George Orwell was worried about what happens when language serves power. In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, he showed how political language can make lies sound truthful and violence respectable. Pacification could make bombing villages and burning homes sound like an administrative exercise.

What happens when a language has not been given the institutional scale to develop the words and systems needed to describe reality precisely?

English lets us turn conditions into actions: marginalise, criminalise, stigmatise, traumatise. I can invent illiteratised - someone actively denied the conditions necessary for literacy. Or statelessised - someone pushed into statelessness by circumstances or decisions.

These are not standard words, but you understood them.

Languages do not become powerful simply because they are revered or have millions of speakers. They become powerful when people build things around them: dictionaries, textbooks, professional vocabularies, journals, universities, examinations, legal systems and translation systems.

Scale is a decision, made by someone, paid for by someone.

I began thinking about this twenty-five years ago, in a clinical setting. A young man was told that he had AIDS, and I watched the sentence meant to steady him confuse him further. The doctor tried to explain it in Urdu. She circled the idea, softened it, borrowed English. By the time she finished, he understood less than when he began. This is not a bad doctor, I remember thinking.

This is a language that has not been given enough institutional infrastructure to carry this truth........

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