Shaping a Civilization

- Do words have power? To what extent does language enhance knowledge?

- What are some problems with language/ how can they impede our knowledge?

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. A man who has a language consequently posses the world expressed and implied by that language.

“Every colonized people- in other words, every people in whose sole an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality- finds itself face to face with the culture of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country.” In his book “Black skin, white masks,” Franz Fanon examines the importance of language in colonialism, specifically focusing on its effect on the colonized people.

When the colonized are faced with the culture and thought of the colonized people, they adopt a sense of inferiority that gives them the desire to learn the language of the colonizing nation. It is implicit that to speak means to exist absolutely for the other. If we take African colonialism by the white man as an example, the African Negro believes and feels that he will be proportionally whiter –that is- he will become closer to becoming a real human being, in direct proportion to his acquiring of the white man’s language. Once the Negro starts to adopt the new language, many problems can start to arise, the most important one being a problem of identity. He no longer feels at home among his people, because he now feels the superiority that is associated with acquiring the new language, he no longer fits in among others of his kind, because he is now more sophisticated in being. On the other hand however, is he ever truly accepted into the white man’s society as an equal?

The black man now has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of a colonialist subjection is beyond question…If language has the ability to completely alter one’s personality and outlook on life, ascribes a basic importance to the phenomenon of language.

Continuing the cultural focus on colonialism and language, another problem that can arise is from a lack of communication. When the colonizing people enter a country whose language they do not know, and do not have the interest to adopt, it leads to a great degree of categorization and loss of individualism. The colonized become insignificant, and due to this lack of respect for their culture (of which the most basic element is language) hostility and antagonism arises between the two people. Furthermore, it prevents the colonizing people from learning from the culture of the locals, and impedes their expansion of perspective and thought due to exposure to new cultures.

The power that language has is unquestionable, but with that power, comes an associated complexity that opens a window for counter effective problems to arise.