“I speak only one language, and it is not my own.”
This paradox, articulated by Jacques Derrida, serves as a poignant entry point into the reality of linguistic dispossession: inhabiting a language that was never freely chosen but imposed through colonial history and maintained through institutional force. For millions, language is not a natural possession but an imposed habitat. This condition creates a profound identity split, where the speaker is a subject of a culture that simultaneously alienates them from their own roots. It is a hierarchy that determines who is heard and who is relegated to silence.
The Experiential Split
The violence of linguistic dispossession manifests in what Eva Hoffman names the “semantic twilight zone”: a liminal space where the inner voice of the mother tongue begins to atrophy before the imposed language has penetrated the deeper layers of the psyche. In this zone, words in the new language function as simple referents, markers without the emotional or conceptual systems required to anchor them to one’s inner life. The result is a profound split between an interior world shaped by one linguistic reality and a public existence conducted in another.
Psychological research suggests that affective processing is significantly stronger in a native language than in a foreign language. Because native languages are learned in high-emotion contexts like childhood, they are built on affective grounding. But when operating in an imposed tongue, public life becomes rational, detached, stripped of the emotional architecture that makes language feel like home. This dissociation produces what might be called contrasubjectivity: the pain and anxiety that emerge when synchronicity between self, environment, and language fails. The individual experiences a faintness, a sense of being severed from their own thoughts even as they articulate them.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes language as the “collective memory bank” of a people, the repository of their philosophy, worldview, and accumulated experience. When a language is replaced by colonial alternatives, this memory bank begins to dissolve. For languages rooted in oral tradition, the stakes are particularly high. Lingala, spoken on each border of the Congo River, for instance, operates through richness in nuance and contextual play rather than grammatical rigidity. Its meaning-making depends on tone, situation, and relational context—an epistemology that resists reduction to the written, standardised forms demanded by the colonial language. But generations have grown up speaking a hybrid Lingala imbued with French. Thus, when Lingala vocabulary is replaced with French loanwords “because it’s easier,” what disappears is, beyond a set of words, an entire framework of ancestral knowledge that cannot be recovered once the language that carried it is gone.
Language as Power Infrastructure
Language is never a neutral medium of communication. It is an infrastructure of power, a system that determines not only what can be said but who is legitimate to say it. Pierre Bourdieu identified linguistic exchanges as relations of symbolic power, where the value of an utterance depends on the social authority of the speaker rather than on its truth.
An official language functions as a gatekeeper, deciding who sounds credible and who sounds suspect. In formal institutions such as schools and courts, speech that deviates from the standardised norm is measured and found wanting. Asylum seekers might find their entire life stories disqualified as implausible, even if the events they describe occurred, because they cannot narrate suffering in the bureaucratically acceptable register. The problem is not a lack of language per se but the wrong relationship to the official standardised version.
The modern nation-state often treats linguistic diversity as a problem to be managed, a deviation from an imagined norm. Those who arrive at state institutions speaking languages other than the official one are reclassified as languageless, their fluency in mother tongues rendered irrelevant or invisible. The monoglot ideology, a term coined by Michael Silverstein, frames language as static and fixed, refusing to recognise the fluid, context-dependent nature of actual linguistic practice. In doing so, it systematically excludes those whose speech does not conform to rigid state expectations.
Institutional Dispossession: The School and the Mind
Schools function as primary sites where linguistic dispossession is enacted and reproduced. In many postcolonial settings, children, upon entering school, are forced to unlearn their mother tongues to gain legitimacy. This separation of the language of conceptualisation (school) from the language of daily interaction (home) results in what Ngũgĩ calls a “dissociation of the sensibility,” which produces a society of “bodiless heads and headless bodies,” where the mind is linguistically severed from the environment it inhabits. Learning becomes a purely cerebral activity rather than an emotionally felt experience, leading to a crisis of confidence where students feel inadequate simply because they are navigating a language barrier.
Political Resistance and Reclaiming Dignity
The struggle to overcome this dispossession has led to two distinct paths of resistance:
The first path is embodied by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s radical break with colonial languages. In 1986, he stopped writing in English, choosing instead to compose his works in Gĩkũyũ. This decision was not aesthetic but a political, deliberate effort to “decolonise the mind”. For him, the use of colonial languages positions European languages as inherently superior and African languages as inadequate for serious intellectual work. To write in Gĩkũyũ is to reject this hierarchy, to assert that African languages are fully capable of carrying complex thought, and to ensure that literature serves the people whose experiences it claims to represent.
The second path is represented by Chinua Achebe’s strategy of appropriation and transformation. Achebe argued that English, though a colonial imposition, could be bent and reshaped to “carry the weight of his African experience.” By infusing English with indigenous rhythms, proverbs, and idioms, African writers could respond to the colonial centre, asserting the legitimacy of their own histories and worldviews. For Achebe, the goal is to make the colonial language express realities it was never designed to articulate.
Both strategies acknowledge the same wound. Both recognise that linguistic dispossession is a structural violence that shapes thought, identity, and social position. Neither path should be necessary. Both exist because the violence of linguistic imposition continues.
The goal of decolonising the mind is not merely about communication; it is about restoring the harmony between a person’s language and their social environment. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o famously suggested, a world of many languages should be like a “field of flowers of different colours,” where each idiom expresses its unique shape while contributing to a common “floralness” of human dignity. Reclaiming one’s language is a vital act of self-preservation and an essential step toward ensuring that every individual has the right to be heard on their own terms.
Written by Divine Boyembe, Edited by Sarah Jiayi Drogies.
Photo Credits: Rufaro Makaya (2024, July 1) on Pexels.
