By imposing the colonizer’s language as the official medium in administration, education, and the judiciary, a deliberate epistemic rupture was created between colonized societies and their cultural heritage. Mastery of the colonizer’s language became a prerequisite for access to prestigious social and economic positions. This linguistic policy was not only aimed at facilitating colonial governance, but also at cultivating local elite fluent in the colonizer’s tongue, elite socially and culturally distanced from the so-called "natives." The result was a deepening of class divisions and a weakening of social cohesion within colonized societies.
In contrast, many national liberation movements turned to the revival of indigenous languages as a form of resistance. This was evident, for example, in Algeria, where Arabic education was intensified during the war of independence, or in India, where the Hindi movement emerged as a response to English dominance. In this way, language itself became a central battleground in the struggle for liberation, a site of contestation between cultural survival and colonial domination. As the Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi said: "Colonialism does not merely seize land, it seizes consciousness through language."
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