My next article will be about Frantz Fanon: How the Coloniser's Language Gets Inside You

Fanon's argument implicates everyday language use in structures of colonial power, including the language you are using right now to read this.

Imagine you are standing in a job interview. You have prepared. Your vocabulary is right, your grammar is right, your register is right. And yet something in the room is already decided, not by what you say, but by how you were expected to sound before you said anything.

That experience, familiar in various forms to millions of people, is not only a social observation. It is, at its root, a linguistic one. The language you speak, and the way you speak it, does not just convey meaning. It positions you within a hierarchy that you did not design.

Frantz Fanon made this argument in 1952. He was a Martinican psychiatrist in his mid-twenties, writing about the Black Antillean who learns to speak metropolitan French and returns home not quite the same person. His question was not about grammar or vocabulary. It was about what happens to a person when the language they acquire carries someone else's world inside it.

Linguists have largely not engaged with this question. The discipline has preferred, for reasons worth examining, to describe language rather than to ask what it does to people. That preference carries political ovetones.