How Every Culture, Every Class, and Every Era Has Used Words Not Just to Communicate — But to Dominate, Exclude, and Protect the Hierarchy
Language did not begin as a tool for sharing.
That is the story we tell about it — the benign, democratic, cooperative story in which early humans developed the capacity for complex speech in order to coordinate hunts, share knowledge, build communities, transmit wisdom across generations. All of that is true. All of that happened. But alongside it, from the very beginning, something else was happening that the cooperative story tends to leave out.
Language was also, always, a tool for sorting.
For marking who belongs and who does not. For signaling which tribe you were born into and which you were excluded from. For encoding power in the very sounds a person makes, so that before a single idea has been exchanged, the hierarchical relationship between the speakers has already been established by the way they speak — the words they know, the grammar they use, the register they inhabit, the vocabulary that belongs to their class and not to the one below it.
This is not a modern corruption of an originally pure linguistic project. It is as old as language itself. Every civilization that has produced a written record has produced, alongside that record, evidence of a stratified linguistic system in which certain words, certain registers, certain languages were deliberately cultivated, deliberately restricted, and deliberately used as instruments of social control. The ancient and the modern, the Eastern and the Western, the religious and the secular — all of them have done this, are doing this, will continue doing this, because language as status is not an abuse of language. It is one of language’s original and most persistent functions.
This article is about that function. What it looks like across history. What it looks like today. And what it means for the person who finally sees it — who understands that the impenetrable jargon of finance, the labyrinthine vocabulary of law, the arcane terminology of medicine, the opaque language of academic theory, the buzzword-laden dialect of corporate life are not accidents of complexity. They are, in significant part, technologies of exclusion. Deliberate or unconscious, ancient or contemporary, they are doing exactly what the sacred languages of ancient priests did: keeping the knowledge inside the circle, and keeping everyone outside the circle in their place.
The Ancient Architecture: When Words Were Property
Begin where civilization begins: in the ancient world, where the connection between language and power was not subtle, not hidden, and not apologized for.
In ancient Egypt, the scribal class — the people who controlled reading and writing — were not simply administrators. They were a hereditary elite whose entire social position rested on their exclusive access to written language. Hieroglyphics were not, despite their name, a simple pictorial system accessible to anyone with eyes. They were a complex, multi-layered script that required years of training to master, training available only to those born into or adopted by the scribal class. The peasant who built the pyramid could not read the inscription on it. The inscription was not for them. It was a conversation conducted over their heads, between the literate elite and the divine — a conversation whose exclusivity was part of its point.
In ancient India, Sanskrit was the language of the Vedas, the oldest sacred texts in the Hindu tradition. For centuries — for millennia — Sanskrit was not a language anyone spoke as a mother tongue. It was a learned, cultivated, deliberately preserved sacred language, access to which was restricted by caste. The Brahmin class not only controlled the texts but controlled the very sounds, guarding the precise pronunciation of sacred syllables with a jealousy that was simultaneously religious and political. The idea was explicit and unashamed: certain words were too powerful, too sacred, too dangerous for ordinary people. Only those born to the right caste, trained in the right lineage, initiated into the right tradition could approach them. The language itself was the wall.
The same structure repeated across the ancient world with remarkable consistency. In Mesopotamia, the cuneiform script required years of specialist training, confining literacy to palace scribes and temple priests. In China, classical written Chinese — wenyan — was a deliberately archaic register that bore little relationship to any spoken vernacular, meaning that literacy required not just learning to read but learning an entirely separate language that existed only in texts and in the mouths of the educated. A farmer in rural China could be a native speaker of Chinese and still be completely shut out of written culture — not because writing was invented to exclude them but because the gap between written and spoken language had been allowed to grow, and then maintained, in ways that served the literate elite perfectly.
These were not accidents. The gap between the language of power and the language of the people was not an unfortunate byproduct of linguistic evolution. It was, in many cases, a deliberately maintained feature. When you control the language in which law is written, you control the law. When you control the language in which divine will is expressed, you control access to the divine. When you control the language in which history is recorded, you control history itself. Language is not just power’s instrument. Language, at sufficient levels of exclusivity, is power.
