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Language is a Revolution By Hannah Maree
In times of revolution, language is a weapon with more power than any gun or sword. Language has always played a profound role both as a vehicle to drive social change as well as an object that, when altered, is symbolic of new beginnings. To understand the implications of censorship on 21st century social movements and recognise the importance of access to language, it may be time to take a history lesson on two of history’s most notable revolutions.
the Revolution, such as Henri Gregoire, to both standardise the French language and make it a compulsory component of education. Words that had once not existed such as la patrie, la nation, le peuple, la fraternité and le citoyen – the homeland, the nation, the people, the fraternity and the citizen – now formed essential parts of the people’s vocabularies. These abstract concepts, which once could never have been imagined by the people, now had words attached to them.
During the French Revolution, the fragmented nature of France’s regional dialects was considered a counterrevolutionary barrier. It limited the extent to which the laws and rights of the new republic could be understood by the population. This compelled the leaders of
Mao Zedong is well-known for his engineering of language to ignite revolutionary forces as well as to further strengthen his cult of personality during China’s Communist Revolution.
