Language, in its many forms, semantics, and phonetics, plays a fundamental role in human interaction. It operates on multiple planes: vertically, it helps shape hierarchies and consolidate power; horizontally, it facilitates communication, knowledge-sharing, and collective identity-building. This dual nature imbues language with the potential to either serve as a tool of oppression or become a weapon of resistance.
Nowhere is this potential more striking than in the intersecting legacies of colonialism and fascism. Across history, both systems have wielded language as a cudgel to bolster authoritarian control and suppress dissent. Yet, in the hands they sought to subdue, language has also been reforged into a tool to dismantle oppressive structures and imagine freer, more authentic futures.
Language as an Instrument of Oppression
In their efforts to establish and maintain control, colonial regimes cast themselves as racially and culturally superior to the peoples they subdued, positioning their languages as extensions of this supposed superiority. This positioning enabled the imposition of their languages as tools of epistemic violence, to denigrate and erase the languages of the subjugated. This erasure included entire life-worlds – the identities, knowledge systems, and cultural expressions these languages carried.
A concrete example of this dynamic is the case of French colonialism in Algeria. As French colonisers positioned themselves as racially superior to the local population, they also presented the French language as the language of modernity, progress, and intellectual refinement – la langue des intellectuels (the language of intellectuals), la langue par excellence (the language of social prestige and civilisation). By contrast, as they branded the local population as subaltern and primitive, they also presented local languages, such as Berber and Arabic, as inferior, obstacles to “civilisation.”
This narrative justified the imposition of French onto the local population, which colonisers extended into all spheres of life – school, courts, administration. Their argument was that it was essential for anybody under colonial rule to adopt French in order to achieve “civilisation.” This imposition established linguistic hegemony while systematically marginalising local languages, making them invisible, irrelevant, or even repellent within the colonial structure. Over time, even the descendants of the colonised were socialised into this linguistic order, and tethered to the colonial language and its associated values. French became the language of power, wielded to diminish and control the ‘uncivilised’ population in Algeria.
Fascist regimes of the 20th century echoed this approach. They sculpted language to glorify leaders, criminalise dissent, dehumanise perceived “enemies,” and restrict the lexicon of defiance. Within their borders, they suppressed linguistic diversity, framing regional dialects and minority languages as threats to national cohesion. Abroad, they projected power through multilingual propaganda, cultural imperialism, and linguistic imposition in occupied territories.
In Mussolini’s Italy, policies were introduced that mandated the exclusive use of standard, ‘pure’ Italian in education, administration, and media. This was under the belief that a ‘pure’ Italian language bred a ‘pure’ Italian identity, or that linguistic unity reinforced national identity. This effort extended into the “Italianisation” of minority regions, such as South Tyrol in northern Italy – annexed from Austria after WWI –, where the public use of German was banned, the German-speaking population was forced to adopt Italian, German place names were replaced, and schools were closed to erase the presence of German.
Nazi Germany took this further, as the German Office of Information collaborated with independent publishers to produce, translate, and export Nazi propaganda materials, including speeches by Adolf Hitler and other key officials. These materials were designed to justify and sanitise the regime’s atrocities, cloaking its racial and cultural purism in persuasive rhetoric. The aim, as the regime controlled the narratives in multiple tongues, was to soften global resistance and secure diplomatic support.
Language as a Force of Liberation
Yet, for all its use in oppression, language has never ceased to be a site of struggle and renewal. Resistance movements and fighters have seized it, turning the oppressor’s weapon into a means to defy colonial and fascist rule while imagining freer, more authentic futures. In Algeria, the National Liberation Front (FLN) championed Berber and Arabic, wielding them in political discourse to assert historical continuity and indigenous self-determination, as well as undermine the colonial narrative that equated French with intelligence and civilisation. These languages became rallying cries, stitching together a collective will toward decolonisation and independence.
Some fighters pushed the reclamation of language further, seizing colonial languages instead to articulate their truths where those very languages had once silenced them, marking a radical inversion of power itself. This inversion fuelled decolonisation, where the languages once used to suppress and erase non-European cultures could be transformed into a vehicle for self-definition and radical reclamation. This was epitomised by the Négritude movement, led by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, who seized French and infused it with Caribbean and African rhythms and traditions to voice a Blackness unbound by colonial frames. French ceased to be the coloniser’s monopoly, and turned into a conduit for Black liberation in French colonies.
Anti-fascist movements and fighters of the 20th century across Europe wielded language with equal force. In Italy, writers like Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese wrote against fascism even as open critique was banned, camouflaging their dissent within allegory and metaphor. Others openly flouted Mussolini’s rigid policy of linguistic nationalism by infusing dialects and regionalisms into their literature. In Nazi Germany, the White Rose movement, led by students like Sophie Scholl, circulated clandestine pamphlets that repurposed the regime’s rhetoric against itself, urging resistance in sharp, defiant German. In occupied France, the Résistance published covert periodicals like Combat, which denounced Nazi collaboration in French that rallied the nation.
Language as Archive of Human Resilience
The intersecting histories of colonialism and fascism reveal how language has been used to control, suppress, and erase entire life-worlds. But they also demonstrate how it has been reclaimed as a site of struggle and self-determination. From Algeria’s FLN to France’s Résistance, resistance fighters have turned it from a tool of subjugation into a key for liberation, proving that those who wield it as a weapon of subjugation can never fully own its potential.
Négritude thinkers, bending French in favour of Blackness, and the White Rose, wielding German to defy Nazi propaganda, embody this truth: language is a living force, a vault of voices that outlast empires and dictatorships. Amid the shadows of resurgent fascism in 2025, this truth beckons us to seize language too – to wield it as a flame to light our own battles.
To cite this article:
Yanee Dewoo, ‘Language as a Site of Struggle in Anti-colonial and Anti-fascist Resistance,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 1, No. 13 (1 May 2025).
Language as a Site of Struggle in Anti-colonial and Anti-fascist Resistance by Yanee Dewoo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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