Medieval Europe: Latin as the Master Key
Nowhere is the political function of a prestige language more nakedly visible than in medieval Europe’s relationship with Latin.
Latin was not the mother tongue of the medieval peasant, the merchant, the craftsman, or the minor nobleman. It was nobody’s mother tongue. As a living spoken language, Latin had been dead for centuries. What remained was something stranger and more useful than a living language: a perfectly preserved, artificially maintained, deliberately difficult written and liturgical language that served as the master key to every room where power was exercised.
All church services were conducted in Latin. All legal documents were written in Latin. All scholarship was produced in Latin. All communication between the educated classes of different European nations occurred in Latin. The entire architecture of power — religious, legal, scholarly, diplomatic — was conducted in a language that the vast majority of the population could not access, had never been taught, and had no practical means of learning.
The implications were total. The peasant who wanted to know what the Bible actually said had to ask a priest, who controlled the interpretation. The merchant who wanted to understand the legal document he was signing had to rely on a lawyer who might or might not represent his interests. The tradesman who had a dispute before a court had to navigate proceedings conducted entirely in a language he did not speak. He could not evaluate the arguments being made about his own case. He could not read the law that governed his own life. He was, structurally, dependent — not because he was stupid, but because the language of governance had been built in a way that guaranteed his exclusion.
When Martin Luther translated the Bible into vernacular German in the sixteenth century, the act was understood immediately — by everyone on both sides of the question — as a revolutionary political act, not merely a theological or linguistic one. Luther said so himself. The point was not just that people could now read scripture. The point was that the monopoly on interpretation was broken. If anyone could read the text, anyone could form a view about what it meant. The priestly class, whose social position rested in significant part on their exclusive access to the sacred language, was being directly challenged. The response from Rome was not primarily theological. It was political. They understood perfectly what was at stake.
What was at stake was not scripture. What was at stake was the gatekeeping function of Latin. And they were right to see it that way. The democratization of religious language was one of the triggers of the most significant political upheaval in European history.
The Colonial Project: Language as Conquest
If medieval Europe used Latin to maintain hierarchy within a society, the colonial powers of the fifteenth through twentieth centuries used language to establish hierarchy between societies — with a violence and thoroughness that makes the medieval precedent look almost gentle.
The colonial project was, among other things, a linguistic project. Everywhere European powers went, they brought their languages — not as gifts but as replacements. Indigenous languages were suppressed, sometimes by law, sometimes by force, sometimes by the subtler but equally effective mechanism of making them economically useless. In colonial schools — and the colonial school was one of the primary instruments of cultural transformation — education was conducted exclusively in the colonial language. Children who spoke their mother tongue in school were punished. Adults who wanted to participate in the colonial economy, the colonial legal system, the colonial administration, had to do so in the colonizer’s language.
This was not incidental. It was strategic. The Macaulay Minute, written by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1835 regarding education policy in British India, stated with startling candor that the goal was to produce a class of people who were Indian in blood and color but English in taste, opinion, morality, and intellect. The language policy was the means to that end. English was not taught because it was inherently superior. It was imposed because it was the language of the power structure — and because a population that could only access that power structure through a foreign language it imperfectly commanded was a population that would always be at a disadvantage navigating it.
The legacy of this is still running. The nations that were colonized are now independent, but the languages of their former colonizers remain in many cases the languages of law, administration, higher education, and elite social life. To participate fully in the power structures of post-colonial Nigeria, India, or Kenya, you need English. The colonial language has outlasted the colony. It continues to sort, continues to gatekeep, continues to mark who can fully access the rooms where decisions are made and who will always be navigating them with a handicap.
The Modern Versions: Same Architecture, Different Vocabulary
Here is where the argument becomes most immediately relevant, and where most people resist it most — because the modern versions of linguistic gatekeeping do not feel like gatekeeping. They feel like expertise.
Consider finance.
The financial industry has produced a vocabulary of extraordinary density and deliberate obscurity. Derivatives, tranches, collateralized debt obligations, quantitative easing, basis points, alpha and beta, leverage ratios, mark-to-market accounting, synthetic positions. These terms exist, officially, because finance is complex and complex things require precise language. This is true. Finance is complex. Precision matters. But here is the question worth pressing: is the complexity of the vocabulary proportional to the complexity of the underlying concepts? Or has the vocabulary been allowed — encouraged — to grow more complex than the concepts require, specifically because the complexity serves the interests of those inside it?
