The Grammar of Power: How Colonial Language Policies Still Decide Who Gets to Be an Intellectual
In the summer of 2019, I sat in a Parisian seminar room and watched a young Cameroonian scholar present her research on Beti oral poetry. She spoke a French so meticulously formal it felt almost brittle—each verb conjugation a small fortress against the skepticism in the room. After she finished, a senior professor praised her “surprising mastery” of the language. She had been speaking it since childhood, in a country where French is the sole official tongue. The condescension wasn’t personal. It was structural. A living residue of a centuries-old project that tied intellectual legitimacy to proximity with a specific, European way of speaking and writing.
This moment, uncomfortable and revealing, is no anomaly. It is the direct inheritance of colonial language policies that did more than impose French, English, or Portuguese. They systematically devalued indigenous knowledge systems and the languages that carried them. Today, those hierarchies still dictate who gets invited to conferences, who lands in prestigious journals, and whose ideas circulate as “theory” rather than “case study.”
The Colonial Classroom as a Laboratory for Hierarchy
To make sense of the present, you have to go back to the classroom as colonial administrators imagined it. In French West Africa, Governor-General William Ponty’s early 20th-century educational reforms were blunt about their aims. The point wasn’t to educate Africans. It was to produce a thin layer of intermediaries—évolués—who could translate between the metropole and the colonized masses. French was the language of reason, civilization, the future. Indigenous languages got shoved into the corner marked “folklore,” at best. At worst, they were actively suppressed as carriers of backwardness and resistance.
This wasn’t a French quirk. British colonial policy, often dressed up in the language of indirect rule, similarly put English on a pedestal as the medium of modern thought. In India, Lord Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education spelled out the goal: “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” The colonial school was a machine for manufacturing linguistic alienation. It taught children to look down on the languages spoken in their own homes as unfit for serious thinking.
The damage wasn’t just cultural. It cut deep into the psyche. To think rigorously, to theorize, to be an intellectual—these capacities got welded to a language that wasn’t your own. The colonized subject learned to split their cognitive life in two. Emotional intimacy and daily survival happened in Wolof, Bambara, or Tamazight. Abstract reasoning and public authority demanded French. This division wasn’t natural. It was manufactured through policies that tied educational advancement, civil service jobs, and social prestige to performance in the colonial language.
The Gatekeeping of Knowledge Production
Look at the top academic journals in the humanities and social sciences today. They publish overwhelmingly in English and, to a lesser extent, French. A scholar writing in Amharic or Quechua, no matter how brilliant, will find their work boxed into local circuits, dismissed as “area studies” rather than universal theory. The gatekeeping isn’t always deliberate. It’s baked into citation metrics, peer review networks, and the plain fact that a multilingual editorial board costs money. But the effect is the same. Intellectuals from the Global South have to perform their thinking in a colonial language to be heard, while a scholar in London or New York can stay comfortably monolingual and still be treated as a universal thinker.
Take philosophy. The Western canon sits as the default: Plato, Kant, Hegel are philosophy proper. African, Arab, or Asian thinkers get shuffled into “ethnophilosophy” or “regional studies.” Their work needs a cultural translator to become legible to the mainstream. This isn’t because their ideas are less abstract or less rigorous. It’s because the language they think in—and the linguistic traditions that shape their concepts—aren’t recognized as vehicles for universal reason. The colonial language hierarchy has hardened into an epistemic hierarchy.
Bilingualism as a Double Bind
For the postcolonial intellectual, bilingualism is rarely a straightforward asset. It’s a tightrope walk between two audiences, each with its own demands and suspicions. Write in French with too much stylistic flair, and you risk being seen as ornamental rather than analytical—a performer of language, not a producer of thought. Write in a stripped-down, academic French that mimics Anglo-American conventions, and you might be accused of betraying the literary heritage that gives French its cultural weight. Write in your mother tongue, and you simply vanish from the international conversation.
I’ve watched colleagues from the Maghreb agonize over whether to publish in Arabic or French. The choice is never neutral. Arabic reaches the local public, the students, the movements for social change—but it doesn’t count for tenure at a French university, nor does it catch the eye of major European publishers. French opens doors in Paris and Brussels but can feel like a betrayal of the very communities you claim to serve. The intellectual is caught in a linguistic economy where value gets assigned according to colonial legacies, not intellectual merit.
This double bind bites especially hard for women and minorities, who are already navigating multiple layers of legitimacy. A North African woman philosopher writing in French has to contend not only with the gendered expectations of her discipline but also with the suspicion that her language choice makes her either too assimilated or not authentic enough. The colonial language hierarchy intersects with patriarchy and racism to create a minefield. Every linguistic choice carries political weight.
Resistance and Reclamation
But the story isn’t only about constraint. Across the formerly colonized world, writers and thinkers are grabbing linguistic agency in ways that scramble the old hierarchies. Some, like the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, have made the radical choice to abandon English entirely for their creative and theoretical work, writing instead in Gikuyu and insisting on translation as a political act. Others, like the Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant, have embraced the opacity and creolization of language, refusing the demand for transparent translation into metropolitan norms.
In North Africa, a new generation of intellectuals is mixing Darija, Tamazight, French, and English in their essays and social media posts. The result is a linguistic texture that reflects lived reality rather than colonial purity. This code-switching isn’t a sign of deficiency. It’s a deliberate strategy—a way of insisting that thought can happen in the cracks between languages, that the most urgent ideas often need a vocabulary no single colonial or indigenous language can provide on its own.
The Monolingualism of the Metropole
One of the most stubborn asymmetries is the monolingualism of the former colonial centers. A French public intellectual can achieve global influence without ever citing a source in Arabic, even when writing about Islam or the Middle East. An American political scientist can theorize about democracy without engaging with scholarship in Hindi or Swahili. Nobody sees this as a gap in their expertise. It’s just the norm. The burden of translation, of multilingual competence, of “explaining” one’s context, falls entirely on the scholar from the Global South.
This breeds a structural ignorance at the heart of global knowledge production. When only one side of a conversation has to learn the other’s language, the resulting “universal” theories rest on a narrow linguistic base. They mistake the particularities of Anglophone or Francophone thought for human universals. The colonial language hierarchy doesn’t just shut out non-European voices. It starves the quality of thought available to everyone.
Institutionalizing Linguistic Justice
What would it mean to take linguistic justice seriously in intellectual life? It would take more than token gestures—a few translated articles, a diversity statement on a journal’s website. It would demand a restructuring of how we evaluate knowledge. Universities in the Global North could require doctoral students to demonstrate reading competence in a non-European language relevant to their field. Journals could build multilingual editorial boards and actively seek submissions in languages other than English. Conference organizers could provide simultaneous interpretation not just for the usual European languages but for Wolof, Quechua, or Tagalog when the topic calls for it.
Such changes would be expensive and logistically messy. But the current system is expensive too—it just pushes the costs onto those who are already marginalized. The cognitive labor of translation, the emotional labor of code-switching, the professional labor of publishing in a second or third language: these are invisible subsidies that scholars from the Global South hand over to the global knowledge economy. Naming them is the first step toward a more honest intellectual culture.
Beyond the Colonial Language Frame
Maybe the most radical move is to stop treating colonial languages as the inevitable medium of intellectual exchange. This doesn’t mean ditching French or English. It means knocking them off their pedestal as the only languages of universal reason. It means creating spaces—journals, conferences, digital platforms—where thought can unfold in Tamazight or Amharic, with translation offered not as a concession but as a bridge between equal traditions. It means reading work in translation not as a watered-down version of an original but as a legitimate form of the text, carrying its own authority.
The goal isn’t to flatten linguistic difference into some utopian polyglot harmony. Conflict, misunderstanding, and untranslatability are part of the process. As the Moroccan philosopher Abdellah Laroui once argued, the postcolonial intellectual’s task isn’t to resolve the tension between languages. It’s to inhabit it productively, to make the gap between Arabic and French, between oral tradition and written theory, a site of creative friction rather than a mark of inadequacy.
When I think back to that seminar room in Paris, I remember not just the condescension but also the quiet defiance in the presenter’s response. She didn’t apologize for her French, and she didn’t retreat into defensive nationalism. Instead, she explained that her research method—transcribing and analyzing Beti proverbs—forced her to think simultaneously in two linguistic systems, and that this double vision was precisely what let her see things a monolingual researcher would miss. She wasn’t asking for permission to be an intellectual. She was redefining what it meant.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Why do colonial languages still dominate academic publishing?
- Colonial languages dominate because of historical path dependency and current institutional incentives. The most prestigious journals, university presses, and citation indexes are based in Europe and North America and operate primarily in English and French. Scholars seeking international recognition must publish in these languages, which reinforces their dominance. Additionally, funding for translation is scarce, and many academic systems in formerly colonized countries still use the colonial language as the medium of instruction and evaluation.
- Is it possible to be a respected intellectual while writing only in an indigenous language?
- It is possible but extremely difficult within current global structures. Writers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o have achieved international recognition while writing in Gikuyu, but they rely on translations into metropolitan languages to reach a wider audience. The challenge is that the global intellectual economy does not treat indigenous-language works as self-sufficient contributions to theory; they are often framed as cultural artifacts or political statements rather than as universal knowledge. Changing this requires building alternative institutions and networks that value linguistic diversity.
- How does the language hierarchy affect which topics are considered intellectually serious?
- The language hierarchy shapes what counts as “theory” versus “data.” Topics that can be discussed using the conceptual vocabulary of English or French—democracy, secularism, development—are treated as universally relevant. Topics that require engagement with non-European languages and conceptual traditions—indigenous legal systems, oral epistemologies, vernacular political thought—are often relegated to area studies or anthropology, seen as particular rather than general. This division is not about the inherent importance of the topics but about the linguistic and conceptual frameworks available in the dominant languages.
- What can individual scholars do to challenge these hierarchies?
- Individual scholars can make deliberate choices about citation practices, ensuring they engage with work published in languages other than English and French. They can advocate for their institutions to recognize publications in multiple languages for hiring and promotion. They can collaborate with translators and support translation initiatives. Most importantly, they can refuse the assumption that monolingualism in a colonial language is a neutral or sufficient position for producing knowledge about a multilingual world.