There is a comfortable belief we still cling to in our education systems and policy debates: that languages are natural, stable entities, existing outside history, politics, and power.
Urdu is Urdu. English is English. Punjabi is Punjabi.
Neat categories. Clean boundaries. Administrative convenience.
But this apparent order conceals a deeper truth: languages were not simply discovered; they were produced, classified, and disciplined through power.
And what power produces, it rarely does innocently.
The Colonial Grammar We Still Think With
Modern linguistics often presents itself as a neutral science of description. It classifies languages as if they were biological species waiting to be catalogued.
Yet the very categories we inherit, “language,” “dialect,” “standard,” “vernacular”, are not neutral descriptors. They are historical artifacts shaped in colonial contexts where language was an instrument of governance.
Censuses needed simplification. Administration demanded clarity. Education required standardization.
So fluid speech communities were reorganized into rigid linguistic units. Continuities were broken into categories. Variation was rebranded as deficiency.
We did not just inherit languages.
We inherited a way of sorting human speech for control.
When Language Becomes Hierarchy
In post-colonial societies, language does not merely communicate meaning. It organizes social life.
English occupies a privileged position not because of inherent linguistic value, but because it is embedded in institutions that define mobility: schools, universities, courts, and global economies.
This is linguistic imperialism—but the term is too restrained for what is, in practice, a structural sorting of society.
A child’s future is often less about intellectual capacity and more about linguistic access. The classroom becomes the first site of stratification, where comprehension is sacrificed in favour of prestige.
Language, in such systems, stops being a medium of expression.
It becomes a mechanism of selection.
The Quiet Violence of Linguicide
Language death is often imagined as abrupt disappearance. In reality, it is slow, administrative, and socially enforced.
No ban is required. No decree is necessary.
It happens when:
a child is corrected out of their home languageschooling equates “standard speech” with intelligence
cultural mobility demands linguistic abandonment
public life excludes non-dominant linguistic forms
This is linguicide without spectacle.
And its result is not only the loss of vocabulary, but the erosion of entire ways of knowing.
The Myth of Sealed Languages
One of the most persistent assumptions in both policy and pedagogy is that languages exist as separate, bounded systems.
But real multilingual societies do not behave this way.
Speech is fluid. Repertoires overlap. Meaning is constructed through movement, not confinement.
What is often labelled “code-switching” is, in practice, not switching at all—but the natural operation of integrated linguistic resources.
The idea of fixed linguistic borders is not descriptive accuracy.
It is administrative design.
What Colonialism Classified, We Naturalised
The deeper problem is not simply that colonial regimes elevated English. It is that they institutionalised a framework for thinking about language itself.
Some varieties were standardised. Others were marginalised. Many were erased from official recognition altogether.
These were not linguistic judgments. They were governance decisions.
Yet we continue to reproduce them as if they are natural facts.
Even contemporary debates on medium of instruction or national language policy often operate within inherited categories whose origins remain unexamined.
The Cost We Normalise
The consequences are no longer theoretical.
They are visible in:
classrooms where knowledge is filtered through linguistic exclusionuniversities where accent is mistaken for intelligence
job markets where fluency outweighs expertise
societies where language maps onto class with disturbing precision
Language, under these conditions, ceases to be a shared resource.
It becomes a gatekeeping system.
Beyond Linguistic Innocence
To question the neutrality of language is not to reject structure, standardization, or education policy.
It is to reject a more dangerous assumption: that these structures are historically innocent.
They are not.
They are layered with administrative history, institutional choices, and inherited hierarchies that continue to shape opportunity in the present.
To ignore this is not neutrality.
It is continuity.
The Question We Avoid
We continue to ask:
These are not wrong questions.
They are simply incomplete.
The more difficult question is this:
How did language itself become a technology for producing inequality, and why do we continue to treat its architecture as natural?
A Discomfort
Languages are not only systems of communication.
They are also systems of memory, of how power once organized speech, knowledge, and legitimacy.
And perhaps the most unsettling truth is this:
What appears today as linguistic order is, in many cases, simply historical power that has become fluent enough to sound natural.