Ask a financial professional to explain what a derivative is in plain language. They can. It takes about three sentences. A derivative is a contract whose value is based on the performance of something else — a stock, a currency, a commodity. That is it. That is the concept. But in practice, derivatives are discussed in a vocabulary so specialized that most of the people whose lives are affected by derivative markets — which is to say, nearly everyone — cannot participate in the conversation about them. The 2008 financial crisis, which was largely caused by specific kinds of derivatives, was a crisis that the public could not evaluate, could not debate, could not even fully understand as it was happening, because the instruments at its center were discussed in a language specifically inaccessible to the public.
This is not neutral. When the concepts that govern the allocation of resources, the structure of the economy, and the regulation of financial instruments are encoded in a private language, the people who speak that language hold a structural advantage that has nothing to do with superior intelligence or superior ethics. They can make arguments in rooms where the counterarguments cannot be made, because the people who might make them cannot follow the conversation.
The same structure appears in law, where the deliberate preservation of Latin phrases, archaic vocabulary, and baroque syntactical structures serves not precision — most legal concepts can be expressed in plain language — but gatekeeping. It ensures that legal proceedings require lawyers, that legal documents require translation, that the system which governs everyone’s rights and relationships can only be navigated by a licensed and expensive intermediary. The law does not use Latin because Latin is clearer. It uses Latin because Latin marks the boundary between those who know and those who do not.
In medicine, the taxonomy of Latin and Greek-derived terminology creates a vocabulary inaccessible to the patient — the person whose body is under discussion. A patient listening to physicians discuss their own case may understand perhaps a third of the conversation. This is defended as precision. But many of the Latin terms have perfectly precise English equivalents that patients would understand without years of medical training. The Latin is not just precision. It is also a register. A signal. A boundary marker between the doctor who knows and the patient who, by linguistic design, is positioned as someone who must be told rather than someone who can fully participate in decisions about their own health.
In academia, the situation has become almost self-parodic. Certain fields — particularly in the humanities and social sciences — have developed vocabularies of such stratospheric abstraction that the actual ideas being expressed, which are often interesting and sometimes important, are accessible only to people who have spent years learning to decode the vocabulary. This serves, among other things, to maintain the distinction between the credentialed academic and the intelligent layperson. If the ideas could be expressed in plain language — and they almost always can, with some loss of technical precision but with enormous gain in communicability — the professional would lose the distinction that the vocabulary provides. The vocabulary is, in part, the credential.
Corporate life has generated its own dialect. Synergies, value propositions, paradigm shifts, moving the needle, circling back, bandwidth, low-hanging fruit, blue-sky thinking, boiling the ocean. This vocabulary is remarkable because it is not even primarily technical — it is almost entirely vague, gestural, and metaphorical, conveying less specific meaning than the plain English equivalents it replaces. And yet it persists and proliferates, because speaking it marks you as a member of the corporate class. It is the accent of professional belonging. To speak it fluently is to signal that you have been inside the system long enough to have been shaped by it, and therefore to belong to the class that the system rewards. To not speak it — to describe the same concepts in plain English — is to mark yourself as an outsider, however intelligent you may be.
The Thing Nobody Says Out Loud
Here is the part that requires the most honesty, because it is the part that the people inside these systems least like to acknowledge.
The complexity is, in many cases, a choice.
Not always a conscious choice. Not always a cynical one. Often it is simply the accumulated result of thousands of individual decisions to use the technical term instead of the plain one, to preserve the Latin instead of translating it, to adopt the new jargon instead of the existing English word — each decision individually defensible, collectively producing a wall that looks like sophistication and functions like a fence.
But here is the test. If you can explain the concept in plain language — and in almost every case, you can — then the plain language is available. The choice to use the technical vocabulary instead is a choice. It may be a choice made for good reasons: precision, convention, professional signaling to peers. But it is a choice. And when that choice systematically excludes the people whose lives are most affected by the concepts being discussed — the taxpayer from financial regulation, the patient from medical decisions, the worker from the legal structures governing their employment — the choice has consequences that are political, not merely linguistic.
