I remember a summer in Paris, 2007. A professor from Martinique stood at the front of a seminar room at the Sorbonne, walking us through the narrative structure of a French Creole novel. The discussion was in French. The book was not. She switched between the two languages with an ease that made the rest of us, clutching our annotated copies, feel like we were wading through molasses. At one point, a student raised her hand and asked, in careful, self-conscious French, whether the author’s choice to write in Creole wasn’t a kind of limitation—didn’t it stop the work from being, well, “truly intellectual”? The professor stopped. She looked at the student, then at the rest of us, and said, quietly: “The limitation isn’t the language. The limitation is what you’ve been trained to recognize as thought.”
That moment has never really left me. It put a name to something I’d felt for years but couldn’t quite pin down: the silent, stubborn way colonial language hierarchies still dictate who gets heard, who gets published, who gets to wear the label “intellectual.” The French and British empires didn’t just drop their languages on people. They built entire systems of validation—systems that still hum, mostly unnoticed, under the surface of global intellectual life.
The Architecture of Linguistic Legitimacy
When we talk about colonial language policy, the obvious stuff comes up first: English forced into Indian classrooms, Arabic pushed to the margins in French Algeria, indigenous languages stamped out across the Americas. But the deeper, stickier legacy is something else. Colonial administrations didn’t just teach their languages. They taught that only certain ways of using language—certain accents, certain rhetorical moves, certain genres—counted as vehicles for serious thought. They built what linguists call a “register of authority.”
Look at academic publishing. A 2021 study in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes found that scholars from the Global South get desk-rejected from international journals all the time—not because their research is weak, but because their writing doesn’t follow Anglo-American rhetorical conventions. Direct thesis statements. Linear arguments. Explicit signposting. These are treated as universal markers of clarity. They’re not. They’re culturally specific. Plenty of intellectual traditions lean toward circular reasoning, implicit argument, or a collective voice. When a scholar from one of those traditions writes in English, they’re often told their work is “unclear” or “underdeveloped.” The thinking isn’t the problem. The container is.
The Francophone Paradox
France’s relationship with its colonial languages is a special kind of mess. La francophonie sells itself as a celebration of linguistic diversity, but it runs on a strict hierarchy. French is the language of universal reason, the child of the Enlightenment. Other languages—Wolof, Bambara, Arabic, Creole—are cultural artifacts. Fine for poetry, maybe folklore. Not for philosophy or science. This distinction was baked into colonial education systems and it’s still there, baked into postcolonial institutions.
Take Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese writer and filmmaker. He made films in Wolof and French. He wrote novels in French. But he knew exactly what the constraints were. In a 1995 interview, he said that African writers working in French are always writing for two audiences: their own people, and the French literary establishment that will judge the work’s worth. The result is a constant, exhausting negotiation—a self-censorship that shapes not just vocabulary but the very questions a writer feels allowed to ask.
This goes way beyond literature. In philosophy departments across France and its former colonies, the canon is still stubbornly European. You can get a whole degree in philosophy without ever touching a text from an African or Asian tradition—unless those texts are framed as “ethnophilosophy,” a term that practically announces a lesser form of inquiry. The message is blunt: real philosophy happens in French, German, or English. Everything else is just data.
The English-Language Publishing Gate
English didn’t take over global academic publishing by accident. It’s the direct result of British colonial policy and American post-war muscle. In India, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 “Minute on Education” was explicit: 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.” English was the tool. Today, India has one of the largest English-speaking populations on earth, and its elite institutions run almost entirely in English. The result? A split intellectual class: those who can operate in English and plug into global networks, and those who can’t.
This split isn’t just India’s story. Across Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia—the language of higher education and intellectual production is overwhelmingly the old colonial language. A scholar writing in Amharic or Tagalog or Farsi might have profound things to say. But they’ll struggle to reach an international audience. Their work won’t get cited. They won’t get invited to conferences. In the most practical sense, they won’t count as intellectuals.
The Translation Asymmetry
You want to see linguistic power laid bare? Follow the translation flows. Books written in English or French get translated into dozens of languages, often within a year. Books written in Arabic, Bengali, or Swahili can wait decades—if they get translated at all. And when they do, they’re packaged as windows into a culture, not contributions to universal knowledge. The framing is everything. A French novel translated into English is just a novel. A Vietnamese novel translated into English is a “Vietnamese novel,” its value tied to how well it represents a place and a people.
This asymmetry shapes what kind of intellectual work gets produced in the first place. Writers and scholars in dominated languages face a brutal choice: write in the colonial language and risk being dismissed as derivative, or write in your own language and risk being ignored completely. Some, like the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, made a deliberate political choice. In Decolonising the Mind (1986), he argued that language is the most important vehicle of culture, and that writing in English is just another form of colonizing the African mind. His turn to Gikuyu was an act of intellectual sovereignty. It also meant that for years, his work was basically invisible to the global academic community that sets the terms of legitimacy.
The Accent Test
Colonial language policies didn’t just decide which languages count. They decided which versions of those languages count. The “educated” accent of the old metropole—Received Pronunciation in Britain, Parisian French in France—became the standard. Everyone else gets measured against it. This isn’t a neutral preference. It’s a gatekeeping mechanism that sorts people into “credible” and “less credible” before they’ve finished a sentence.
Sociolinguistics research keeps showing the same thing: accent discrimination affects hiring, academic evaluation, even legal outcomes. A 2019 study in the Journal of Sociolinguistics found that UK university students rated lecturers with non-native accents as less intelligent and less competent—even when the lecture content was identical. The same pattern holds in France, where speakers with Maghrebi accents face systematic bias in professional and academic settings. The colonial hierarchy of French over Arabic has been internalized and turned into a hierarchy of Parisian French over Algerian French.
