Chapter Eight - Colonizers, Translators, and Thieves

CHAPTER EIGHT

Colonizers, Translators, and Thieves

LANGUAGES DON’T SPREAD because they’re beautiful.

They spread because someone had a sword.
Or a Bible.
Or a boat.
Or a flag.

This is the chapter where we stop pretending language is just about communication and start looking at how it got weaponized.

Let’s start with empires.

When an empire moves in, your language moves out.

The Romans did it with Latin.
The British did it with English.
The Arabs did it with Arabic.
The Chinese did it with Mandarin.
The Russians did it with Russian.
The Americans did it with everything but guns (and also guns).

Colonizers didn’t just take land. They took words.
They renamed rivers, cities, and entire continents.
They banned native tongues.
They made “proper” language a requirement for school, jobs, and survival.

Speak your language?
You’re a savage.
Speak ours?
Maybe we’ll let you live.

But it wasn’t just violence.

Sometimes the weapon was a smile.
A missionary.
A priest with a translation guide.
Someone who said, “We just want to help you read this holy book.”

And suddenly, your language isn’t just being erased, it’s being translated.
But translated how?

Does your language even have a word for sin?
Does “God” mean the same thing in your worldview?
Does your grammar allow for heaven, hell, or eternal damnation?

Because if not, don’t worry, they’ll just make something up.
Or worse, force your words to fit their meanings.

That’s how entire cultures got rewritten.
That’s how belief systems got mistranslated, simplified, or outright falsified.
That’s how “do not kill” got turned into “except them.”
That’s how sacred oral traditions got flattened into paper.

Translation is never neutral.

And then there’s theft.

Even today, we borrow words constantly.
But let’s not pretend it’s a two-way street.

English, in particular, is a Frankenstein monster of stolen phrases.

We ripped from French, German, Latin, Greek, Dutch, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Yoruba, Navajo, Tagalog, and then had the audacity to tell immigrants they “talk funny.”

We swiped foods, fashion, slang, ideas, insults, and identities then anglicized the hell out of them.

Words like karaoke from Japan, safari from Arabic via Swahili, shampoo from Hindi, tsunami from Japanese, pajamas from Persian, banana from Wolof, robot from Czech, algebra from Arabic, and zombie from Kongo or Kikongo. All of them yanked out of context, rebranded, and mass-produced.

We take the words. We strip the accents.
And then we act like they were always ours.

But the people who were colonized?

They didn’t just roll over.

They code-switched.
They hid meanings inside metaphors.
They wrote protest poems.
They built creoles and pidgins and patois and slang. Patched-together languages made from scraps of oppression, turned into something new.

Language is always adapting.
Even under pressure.
Even under boots.

Especially under boots.

So yeah.

Language spreads.
But not always by choice.
Sometimes it spreads through violence.
Sometimes through guilt.
Sometimes through “education.”
Sometimes through WiFi.

But every borrowed word has a story behind it.
And a wound.