The person who speaks the vocabulary of power is not more intelligent than the person who does not. They are more initiated. And initiation is not intelligence. Initiation is access. And access, historically and presently, has been distributed not by merit but by birth, class, education, and proximity to existing power.
This is what makes the linguistic hierarchy so pernicious: it disguises a class system as an expertise system. It makes the exclusion look natural, like the consequence of some people having worked harder or thought more carefully — when what they actually have is a vocabulary that was available to them because of where they started, and that continues to serve their interests precisely because it is not available to everyone.
What Happens to the People Outside the Wall
The people who do not speak the languages of power do not simply lack access to information. They are shaped, over time, by the experience of that exclusion in ways that go far beyond the practical.
When you grow up unable to understand the documents that govern your life — the lease, the contract, the medical form, the financial statement — you learn a particular lesson about your place in the world. You learn that the world has rooms you cannot enter. That there are conversations happening about your life in a language you cannot follow. That the systems governing your health, your money, your rights, your children’s education are controlled by people who speak a different language, and that different language marks them as different in kind, not just in role.
This is not a small psychological effect. It is the experience of structural subordination. And it produces — in generation after generation of people excluded by linguistic gatekeeping — a specific relationship to institutions, to authority, to expertise, and to their own capacity for understanding. The relationship is not stupidity. It is learned helplessness, installed by a system that depends, for its functioning, on the belief of those at the bottom that the complexity is real and that their exclusion from it is natural.
The Radical Act of Plain Language
In this context, the choice to use plain language is not simply a matter of communication style. It is a political act.
Every time a doctor explains a diagnosis in words the patient can actually understand, they are dismantling — briefly, locally — a power structure that depends on the patient’s confusion. Every time a lawyer translates a contract into plain English, they are doing the same. Every time a financial professional explains a product in terms that require no specialized vocabulary, every time an academic writes for an intelligent general audience instead of a credentialed specialist one, every time a corporate professional describes a strategy in language a non-corporate person could follow — they are making the same choice. Not to surrender expertise. Not to pretend complexity does not exist. But to refuse to use linguistic obscurity as a substitute for genuine knowledge, and to refuse to use inaccessibility as a mechanism for maintaining status.
The resistance to this is real and, when examined, revealing. Plain language threatens the linguistic hierarchy in the same way that Luther’s vernacular Bible threatened the ecclesiastical one. If the concept can be understood by anyone intelligent and attentive, then the exclusive claim of the specialist to be its interpreter is weakened. The vocabulary is not just the tool of the trade. It is the fence around the garden. And gardens whose fences come down must compete on the quality of what grows inside them, not on the height of the wall.
A Closing Reframe
Language was never only about communication.
From the Sanskrit mantras reserved for Brahmins to the Latin of medieval courts, from the classical Chinese of the imperial examinations to the financial jargon of modern investment banks, from the legal Latin of property documents to the corporate vocabulary of the professional class — language has always been doing double duty. Saying something. And simultaneously marking who is allowed to say it, who is allowed to hear it, who is allowed to evaluate it, and who must simply accept what they are told because they do not have the words.
This is not a conspiracy. It does not require malicious intent, though malicious intent has certainly been present at times. It requires only the perfectly natural human impulse to mark the boundaries of the group, to signal belonging, to protect the advantage that specialized knowledge provides, and to allow the vocabulary that encodes that knowledge to become more complex than the knowledge itself requires — because the complexity serves the people inside it and the simplification would only serve the people outside.
The next time you encounter language you cannot follow — a legal document, a financial instrument, a medical explanation, a corporate strategy, an academic argument — the first question to ask is not how do I learn this vocabulary?
The first question is: does the complexity of the vocabulary match the complexity of the concept, or is the vocabulary doing something else?
Because if the concept can be expressed simply — and it almost always can — then the complexity is a choice. And choices have beneficiaries. And the beneficiaries of linguistic complexity are almost never the people on the outside of it.
Language is power.
That was always the point.
The question is whether you are using it, or being used by it.