This accent gatekeeping has a chilling effect on who dares to speak. I’ve watched brilliant colleagues from former French colonies hesitate to present their work in Paris, self-conscious about their pronunciation. I’ve seen students from South Asia silence themselves in British university seminars, convinced their English is somehow less valid. The tragedy is that these anxieties aren’t really about communication. They’re about legitimacy. The question isn’t “Can I be understood?” It’s “Will I be respected?”
The Archive of Absence
Maybe the most insidious effect of colonial language policies is what they’ve made invisible. For every intellectual who managed to write in the colonial language and get recognized, there are countless others whose work was never translated, never archived, never taught. Whole intellectual histories have been flattened into the narrow band of what got produced in English or French.
Think about Arabic philosophy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. While European thinkers were wrestling with modernity, colonialism, and reform, Arab intellectuals were having parallel debates—in Arabic. Figures like Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and Muhammad Abduh produced sophisticated works of political philosophy, theology, social criticism. Yet these thinkers are almost completely absent from Western philosophy curricula. When they do appear, it’s usually as precursors to something else—nationalism, Islamism—not as philosophers in their own right. The language of their work marks it as regional, not universal.
This archival absence isn’t an accident. Colonial administrations actively suppressed indigenous language publishing in many territories. In Algeria, French authorities dismantled the Arabic-language education system that had existed for centuries. Literacy rates dropped from an estimated 40% in 1830 to under 10% by the end of the century. The destruction of intellectual infrastructure wasn’t a side effect of colonialism. It was the point. As the French historian Fanny Colonna has documented, the colonial state systematically closed Quranic schools, restricted Arabic printing presses, and criminalized the teaching of Arabic grammar. The goal was to cut Algerians off from their own intellectual traditions and make them dependent on French-language institutions.
The Bilingual Burden
For intellectuals from formerly colonized regions, bilingualism is often presented as a gift. And in many ways, it is. Moving between languages can open doors, spark connections, enrich thinking. But it also imposes a specific kind of labor that monolingual intellectuals from the metropole never have to do. The bilingual intellectual is constantly translating—not just words, but whole frameworks of thought. They have to make their ideas legible to a dominant audience while staying faithful to their own linguistic and cultural contexts. It’s exhausting work. And it’s work that goes largely unseen.
Worse, the burden of translation is lopsided. A French philosopher can write exclusively in French and be considered a universal thinker. An Algerian philosopher who writes in Arabic is a regional specialist. If that same Algerian philosopher writes in French, they’re often expected to explain, to contextualize, to serve as a bridge. Their work gets read not for its own contribution but for what it reveals about “the Arab world” or “the Muslim mind.” The universal is reserved for those who write from the center. Those at the periphery are forever particular.
Breaking the Frame
So what would it actually mean to decolonize intellectual life? It would take more than adding a few translated texts to a syllabus or inviting a token scholar from the Global South to a conference. It would mean questioning the very categories that colonial language policies created: the split between philosophy and ethnophilosophy, between literature and folklore, between the universal and the particular. It would mean recognizing that intellectual traditions in Arabic, Swahili, Quechua, and hundreds of other languages aren’t raw material for Western theory—they are sites of theoretical production in their own right.
Some institutions are starting to wrestle with this. The University of Cape Town, for instance, has been pushing something called “intellectual multilingualism,” encouraging students to write in African languages and building academic vocabularies in isiXhosa. But the structural obstacles are enormous. The global ranking systems that determine university funding and prestige are heavily weighted toward English-language publication. A scholar writing in isiXhosa might be doing vital intellectual work, but they won’t help their university climb the Times Higher Education rankings.
The question of who gets to be an intellectual isn’t just about individual recognition. It’s about what kinds of knowledge get produced, what questions get asked, what answers are considered legitimate. When whole linguistic communities are shut out of intellectual life, we all lose. We lose the insights that can only come from thinking in a particular language, with its own metaphors, its own ways of organizing experience, its untranslatable concepts. We lose the intellectual traditions that colonialism interrupted—traditions that have been struggling to recover ever since.
FAQ
Why do colonial languages still dominate intellectual life?
Colonial languages dominate because they were systematically imposed through education systems, legal frameworks, and economic structures that are still with us. Publishing houses, universities, and international organizations keep privileging English and French, which creates a self-reinforcing cycle: scholars have to publish in these languages to get recognition, and that recognition keeps the dominance in place.
Can someone be considered an intellectual if they don’t write in a colonial language?
Yes, but their recognition is usually limited to local or regional circles. The global intellectual establishment, shaped by colonial history, tends to dismiss or overlook work produced in non-European languages. This creates a two-tiered system: intellectuals in dominant languages get global reach, while those in other languages are pushed to the margins.
What can be done to challenge these colonial language hierarchies?
Challenging these hierarchies means structural change: universities need to value publications in multiple languages, translation needs to be funded and recognized as serious intellectual work, and curricula need to include thinkers from diverse linguistic traditions. On an individual level, readers and scholars can seek out work in translation and question the assumption that important ideas only come in certain languages.
How does the privileging of certain languages affect knowledge production?
When only certain languages are treated as legitimate for intellectual work, whole ways of thinking get excluded. Different languages encode different conceptual frameworks, and losing linguistic diversity in intellectual life means losing diverse approaches to understanding the world. It narrows the range of questions we ask and the answers we consider valid.
Nadia Bassam writes about the intersections of language, power, and postcolonial identity. Her work draws on years of research across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe.