Politics & Power Quote by Edward Sapir

Sapir is making an engineer's case for fairness: if you want a truly shared tool, no one gets to smuggle in home-field advantage. The phrase "common creation" frames an international language not as an evolved inheritance but as infrastructure, something built deliberately for collective use. Infrastructure always comes with a bill, and Sapir names it bluntly: "common sacrifice". What gets sacrificed is the comfort of the native tongue as default, the invisible privilege that turns one group's habits into everyone else's homework.

The shrewd move is his pivot from beauty or efficiency to politics. He calls the strongest argument "not the least potent" and then anchors it in neutrality: a constructed language is "equally foreign" to all. That "or apparently so" is the tell. Sapir, a linguist steeped in how language encodes culture, knows neutrality is never pure. Even an invented language has designers, defaults, and hidden hierarchies. Yet he also understands perception is power: if the language feels equally alien, it can function as a social contract, lowering the resentment that trails the global spread of any dominant national language.

The context is early 20th-century internationalism: Esperanto clubs, post-World War I hopes for a rationalized world order, and anxieties about nationalism hardening into catastrophe. Sapir's subtext is pragmatic and moral at once: global communication requires coordination, and coordination requires legitimacy. A constructed language won't erase inequality, but it can stage a symbolic reset, making linguistic cooperation look less like surrender and more like membership.