize knowledge without abandoning European languages?
Yes, but it requires a conscious effort to challenge the assumption that European languages are inherently more suited to intellectual work. Decolonizing knowledge means recognizing the conceptual richness of indigenous languages, supporting translation in multiple directions, and creating academic spaces where multilingualism is the norm rather than an exception. It also means questioning the epistemological frameworks embedded in colonial languages rather than treating them as neutral tools.
How do colonial language policies continue to affect education in former colonies today?
In many former colonies, the language of instruction in higher education remains the colonial language, while indigenous languages are relegated to primary education or informal settings. This creates a system where students must master a foreign language to access advanced knowledge, placing an additional burden on those from non-elite backgrounds. It also perpetuates the idea that indigenous languages are unsuitable for scientific or philosophical discourse, a legacy of colonial ideologies that explicitly denigrated local knowledge systems.
What can be done to support intellectual production in marginalized languages?
Supporting intellectual production in marginalized languages requires investment in publishing infrastructure, translation programs, and academic recognition. Universities can establish journals and book series in indigenous languages. Governments and international organizations can fund translation initiatives that move knowledge in multiple directions, not just from marginalized languages into English or French. Scholars and readers can actively seek out and cite work published in non-dominant languages, helping to build their prestige and visibility within global academic networks.