IB Philosophy 10.4.3 Language, Power, and Identity Key Definitions

A colonial language is the language of the colonizing power imposed on colonized peoples as the dominant medium of education, administration, and culture, displacing indigenous languages and restructuring the colonized person's relationship to knowledge and the world.

A creole language develops from contact between colonizer and colonized tongues, often stigmatized as inferior to the metropolitan standard but carrying the lived experience and cultural memory of the colonized community.

Developed by Gayatri Spivak, epistemic violence is the harm caused when a dominant culture imposes its own categories and standards of knowledge on subordinated groups, silencing their ways of knowing and rendering their experience invisible or illegitimate.

pierre Bourdieu's concept for the social value attached to particular ways of speaking, including accent, vocabulary, and command of prestige dialects. In the colonial context Fanon analyzes, linguistic capital is racially restricted: the colonized person may master the colonizer's language yet still be denied the social recognition that fluency would confer on a white speaker.

Negritude is a literary and intellectual movement founded by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sénghor, and others that reclaimed and celebrated Black African identity, culture, and values in direct opposition to the dehumanizing logic of French colonialism. The movement sought to reverse colonial denigration by affirming blackness as a source of pride, creativity, and shared humanity.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the thesis that the structure of a language shapes or constrains the thoughts and perceptions of its speakers. In its stronger form (linguistic determinism), language determines thought; in its weaker form (linguistic relativity), language influences but does not fully determine thought.