What name we give a problem also determines who may intervene in it and how. Liberation sometimes begins, before we give a new answer, with noticing the words in which the question was put to us.
When we think power operates only through laws, weapons and money, the role of language looks small. Yet what name we give a problem can determine whom we see as a victim and whom as a threat. Phrases such as “irregular migrant,” “risky employee,” “respectable citizen,” “family values” or “economic necessity” do not merely describe reality; they also establish which intervention will be possible and acceptable.
Whoever names, draws the border
When a behaviour is named a crime, an illness, a sin or a failure to fit in, it enters the field of a different authority. If it is a crime the police speak, if an illness the physician, if a sin the religious office, if non-conformity the institution’s manager. When the same person is defined by a different word, the treatment applied to them changes.
Naming is therefore not neutral. The word “saving” can make the cutting of social rights look necessary and rational; “cleaning” can render innocent the emptying of a neighbourhood of its residents. Language softens the harshness of violence or magnifies the anger directed at a group.
Whose speech counts as knowledge?
Discourse is not only the words used but the order determining who is entitled to speak. An expert’s report may count as objective and a poor person’s account of their own life as personal. The institution’s record is seen as fact, the citizen’s objection as an allegation. Some voices gain credibility before they even speak; others are met with suspicion whatever they say.
Here power need not forbid speech entirely. It is enough to give everyone the floor and take some words less than seriously. The employee is heard in the meeting but the decision does not change; public opinion is sought but the project has already been decided. The language of participation can become a decoration that hides participation’s effect.
The innocence of the passive sentence
Official language is skilled at hiding the agent. “Mistakes were made,” “undesired consequences arose,” “an intervention was carried out.” Who made the mistake and who intervened are removed from the sentence. The outcome looks like a natural event; responsibility is lost inside the grammar.
Companies too can call dismissal “restructuring,” low pay “cost optimisation,” intensive surveillance “employee experience analysis.” Technical phrases distance the decision from its effect on people. The more pain is abstracted, the easier it becomes for the decider to feel neutral.
Language is also a field of resistance
Because power uses words, language is not entirely its property. People can refuse the names given to them, reclaim identities treated as insults and find new words for invisible experiences. When a situation previously lived as personal shame gains a shared name, it becomes a political problem.
But new language too can quickly harden. Knowing the right word can replace building the right relation. People can learn to use accepted terms without changing their behaviour. Sensitivity to language matters; but merely updating the dictionary while leaving resources and decision-making power the same is settling for symbolic progress.
Questioning discourse
In assessing a text or a speech we must look not only at whether it contains correct information but at which world it makes seem ordinary. Who is the subject and who the object? Whose interest is presented as the common good? Which options are rendered unthinkable from the start? Which harm is minimised as a technical detail?
Exposing the language of power is not looking for a hidden plan behind every word. Discourse usually works independently of the conscious intentions of those who use it. People can normalise particular relations of force while merely repeating the institution’s language.
Questioning the language we use is therefore not only a matter of politeness. When we continually define a group as a burden, a threat or a cost, we prepare the mental ground for the harsh measures that will be directed at them. When we name the same people neighbours, workers or rights-holders, other responsibilities become visible. Changing a word does not create justice by itself; but it can make injustice harder to see as ordinary.
Words alone do not change the world; but they affect which change can be thought. Naming an injustice does not end it, yet as long as it stays nameless it is lived as personal fate. Language is not merely power’s mask but one of its working instruments. Liberation therefore sometimes begins, before we give a new answer, with noticing the words in which the question was put to us.
Language builds power not only through insult and propaganda; it divides the world with ordinary administrative words too. When a dismissal is called an “efficiency adjustment,” a pay cut “cost optimisation” and the sale of public space “value creation,” the loss suffered looks like a technical necessity. Words do not remove the pain but can fog who is responsible. Passive sentences hiding the agent produce the feeling that the decision came about naturally.
Categories too do not merely describe; they determine which rights people will reach. Being counted a “customer,” a “rights-holder,” “illegal,” “risky,” “unsuccessful” or “respectable” changes how institutions behave. A person is met not with their complex life but with the category in their file. When the category is wrong, the burden of telling their own story falls on them again. Here, instead of telling someone directly to be quiet, power gives them a name that makes their speech untrustworthy from the start.
In the digital age this naming migrates into numbers. Engagement rate, credit score, risk score and performance level look like objective measures, yet definitions lie behind them. What we count, what we leave out and where we set the thresholds are choices of language. A number does not end debate; it can merely dress judgement in the costume of mathematics. The sentence “the system gave a low score” hides which understanding of a human being the score rests on.
Attending to language is not policing words. Determining by force which word people will use can build a new power of its own. What matters is being able to discuss the consequences of words and making room for the named to name themselves. Naming an injustice creates shared experience; it can show that what was taken for personal shame is structural. Language does not change the world by itself, but it makes visible what is to be changed. The first step towards freedom is sometimes stepping outside the dictionary offered to us and framing the question anew.