Language & Power

And the rich linguistic landscape of S3 of The White Lotus: Thai, Mancunian, Southern & more

Mar 13, 2025

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Thank you for all your messages about last week’s newsletter on what it means when a country (or rather, those in power) declare or desire to have one “official language”. It is a heavy topic, not just in light of what is happening in the U.S., but what has been happening in many other countries all around the world for a very long time. Language is power, and power is unfortunately often abused. I wanted to do a short follow-up on this idea of power structures in the context of languages as two things came up earlier this week I found interesting, and I hope you do too.

Over on LinkedIn, there was a conversation prompted by another author and linguist, Karin Martin who asked:

Have you ever felt less powerful because of the language you were speaking?

Martin prompted her community with a few other questions including when they last felt a language influenced their position in a conversation, or if they felt less confident depending on the language they were using. In the comments, the idea of one’s personality changing when using different languages came up, as did ideas around feeling “uneducated” in one language over another. A couple of people mentioned the feeling they, or someone they knew, seemed “quiet” in certain circumstances, a trait they assumed was across all languages. However, they soon realised it was because they did not feel as confident in one of their languages over another, and that made them often close off from conversations.

It reminded me of all the times I have felt frozen in one of my languages. I’ve written before how I felt insecure talking about my book in Polish at a meeting last year at the Polish embassy. I thought I had to be “extra professional” in that meeting and yet, I could not shake feeling a bit like a child trying to explain linguistics concepts and theories in a language I do not use for work. And then there is French, a language I grew up using regularly at school in Canada. Although I am fluent, I use it so rarely that when I try, I just end up apologising profusely for forgetting words. I was about to write that it is not always about power structures, but I don’t know if that is true. Notions around power always play into how we perceive our language use, especially in situations where there are hierarchies. And this is also often true for monolinguals.

As I quoted from Ingrid Piller’s Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice in the last newsletter, I want to share something else she writes about linguistic privilege. Linguistic privilege goes hand-in-hand with power and so much more:

…the linguistically dominant can remain oblivious to the workings of linguistic diversity: ‘language’ obviously will seem less important to those who never felt the necessity to learn another language in order to get an education, to find a job, or to participate in the life of a community they wished to join; those who never needed to worry about how their accent might sound to a potential employers; those who never needed to contemplate whether their linguistic proficiency was adequate to participate in classroom discussions, or whether they would be considered worth listening to when trying to call emergency services.”

I want to flip the script and ask if you have ever felt (more) powerful in a certain language context? And I want to add that this could easily apply to someone who uses one language, or many. What was the context? Why did it make you feel (linguistically) powerful?

As Piller notes, language may seem “less important” to you if you have lived your life predominantly in a language that is the community one and it is also your dominant one. But maybe if everyone thought more about ‘language’ and languages, ideas around multilingualism would continue to shift in the right direction.

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